Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  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.

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ I heard myself saying.

  ‘Whaddayamean?’ Dirkie called, almost panic-stricken. ‘I’m shitting myself anyway, the International Blasting Licence? No way, man!’

  ‘The point is, if you get your International you can work anywhere in the world, but the Local is only for here,’ I said. ‘Anyway, if we miss out they hold the exams every three weeks, first the International and then a
week later the Local. It also means because we’ve studied for the International we’ll be bound to pass the Local as it will be a lot easier.’

  ‘I dunno, man,’ Dirkie said, shaking his head.

  ‘Ag, it will give you confidence, Dirkie,’ Karl assured him. ‘Like Tom said, if you fail the International it’s blêrrie good practice and you’ll pass the Local easy as anything, man.’

  And so we all decided to sit for the International Blasting Licence, an occurrence that had never been attempted by a trainee-mining group.

  Three weeks from the end of the three-month course, after another particularly difficult shift using jackhammers to drill an end for blasting, Jones stopped me as we were about to enter the cage to take us to the surface. I was soaked to the skin, cold and dirty, my face blackened from the wet, powdered muck kicking back from the holes we were drilling, and I was looking forward to the glorious promise of a hot shower and clean, dry gear.

  ‘Fitzsaxby, stay! We need to talk, Boyo.’

  I looked at him and he must have seen my dismay, the next cage was in twenty minutes and I was tired as a dog. ‘Mr Jones, can’t we do it on the surface?’

  ‘You being cheeky, Boyo?’

  ‘No, Sir, er, Mr Jones.’

  I watched as the cage left with the others in it, whereupon Jones drew me into a side haulage. ‘Sit!’ he commanded.

  I did as he’d instructed and sat on the bottom rung of a ladder leading up into a grizzly escape tunnel.

  ‘It’s got to stop!’ Jones barked, standing directly over me.

  ‘What has, Mr Jones?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘You’re fucking giving them the answers, Boyo!’

  ‘But I’m not,’ I protested.

  ‘But I’m not, Mr Jones!’ he shouted down at me. ‘Yes, you bluddy are!’

  ‘Honestly, Mr Jones, I’m not.’

  ‘It’s some sort of sign language, with your hands. What do you take me for, Boyo, a bluddy idjit?’

  I shrugged. ‘I can’t help you, Mr Jones, I honestly can’t,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Look, Fitzsaxby, I’ve been teaching young idjits like this for ten years, they don’t change, this class is no more intelligent than any other, which means they’re stupid to the fucking core. Of the ten trainee miners, on average three will get through the Local Blasting Licence the first time, then four weeks later, when I’ve drummed a little more sense into their thick heads, four more and we’ll piss the other three off. But you’ve all applied to be judged for an International Blasting Licence and that’s fucking absurd! You’re the only one capable of getting one, but take my word for it, Boyo, you won’t be going for it because unless you tell me how you’re doing it, I’ll break you before you get to take the exam.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be to your credit if they all did get their blasting licence, Mr Jones?’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Boyo! Because they won’t! You can’t turn crap into chocolate pudding! We’ll have lost six grizzly men, my reputation and my copper bonus and that is definitely not going to happen, son!’

  I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Gareth Jones could do exactly that, prevent me from taking my blasting licence by coming up with some reason why I shouldn’t work underground. Ian de la Rue had warned me that Jones had absolute power over the trainee miners and that he couldn’t interfere unless it was a safety matter. Jones was a good miner, but that’s all. He knew his stuff but not a great deal beyond it. He believed in the school of hard knocks and everything he’d ever learned had been by doing it tough. He also knew the nature of miners and the capacity of the trainees. Nothing on earth was going to convince him that all ten of us could pass the test or that even three of us could pass the difficult International Blasting Licence. He was, he believed, facing a wipe-out and with it personal disgrace. All his trainees were going to fail with the exception of myself, and he’d convinced himself this was an act of revenge on my part, my personal payback for the hard time he’d given me. As usual, I’d been too smart for my own good. Here I was once again rescuing drowning puppies and, in the process, had landed myself in the shit. The two-and-a-bit months of sheer hell I’d been through under the Welsh git’s direction had all been for nothing. Without his imprimatur it was as good as over for me.

  The stupid thing was that I was convinced all ten of us could pass; the guys had really enjoyed the study and had come ahead in leaps and bounds. I’d used a game they loved and understood intimately to teach them something that had been made into a daily purgatory that they had come to hate, but now enjoyed. They would test each other constantly, proud of their new-found knowledge. Besides, if one or two of them failed the International test they could still do the Local one the next week, and I knew even Dirkie de Wet could get his Local Blasting Licence in his sleep.

  The whole shebang was about to come apart for me. This stupid man was capable of upsetting everything. The three months in the School of Mines barely paid for the rent on the hut and my mess bill. Until we obtained our blasting licence we couldn’t share in the prosperity brought about by the copper bonus. Instead we endured, for four pounds a week, the daily misery Jones seemed to enjoy inflicting on us.

  It was all put down to the reality of mining, Jones was thought to be toughening us up for the environment in which we were eventually to work. Even Ian de la Rue believed that young mining students ultimately worked better when they were faced with the so-called reality of the real world of mining. Jones worked us all to the point of exhaustion and commonsense indicates that’s the point when men have accidents. Whenever one of us collapsed or hurt himself, this was put down to stupidity or a lack of hardness or physical ability. It was almost always due to exhaustion or because of some deeply resented punishment that preoccupied a trainee to the extent that he took his eye off the ball. In reality, no miner ever worked under anything like the conditions Jones put us through. We accepted that initially some of us were soft and needed hard physical work to condition us, but this was achieved in a fairly short time. After this point it simply became bloody-minded perversity by our instructor.

  The salient point seemed to be overlooked that we’d all come to the mines for the singular purpose of earning more money than we could expect to earn elsewhere. Our future salaries would depend on our own efficiency. Even the dullest trainee among us was anxious to learn and absorb as much information as possible and besides, we, like almost all humans, had a personal interest in staying alive. This was the framework on which I had based the simple method of learning, using the game of rugby as the matrix. Curiously, every trainee seemed to work harder than under the acerbic tongue and constant harassment that was our instructor’s method of learning how to survive underground. Gareth Jones simply couldn’t conceive of a method of instruction that depended on cooperation and the practical intelligence most men with personal ambitions possess. Hard graft and punishment was how he’d learned mining in his native Wales, and what was good for the goose was also good for the goslings.

  I sighed, then shrugged. ‘Okay, it’s an association of ideas, Mr Jones, a mental game.’

  ‘Ha! Gotcha, Boyo! Brainwashing, eh? I knew it!’ he exclaimed triumphantly.

  ‘Hardly that, it’s simply, like I said, an association of ideas, each object or move or association is intended to act as an aide-mémoire. We used rugby because everyone knows the rules. It’s very simple really, a mental game that helps them to learn. I can show you how it works, if you like.’

  Jones reeled back in horror. ‘That’s it! Mental telepathy! Oh no you don’t! You’re not getting inside my mind, Fitzsaxby.’

  ‘Of course not! There’s no such thing as mental telepathy, Mr Jones.’

  ‘Don’t you go denying it now, Boyo, I know what you’re up to! Do you think I’m stupid? They’ll all go in front of the blasting licence examiner and you’ll wipe their minds clean and they’ll all fail. It’s your revenge, isn’t it?’

  I sighed, the whole thing was suddenly becoming ridiculous
. ‘You’re becoming paranoid, Mr Jones, no such thing can happen.’

  ‘Don’t you go using them big words on me, Boyo! I know what you’re up to and it won’t work, you’re on report and that means you’re out of my school!’ He paused, and then smacked his palm against his forehead. ‘Christ, of course! It’s hypnosis!’

  If it hadn’t been so serious I would have laughed. ‘Please, Mr Jones, this is ridiculous, first it’s hand signals, then brainwashing, mental telepathy and now hypnosis. I admit we’ve been coaching each other using a game everyone likes to play. But what’s wrong with that? If they know the answers they’ll pass and you’ll get the credit!’

  ‘But they won’t fucking pass, in ten years one trainee in every three intakes might get their International. I don’t mind telling you I had to sit three times to get it and it took me four frigging years! Now you’re telling me nine bluddy Afrikaner gits are going to pass the first time they try?’ He leaned back, a sneer on his face. ‘Do me a favour, son!’

  ‘But if they fail, the following week they can sit for the Local and be confident they’ll pass. Honestly, Mr Jones, the guys know their stuff, even de Wet does. It wasn’t my idea that they sit for the International, they want to and they know if they don’t make it they can have another go at the Local Blasting Licence.’

  ‘It’s brainwashing, you’re making them think they can do stuff they can’t do.’

  I thought of Doctor Van Heerden’s advice to me. ‘No, Mr Jones, most of these guys have been constantly told they’re domkops, it’s probably happened from the first day they went to school. You constantly tell us how stupid we are and for them, anyway, it’s a reinforcement of what they already believe about themselves. That’s a form of brainwashing. They believe you and that’s the problem. No-one can make you feel inferior without your own consent. All I’ve managed to do, by using the rules of a game they all consider they’re experts at, well, to use a rugby term, I have helped them sidestep this belief they have of themselves as stupid. You’re a Welshman, you know that every Welsh kid, like every South African one, believes he knows the game of rugby inside-out. It’s like using baseball as a medium to teach an American kid or to an English one the rules of football. Probably for the first time in their lives they’ve become interested in learning.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s all that’s happened, Mr Jones. You’ve seen it for yourself in the past three weeks, very few of your questions go unanswered, the guys are even eager to participate, and the practical mining we do, you have to admit, has greatly improved.’