Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  Six o’clock, the bell burst inside your head. Get up, make your bed, march along the corridor to empty your latrine tin; march back, get a bowl of porridge, and a cup of sweet black tea. Eight o’clock, another bell—the bells rang all over the prison with a fiendish brassy din—and the convict stands to attention at the door of his cell. A warder comes along. ‘Right wheel, march….’ They fall in, the prison boots shuffling heavily and dismally along the corridors. In the yard there is roll-call, and the prisoners are dismissed—some to their work, others to the Ring.

  Starkie spent some time on the Ring. This is the second-best institution in New Zealand gaols, the best being the Dummy. The Ring is in the prison yard and about thirty feet in diameter. The game is to try to find the end of it; but you never do, although you are marched around it from eleven in the morning until five at night—the close of the convict’s long day. Over the dry ground shuffle some great fellows who have known action in their time. In front of the fifteen-year-old savage, gawky in his shapeless white trousers and peaked cap, marched old Jimmy Pearson; Dan Paul the murderer, the grey old badger who battered his wife’s head to a bloody pulp when in drink; Archie Sayegh—men for whom prison life held no mystery whatever. Dinner was called at twelve, and wasn’t bad—potatoes in their jackets, stew served in tin pannikins and eaten with battered tin spoons. Before the five o’clock meal, each man was searched by a warder, then marched back to the cells and locked in, with two ancient magazines for company. A pound loaf of bread, a plate of swimming oatmeal, and a cup of black tea finished the day’s amenities. Then tap-tap-tap again. You could talk in the Ring, your mouth twisted up sideways so that the warders didn’t hear. Starkie thought he had got the idea of the Morse code. He pressed his face against the wall, picking up the soft little staccato of taps.

  ‘Bluey’ Jameson next morning told him to fall in line with Dave Lester’s squad, and he was marched out to the swamps where the prisoners were reclaiming land, shovelling reeds and tons of stinking blue mud. After a mile and a half in line, they were loaded on a funny little black she-devil of a train, puffed along half a mile farther, then dumped out near the swamplands. The mud was no joke. Apart from the fishy reek of it, it clung in great soggy dollops to the shovels, and underfoot the ground gave into pot-holes where the men sank knee-deep. He was wet as a seal before the dinner halt.

  The food for the swamp gangs was cooked on the spot—meat boiled up in a foul and corroded old copper which hadn’t been cleaned since the day it left the ironmonger’s shop. They were out of sight of the gaol’s coarse but cleanly amenities. The tins in which the stew, flanked with potatoes in their jackets, was ladled out were foul with grease. Dinner was served in a long shed and eaten standing or sitting on the ground. Talk was allowed at meal-times, and the men had a tobacco issue—an ounce a day of rank black twist. Starkie’s lungs craved for the bite of tobacco-smoke. He hadn’t yet received his issue, but old Sampson tossed him over a lump of twist. The others lit their little three-inch clay pipes. The flame of a candle-stub was used. Their match ration was one a day, and the stub was a life-saver.

  Arney, the warder in charge of the swamp gangs, knocked the twist out of Starkie’s hand and trod on it.

  ‘Wait till you get your tobacco issue,’ he said curtly.

  Starkie saw old Sampson’s lip twist, waiting to see him make a fool of himself. He kept his mouth shut and walked away.

  Cigarettes weren’t allowed either in the gaol or at the swamps, but the men smoked them—the tobacco shredded and rolled in scraps of paper, the cigarettes held in the mouth beside the stem of the empty clay pipes, whose reek was too much for all but the toughest stomachs. When Arney handed them over to ‘Bluey’ at the gaol, they were searched, man by man, lined up in the Dome—the centre of the great building. Arney stepped out and passed a slate to ‘Bluey’. ‘Bluey’ pondered a moment, then spoke sharply.

  ‘Stark, half rations, insufficient work.’

  That night his bread was cut to half a pound. The bowl of porridge had dwindled, but the tea arrived black and strong as usual. He drank it in little steaming sips, then folded his arms over his head and lay on the floor of the cell, too tired to listen for the Morse code.

  Arney the warder didn’t like Starkie, and Starkie didn’t like him. On the next day at the swamps they watched each other, cat and mouse. ‘Stark, fall out—no tobacco.’ But Hawley, who had known his father before—ten years ago he had disappeared into this secure retreat—slipped him a lump of twist, and the men in the afternoon distracted Arney’s attention while Starkie drew the smoke down into his lungs. On Saturday the prison personnel washed its body, and on Sunday sanctified its mind. The men, about a hundred and twenty, were marched in bunches to the shower-room, and stripped to stand under the cold jets, their strong, toughened bodies stretching and turning like an uncouth statue-gallery in the white light. You could tell by their skins and the colour of their eyes what prison had done for them. A man’s life in prison depended mainly on his self-control and his stomach. The yellow, uneasy ones were the ex-clerks who couldn’t stand up to rough fare. But on a lean diet the labourers had thrived, and the swamps sweated the fat off their bones and the beer out of their blood. They were brown, and trouble had fined the outlines of some of the younger faces. It was a crude, pathetic statue gallery, but not a bestial one. Starkie’s bronze carcase was outrivalled by the splendid nugget-black of old Archie Taylor, an American negro with the stature of a giant.

  Jim Frenton caught Starkie smoking at the wrong moment, and there was an argument. Starkie, who had begun to develop a constitutional dislike of all warders, told Jim Frenton what he could do. Frenton didn’t, but went instead to the Governor. At 2.30 in the afternoon, Starkie was locked up in his cell and that humble abode swept clean of furnishings as though a vacuum cleaner had been over it. Books, blankets, hammock, knife, fork, and spoon were all removed. He was left with the Bible and a latrine tin. After dark the cell was unlocked and his blankets thrown in to him, locked again, and the warder’s boots crunched away, leaving him in solitude and darkness. He curled up under the blankets and ignored everything—even the Morse code, which he now understood well enough to deduce his neighbour’s ideas on warders. This was not bad as far as it went, but Starkie could have carried it farther. His solitude lasted from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, when he was taken in front of the Governor and sentenced to three days in the Dummy.

  It is always dusk in the Dummy, which lies underground. A vague ghost of daylight slips through from the corridor, but there is no window, no ventilator. At six in the morning the door is unlocked, and the prisoner gets his clothes, all except boots. At nine in the evening he is stripped of everything but his shirt, given a six-foot strip of rubberoid twenty inches wide, and two blankets. With these he makes his bed on the concrete floor. His day’s rations are thrown into the cell at the six o’clock awakening—a large tin basin of water, a sixteen-ounce loaf of dry bread. The solitude which is strange and gloomy by day at night becomes unendurable. Lying on the concrete floor in winter-time, the slippery rubberoid clammy under a man’s body, the convict finds that big sores break out on hips and knees. At last the lying-down position becomes unbearable.

  Starkie invented a game to keep him warm at nights. It was a very clever game. He pulled a button off his shirt, flicked it as far as he could between finger and thumb, then knelt down in the darkness and groped for it on the concrete floor. Finding it in the pitch-black of the cell took an astonishingly long time, and when he did feel it under his fingers he stood in another corner of the cell and flicked it away again. It was a simple recreation, but it was his challenge to the ponderous four-walled darkness which told him, in that oozy voice of a silence, that he was no longer a man. Flick … grope … button between your fingers. Somewhere perhaps in the darkness of his cave, starving Neanderthal found a way to take his mind off the sinking flames of his last fire.

  It was warmer in the daytime, and then he coul
d sleep, with the Bible for his pillow. He ate his bread-ration at six o’clock, and for the rest of the day went without. At the end of his three days in the Dummy, he was taken up, put in his cell again, and given another bread-ration. Then he was marched out to the swamp again and put on the sand-rake. The bread and water diet hadn’t affected him very greatly while he was in the Dummy; but now the rake was too much for him, and the sand, which was loaded on tip-trucks and sent rattling down the line, was a gigantic enemy. He knew he was for it again. Back at the gaol, he was put on half rations for insufficient work. The next morning, a Saturday, the boys were lined up to parade in the Ring. A little Englishman—Hastings by name—signalled him with crooked finger and wary eyes. Starkie edged close, was slipped half a pound of bread from under the Englishman’s shirt. But Starkie was clumsy. Arney saw. Arney snatched the bread and threw it on the ground. Starkie shouted at him, something unintelligible but offensive, was marched off and locked up again. For three more days he lived on bread and water.

  The older men among the prisoners didn’t like seeing the kid roughly handled, and made things worse by slipping him presents, which he never had guile enough to hide. There was a rumour that Wylde Stark had asked the prison authorities to hand it out tough, saying that it would make or break the cub. This would have been in keeping with the old Indian’s character, but he didn’t allow for the streak of pride which made Starkie forbear to take things lying down. Anthony, the drill instructor, caught him smoking the cigarette John Cunningham had passed to him in the Ring—smoking it greedily; for almost invariably when the tobacco issue was passed out, came the curt command, ‘Stark, fall out.’

  Anthony looked through the spy-hole of the cell. ‘I’ll fix you later,’ he promised.

  The superintendent was at breakfast. Starkie had heard much prison gossip as to what it felt like to be fixed by a warder or instructor. He got ready. The door opened. Anthony advanced his stout body into the cell.

  The most useful piece of furniture in the cell was a three-legged stool. Starkie picked it up, brought it down on the drill-instructor’s skull. Anthony went down like a log. Starkie, in a moment’s frantic groping, found the gaol keys, burst into the long corridor. For perhaps five seconds he had a wild hope of freedom. Then the bells sounded, fierce, brassy, insistent, all along the grey passages. A fellow-prisoner had given the alarm.

  There were six guns pointing at him. He backed slowly into his cell, his eyes mad, every nerve in his body snapping.

  ‘Hold up your hands,’ said one of the warders.

  ‘Starkie, for God’s sake be good!’ urged Frenton; Starkie, seeing the man’s brow beaded with little drops of sweat, remembered that they had been at school together, until he was kicked out of that school, as from all the rest. They got one of the handcuffs on him. The touch of steel sent him crazy, and, guns or no guns, he smashed the other handcuff at the face of Goodwin, the warder who was holding his arm. He felt a gun nuzzle into his ribs, and froze. The other handcuff went on. They marched him down to the Dummy.

  That night he went before the heads again. Twenty-one days on bread and water in the Dummy. Seven days in ‘figure eights’.

  Ever since he had heard the bells give warning in the corridor, a queer spasmodic shiver had shaken him every few minutes. He was still shaking when they marched him back to the Dummy.

  The ‘figure eight’ is a mild version of the French Foreign Legion’s beloved torture, le crapaud. For a period of hours each day, ranging from two to four, the prisoner’s arms are doubly handcuffed across the small of his back, wrist and elbows forced together. No leglocks are used. He can sit, stand, or lie, as he pleases. At the end of an hour, the niggling little ache which starts between the shoulder-blades will have forced its way up into the cervical vertebrae. Wriggle or twist as he likes, he can find no position to ease that red thrust through the muscles of shoulder and neck. Then the ache creeps downwards, biting into the ribs and spine.

  The new hand makes things worse for himself by tossing about. An hour is enough for most men. When his three hours a day were finished, Starkie’s nerves were in pulp. But the stone floor, the shadows, seemed almost friendly. He crept into the back of his kennel like a sick dog, and crouched there, terrified at the thought of another day’s passing and the figure eights again.

  On the sixth day, Anthony was out of hospital and came down to the Dummy. The door opened and he walked in, a shadow looming among the other shadows.

  ‘You’re the one who hit me over the head with a stool, eh?’ A fist crashed into the face of the handcuffed boy. Then the door clicked again, footsteps retreated.

  In the morning, Starkie complained to the prison superintendent, showing his split lip. He was told that none of the warders would do such a thing.

  ‘You must have fallen down,’ said the superintendent, with splendid confidence, and proceeded unperturbed on his way. But Anthony did not come down to the Dummy again.

  When the pound loaf of bread was thrown into his cell each morning, the tin pannikin contained plenty of water, yet the curious thing was that he was always thirsty. Lapping the water out of the pannikin didn’t seem to ease his throat. The first week he got through the bread ration without overmuch difficulty. Before his sentence in the Dummy was finished, twelve loaves were piled up in a corner of the cell. He would start to eat the bread, gnawing it like a rat. Then the muscles of his throat constricted horribly, salt came into his mouth and nostrils. He swallowed and swallowed, jerkily, but he couldn’t get it down. He thrust it aside and lay with arms folded over his face. At least his wrists were free. No more now of the deadly nagging ache which started as a little feeling of nausea, and persisted until it over-rode the world. Seven days’ figure eights, and they were all over…. He turned his face to the wall of the cell, and the darkness lapped him about. Overhead sounded the feet of men, hollow on the hollow stone floors.

  He began to dream a great deal about water, not only when asleep but in waking hours, when his mind now slid easily and rapidly into daydream. It wasn’t that he was ever kept short. He could never complain that the tin pannikin wasn’t properly filled. It was just that it never seemed enough, or its water was too flat to alleviate the tightness in his throat. He could see a dark dew-pond in the Canterbury hills, and a hawthorn tree stooped over it, its wizened little berries bright scarlet. In the Dummy, all colour-tones were bleached out into the monotony of black shadow, grey daylight. He could very clearly remember the edge of foam, hissing and pale yellow on the brown sands, where he had bathed with May Simms. Then the innermost waves, translucent, knee-deep, with soft little cold patches which were the half-fluid bodies of transparent jellyfish. Deeper, the sea curled green and laughing against a girl’s white breast and shoulders. It was a picture-gallery to him, no longer even the shadow of an emotion. All the strength of his senses seemed to have been sucked out of him. He could turn quietly enough from May to the brownish but very clear waters of the Waihopai stream, and remember the feel of the thick blue-skinned eels between his fingers.

  In those nights of his last week in the Dummy, somebody else stood beside him, invisible. He was not aware of this. He only knew that he felt a great deal quieter, and had no desire to eat. The same shadow once stood in the cave-cells of the old hermits who mortified their flesh with fasting, and tore the lusts out of their senses with the chastisements of whips, brambles, and flinty beds. ‘They turned to gloomy madness …’

  A prison doctor—a youthful man named Andretton—came into the Dummy one morning and asked Starkie questions, speaking in a clipped, friendly style. He stood over the boy, who refused to move from the corner in the shadows, ran his hands over the ribs, felt his pulse, felt the movement of the muscles working in his throat. He ordered Starkie up to daylight and full rations three days before his time was up. Starkie never grasped what the doctor was saying until the white beam of the sun pierced into his eyes through a high window as he shambled at the warder’s heels back to his cell.
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  They fed him with porridge, bread, and marmalade, sweetened tea; the black, steaming fluid trickling down his gullet broke the misery of thirst that the dry bread had brought on him, and as he drank, slow tears of thankfulness came into his eyes. There was nobody to see them. When the others were marched out to the swamplands, he stayed behind in his cell still under sentence of solitary confinement.

  At eleven o’clock Anthony came along, opened the door, and handed Starkie two pounds of oakum. He made no attempt this time to touch the prisoner, and refrained from the usual rough jeer. Perhaps something in the boy’s hollow eyes and silence touched him. The door was shut. Starkie was left with the oakum.

  At first glance the prison task of oakum-picking looks like velvet compared with the shovelling of swamp mud. The materials of labour are so small and harmless. One can pick up the twisted ropes in a single hand, and crush the results of a day’s work into a coat pocket.

  The end of the afternoon found Starkie with every finger-nail on his hands broken, the skin rubbed into raw and bleeding patches, the palms puffing up in great yellow blisters.

  The oakum comes in little short rope-lengths, ship-ropes tarsealed, greasy, and hard with perhaps fifty years’ wear and hauling on the vessels of the Seven Seas. It is the oakum-picker’s task to separate these lengths fibre from fibre. This involves wearing through the tar and grease with the surfaces of the fingers—picking, picking, picking, while the matted hemp resists loosening with all the strength which the hard hands tugging at it on the high seas have given to its compact mass. The amount of fibre to be prised loose from a single rope-length is unbelievable. When Starkie’s two pounds were picked, the mass of loose fibre piled up high as an ordinary kitchen table. He stared at it, unable to believe that it had all come from those brutal little tarred ropes. The warder came in, slammed down his rations, departed. He stretched himself out, utterly weary in body and mind.