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HYDE (Robin)
Passport to Hell: The Story of James Douglas Stark, Bomber, Fifth Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Forces.
1st Ed., 256pp. Hurst & Blackett. nd (1936)
#67522
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![[HLMainPic]](booksThumbs/67522.jpg "Click on the left or right of the image for more images")
Stark was a real person, despite the novelised nature of this memoir. "'Passport to Hell' is the story of James Douglas Stark, Starkie and his war. Journalist and novelist Robin Hyde came across Starkie while reporting in Mt Eden Gaol in the 1930s and immediately knew she had to write his queer true terrible story. Born in Southland and finding himself in early trouble with the law, the young Starkie tricked his way into a draft in 1914 by means of a subterfuge involving whisky and tea. He had a subsequent checkered career in Egypt, Gallipoli, Armentieres, the Somme, and Ypres. Hyde portrays a man carousing in the brothels of Cairo and the estaminets of Flanders; looting a dead man's money-belt and filching beer from the Tommies; attempting to shoot a sergeant through a lavatory door in a haze of absinthe, yet carrying his wounded captain back across No Man s Land; a man recommended for the V.C. and honoured for his bravery but also subject to nine court martials. It is a portrait of a singular individual who has also been described as the quintessential New Zealand soldier." (This note taken from a Facebook post of unknown but apparently informed origin.) Orig. orange cloth, titled in black, little rubbed & worn, VG & now rare. See illustration on our website.
£75
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