Whitethorn (75 page)

I laughed, shaking my head. ‘As safety officer is this also in your brief?'

‘Christ no, officially it's not allowed. The British won't tolerate such scandalous goings-on, but the mine management turns a blind eye and so do the local cops, so we make sure we keep the private airstrip graded and in good order. There's also plenty of penicillin available at the mine hospital when one of the girls leaves a miner with a small token of her esteem.'

‘You mean a dose?'

‘I can see you're not slow, son,' Ian de la Rue declared. ‘The girls arrive in Katanga clean, having had a medical inspection before they leave Brussels, but by the time they get here after the miners across the border have dipped their wick, they're second-hand goods. They'll get another medical when they return home to Brussels, but they've not infrequently picked up something nasty on the way because some of the miners will pay double if they can do it without using a franger . . . er, a French letter. So if it gets too hard to contain yerself, always use a condom, mate.'

I couldn't help laughing. ‘Let me see, these appear to be my options. I die working as a grizzly. Or I get beaten to a pulp by a bunch of Afrikaners for a dalliance with the inebriated wife of a diamond driller. I'm lynched for fraternising with a schoolgirl. Forced into marriage or have to leave town for getting someone pregnant. End up being ostracised by the white community for indulging in a bit of black velvet. Finally I could contract a nasty disease from a Belgian whore earning her right to a respectable future life by means of an ill-gotten dowry.'

‘Too right, mate! Never better said,' he laughed. ‘Take my advice, Tom, stick to wanking, that way you'll meet a better class of woman!
And
you'll be safe.'

I grinned, the mine safety officer was a character, alright. ‘While you're at it, is there anything that's nice about the place?'

Ian de la Rue looked down at his shoes and appeared to be thinking. ‘You can play a bit of sport, they've got it all here: tennis, squash, rugby, cricket, and the swimming pool's nice. There's an Anglican church, you can join the choir or the fellowship.' Then he looked directly at me. ‘The money. It's the only reason we're all here, son.'

I extended my hand. ‘Thanks, Ian, for picking me up, and for the friendly advice.'

He shrugged. ‘It's my job.' He shook my hand. ‘Do you play poker, Tom?'

‘A bit.' I'd learned the game from one of Pirrou's dancer friends and quite fancied myself as a poker player going through the motions deadpan, and I was secretly thrilled when I won.

‘Don't. The cardsharps, like the whores, move into town regularly, only they'll cost you a lot more than fifty quid an hour.' Ian de la Rue rose from his chair. ‘I'll walk you over to the mess and sign you in, the tucker's not too bad and if you get tired of it you can get a half-decent steak at the club.' We turned and left the enclosed veranda when he cleared his throat. ‘Ah, the hut, mate,' he said, pointing to the steel door, ‘you've left it open.'

I locked the hut and we walked in the direction of the mess, Ian de la Rue talking all the way. ‘I'll pick you up at seven o'clock tomorrow morning and take you to Number Seven shaft. That's where the underground School of Mines is situated and you'll meet Gareth Jones.' He hesitated, then added, ‘Tom, Welsh miners have a different attitude to mine protocol, while you're in the school always call him Mr Jones, even when you meet him in the club, after that you're free to call him anything you like and it probably won't be very complimentary. I can see you're not stupid, which makes a nice change, but don't let Jones know you're clever, it will put you at a distinct disadvantage.'

Ian de la Rue's advice concerning Mr Jones was certainly timely. The underground School of Mines proved to be hell on wheels. It was pretty difficult, even with my training at The Boys Farm, to appear to be consistently stupid and it didn't take Mr Jones long to cotton on that I was brighter than the rest of the trainees. He immediately thought I was secretly laughing at him. Nothing could have been further from the truth, I was fully committed to staying alive and coping with the manual work. The procedure in the School of Mines was to do every job that existed underground. That is, every job that an African did and every one that a white miner performed. Not only do it, but do it harder and faster and longer. Lashing was the business of loading ore from a freshly blasted tunnel end, simply referred to as ‘lashing an end'; that is, loading solid lumps of rock blasted from the face, which is simply the surface of the rock drilled to extend the tunnel, known as a haulage. Most of the blasted rock proved too big to pick up with a shovel, and needed to be manhandled. Jones was never satisfied until you collapsed with your hands raw and bleeding. I was the smallest in a group of big Afrikaner guys, all young and strong and, dare I say it, some of them thick as a bull's dick, as the saying goes. Mr Jones wanted me to be the first to collapse, proving perhaps that in this environment brains didn't triumph over brawn. But in this one respect the years on The Boys Farm paid off, as except for the time at the Bishop's College, I'd been teethed on manual labour. I knew how to use a pick and shovel and how to lift and carry, and although Jones would routinely get me on my knees and finally unable to continue, I was never the first or even the second or third of the trainee miners to collapse. It was the same drilling an end prior to blasting it. We'd have to manhandle a 60-pound jackhammer on our own, when it normally required two men to operate it, and it was backbreaking work sufficient to reduce several of us to tears.

Jones would examine us on mining theory, a question-and-answer session every morning that my fellow trainee miners grew to fear as they struggled for the answers he demanded. If a trainee failed, as they invariably did, he took enormous delight in humiliating him. By sheer coincidence the entire group were South Africans and Afrikaners to boot, and Jones seemed to take a particular delight in bringing them undone. I remained silent, not wishing to add to their sense of being thought of as stupid, whereupon he'd think of some nasty punishment for the entire class because he didn't get the reply he needed. But my playing dumb didn't last too long because he'd glare at me and say, ‘Okay, Fitzsaxby, if you don't answer the next question you all do an extra hour's lashing.' Then he'd ask me a question out of the training manual on something we hadn't yet done in class or in practice. But the red book would always save me, it had trained my memory to a fairly prodigious level and a law degree had given me further training in absorbing detail. The manual was pretty simple stuff anyway, and I'd read the entire contents of the training course in the first three nights after we'd received it, and I would invariably know the answer. This would infuriate Mr Jones and we'd receive a punishment for ‘having a fucking smart-arse among you'. There was no getting the better of him, and I soon began to realise that part of the training was his attempt to exasperate us to the point of breaking our spirit. Humiliation and constant and unfair punishment are both sound methods for bringing a man to his knees or having him resort to violence, whereupon he'd be instantly dismissed and given his train ticket back to South Africa. I was to learn that if Mr Jones was unable to eliminate at least three trainees from a group, he wasn't satisfied. Moreover he was invariably successful in this endeavour. ‘Eliminating the no-hopers and the weak' was, to his perverted way of thinking, all part of the training to be a successful underground miner.

The Afrikaner temperament is not without arrogance and a sense of superiority, and so Jones had just the right sort of material to work with: quick-tempered, argumentative men unable to retaliate physically as they normally do. For me, anyway, it was back to the future, this was simply a grown-up Boys Farm. I guess I could read Gareth Jones like an open book; he wasn't a patch on Mevrou or Meneer Prinsloo or many of the boys who had bullied and harassed me in the past.

However, I could see it was getting to the class. I felt that Jones's attempt to alienate me from the rest of them by making me the cause of further punishment was something they might also be coming to resent. Jones probably knew this, and used me as the straw that broke the camel's back. Even though I spoke Afrikaans as well as they did, I was still the
Rooinek
and they were getting punished because of me. Jones's attempt to alienate the so-called smart-arse from the rest of the class I thought might well be working.

I decided to apologise to my fellow trainees. We were back on the surface after a particularly gruelling day when we'd received two extra hours of hard work with attendant humiliation and abuse for my smart-arse-ness. We were showered and changed and sitting in the change room too exhausted to walk the 2 miles along the mine railway track back to the single quarters. I spoke in Afrikaans, which I now translate here.

‘
Hey, kêrels, mag ek praat, asseblief
? Hey, guys, may I say something, please?' They all looked up, too weary to speak, though one or two of them nodded. ‘You guys are getting a lot of extra shit because of me, and I want to apologise. But I'd also like to tell you what I think is going on. Is that okay by you?'

‘
Ja
, tell us, man. I'm glad you know, Tom, because I'm fucked if I do,' a trainee named Karl Joubert said. Several of the others laughed and nodded knowingly.

‘Well, this training is a bit like going into the army, the idea is to reduce us to the point where we don't think and simply obey without questioning. It's all designed, Jones thinks, to keep us alive in dangerous situations. So we take no chances, do everything according to the book and all will be well. You could call it a kind of brainwashing. Jones regards thinking as dangerous, and in some respects he may be right, a grizzly is a dangerous place with the constant use of gelignite, so always doing things by the book will reduce, somewhat, the danger factor.'

‘You mean all this shit is good for us?' one of the guys asked.

‘Some of it is,' I said quietly. ‘Last year six grizzly men died, and according to the safety officer Ian de la Rue, all of them did something on a grizzly they shouldn't have attempted. Because the grizzly is the first job we do after we come out of the School of Mines, such a death can mean we weren't properly trained and that points the finger directly at Jones. So, in a way, he is to blame. So what does he do? He tries to overcompensate, he works us to a standstill in order to eliminate the weak among us and turn everyone else into people who never vary procedure. He expects some of us to fail our blasting licence the first time around and some of us never to get it. In this way he can continue to put the boot in and condition us for grizzly work. Only the strong must survive is his motto. When someone like me comes along, someone who seems to know all the answers, he decides he must eliminate me because I'm not good for the group.'

‘What are you saying, that he wants you to quit?' someone said.

‘
Ja
, and the best way to do that is to exert group pressure on me, get you guys to blame me for what's happening,' I answered.

‘So that's the bastard's game, hey?' Dirkie de Wet, a huge Afrikaner, exclaimed. ‘Listen, man, I'm not going to get through, I can do the hard work but the theory, man, no way, my brain goes numb when he asks me something. I know myself, one of these days I'm going to smash him.'

Several of the others nodded. Dirkie turned to the others. ‘I don't know about you, but every time Tom here answers one of Mr Jones's trick questions it's worth it to see the bastard's face.'

There was a murmur of agreement among the men. ‘So, Tom, we not going to let it happen,' Dirkie assured me. ‘Maybe yes, but he's not going to break you, you hear?'

I thanked them all and then added, ‘Look, there's no reason why we can't all pass the blasting licence test, it's all verbal anyway and Jones doesn't conduct it, the mines inspector in Ndola does. What say I devise a system that will help you to remember the questions when the time comes, a sort of
aidemémoire
?'

‘A what?' several of them chorused.

‘A way of remembering things, like a game, we'll practise it every day for the next two months. Do you all like rugby?'

They all agreed they did.

‘Do you know the rules of the game?'

They nodded.

Over the next few weeks we got a lot of fun out of a simple system of code words and analogies I devised, based on the game of rugby. We'd sit during the breaks and I'd be the inspector of mines in Ndola, and ask them questions, and it wasn't long before Jones was having trouble finding ways to make us look stupid. That's the funny thing about confidence, they all started absorbing stuff on their own, and we had become quite competitive. I have discovered in life that a person who thinks themselves stupid and then is allowed to gain confidence in their own ability will blossom beyond all expectations. Doctor Van Heerden had once said to me, ‘Tom, no man can make you inferior unless you give him your consent.'

Then we received our application papers to obtain our blasting licences and, on the spur of the moment, during a rest break Karl Joubert said, ‘Why don't we all do the International?'

The group looked at him as though he'd suddenly gone mad. ‘You're crazy!' two of them echoed.