The Power of One

TWENTY-THREE

Nineteen fifty-one was the year I won the South African Schools featherweight title, and the Prince of Wales School won the schools championship for the third year running. Darby and Sarge were heroes and both had become welcome members of the masters’ common room. Success of any sort seems to break down social barriers. We all sat for our matriculation, although a first-class pass for Sinjun’s People was a foregone conclusion. Atherton was selected for the South African schoolboy rugby team to tour Argentina and Cunning-Spider had made in into the Transvaal Schools cricket team. Pissy Johnson, with a lot of coaching from Hymie and me, felt confident that he’d get the marks in his matric to study medicine. He had become an expert at fixing cuts in the ring and from this small beginning his ambition to be a doctor had blossomed.

I had, by all accounts, a brilliant school career, getting my colours in rugby and three times for boxing as well as being head prefect and a company commander in the school cadet corps. While my music hadn’t really progressed, I was still by school standards considered amongst the more superior musicians.

In Sinjun’s terms, I was well on my way to being a Renaissance man. In my own terms I felt less successful. I had survived the system but that was in many ways the problem. I seemed to be losing control of my own life, forfeiting my individuality for the glittering prizes and the accolades of my peers. The need to win had become everything, the head had become more important than the heart, Hoppie’s advice had worked too well.

I had supported myself at school with the Bank and the various scams Hymie and I had developed. But what had been intellectual amusement for Hymie was deadly serious for me. I needed the money not only to survive but as a means of dignity. Hymie and I had become inseparable friends and with the death of Doc he was certainly the most important person in my life. But I knew deep down that Hymie had been chosen because he could help me survive the system. I was a user. It had become a habit; winner that I seemed to be, I had become a mental mendicant.

I was conscious also of the price I paid. That in return people took strength from me. Hymie, Miss Bornstein, Mrs Boxall all needed me as a focal point, I was required to perform for them in return for their unstinting help and love. The concept of the Tadpole Angel which I had tried to set aside would not leave me. After the Mandoma fight the black crowds at my boxing matches had become enormous and at the South African Schools Championships the police had been called to disperse the chanting crowd outside the Johannesburg Drill Hall. I knew that eventually something more was expected of me. All my life I’d been pushed around. By the Judge. By the Lord. By the concept of the Tadpole Angel. In my own way I had fought and in return had been given Doc and Hoppie and Geel Piet as my mentors. The point of all this was difficult to understand. Perhaps, after all, life is like this. But I felt that I needed to take one independent action that would put my life back under my own control. It was as though I needed to lose but hadn’t developed the mechanism to do so. I only had one problem with this; I hadn’t any idea how to go about doing so.

The only totally independent thing in my life was my ambition to become the welterweight champion of the world. It was the only thing that couldn’t be manipulated. I either had it in me or I hadn’t. It was the thing those who loved me, with the exception of Captain Smit and Gert, couldn’t understand. It was the one thing in my life that seemed to make sense to me. In this single action there was no corruption of the spirit.

In the last week of term Singe ’n Burn accompanied me to my interview with the Rhodes scholarship board. I had sat for two scholarships. One to Witwatersrand University and another to the University of Stellenbosch, an Afrikaans-speaking university with a brilliant law school. But, more than anything, I wanted to go to Oxford. I felt I was unlikely to compromise this desire, come what may. Hymie’s family had already agreed to pay for me to go, but even as a loan I found this unacceptable. Unacceptable to me, to the memory of Doc, to Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein, Captain Smit, Gert, Hoppie Groenewald, Big Hettie and most of all, to Geel Piet, who had never in his life experienced a hand extended to him in help.

Even my mother, convinced that the temporal things of life were secondary and who had given the Lord the entire credit for making my education possible, had sat behind a sewing machine from dawn until dusk to support me as much as she was able.

I was a man now, I was through with taking. I felt the rest was up to me. If I didn’t know what the next step in my life was to be, I felt that I might set it in motion by acting independently of the help that was always so generously extended to me by others.

Hymie, the gambler and businessman, reckoned the odds on my winning one of three Rhodes scholarships for South Africa were less than even. As the time for my interview grew close he grew more and more distraught. He sensed my need to act independently and that to some large degree the Rhodes scholarship would achieve this aim. At the same time he wanted to cushion me from the disappointment if I lost. It was not unknown, but highly unusual to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship straight from school. Rhodes scholars were almost always chosen after an initial degree at university, when the student had already confirmed a brilliant school career with an equally brilliant first degree taken in conjunction with a sporting and cultural contribution in the university environment.

‘Christ, Peekay, in my old man’s terms the fees to Oxford are petty cash. We’d be together like always and come back home and eventually open a practice together. You can start looking after the people and I’ll make us a squillion dollars. It’s all so easy. Why do you have to make it so bloody difficult?’

‘Well, for a start I’m going to be welterweight champion of the world. If I took your dad’s money, I’d have to use all my time to justify it at university.’

‘You don’t have to justify it, you can do both!’ Hymie yelled.

‘You know me better than that. Let me tell you something stupid, Hymie. If I had to choose between becoming welterweight champion of the world and taking a law degree at Oxford, the boxing would win.’

He looked stunned. ‘Why? You’re not the sort of guy who wants to be famous that way. In fact, you’re exactly the opposite.’

‘It’s got to do with something which happened when I was very young. I can’t explain it, it’s just got to be that way.’

‘Peekay, the money you’ll make as a professional, even a world champion, will be nothing compared to the two of us together in a law practice.’

‘It’s not something I can explain. I’ve worked for this since I was six. It has nothing to do with the importance of being the welterweight champion of the world.’ I chuckled inwardly. How the hell could I explain to him that I was doing it, in part, for a dead chicken!

‘Look, Peekay, you’re only just a lightweight, it will be two, maybe three years before you become a welterweight, you can take your degree, or a good part of it anyway, and then go on with your boxing career. I’ll help you. We’ll even make a lot of dough out of it.’

The interview with the selection board was a fairly harrowing experience, the first hour taken up with the board talking to Singe ’n Burn while I cooled my heels in the waiting room of University House. The waiting was the worst part. The selection committee was comprised of three fairly elderly men who simply started to chat with me. One of them, a thin man with round steel-rimmed glasses which slid down to the tip of his very long nose and whose hair was parted precisely in the middle and slicked down with brilliantine, looked like Ichabod Crane. He peered at me over the top of his glasses and quoted the first line of three verses from Ovid, then asked me to complete them. I had to laugh, it was stuff I’d learned from Doc when I was nine.

‘Not bad, not at all bad, only one small mistake.’

‘Please, sir, I disagree,’ I replied, my heart in my mouth. The three poems had been among Doc’s favourites and I knew them intimately. I was certain I’d not made a mistake.

‘Bravo, young man!’ Ichabod said. ‘You’re quite correct and, besides, you had the courage to say so.’ He pulled his glasses back to the top of his nose and wrote something down on a tablet of lined bright yellow paper.

The three examiners looked positively musty with learning and not at all like sporting types. But, after they’d chatted to me seemingly about this and that, they fixed on my boxing. Why, they wanted to know, was I obsessed with boxing? My submission showed me to be a brilliant student, a very talented musician, a good rugby player and a brilliant boxer. One of them read from the submission, ‘Has the ambition to become a professional boxer and to win the welterweight championship of the world!’ I could see he was quite taken aback.

‘Surely a boy of your obvious intelligence, or according to your headmaster, brilliance, must see that a vocation as a professional pugilist is not compatible with reading law at Oxford?’

‘Lord Byron was a pugilist, sir. No one doubted his intellectual integrity,’ I answered. He grunted and wrote something down on the pad in front of him. Ichabod Crane had a slight smile on his face.

‘Ah, I do not recall whether Byron was an Oxford man!’ he said, which caused his two colleagues to laugh.

‘Your point is well made, Mr… er, Peekay, but as I recall he was an amateur.’

‘There is considerable evidence that he fought on occasions for a wager which today would make him a professional, sir.’

‘Be that as it may, a small wager on the side amongst friends is hardly the same thing, is it?’

‘No, sir,’ I replied, unwilling to press my luck any further by pointing out that quite large sums of money were involved.

At the end of the interview I was asked to wait with Singe ’n Burn in the waiting room. The head seemed even more nervous than me and made me repeat every word of the interview. When I got to the bit about Byron he was delighted. ‘Excellent!’ he said, clapping his hands, but then when I told him about Byron fighting for a wager and the somewhat brusque reply I had received, he frowned. ‘That’s Lewis of Natal University, a man who doesn’t care to be contradicted.’ When I concluded my account he simply said, ‘Well done, Peekay, you have acquitted yourself well.’

We were then ushered back in and it was Ichabod Crane who announced that I had been listed in the last five candidates and would be required to sit for the Oxford University entrance examinations.

‘The Prince of Wales School which you attend has an enviable reputation, and if you are an example of its product, the least I can say for myself and my colleagues, is that we have been impressed.’ They then stood up and shook hands with us both.

Singe ’n Burn was elated, we were over the major hurdle.

They had taken my schoolboy candidature seriously. Several days later I sat with Hymie for the Oxford University entrance examinations the results of which would be announced before the Rhodes scholarships.

I arrived home for the Christmas holidays to find my picture was on the front page of the Goldfields News. Mr Hankin, frustrated newspaperman to the last, had used the picture Doc had taken of me sitting on our rock the first day we had met on the hill behind the rose garden. Despite the fact that every one in town knew who I was, above it a banner headline read: BOY ON A ROCK FOR OXFORD! I recalled with a touch of bitterness the stupid old fart’s last use of this picture on the front page, when he accused Doc of being a Nazi spy and of breaking my jaw.

I found myself a local hero once again. As far as the town was concerned my elevation to Rhodes scholarship status was all over bar the shouting. In the month it took for the results of the Oxford entrance examinations to come through, Miss Bornstein became a nervous wreck.

Down at the prison they were much more impressed with Solly’s thirteen-punch combination. If they could have chosen between a scholarship to Oxford, a place they’d never heard of anyway, or a thirteen combo, there is little doubt they’d have plumped for the latter. Once again I won the Eastern Transvaal featherweight title and also best boxer of the championships. With this, my fourth successive win, Captain Smit, in what he later described as one of the great moments in his life, was able to claim the trophy permanently for the Barberton Blues.

My examination results arrived in late January and stated that I had received a distinction in all subjects. Miss Bornstein was beside herself and it was such big news around the place that old Mr Bornstein contrived to lose the first ever game of chess to me while denying hotly that he had purposely done so. Four days later a letter arrived from the Rhodes scholarship committee.

Dear Mr ‘Peekay’,

On behalf of the selection committee for Rhodes Scholarships for the year 1951, we regret to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful.

I have been asked by the selection committee to commend you for the manner in which you conducted yourself during your interview and for the results you achieved in the required examination.

It is the earnest opinion of the committee that, having completed your first degree, you should apply again.

Yours faithfully,

L.J. Fisher

Secretary to the Committee

The people around me had become accustomed to my winning, it was a habit they shared, an indulgence they took for granted. I could see they were shocked and bitterly disappointed that, having done their part, I had somehow failed them. Miss Bornstein and Mrs Boxall were distraught beyond belief, having quickly convinced themselves of some sort of plot. My mother, after shedding a few tears, soon concluded that the Lord had decided it was not His will for me and that, if only I would accept Him into my heart and into my life, His purpose for me would become clear. Two days later she announced at the dinner table that the Lord had guided her quite clearly and that I should give up boxing as it displeased him. When I had done so, I would be guided in the Lord’s special plans for me.

When I replied that boxing was too important to me, she had burst into sudden tears. ‘That is the devil in you talking, God is not mocked!’ she shouted, leaving the table with her face buried in her table napkin.

‘There, there. There’s a good lad,’ my granpa soothed.

The following day a letter arrived from Singe ’n Burn in which he said that he was confident I would ride through the disappointment and that I had the internal fortitude to grow stronger from the experience. He added that the true Renaissance man accepted defeat as the ingredient which made eventual success worth striving for, blah, blah, blah. He then added that he had received a letter from Professor Stonehouse of Witwatersrand University who, it turned out, was Ichabod Crane. In it Stonehouse had remarked that the committee had been visited by a Captain Swanepoel who had not been complimentary about the school and its activities and in particular my implication in these activities. He wanted to assure Singe ’n Burn that should he hear otherwise, this involvement by the police did not affect his judgement nor did it, he felt sure, affect that of his colleagues. Stonehouse concluded by saying that my application for a scholarship to Witwatersrand had been accepted and that he hoped the headmaster would be able to influence me to accept.

The following week the second scholarship, to Stellenbosch, was confirmed and I received an invitation to apply to Natal University. But I knew, in the minds of those who loved me, that this would be accepting the crumbs from the rich man’s table. They were emotionally involved with Oxford and no other place, no matter how grand, would have satisfied their expectations for me and rewarded them for the parts they had played.

Only my granpa seemed unconcerned. He’d said nothing when the letter from the committee had arrived, except of course, ‘There’s a good lad.’ I found him later in the garden grafting rose stock and we sat out of the blazing December sun in the dark shade of one of the big old English oaks. As usual he took ten minutes to tap and tamp and strike and eventually puff up a blue haze around his head. I’d given him a tin of Erinmore which I’d bought in Johannesburg and the honey-treated tobacco smoke smelt delicious as it swirled around his head.

‘My brother Arthur went to Oxford, he was the clever one in our family. Like you he won scholarships, first to grammar school and then to Oxford.’ He puffed and looked over the roof which still hadn’t been painted. ‘In my time not too many grammar school boys made it through to the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge.’

‘What happened to him, Granpa?’

The old man puffed at his pipe and stared out into space for ages, puff, puff, puff. ‘I don’t know what went wrong, lad. He rose to be Lord Chief Justice of Appeal and was completely crippled by arthritis by the time he was forty. A miserable life really, made a lot of money and a lot of misery for himself and everyone else. According to my sister Jessie, he died rich and lonely.’ He puffed on his pipe a little longer. ‘Funny thing about Arthur, he never could get things in their right perspective.’

Hymie had sent a telegram every week demanding to know if the results had come out and asking me to phone him, reverse charges, when they did. I called him from Mrs Boxall’s office in the library.

‘Hard luck, Peekay, so close, so bloody close!’ There was a click on the phone and then a woman’s voice. ‘Operator here, please do not swear on the public telephone,’ the phone clicked again. ‘Christ! Who was that?’ Hymie said on the other end. The phone clicked again and went dead. I dialled the exchange.

‘Operator, I was cut off.’

‘Peekay, this is Doris Engelbrecht!’ Doris was a woman in her mid twenties, a Marie ‘tonsillectomy’ convert who now taught Sunday school at the Apostolic Faith Mission. ‘I am supposed to cut off calls that contain obscene language. Your party in Pretoria used filthy language and has taken the Lord’s name in vain. I can’t allow it on the public telephone even if he is paying reverse charges.’

‘I’m sorry, Doris, he just talks like that, he means no harm, it’s just his way.’

‘Ag sis, Peekay, how can you know such a person? You who are so clever and all and whose mother is a very high up born-again Christian?’

‘Doris, you’re not supposed to be listening, telephone calls are meant to be private.’

‘It says in the book I must not allow people to use obscene language on the telephone. How can I not allow them when I don’t hear them?’

There seemed to be no ready answer to this. ‘Doris, if you get me my party in Pretoria, I’ll tell him not to use bad language.’

‘Tell him also to wash his mouth out with Lifebuoy soap!’ Doris said.

The phone rang a couple of minutes later. I grabbed it and before Hymie could speak said, ‘Watch your mouth, Levy. Doris the born-again Christian is monitoring you.’

There was only the slightest pause on the phone. ‘What’s your favourite chocolates, Doris?’ Hymie asked. There was silence on the other end. ‘Black Magic or one of those big three-pound boxes with the picture of an English cottage on the outside showing all the flowers in the garden, you know, with a big pink ribbon?’ The silence continued. ‘I just want to say I’m sorry for my language, language like that can upset certain parties.’

Doris’s voice cut in sharply. ‘Tell the party on the other end I will not be tempted by the devil, Peekay!’

‘Ag man, Doris, my friend has a chocolate factory, it is just a way of saying sorry,’ I coaxed.

‘A box so big you can’t pick it up with one hand, Doris,’ Hymie said.

‘The box with the garden and the pink ribbon, then,’ Doris piped in a small voice.

‘Okay, then you’ve got to promise not to listen any more, Doris,’ I said.

‘Only if you promise on the Lord’s name that your friend won’t swear some more,’ she said, a trace of warning still in her voice.

‘Thanks, Doris,’ we both said. The phone clicked and Doris was gone.

‘For Christ’s sake, don’t forget to send the chocolates, Hymie. I’ve got to live in this town.’

‘Is it safe to talk now?’ Hymie said.

‘Of course! You have the word of a born-again Christian!’

‘No I won’t forget, we keep a roomful of obscenely large boxes of chocolate at the carpet emporium. My dad calls them his “sweeteners”; every customer gets a box when a salesman determines it’s time to close the sale. My dad claims his entire carpet empire is built on chocolate.’ Hymie laughed, ‘He even calls the salesmen his chocolate soldiers!’

His voice changed abruptly. ‘The offer still stands, old mate. You don’t have to take the money, it’s just a loan. Now that you’ve passed the Oxford entrance examination and all.’

‘Hymie, we’ve been through that! You promised you wouldn’t bring it up again.’

‘Cripes, Peekay, what are you going to do?’

I told him about the three scholarships I’d been offered and the paragraph in the letter which encouraged me to apply again when I had obtained my first degree.

Hymie was silent for a moment. ‘Got it! We’ll go together to whatever university you choose and then we’ll take the last two years at Oxford. You’re only just seventeen and I’m just eighteen, we’ve got lots of time!’

It was my turn to be silent. ‘You’ve forgotten one thing,’ I said finally.

Hymie was quick as a flash. ‘Of course I haven’t, we’ll go to Witwatersrand and Solly can continue to train you and the old combo will stay together.’

‘It sounds great, Hymie, but you’ve already been accepted for Oxford. This doesn’t fit in at all with your plans.’

‘Plans! Plans are meant to be broken. This is a much better idea.’

But I knew it wasn’t.

‘Let me think, Hymie. I just need a few days to think things out.’ I knew quite suddenly that I would have to visit the crystal cave of Africa, that I had to ‘speak’ with Doc. Doc was still a very real part of my life and I had come to think of the crystal cave of Africa as the place I would be closest to him.

‘Call me, reverse charge, in a week, you promise now. So long, Peekay.’

The next morning I packed a rucksack and left before dawn for the cave. By mid-morning I had climbed to the shelf next to the cave. I had no desire to enter; Doc’s spirit was everywhere, I was as close as I needed to be.

The shelf faced west and caught the late afternoon sun so that now I sat in shadow, the smooth dolomite surface still cold from the night. I closed my eyes as Inkosi-Inkosikazi had shown me how to do so many years ago.

Now there came the sudden roar of water in my head and then I saw the three waterfalls. I was standing again in the moonlight on an outcrop of rock directly above the falling water. Far below me the river rushed, tumbling into a narrow gorge. Just before the river entered the gorge an apron of green water spread from the base of the last of the falls and across its centre, a small boy’s jump separating them, were the ten black stepping stones, their smooth wet surfaces only inches above the swirling current.

I took a deep breath and launched myself from the rock; the cool air mixed with spray rushed past my face. I hit the pool at the bottom of the first waterfall, the sound of the splash drowned in the roar of the water. I surfaced to be swept over the second of the falls and then again over the third, landing in the deep pool of swirling green water. I fought my way to the surface and struck out towards the first of the black stones. Pulling myself up onto it, I hurriedly jumped from one stone to another, finally leaping for the pebbly beach beyond. I felt my toes and the ball of my foot touch the smooth round river pebbles, and as I landed I found myself inside the crystal cave of Africa.

The cave was illuminated as though by soft sunlight and I had no trouble seeing around me. It was more magnificent than I had ever imagined, the stalactites suspended in every imaginable colour, some hanging thirty feet from the ceiling. I walked towards Doc’s platform skirting the mirror-still pools of water reflecting the grotesque and beautiful stone icicles. A ray of sunlight, as sharply defined as if it were painted in a Raphael skyscape, fell onto the platform. I looked up to see a perfectly round hole in the ceiling through which the sun shone as though predestined for this precise hour of this precise day. The beam of light shone through the crystalline structures above the platform and spilt down the steps leading up to it. Slowly I climbed the rough, natural steps until finally, standing on the top step, I looked down onto the platform where Doc lay at my feet.

Doc lay as I had imagined he would, fingers extended, arms bent at the elbows and crossed at the wrists across his breast, his legs straight, like the effigy of a medieval knight at rest on a gothic tomb in a quiet corner of a great cathedral. He was made of pure crystal, the soft sunlight reflected from the effigy dancing at the edges. Doc’s sculptured face was surrounded by burnished light.

I told him of my fear of losing control of my destiny, how, because I had camouflaged myself so well, I seemed now to be shaped and directed too much by the needs of others. How the power of one within me was being dissipated even though their purposes for me were not corrupt or ill-intentioned. On the contrary, their deeds came swaddled in the innocence of love. I was becoming powerless as those around me plundered my spirit with the gift of themselves.

It was as though there was a voice inside me explaining me to myself: I had become an expert at camouflage. My precocity allowed me, chameleon-like, to be to each what they required me to be. To Doc a companion, to Mrs Boxall an enchantment, to the people a champion, to Captain Smit a fulfilment, to Miss Bornstein a bright lint in a dull warp, to Hymie a foil, to Singe ’n Burn a product and to my peers an idealised school boy, a winner and a great guy.

I was a poor boy among rich ones and in my mind the status they gained by the simple expedient of being wealthy was only leavened by my superior performance in every other expectation. I had come to identify with my camouflage to the point where the masquerade became more important than the truth. While this posturing was so finely tuned it was no longer deliberate, it had nevertheless been born out of a compulsion to hide. As a small child I had discovered that only two places are available to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a non-entity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow.

My camouflage, begun so many years before under the persecution of the Judge, was now threatening to become the complete man. It was time to slough the mottled and cunningly contrived outer skin to emerge as myself, to face the risk of exposure, to regain the power of one. I had reached the point where to find myself was essential.

I was not conscious of how long I had been sitting cross-legged on the shelf but slowly my eyes focused and the soft blur of blue in front of them sharpened into the mountains to the west. In the rainforest below me I heard the cry of a red loerie. My legs were stiff and my ankles sore where they had been crossed. I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom… the same sense of being free that I had felt when the big, black, hissing train had pulled out of the platform, away from the hostel, Mevrou and the Judge. When Hoppie had sat opposite me and we had first shared an adventure and a green sucker between us.

I had come back from the dreamtime in the crystal cave of Africa with a certainty that I would be tested once more before the power of one would become mine alone. When my destiny would be in my own hands.

I continued to sit completely still as Doc had taught me to do when observing any living thing. ‘Still like rock, Peekay, past the itch and the scratch and the pain, where the concentration sees with a diamond-sharp light.’ And so I sat perfectly still, emerging slowly from the cocoon of the trance I had been in. In my mind I asked Doc for a sign.

At that moment, sitting still as a rock on the shelf directly outside the crystal cave of Africa, I had no doubts, nor was I troubled by the intellectual absurdity of the request for a sign, a confirmation in a physical sense of the message I felt so clearly within me.

At first it was hardly a movement at all, less even than the flicker of an eyelid, a slight blurring of light. Then the head of the black mamba rose above the edge of the shelf two feet from where I sat. Its flat anthracite head froze inches above the shelf. Its forked tongue, as though possessing a life of its own, flicked and trembled the air for vibrations. The huge snake rose, periscoping above the shelf, moving forward until its head was no more than six inches from my face. I could see its eyes, black tektites without movement set above jaws of injected death. Its head moved in slow motion from side to side, sweeping across my sightline. If it struck I would have fifteen minutes to live… enough time to enter the cave and lie beside Doc before my nervous system collapsed. The mamba’s head moved below my line of sight and then came to rest on the toe of my boot. I could feel the pressure of its body as it slid over the boot and along the shelf to disappear over the cliff’s far edge. The snake could only have come out of the cave. Doc had sent me a sign. I knew what I was required to do.

Slowly the numbness left my body and I felt the rush of adrenalin as it hit my bloodstream, leaving me trembling. I waited until the shaking had ceased before I dropped down to the tiny ledge and worked my body flat against the cliff wall until I stood facing into the opening to the cave. The floor of the tunnel leading to the cave was covered with sand worn from the walls by the erosion of the wind. I could clearly see where the snake had entered and then returned, no doubt having fed on the hapless bats asleep inside. Doc had sent me the sign I wanted.

I carefully worked my way back to the ledge, shouldered my small rucksack and started to climb down the cliff. The snake was unlikely to be on my path. Fat from eating bats, it would find a place to sleep under the safety of a rock where it was unlikely to be disturbed.

Once I had recovered from my fear, I found the snake an entirely appropriate, even perhaps a magnificent symbol. The black mamba, the most deadly snake in the world, takes one partner for life. If its partner is killed the second snake will often wait for the killer to return, prepared to die in order to take revenge. Not naturally aggressive, it will nevertheless defend its young, raising itself onto the last few inches of its tail and striking sideways in a whipping action. As most humans instinctively raise their arms in panic to defend their eyes the mamba fangs most often strike into the top of the upper arm. The journey to the heart is swift and the outcome deadly certain.

There was a great deal of consternation from everyone concerned when I announced that I wanted to take a year off between school and university and that I would go up to Northern Rhodesia to work in the copper mines. It was as though all who loved me, even the boxers, felt that if I broke the continuity of my life, the spell which bound our relationship would be broken.

Gert’s brother had visited him at Christmas from the Copperbelt and had talked of the shortage of white labour in the mines of both the Copperbelt and the Congo. The Korean War had just started and copper prices had soared. He told of diamond drillers making two hundred pounds a week and young grizzly men making a hundred after they were paid their copper bonus.

Northern Rhodesia was a British colony across the Zambesi, it was far away from the people who held me so dearly within the thrall of their ambitions. It was away from the legend of the Tadpole Angel. It was even away from boxing. I saw it as an opportunity to come to terms with myself and to build my body to the size of a welterweight. The hard underground work would toughen me, while twelve months away from the ring would do me no harm. I had been boxing since I was seven years old and had fought one hundred and sixteen amateur fights. My instincts, which always served me well, told me it was time for a rest.

Gert’s brother, Danie, worked as a diamond driller, the elite corps among the Copperbelt miners. Most of the diamond drillers were Afrikaners from Johannesburg attracted by the huge copper bonus white mine workers were being paid. They were so named because the cutting edge of the drill bits were studded with industrial quality diamonds to make them hard enough to cut through the rock. Danie worked in a mine near Ndda, in the centre of the Copperbelt. He said he could get me a job as a grizzly man at the Rhoan Antelope Mine owned by Anglo American in the small mining town of Luanshya. A grizzly man worked with high explosives and was the next highest paid job on the mine.

The four-day trip by train left South Africa at Beitbridge and travelled across Southern Rhodesia to Victoria Falls where I crossed the Zambesi into Northern Rhodesia. Southern Rhodesia is not unlike the Eastern and Northern Transvaal but across the great Zambesi the country changes to flat grassland and equatorial forest. The trees which covered vast areas of the country were unlike any I had seen before, for they carried their autumnal colouring all through summer. Leaves of brilliant reds and yellows and even mauves and purple, all the colours expected of a northern hemisphere autumn. A passenger who sat beside me told me of giant edible mushrooms that appear in the forest overnight and grow two feet tall with a canopy three feet across. A mushroom weighing thirty pounds. I’d been around long enough not to take everything I heard as gospel, but in the months to come I would see Africans selling these huge mushrooms at the side of the road, simply cutting off the amount the purchaser required. Giant, brilliantly coloured moths with a wingspan ten inches across also bred on the wet, leafy floor of the forest.

Northern Rhodesia felt different and the Africans, like most from central Africa, were truly black, their faces seemingly flatter and their build smaller than the lighter milk chocolate brown of the Zulu or the Shangaan. They spoke Swahili, and it was with some consternation that I realised it was a language I did not speak and that I was cut off from the African people for the first time in my life. In the mines they talked a language known as Ki-swahili which was not unlike Fanagalo, but like all languages designed for a working purpose, it was limited and stunted. Africans raw from their villages in the bush were recruited to the mines where they were taught this mine language so that they could take instructions from their white bosses and, in many cases, talk to each other. A work gang often contained black miners from half a dozen different tribes, each with a different language.

At four o’clock in the afternoon on the fourth day we finally pulled into the sleepy town of Ndola. Ndola was really only a small community made up of miners’ families and tradespeople who lived off the giant copper mines. The remainder of the town’s people were British colonial service administration officers and their families. It made for an uneasy white dichotomy. The mining families seldom mixed socially with the civil service families established at a separate end of the town. Ndola was thirty miles or so from Luanshya but the end of the railroad as far as passenger trains were concerned.

Gert’s brother met me at the station where the air was filled with the babble of confused and frightened blacks. White mine officers feigned indifference while blue uniformed black mine policeman filled with self-importance and professional impatience herded and pushed hundreds of Africans from the train. Too late now to turn back, they had been harvested from the bush like wild tsamma melons.

For the past two days and nights the train had stopped at small sidings with no more than a tin shed and a small clearing to separate them from the rest of the bush. Here small groups of perhaps a dozen Africans wrapped in blankets would be herded onto the train by a black recruiting officer. The whites of their eyes showed their fear and confusion as they were bundled aboard the hissing, steam-belching monster, jeered at by those who had earlier been gathered up and who were by now, with arms resting casually on the sills of carriage windows, accustomed to the clickity-clack of momentum and the wonderment of the snake which runs on an iron road.

Now they were almost at the end of their journey. I watched as the black mine police tried to get them roughly into line. They came only because drought and a great locust plague had destroyed their crops and the grazing for their cattle. Driven from their villages as indentured labour for the mines, they would work for a year so they could send money to keep their starving women and children alive. The fear these poor creatures felt the first time they were plummeted into the bowels of the earth was a source of great mirth to the initiated black miners as well as to many of the whites.

Gert’s brother noticed me looking at the poor buggers. ‘Ag man, they like a monkey when they first come. They can’t even climb a ladder and when you show them a mirror they go almost white when they see the big ape looking back at them. It’s very funny man, I’m telling you.’ He picked up my suitcase and I followed him over to a green Bedford utility. ‘I just come off shift so I’ll drive you to Luanshya, I telephoned the mess there yesterday and they know you coming. Tomorrow you got to report to the mine recruiting office for a medical and then you go sign on for the school of mines for three months. I got to warn you, man, they got a Welsh bastard there called Thomas, watch out for him. If you get out of the school of mines and get your blasting licence you go onto grizzlies for six months, three if you lucky. But the money is good.’

‘Why only six months or even three?’ I asked as we pulled out of the station.

‘I didn’t want to tell you before, but if you on grizzlies much longer the odds is cut down.’

‘The odds?’

‘Ja man, the odds of getting badly injured or killed.’ Gert laughed. ‘They don’t pay you that kind of money for nothing, you know.’

‘Does everyone go onto grizzlies?’

‘Ja, all the young guys, if you over twenty-two your reactions not fast enough. Only young guys are fast enough or,’ he grinned, ‘mad enough to do it!’

‘Christ, it doesn’t look as though I’ve got a lot of choice!’

Gert’s brother laughed again. ‘None. All young guys got to be grizzly men, nobody else will do it. On the Rand it’s not even allowed. Moving ore through a grizzly is the best way, but it’s also the most dangerous. The miner’s union on the Rand won’t have a bar of it and grizzlies are banned anywhere in South Africa, but here in Northern Rhodesia they don’t care, man. As long as they get the muck out they happy.’ He paused as he made a turn, heading the ute onto a corrugated dirt road leading out of town. ‘But you make blêrrie good money and if you careful you’ll be orright.’

I laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Danie, I’ll be bloody careful!’

He looked at me, his hands vibrating on the steering wheel as we hit a particularly badly rutted strip. ‘That’s the blêrrie trouble, a grizzly man comes on night shift, eleven to seven, he got the job to pull all the ore out of a stope. That’s my job as a diamond driller, I drill the stope all day and you got to pull the muck out through the grizzly at night. If you too careful and you don’t get enough muck through the grizzly so I got an empty stope to work with, you in a lot of trouble man!’ He gave me a knowing grin. ‘You do that a few times and you can collect your ticket. The diamond driller is king and you fuck up his stope you don’t work in the mines no more, man.’

I remained silent. I hadn’t any idea what he was talking about, but I gathered that whatever a grizzly man did he was under all sorts of pressure. And pressure creates accidents.

‘That’s one good thing about Thomas in the school of mines, he makes things so blêrrie bad in your training that if you make it and get your blasting licence you got a good chance of staying alive on a grizzly.’

Danie left me at the mine mess where I had a room reserved for a month before I moved into a hut of my own in one of the single men’s compounds surrounding the mess.

‘I’ll try to visit sometimes, you hear. But up here it’s not so easy, each mining town is on its own and you will work night shift and me always day so it’s no use for me to come over. If it gets very bad you can call me.’ He scribbled the name of his mine and a phone number on a piece of paper. ‘Just leave a message for me at the mine office, I’ll come as soon as I can.’ He extended his hand. He was a big bloke, six foot two or three and he had the usual Afrikaner gorilla grip.

I thanked him for his help. ‘Ag man, Peekay, any friend of my little boetie is a friend of mine. Gert says you a real man and will one day be a world champion, I’m glad to help.’ He paused. ‘There’s boxing up here also, but nobody as good as you. Some of the Kaffirs is okay, they will be quite good to practise on, these blêrrie apes has got heads so hard they’d wear out a diamond drill. So long, Peekay, all the best, hey.’ I watched as the ute accelerated, skidding its wheels before moving away in a cloud of dust.

Apart from the smelter and mine administration offices the small mining town of Luanshya consisted of two parts. The town itself, which contained the married mine officials and their families, school teachers, shop owners, and colonial administration, most of whom were police, and a quite separate area for single men of several hundred small circular huts known by the South African term ‘rondavels’.

Each of these rondavels had a corrugated iron roof and walls and floor of cement. A square flyscreen verandah, six feet wide and fifteen feet in length, was attached to each hut. While this stoep was a flimsy affair intended to keep mosquitoes out and let a breeze in, the door to the hut was made of sheet iron, almost impossible to break down if locked from the inside. Two small windows on either side of the hut were barred. There was nothing friendly or homely about these huts except perhaps for a large ceiling fan which sometimes, on a blazing hot day after a nightshift working a grizzly, stirred the air enough to induce a fitful sleep.

The rondavel contained a bed and mattress, a wardrobe, a table and two chairs. In the centre of this untidy army of huts was the mess, where for a few pounds a month you ate. The block I was to live in contained men from forty-two countries, many of whom had a dubious past and a doubtful future in the country from which they originated. While there were a few grizzly men like myself, young guys who were fast and fit enough to work the tungsten steel grizzly bars without killing themselves, most of the miners were in their thirties, some even older. They were without exception tough, hard men who had come for the money. Few were traditional miners, many were drunks and criminals, some of them ex-Nazis on the run, some mercenaries who had just kept moving when the war ended, waiting for another to happen though not prepared to don a uniform for formal affairs such as the one gathering momentum in Korea. Some were card sharps, con men and thieves who, while working in the mines in order to remain in town, had come for the after-hours action.

I learned that the normal courtesies did not apply, and not to ask a man where he came from or to inquire into his past. He might tell you when he became soulfully or sentimentally drunk, but most of the crud, as the compound men were called by the town’s people, had learned to keep their mouths shut, drunk or sober. I also quickly learned to keep my hut shut on a Saturday night, when the week after I’d been allocated one I narrowly avoided being pack raped. In a town with no women, other than a handful of married dames, a seventeen-year-old boy was a grand sexual opportunity for a drunken group of Germans, Russians, French Algerians and Slavs. Had I not been rescued by Rasputin, a giant Georgian who almost never spoke, I would have been bum bait for sure. While the town itself was policed, the crud compound was on mine property and largely left alone unless a stabbing took place or a drunken brawl got out of hand.

Every six weeks a Belgian DC-3 would land on the small airstrip a mile out of town near number nine shaft. To the cheers of the waiting crud it would disgorge twenty-five whores from Brussels via the Belgian Congo where they had already spent a lucrative week in the copper mines of Katanga province. A couple of weeks on their backs would set them up for a year at home. Indeed many of them were young housewives putting together the deposit for a home or shop girls earning a dowry. Europe was short of men and a girl had to have a little more than a respectable background if she hoped to marry. Two easily explained weeks away on holiday and a pair of constantly opening legs was all it took to consolidate a proposal for marriage with the deposit, ostensibly from the bride’s parents, on a nice little cottage in the suburbs of Antwerp. Some of the ladies were professional whores, because that’s what some of the crud wanted. A good whore knows how to get drunk with a man, give him what he wants and rob him of a week’s wages without disturbing his anonymity or touching his heart. A man on the run finds compassion or love or even pretended innocence his greatest source of emotional danger.

The crud would wait from dawn on the day the whore flight came in, chaffing each other about getting the fresh meat and the prettiest women, cursing the bloody frog crud across the Congo border for having first go, telling each other that it was a well-established fact that frog crud have tiny pricks and that’s why the women went there first. They would tell each other with winks and guffaws that, had it been the other way around, the bloody frogs would have ended up getting it for nothing because the whores wouldn’t have known they’d been on the job. The whores were known as French letters because the frog crud had first dipped their pens in and then sent them by airmail across the border. The Congo miners were a mixed lot just like the Copperbelt, though the majority were Belgian who spoke French. But the distinction escaped most of the crud. ‘If he speaks French he’s a frog. So who’s going to argue?’

My new life began in the school of mines, a school conducted mostly underground on day shift at number nine shaft which stood on the edge of town. It was run by two large Welshmen who, it was claimed, played together in the front row for Cardiff before the war. Dai Thomas and Gareth Jones were a remarkable duo with Thomas working underground with the class and Jones, an ex-school teacher and the mine technical officer, taking the two-hour theoretical class before our eight-hour underground shift began.

The combination was worked to extract the maximum agony out of the three months spent in their care. Jones would feed Thomas the weaknesses of each member of the class and Thomas would exploit these for all he was worth when we arrived underground. They saw themselves as being in the practical business of showing men how to stay alive underground and they damn near killed them in the process.

At seventeen I was the youngest and also physically the smallest of as tough a collection of reluctant students as ever assembled to learn anything. We had all come for the money and not for the career, but the Northern Rhodesian Department of Mines required that all miners obtain their blasting licence, a process which required that we learn not only how to use dynamite but that we were trained as lashers, timber men, drillers and pipe fitters. The first two months were physically the hardest of my life. At one hundred and thirty pounds I was not designed for the kind of work required. This was not South Africa and Thomas demanded that the men under him do all the work normally done by African miners. The back-breaking labour of drilling and lashing a freshly blasted haulage could bring grown men to total exhaustion and, many a time, to the point of mutiny. Thomas was remorseless. Lashing was the process of removing blasted rock by hand and shovel and loading it into underground trucks. This we performed six hours a day, every day for the first month, often in narrow haulages a thousand feet underground in temperatures of a hundred degrees. The eight-hour underground shift allowed half an hour for lunch and a five-minute water break every hour. Years of boxing had conditioned my arms and upper body and I quickly learned the rhythm of working a blunt-nosed, long-handled miner’s shovel. But by the end of the shift I was buckling at the knees and blubbing from exhaustion. Thomas heckled the men with invective, constantly trying to provoke a fight, trying to make a man lose his head and have a go at him. One or two tried and apart from receiving a thrashing were expelled from the school, their chance at the big money gone forever. I longed to take Thomas on. No one knew I was a boxer and when I was not too exhausted and could dream a little, I fantasised about him throwing punches at me, missing hopelessly and finally falling exhausted on the ground having been made a monkey of in front of the crud. In my daydream I would leave him grovelling on the ground while I quietly picked up my long-handled shovel and continued lashing the end without saying a word. Just the knowledge that I could probably manage to do this in real life kept me going when he baited me, sometimes without let-up for an hour at a time.

‘Okay shit for brains, you’re so fucking smart, how much gelignite is required to blast a twelve hole end?’ In the first week I had read the textbooks Gareth Jones had issued to us from cover to cover, and Thomas soon discovered I knew the answers to the simple questions he threw at us when we went underground each day. He didn’t like a smartarse in his class and seemed determined to get me. He would ask questions which appeared in the books weeks ahead of our learning them, but I usually knew the answer. The rest of the crud were not known for their brains and reading isn’t generally a strong point among such men. I knew I couldn’t goof the answer just to satisfy Thomas’ need to put me in my place. The crud derived enormous pleasure from my getting the answers right and therefore, in their minds, getting the better of Thomas.

‘Six foot drills or nine, sir?’ I’d ask.

‘You being a smartarse, boyo?’

‘No sir, but it would make a difference wouldn’t it?’

‘Of course, you half-wit, of course it would make a difference!’

‘Well, that’s why I asked, Mr Thomas.’

Caught in his own verbal trap. Thomas would answer angrily, ‘We don’t use too many nine-foot Jackhammer drills, now do we?’

‘If the rock is a bit cakey we do, sir,’ I answered.

Thomas would jump up in glee. ‘There’s precious little cakey rock in a fucking copper mine, boyo!’

‘In that case eighteen pounds, sir,’ I would answer smoothly. The men around me would wear smiles as big as water melon slices.

‘Correct!’ Thomas would yell. ‘But don’t you be a smartarse with me, boyo, or you’ll be lashing ends until your arms fall off and you have to use your shoulder stumps to pick your nose.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I’d say, but I knew he would have the last say, moving me over to a badly blasted end where the ore had broken in large lumps too big for a shovel so that I had to break and lift the rock all day until I collapsed from exhaustion.

‘No malingering, boyo, back on the job in five minutes or you’re fined a quid.’ In the school of mines we were paid a token salary which just covered the cost of the hut and our mess bill with a couple of quid over for essentials. If, by the end of the month, you were down five pounds it made things tough.

I told myself that nothing Thomas said or did could wear me down. I convinced myself that the hard work was why I’d come, and indeed, after two months in the school of mines my body had never been harder and I knew the muscle bulk would soon begin to follow. While I kept a speedball and a punching bag in my hut where it wouldn’t be noticed and worked out every day with weights in the club gym as well as doing five or six miles of road work three times a week, I made no attempt to join the boxing club.

Sport was the one thing both miners and good citizens shared and the club, heavily subsidised by the mines, was the social centre of the small town. The club affected all the traditions and mannerly ways anglophile institutions of this sort demand from lower middle-class members who find themselves fortuitously thrust into the upper echelons of a colonial backwater society, and it solved the problem of having to accommodate the multi-national crud by building a separate bar for them. This was in a separate building from the club, with its own entrance where men could come without being seen by the town establishment, mine officials and the more acceptable of the miners’ families.

The crud bar, as it was known, contained a fifty-foot bar counter, cement floor and white lavatory tiles six feet up the walls. It also featured swing doors like a Western saloon. The bar room itself was empty and permitted standing room only. Outside was a beer garden with a hundred tables or so, each one sporting a permanent tin umbrella welded into the centre of a steel table which, in turn, was bolted onto the painted green cement yard. The chairs too were made of steel, their legs permanently bolted to the cement. Each table and six chairs were painted a different colour so that from a distance it all looked very gay. Above the tables, suspended like tall washing lines, were strings of coloured lights which at night gave a weird sort of green and mauve cast to everything.

Three barmen, all Germans, all called Fritz and all fat, worked the bar like an ordinance office. Each Fritz operated his third of the bar and behind him was a complete stock of liquor and a cash register. He never left his own territory to pour a drink, draw a beer or make change. Each Fritz was known by a number, Fritz One, Fritz Two and Fritz Three. Each had a crud following whom he came to regard as regular to his part of the bar. The Fritzs boasted there wasn’t a drink in the world they didn’t have or couldn’t make. But mostly they served brandy, beer, rum and vodka, in that order. If you did your drinking standing in the bar you could get your liquor served by the measure and your beer by the glass. But if you wished to sit outside, you got a jug of beer or bought a full bottle of spirits, unless you wanted to keep fighting your way back into the bar for single serves. No Fritz was ever known to move from behind the long bar. The crud bar stayed open from seven a.m. until midnight when one Fritz would hose it out, removing at the same time the crud too inebriated to leave on their own.

During the day, until three o’clock when the day shift ended, the three Fritz wives, each one as big as her husband, worked the crud bar. They were known as Mrs Fritz collectively and remained un-numbered. Husband and wife, it seemed, never got together and it was a source of constant wonder among the crud that the Fritzs between them boasted fifteen fat blond children. The joke going around was that when the Fritzs left the crud bar they were going to buy the whole red light district in Hamburg.

At the end of three months, only eleven of the eighteen men who joined the school of mines with me remained. We were eligible to take our blasting licence, choosing either the international or Northern Rhodesian version. Thomas, in a rare show of kindness, suggested that I sit for the international, as he hadn’t had a student pass the international in seven years.

‘If you pass you’ll be the youngest ever, which would be a feather in Mr Jones’ cap, and I might even take a pat on the back myself, boyo.’ The rugby season had begun and Thomas had discovered, too late to be of any use to me, that I could play and in the trials looked like I could make the first team of which he and Jones were selectors.

The examination was held at the office of the Department of Mines in Ndola. It consisted of a half hour written examination and an hour of verbals. This was because many of the men were not much good at writing but could answer most of the questions put to them directly.

Most of the guys with me were frightened to the point of paralysis. If you failed you returned to the school for another month, and failure after that and you were out of the mines. I had been coaching them for the last month and had come to be known as Professor Peekay. On the bus into Ndola I fired endless questions at them.

All but a huge Boer from the Orange Free State obtained their blasting licence. The Boer, a likeable enough bloke but thick as mahogany, was out forever, but cheered himself up with the knowledge that he had been accepted as a stoker on Northern Rhodesian Railways. Thomas and Jones had followed us to Ndola by car and after the morning’s examination we’d all repaired to Ndola’s only hotel, where just about everyone got very drunk and ended up telling Thomas what a good old bastard he was. I had passed the international licence and must have consumed a gallon of lemon squash just responding to the toasts the men kept proposing to Thomas, Jones and Professor Peekay. The more drunk they became the more effusive, until towards the end Thomas had become a certain candidate for sainthood and they all swore that they would protect me against all comers and that there was nothing I couldn’t ask them for.

My life as a grizzly man commenced the next day when I went underground for the first time on my own, on the eleven to seven shift.

The workings of a grizzly need to be briefly explained. Imagine if you will, a funnel pointing downwards towards the ground. The top bit of the funnel before it narrows down to the spout is the stope, which is, in fact, a huge underground hole. The spout from it is used for getting the rock, blasted off the sides of the hole, out of the hole. This spout is sixty feet long and leads directly to a main haulage. The bottom of the funnel spout is fitted with a steel door worked with compressed air. Halfway down it, that is thirty foot from the main haulage and the same distance from the beginning of the stope, a set of six tungsten steel bars are fitted across the funnel spout with a narrow walkway cut sideways into the rock leading to it. These six tungsten bars are known as a grizzly. The reason for this name being that tungsten bars were made in Canada, hence ‘grizzly bars’. The ore drilled and blasted from the sides of the stope by the diamond drillers is funnelled down the spout at the bottom of the stope and comes rushing down, with the smaller bits falling through the grizzly bars, filling the bottom half of the funnel spout. The bigger bits fall onto the base and need to be blasted through them into a suitable size for loading onto the trucks in the main haulage. Underground trains pull up to the compressed air door and operators standing on the main haulage open the door at the end of the funnel and fill the trucks with ore. It’s really a very simple operation but also a very dangerous one. The grizzly man works the bars which are directly under the mouth of the stope which is capable of disgorging rocks the size of small motor cars without warning.

The grizzly man works in the dark; his miner’s lamp attached to his hard hat with the battery clipped to his webbing belt is the only source of light. He has five Africans to help him lash the rock through the grizzly bars and to prepare mud for the explosives. Occasionally he will get the muck flowing from the stope and it will continue to run all night, with only an occasional blast or a little work on the bars with long crowbars to keep it going. But mostly it’s gut-wrenching work laying charges and working ore through the bars, sometimes as many as forty or fifty blasts a night until a powder headache caused by the sweet, sickly smelling gelignite sticks threatens to tear your head off your shoulders. Only diamond drillers, who use more gelignite than grizzly men, get worse powder headaches, sometimes being reduced to a state of unconsciousness or temporary insanity by the terrible pain.

A grizzly man works on the actual bars which are about six inches thick and two feet apart. Safety rules require that he be attached to a twenty-foot chain which clips to the back of his webbing belt. But the chain, like so many safety procedures, is a Catch 22: if he slips and falls through the bars into the bottom half of the funnel his back will snap like a piece of celery as his fall is broken by the chain some fifteen feet below the bars. If he doesn’t break his back and the muck starts to run, the ore coming through the bars would tear him into mince. A good grizzly man takes his chances on the bars without a safety chain and learns, even in the dark, to be as agile as a monkey, jumping from bar to bar all night carrying a five-foot steel crowbar in his hands.

Grizzly men always work the same grizzly, knowing their lives depend on their intimate knowledge of the character of the stope and the funnel. Each grizzly has a personality of its own and a good grizzly man can read his grizzly as though his mind is tuned into the very rock it’s made from. A slight leaking of pebble in a hang up and he knows to run for safety as a hundred tons of rock is about to come down directly over his head. The wrong pitch in an echo from the stope and he knows a single rock may come hurtling through to smash him off the bars. His reactions are as fine tuned as those of a top racing car driver, and his adrenalin pumps all night. At the end of a shift a grizzly man will have lost four or five pounds in weight and will be in a state of total exhaustion. At the end of three months he is taken off grizzlies for a spell of two months, before he is allowed to return. While the money was enormous, most grizzly men elected not to return and took a lower-paid job as a pipe fitter, timber man or ganger.

One particular job on the grizzly led to the final unnerving of even the most courageous of men. Some time during most shifts and often three or four times the rock would become blocked at the mouth of the stope. That is, at the very top of the funnel some thirty feet above the grizzly bars. In mining terms this was known as a hang-up or a bunch of grapes. Rocks of every size jammed the mouth of the stope. The safety procedure required to dislodge the rock and get the stope flowing again was to make up a parcel of gelignite. This is then tied to the end of a thirty-foot bamboo pole. The sticks of explosive are then wrapped with cordtex, which is explosive made into a cord which looks like white electrical flex. The idea is to push the parcel of gelignite against the rocks jamming the mouth of the stope. Then to light the fuse attached to the end of the cordtex which has been trailed from the parcel of gelignite to the level of the grizzly. Whereupon, if you’re very lucky, the blast against the hang-up hopefully dislodges the rocks, causing the mouth of the stope to open again and the muck to flow.

But life on a grizzly isn’t meant to be easy, and dynamite or gelignite, when it is not sealed with a mud pack, blasts outwards away from the rock, taking the line of least resistance. Blasting a hang-up with the bamboo pole technique is seldom successful. The pressure on the grizzly man is enormous, he must get the muck flowing and, using the bamboo pole technique he could blast away unsuccessfully all night. He is paid by the truck load, and if he doesn’t empty his stope the diamond driller will lose his day shift, which often results in a grizzly man losing a couple of teeth. Apart from all this the grizzly man’s pride is involved. A grizzly man who leaves a grizzly hung up is the lowest form of life in a mine. As Thomas would say, ‘It’s just not fuckin’ done, boyo!’

After unsuccessfully trying to bring a hang-up down with a bamboo pole bomb, the grizzly man fills the front of his thick woollen miner’s shirt with mud and a gelignite bomb strung with cordtex, and scales the sheer face of the funnel until he reaches the hang-up. This is the dangerous part, if the hang-up comes down while he is fixing the explosive against it, the grizzly man is dead, thrown sixty feet down through the bars to be buried under fifty tons of rock. Fighting the panic of being totally committed with nowhere to go, you find a jamming point between the rocks and insert the gelignite bomb. Then you wind the cordtex around it and let enough cordtex fall to the grizzly below so that you can attach a fuse to it. Finally you seal the bomb with mud to make it airtight so that the blast will go inwards into the rock. Having set it and packed it you then have to come down again, each precarious step up and down the sheer face of the funnel a gamble that the hang-up will hold. Back at the grizzly level you connect the cordtex to a fuse, signal the African to blow the warning hooter, light the fuse with a cheesa stick, a flare the size of a thick pencil which, once lit, cannot be extinguished. Then you have thirty seconds to retire into the safety tunnel before the blast goes off.

If the hang-up still doesn’t come down you are forced up again, aware that with the added blast it could be teetering and on the point of crashing down. You soon learn to make only one trip up the funnel laying several blasts across the face of the hang-up and stringing them together with cordtex. This means you spend ten or fifteen minutes up against the hang-up with each second increasing the tension and the danger. But this way, when the four or five bombs go off simultaneously, you have a good chance of bringing the hang-up down. It all depends on nerve… yours. If you have the nerve to stay up the funnel for fifteen or twenty minutes, carefully laying a blast pattern and sealing each bomb with mud, it takes a very big hang-up to defeat you. In the year I was to work grizzlies, five of the twenty grizzly men working the mine were killed when a hang-up gave way while they were up the funnel laying charges against it.

Mine rules did not permit grizzly men to climb up into the mouth of the stope: caught doing it meant instant dismissal. But because you were forced to at least twice during a shift, the shift boss would stay away from the grizzly levels so that he wouldn’t catch you. Everyone’s copper bonus depended on the grizzly man getting the ore out of the stope. No shift boss would police the rules when he knew that the bamboo pole technique was so ineffectual that a hang-up might remain all night and not a ton of ore would be moved out of the stope.

When I wasn’t shitting myself I took a perverse pride in being a successful grizzly man. I was the youngest in the mine with one of the best ore tallies. The diamond driller who worked the stope above my grizzly was an Afrikaner called Botha whom I never met as he worked day shift and I worked nights. The diamond drillers were the underground elite and never spoke to the grizzly men personally, the work was too dangerous and a driller didn’t want the responsibility of knowing who was working his stope. But if you kept your ore tally up and his stope empty, he would send you a case of brandy at the end of each month.

A case of brandy from your diamond driller was the badge of honour every grizzly man worked for: in the crazy crud world of the Central African copper mines it became an approbation even more important than money.

I gave the brandy to Rasputin, the giant Georgian who lived in the hut next to me. Rasputin worked as a timber man on the same night shift as I did and we cycled to number seven shaft about three miles out of town where we both worked. From the night he had saved my rear end virginity, we had been friends, our friendship based less on words than on the things we shared. Rasputin spoke very little English and rather than learn any more he simply didn’t talk. He’d sit on my stoep or I on his and we’d play chess. He was a good enough player to keep me interested and if I lost concentration he would sometimes take a game. Often we would simply sit and I would read a book or he’d play his collection of Tchaikovsky symphonies and concertos on his new portable record player. He never played anything but Tchaikovsky and would sit with a huge block of native timber in one hand and kindling axe in the other, and without ever releasing the block of wood he would chip away until three hours later it became a perfect ball. Rasputin was almost as tall as Doc had been but he was twice as broad, even bigger than the Afrikaners, and the axe would have weighed five pounds. The act of carving the block of wood into a ball was one which took almost unimaginable strength. When Rasputin wasn’t carving a ball he was sharpening the axe. He would work away to the music, going through the entire repertoire of concertos and of the three symphonies. Sometimes silent tears would roll down his cheeks and spill into his shaggy beard. These he never bothered to wipe away, but he simply continued to carve at the block of wood, occasionally putting down the axe long enough to pick up a tin mug filled with VSOP brandy which he would half empty in one gulp and then refill to the brim. When Tchaikovsky came to an end, which meant sitting through all three of his piano concertos and his violin concerto and at least three symphonies, mostly his number one in G minor, two in C minor and always ending with his sixth, the grand and brilliant Pathétique, a bottle of Botha’s brandy would be empty and the wooden ball would be complete.

Rasputin would carefully pack away the record player, dust the records and slip them into their jackets and lay them on top of a towel in an old suitcase. Then he would take the wooden ball and add it to a pile on the floor inside his hut. There must have been six or seven hundred of these about the size of a bowling ball, stacked in separate heaps of about one hundred each, one ball added each day. Some of the older ones had turned a lovely silver grey colour and others bore beautiful markings from the native timber he used. Each ball was identically sized and beautifully made, you could pick up two carved months apart and their perfect roundness and size were so close the eye couldn’t pick out the difference, each ball a testimony to his enormous skill and strength. His hut smelled of the sap of young timber, not unlike the smell of a forest. Rasputin would step into his hut and take a deep breath, inhaling the sappy odour of the uncured native timber.

‘Smell like Roosha, Peekay.’ I often wondered if in his native Russia he had once lived among the birch forests of the Taiga, but I could think of no way of asking him.

I became fascinated by the beautifully carved balls and found that I could hold the axe in position to work a piece of wood for no more than three minutes before the hand holding the wood would no longer function and the pain in my right wrist from holding the axe became unbearable. I realised that the exercise involved would strengthen my arms, wrists and even my hands for boxing, so I purchased a smaller and lighter axe and Rasputin sharpened it for me until it was like a razor. The idea that I wished to emulate him gave the huge bear of a man great pleasure. We’d sit on his verandah whittling away, listening to Mr Tchaikovsky, Rasputin drinking brandy and shedding tears which fell like drops of liquid silver down his cheeks to disappear into his huge black beard.

Eventually I worked out that the wooden balls were Rasputin’s calendar, one ball for each day he had spent in the mines. By my reckoning he had been there about three years.

We would meet after our shift came up at seven a.m. and cycle back to the mess for breakfast. Rasputin would always be showered and waiting for me as my cage came up from underground, somehow he managed to finish his shift early and get up to the surface before the grizzly men.

‘Much muck move, Peekay. You good boy,’ he would say without fail as I stepped out of the cage. Then he would take my miner’s lamp from me and put it on charge in the battery room so that I could go straight to the shaft office, check my ore tally, sign off and quickly get to the showers. When I emerged from the change rooms twenty minutes later he would be standing outside in the morning sunlight with my bicycle, ready for a quick getaway.

I’d been off grizzlies for only a week after having done my three months, when the mine captain called me into his office and asked me to volunteer to go back on. I was supposed to be rested with a main haulage job such as bossing a gang of lashers but three grizzly men had been badly injured and the mine had no replacements coming out of the school of mines. The incentive was to double my copper bonus for the period I was back on grizzlies. It seems Botha the diamond driller had been screaming about the new grizzly man on his stope and wanted me back. The money and the compliment were too much for me. Youth has a strong sense of its own immortality and I was no different from most. I found myself back at my grizzly platform for another three months. At the end of the month two cases of brandy arrived from Botha which made Rasputin completely independent of the crud bar. He was so proud of me he started to cry.

Lashing a case of brandy to the carrier on each of our bikes we pushed them the three miles to town, the twenty-four bottles in each case clinking merrily as we steered the bikes over the corrugated dirt road. When we arrived at the crud compound he put the cases in his hut and emerged moments later carrying an ancient twelve-bore shotgun.

‘Tonight Rooshan stew!’ he announced. Rasputin’s rabbit stew was his highest compliment and I must say it really was delicious, a thick broth flavoured with strange herbs he gathered in the wild and delicious chunks of pink rabbit meat served with tiny whole onions and potatoes. I watched as he headed for the bush, not even waiting to have his breakfast at the mess.

I rose at four in the afternoon as usual. From Rasputin’s hut came the delicious smell of the rabbit stew. I knew he would call me in about five-thirty to eat and so I headed off to the shower block to do my ablutions. We would eat and then attend a movie at the club. It was Wednesday night and Wednesday was always a Western. Rasputin loved Westerns with a passion. We would arrive early and sit in the front row, Rasputin with a bottle of brandy and his mug, ready to shout and scream and wave his fists at the baddies on the screen. He would weep when the hero was in a tight spot about to be burnt by Indian braves or tortured by malicious outlaws. Finally, when the film reached its climax and the hero emerged unscathed and triumphant with the girl, he would stand up and bang his mug against the empty brandy bottle and shout his approbation in Russian. Nobody seemed to mind, Rasputin was a part of the Wednesday Western and he’d always buy sweets and ice cream at the interval for all the kids. It became a tradition to yell and scream and pretend to cry at all the places Rasputin did and a grand time was had by all.

At five-thirty I heard his bellow, ‘Peekay, you come!’

Rasputin had placed two bowls on the table and beside them were two large spoons. Arranged in a jam tin in the centre of the table were wild flowers he had gathered when he was out rabbit hunting and beside the flowers rested a round loaf of fresh bread. The flowers were a nice homely touch and the stew in a large pot on his single electric burner smelt wonderful. Rasputin poured it straight from the pot into the bowls, the delicious broth came steaming up at me. He dipped into the pot with a fork, stabbing chunks of pink rabbit meat and placing them in my bowl. Finally he produced a bottle of lemonade for me and, filling his tin mug with brandy, we tucked in, tearing huge hunks of bread from the loaf and slurping hungrily at the delicious stew. Neither of us said a word until it was all eaten and we’d had a second helping.

‘Russian stew very delicious, Rasputin,’ I said finally, rubbing my tummy to emphasise my satisfaction.

Rasputin looked pleased, even a little embarrassed at the compliment. He rose from the table, and walking over to the wardrobe withdrew from it the ancient twelve-bore shotgun. Pretending to aim at an imaginary rabbit in the distance he squinted down the barrel. ‘Ho, ho, Peekay, rabbit go meow meow, me go boom boom, rabbit kaput!’ he laughed uproariously and put the shotgun back into his cupboard.

I had never eaten a cat before but I knew there was no way I would be able to refuse Rasputin next time he paid me his supreme compliment and went rabbit hunting again. I quietly prayed that I wouldn’t do anything in the future that would please him too much. I wondered silently which of the town families was wondering what had happened to their cat.