'Charged With Being Starkie, Sir—And God Knows What Else'

Radio Record, Volume X, Issue 5, 14 August 1936, Page 17

'Charged With Being Starkie, Sir—And God Knows What Else'

An Amazing New Zealander-At Home And At War

OHN DOUGLAS STARK, born Invercargill, 1898-son of a Red Indian father and a Spanish mother: that’s the man who is the hero of Robin Hyde’s successful novel, "Passport to Hell," just published. Starkie was never made to fit in with our ideas of civilisation, and his boyhood in the southernmost parts of New Zealand was stormy and haphazard.

After a spasmodic school career, Starkie, by a series of misadventures, found himself in gaol. He was then 16. To this boy with the swarthy complexion and the big frame, came some pretty hard knocks. In the Invercargill gaol he was put in "figure eights" as an extra punishment. Robin Hyde describes this form of torture:

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, wrists and elbows forced :together.. No. leglocks are used. He-can, sit, stand, or lie, ag 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 cérvical 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. Then the Great War intervened and saved Starkie from further youthful misadventures in New Zealand.

Although he was only 16 he managed to get by the authorities and joined the famous Fifth Regiment. Trentham came next, with plenty of hard training and nights of fun and foolishness in the ""‘little Upper Hutt towns, where, in the big white riverside houses, liquor was to be had." But Starkie got himself into another spot of bother before he finally left. In the mix-up between a sergeant, Starkie and a table, an officer was hit, and the brown-skinned 16-year-old got 21 days’ barracks. The barracks were on Mount Cook, where Wellineton’s proud National Art

Gallery stands to-day. His ‘companions were 21 Germans brought to the mainland from Somes Islandand ‘they. were treated. none to gently. Robin _ Hyde sums up Wellington i in this way: In Wellington ; ......there are the dark, slanting hills, and.-those .enormous erystal-green waves which, pour in, translucent hillocks,‘ by: the Red Rocks." If*you.'can once be perfectly alone with the hills and sea ‘of Wellington you have something they can’t take away from you, no matter where and why they lock you up. : Then there was the tragic parting on tlie wharf as the Fifth Regiment sailed. Half of that regiment never came back at all: The wharf was packed with (Continued on page 48.)

CHARGED WITH BEING STARKIE, SIR

(Continued from page 17)

women and children--sobs began to break from wharf and ship, a convulsion of sound. The Maunganui sailed at two o’clock and, when the ship was several hundred yards out in the stream, the sobbing of the women could still be plainly heard, a "fused, wailing sound that outraged nature." And so came the Fifth Regiment to the land of Egypt. Their camp was at Zitoun, about three miles from Cairo, thousands on thousands of white tents pricking up among sandy hills. There follows here a vivid description of the battle of the Wazza, when hundreds of soldiers ran amok in this notorious corner of Cairo, pillaging, burning, murdering. No one knew how it started, and very few worried about its ending.

‘But the real thing was at hand. It was in the pale rise of the’ morning that the New Zealand. men were taken off in barges to land beneath the yellow clay cliffs of Gallipoli. A splendid morning sunlight broke over an utterly quiet scene. Four hundred men were lined up on the beach. A man pitched forward-faint-ed, the others thought. Only a little blue mark between his eyes told the story of the Turkish snipers in the hills. And then opened that ghastly chapter in the history of the war, the chapter in which the names of New Zealand and Australia loom large. Every day burying parties went into No Man’s Land to collect the bodies.

From a distance of a few yards the bodies, lying in queer huddled attitudes, appeared to have something monstrously amiss with them Then the ‘burying party, white-faced, realised that 24 hours of the Gallipoli sun had caused each body to swell] enormously-until the great threatening carcases were three times the size of a man, and their skins had the bursting blackness of grapes. It was impossible to recognise features or expression in that hideously puffed and contorted blackness. It was on Gallipoli that Starkie got his first wound of importance and he was taken off on the Maheno to Malta, The men left Gallipoli singing Maori waiatas, those sweet, plaintive tribal songs . . . O listening dead upon the hillsides of Gallipoli and in the deep gullies of the little bitter-tasting bushes!-it is the voice of your country that is bidding you farewell. They are going now, with that music on their lips, to slay and to be slain, in other fields. Next came Marseilles and the long route marches to Armentieres. Things got pretty hot and a!l day and night hand grenades, shells, and trench mortar shots smacked into the New Zealand lines. Starkie was in the thick of things: . The front line hadn’t been picked out for its looks, rot now with the rain of autumn washing the trenches into heaps of slushy mud. And there was a citizén of No Man’s Land that the boys didn’t like so much better than the Gallipoli flies. Grey as ghosts and bigger than house-cats, the naked mangy rats of No Man‘'s Land crawled into the

dug-outs, and their sharp teeth gnawed through leather, cloth and soap .with fine impartiality. When the men turned in at night there would be a rustle and scuttle underfoot, and the loathsome grey scavenger, its lean back. covered with scabs, its bright eyes inexpressibly hideous in their eagerness. would slide into the shadows... . Out in No Man’s Land lay the nobler banquets of the trench ghouls-bodies face downwards in the mud, the: lobes of their ears eaten away. Next the Somme-at first like an enormous picnic, and then such a hell as even Dante himself could scarcely vision. Starkie saw his brother blown tv pieces, his best friends killed and left lying in the stinking mud; he went mad, emptied his revolver into a line of German prisoners, flung a Mills bomb into‘ dug-out full of Huns. He didn’t wait to see what , might crawl out of the

cascade of mud and brushwood. And then Mametz Wood... . it: was Death who had captured this wood, no other King or Kaiser was supreme there for any length of time. Later, prison at Le Havre. But perhaps the words on the jacket of "Passport to Hell" can best sum up the career of John Douglas Stark: The extreme crudity of his early upbringing created a’ rebel spirit reckless enough to have served imprisonment, brave enough to have been recommended for the Victoria Cross, and tough enough to have escaped from Le Havre prison. To-day Starkie lives in a little house in Grev’s

sow vow’ =_---, Avenue, that Auckland thoroughfare "garnished with a double row of half-hearted English trees whose falling leaves add to the general shiftlessness." From this amazing book, written by a girl whose name is going to sear across the literary heavens, we can take ! the closing lines: In New Zealand they are scattered. that most unknown of soldiers-ordinary men-and many of the best among them are too shabby and too harrassed to attend R.S.A. ceremonials. Yet, potentially at least, the returned soldier’s desperate desire to fit in again, to go forward and die, is one of the’ most valuable things remaining in our world; as the link, the friendship between scattered and shabby men who congregate around a thousand little homes like Starkie’s, is one of the most honest. ©