Passport to Hell

by Hyde, Robin

  . . .

  His father said: ‘You’ll stay at school all right.’

  Starkie looked at him, with eyes whose limpid darkness prickled suddenly with glints of battle. For a schoolboy, those eyes could look amazingly innocent. It was hard, thought his first masters, that Starkie could play truant with all the perverse ingenuity of a dusky lamb among Bo-Peep’s sheep, and then turn up with the eyes and smile of a bronze cherub. Reason, kindness, sterner methods, all fell flat. So far as could be discovered, Starkie’s urge was not so much resentment against school, as a series of angel visions that slid gently into his mind at the wrong moment. He started off with the best intentions, plodding along the dusty Invercargill roads. Half-way, his genius revealed to him Starkie bird-nesting in the park…. Starkie with boots off and toes deliciously muddy, hauling up a whopper of an eel, an eel that all men would admire…. Starkie just wandering, on a road bent up like a teaspoon in the queer, flat-lidded saucer of the plains. Normal enough for little boys, in their classrooms, to shoot up their paws, with a hoarse, ‘Please, teacher, may I leave the room?’ Not so normal for them to vanish, and be discovered in God’s good time, trudging patiently towards the skyline. Starkie’s first school fought a losing battle with the great outdoors, and Wylde Stark, after a year, removed him to another.

  Invercargill was not badly supplied with schools. The first establishment having failed, there remained the Waikiwi School, the Park School, and the Marist Brothers’ School—to say nothing of more expensive establishments beyond the reach of a Wylde Stark.

  To each of these in succession James Douglas Stark was either led or driven. He never lasted longer than six months. There was no manner of real frightfulness about his escapades. He was simply schoolboy—large, intractable, cheerful, and unimpressionable schoolboy. Indeed, none of his schoolmasters appears to have made any real effort to impress him. One of the Victorian poets has a heart-murmur to the effect that the law of force being dead, the law of love shall prevail. This poem had not as yet travelled to Invercargill. The youngest Stark’s reputation as an outlaw preceded him, and masters rolled up their sleeves in readiness. Occasionally they had a really sound excuse, as when with a length of rubber and a pen he devised a new sort of harpoon, and—the lord of the Waikiwi School having his back turned to the class while working out a useful little problem on the blackboard—let fly with this horrible weapon, penetrating the fleshy part of the schoolmaster’s thigh.

  At the Marist Brothers’ establishment, however, the schoolmaster—an arrogant Irishman—was a deal too quick for his notorious new pupil. James Douglas Stark arrived in company with the McCarthy twins, Chris and Pete. That Chris was making hideous faces when the roll-call was uttered in deep and solemn tones was some excuse for a brown face crumpling up in a smile at the wrong time. The arrogant Irishman was at his desk in a moment. A thin but nippy little cane slashed him thrice across the knuckles. ‘Now, my boy, don’t laugh at the wrong time,’ advised the arrogant Irishman.

  As far as the Marist School was concerned, James Douglas Stark never smiled again. Five minutes later he begged permission to leave the class-room in order to attend to the demands of nature. Seven minutes, and he was legging it down the road in the direction of Thompson’s Bush. Thereafter thrashings, bullying, and cajoling were all one to him. He could be dragged to the Marist fountain, but never again led to drink. Between him and the Irish nation arose an enmity not easily mended. Ten years later, when thoroughly incapacitated for war service, he applied to a then very affable British General for leave in Ireland. He was informed that he could have any other part of the British Empire he liked, but to Ireland he might not go.

  The affair with the Marist teacher was the end of his schooldays. In Wylde Stark’s desk accumulated a stack of neat but ineffectual summonses from the Truant Officer’s legal-minded friends. Had James Douglas been born into their own family circles they would have realized the impotence of laws in coping with some important human problems. Yet out of school hours there was never anything that one could actively dislike in the long-legged, dark-eyed, eternally smiling youth, whose whistle was the most elaborate and debonair in the whole of Invercargill. Only of one person was he afraid—his elder and much larger brother, George. Wylde Stark, in thrashing his son, was restrained by an affection which seems strange in a Delaware Indian. George Stark, when thrashing his younger brother, went stolidly ahead and thought of nothing but the subject in hand. But George, though formidable, could be dodged. If bread and circuses were the ruin of old Rome, eels and circuses were young Stark’s downfall. The eels—from three inches long to massive and hideous creatures as thick through as a man’s forearm—were to be discovered in the brownish Waihopai River waters, or in the little creeks that wriggled like Indian scouts under the tangled sub-forests of Thompson’s Bush.

  The New Zealand bush world was as disorderly as himself. Supplejacks coiled and swung like great black serpents between the trees. One of his former schoolmasters had had an unforgivable trick of sending his pupils out of class to cut supplejack wands, and on their return entreating them to bend over desks—thus chastising them with their own scorpions. The bush-lawyers had trailing arms whose every leaf and twig was spined with sharp little hooks, ruthless enemies of decent homespun jackets and pants. Wild mint, flowering purple and with the cleanest of odours, grew into the rims of the little river-pools in whose mud the eels might be sought for, sometimes in the gorse-gold and sleepy warmth of a day’s sunlight, sometimes with torches after nightfall, Maori fashion. The world was happy; and moreover, the problem of boots did not arise. His toes enjoyed an Arcadian existence of muddy freedom.

  He was eleven years old, and Starkie to all the world except his immediate family circle, when he made his first bow to a magistrate—a benevolent gentleman by name Sentry, whose long white whiskers gave him a distinct resemblance to God the Father. Despite, or because of, that, he received the outlaw in a pained manner, made inquiries as to his school record, and ordered him six strokes with the birch. Waiting in the locked police-station—the amenities with which child delinquents are now treated not yet having commenced to trouble the waters of New Zealand law—meant an hour of sweating terror. The policeman, though sometimes alluring, is definitely a figure of dark might on the child’s horizon. But dark and mighty though the theoretical policeman may have been, the little Scotch terrier who eventually arrived and commanded him to remove his breeks was a different story. The birch didn’t hurt as much as his father’s, let alone George’s.

  There is a dread age when boys and the little white knobs on telegraph-poles exercise a baleful influence over each other’s destinies. This arrived, and in acute form. A magistrate grew tired, as Wylde Stark—who would otherwise have been a respected member of his little community—had already been for several years. Starkie was consigned to the care of the Burnham Industrial School intended specially for the reform of incorrigibles.

  According to all the traditions of fiction, Starkie should have suffered hell among the three hundred boys in the big wooden buildings of the Industrial School, and emerged later with a smouldering hatred of society. Actually, he disliked it no worse than any of his other schools. He liked crowds; he was both too large and too energetic to be put upon by older boys. Despite his many departures from schools, he was by no means a fool, and hours in the classroom were not the long-drawn agony to him that they were to some of the poor gangling youths mentally incapable of learning even the elements of the three R’s. He disliked Burnham as he disliked every other form of authority set over him, but not much worse than the other abodes of learning, and not nearly so keenly as he hated the Marist priest. He had his first taste of the cells for running away. In the first hour the experience was no worse to him than sitting in a concrete tank. Then something he didn’t understand, something instinctive in his racial heritage, rose up and suffocated him. The walls seemed too narrow, and before they took him out he was beating his hands against the door.
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  Sometimes into the hands of a rebel fall prizes which the well-behaved can only sigh for. How many boys of twelve years old are resolved that a sailor’s is the only decent life? But if Starkie had been a social asset, a turner of music pages, a hewer of mathematical tall timber and a drawer of the waters of Latinity, his fate would have been white cuffs and collar, and a pencil behind his ear. When he informed the Burnham authorities—mainly vested in the substantial person of Mr Thomas Archey—that he wanted to go to sea, there was no obstacle put in his way. Mr Archey and Wylde Stark conferred together. Starkie was carpeted and invited to give his views. He gave them, molto con agitato. In a week’s time he was taken down and put aboard the Kittawa, which was, so her senior fireman confidentially informed him, the bloodiest little coal-boat on the West Coast run.

  Bloody or not by nature, the Kittawa in her person was black, but not comely. She ran between Greymouth, Westport, Niger Bay, Lyttelton, and Wellington, taking on the soggy West Coast coal which keeps the air filled with black-diamond dust and the faces of its tenders as black as imps in hell. He got to know wild and alluring country. The West Coast is where the gold-rush hit New Zealand over half a century ago, filling up a wilderness with its mushroom towns, forty taverns to a main street, and nothing to show for it in five years’ time but raw crosses in a graveyard. Through the forests the outlaws and the native parrots, the red-plumed kakas, had swept in varying degrees of magnificence. And though the Coasters hanged or shot the outlaws when they could lay claws on them, the life in the mushroom towns wasn’t precisely Sabbatarian. There was a law about wearing coloured shirts, and a man who happened to appear in a white one at any decent hostelry would be likely to have it ripped off his back, and lucky if the shirt was all he lost. The diggers’ vast boots and moleskin trousers having vanished away, sign-boards swung sullen and ghostly in the phantom townships, and the coal-burrowing began, with the muscles and conservatism of a brood known there as ‘the black Irish’ to do the dirtiest work. The Kittawa plied between one coal-market and another, picking up dirty sacks, an occasional dirty passenger, and talk dirtiest of all.

  His four months on the Kittawa were salty days for Starkie—exciting, hard-working, thoroughly alive days, and nights when he could crawl into his hammock and listen to the old hands swap yarns, chipping in whenever he felt it wouldn’t mean a boot behind the ear. One or two of the crew weren’t any too fond of the Kid, as he was generally called. There was a livid yellow little Greek cook, who loved him the way he loved soap and water. This feeling was not without reason, having arisen, as so many things do on a coaler, in a pan of hash. It was one of Starkie’s jobs to carry the food from the cook’s galley to the sailors and trimmers, who reigned in their meal-time glory over the fo’c’s’le. The Greek was born dirty, and so was his hash. On a certain day occasion arose for a trimmer to say that black and all as he might be, he wasn’t going to soil his inside with grub that crawled. Starkie was requested to take the hash back to the galley and ask for more. He did, and the cook sent him back again with a clout across the ear. The trimmer, when the same hash sorrowfully presented itself in the fo’c’s’le, uttered a bull-like roar and commanded him to return the hash and, should the cook object, to bloody well crown him with it.

  This was an errand which would have been more after Starkie’s heart had he known a little less about the yellow Greek cook, who, yellow as he was, kept a knife as sharp as a razor and unpleasantly curved. But he was more afraid, on the whole, of the trimmers than of an early death. The Kittawa was no place for mild-mannered men, and the trimmers stalked terribly through his dreams like the sooty pictures of fiends adorning those ancient books with which his father had tried to induce some interest in Sunday school. Starkie went back to the galley.

  ‘You, is it?’ rather obviously said the little cook, but with a steel glint in his narrow eyes. The knife lay long and handy on a bench.

  ‘Oh, God!’ prayed Starkie—and lifting the pan of hash aloft, carried out the trimmer’s request. He never waited to see or hear the result. The smother of the hash gave him a moment’s start, and in that moment he regained the fo’c’s’le and bolted between the trimmer’s legs, trembling like a dog.

  Thereafter he was regarded in the stokehold as a good kid, but the yellow cook watched him; and a more powerful if less uncivilized spirit of evil arose in the shape of an A.B., who appointed himself unofficial first mate of the Kittawa. Starkie filled the lamps, ran errands for the crew, scrubbed the decks without making the remotest impression on accumulations of coal-dust, and tended brass with polishing rags and powder until it possessed the white shine beloved in the King’s Navy. The A.B. who wanted to be mate had a lot of spare time on his hands. He followed where the boy shone the brass white and speckless, then, with a grin curling back half-shaved lips from yellow teeth, he spat tobacco-juice on it.

  ‘Sorry—my mistake,’ the tormentor would murmur, and pass on his way, returning in the next five minutes to spit on another patch of brass. The man’s swagger, his very legs in their baggy trousers, his smile before and after he spat, made something very odd happen to the boy’s heart. It would thud horribly as he heard the footsteps of his enemy approaching, and then stop dead. He would see the shadow on the white, coarse-grained deck as the man stood over him.

  ‘Sorry—my mistake.’

  The day before they made port at Lyttelton, on his fourth month aboard the Kittawa, the trimmers held a wash-day and appointed Starkie washerman. He didn’t mind their shirts and underpants, for by this time the casual friendliness down among the coal-dust was about the most comfortable relationship of his youth. When he had the washing fluttering on the derrick, his friend the tobacco-spitter appeared, and burst into a tirade against the appearance of washing above decks. Then the shouting stopped. Starkie knew intuitively that something worse was about to happen. He slewed round to see the man grinning at him, his lip curled like a dog’s.

  Starkie knew he was going to spit. He also knew that for some obscure reason this would be a calamity, and mustn’t happen. He shouted: ‘You spit, and I’ll kill you!’

  Brown tobacco-juice sprayed in a jet on the shirt he had just pegged out.

  ‘Sorry’—said the enemy—‘my mistake.’

  The blow mightn’t have done much damage on its own account, but the man—twenty years older than his twelve-year-old victim, and built like a gorilla—was expecting almost anything but to be hit in the wind. His footing on the upper deck by the derrick was insecure. Back he went, and before he had time to finish the curse that left his mouth as he fell, his head cracked against the lower deck. The deck-rail broke his fall, fortunately for David—and Goliath both—but the crack on the head finished his activities for the time being. He lay perfectly still, his mouth open, his arms crooked out in a curiously helpless attitude. Starkie, his heart in his mouth, stared down terrified at his first unconscious man.

  Captain Pennington of the Kittawa was old and fat and philosophical, and he disliked men who spat on polished brass only a little less than the police who take it upon themselves to ensure the safety and happiness of the same. He had a case on his hands with the A.B.’s cracked head, and one which would have to be reported, for the man wouldn’t be on his legs again in a fortnight. He summoned Starkie to his cabin.

  ‘There’s plenty of police on shore at Lyttelton,’ said an unmoved and elderly voice.

  Starkie replied nothing. His head was hanging; he had liked the sailoring life.

  ‘… Taking an interest,’ continued the voice, ‘in acts of violence … h’m, h’m, h’m! … Have to report the case, my boy. Can’t do that until we’re in port. No wireless aboard this ship.’

  He stressed the this as though the Kittawa’s lack of wireless communications elected her queen of the ocean wave. Maybe he was right.

  ‘H’m!’ added the voice. ‘All a question of who gets ashore first.’

  Pale-blue eyes stared unwaveringly into dark ones. A head, crested like a c
ockatoo’s, nodded gently.

  ‘That will be all, Stark,’ said Captain Pennington smartly.

  Starkie turned and departed from the cabin, his sea-faring days at an end. In a yellow morning the Kittawa docked at Lyttelton, and before the gang-plank was down Starkie was off the ship, swinging himself monkey-like along a rope. He never saw Captain Pennington again, nor his gods the trimmers, nor the little yellow cook. Once or twice he caught sight of the Kittawa, creeping over listless grey waters like a particularly black damned soul shifting its quarters from one circle of the inferno to another, and thought how homely the sooty flames of her hold-lamps had been in those four months.

  The fear of the law, when it comes in the form of an acute attack of panic, can be a very real thing. His brief garments soaked through with rain, a twelve-year-old boy climbed the Port Hills above the grimy town of Lyttelton until his breath caught, and a stitch tore bitterly at his side. When he was satisfied that he had put distance enough between himself and the public, he flung himself down on the tawny grasses, close-beaded with the delicate drops of the drifting autumn fog, which had followed on the rainstorm’s track. At first the fog, blotting out the gaunt town, the black line of its railway-cranes standing grim and dark against the sky, was a comfort to him. Law and vengeance suffered a blurring of outline. He lay in the grass, looking down on that unreal and fog-hidden town, until its lights began to prick through the veil. Their prying frightened him once again, so he dragged himself to his feet and started off over the hills which heap up brown and bare on the miles between Lyttelton and the city of Christchurch, which has drained the port of population and money, leaving Lyttelton a disconsolate hill-slope of blackened houses, inhabited only by officials who can afford to live nowhere else. There is almost no bush on these hills. Northwards they slide into fine ranch country where the roads move with the padding of thousands of dust-brown sheep.