Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  Jones shook his head, unable to deny that this was true. ‘They won’t pass the International, Fitzsaxby, even you may fail it. It’s not your responsibility to get them through, it’s fucking mine! If the whole class fails there’s enough people around here and in management who’d just love to put in the boot. Two more years and I can go home a rich man. Nobody, you least of all, is going to fuck that up for me. The mine needs six grizzly men out of your intake and, by Christ, they’re going to get them. But listen to me carefully,

  Boyo. You won’t be one of them!’

  ‘But even if they fail, they can sit for the Local Blasting Licence a week later!’ I persisted.

  ‘Listen, Boyo, don’t think I don’t understand you’re setting me up. Nobody sits for the International the first time, let alone a whole new intake of mining trainees who combined haven’t got the brains of my dog Spot!’

  I had to think fast, by making the class believe they could go for the big one, the International, I’d clearly over-reached myself. Gareth Jones knew such an achievement to be impossible. It was a task well beyond his certain knowledge of the ability of his trainees. Underground miners are not generally known for their mental acuity. Only the diamond drillers possessed an International Blasting Licence and most of them, like Jones, had taken years to obtain it. He had become convinced that I’d hatched some diabolical plot to bring him undone. He seemed to truly believe that I could somehow enter the minds of my fellow trainee miners and make them believe they could succeed when they’d fail, vastly over-reaching themselves. He was about to become the laughing stock of his fellow miners and, in his own eyes, lose the respect of the mine management.

  While Jones had absolute authority within the school, every trainee was free to choose which blasting licence he undertook. I had foolishly thought that the extra pride my fellow trainees would gain having an international accreditation would be worth it, and I hadn’t thought how the idea of ten novice miners getting the big prize first-time round was likely to put every miner’s nose out of joint. What’s more, such a result didn’t help the mine, they only needed young men with quick reactions to qualify for working on a grizzly, an efficient but very dangerous method of getting ore from the stope, outlawed everywhere with the exception of the Copper Belt.

  It wasn’t too hard to see Jones’s point of view, and I felt stupid that I hadn’t worked it out before this. The problem was that I’d found myself back at The Boys Farm where a single, constantly bullying authority decided what was best for me. I’d resented Jones to the point where I wasn’t thinking clearly. All I’d wanted to do was prove him wrong about us all. That we weren’t useless and stupid as he constantly told us. But, if I was honest with myself, what I was really doing was showing off, a sign of my own immaturity. I had put the idea into the heads of my fellow trainees that they could achieve the marks required for an International Blasting Licence. I had become philosophically convinced that given the right training, encouragement and confidence, almost anyone could achieve results way beyond any previous intellectual assessment they’d made of themselves. If I was wrong, I told myself, they hadn’t lost much and they could sit for the lesser licence a week later. After all, I thought of myself as just such an example: Miss Phillips had believed in me and allowed me to escape the almost certain mediocrity The Boys Farm would demand from me. Mediocrity is just as much a habit learned as achieving good results. It was time to back down in the hope that I could save my own skin.

  ‘Mr Jones, do you honestly believe if the class sits for the International that they’ll all fail?’

  ‘Nothing more certain, Boyo!’

  ‘Well then, you’re probably right.’

  ‘Probably? Fuckin’ oath I’m right!’

  ‘And if they sit for the Local Blasting Licence, that only three will pass the first time and another three the second, that is counting me out because you’ll not allow me to sit for it?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. I’ve been a miner, man and boy, for twenty years, I ought to bluddy know.’

  ‘And, as far as you’re concerned, there’s no exception to this rule of thumb?’

  Jones sighed. ‘Look, Fitzsaxby, I don’t know how you got here, but you don’t belong, see. You’ll never be a miner’s arsehole. Clever young gits like you don’t belong underground. You may get your blasting licence, but you won’t last on a grizzly, you’ll do something clever and kill yourself and I’ll be the first to applaud when that happens. Mining is a job where men work to a procedure, you drum it into them until they can’t think for themselves, it becomes an instinct to do as they’ve been taught and that way they mostly don’t get killed.’ He pointed his forefinger at my chest. ‘Or, perhaps, Fitzsaxby, you’re too much of a smart-arse to understand this? I don’t give a fuck if you hate me. I do care that you stay alive long enough as a grizzly man to earn me, as well as the rest of the workers, a copper bonus! I need six of you working grizzlies in the next three weeks and, by Christ, I’m going to get them.’

  While I knew that his logic was curious to say the least, this wasn’t a time to argue that initiative and intelligence might also play a part in mining.

  ‘Look, I’m truly sorry, I’m obviously in the wrong, Mr Jones. I’ll try to get the fellows to back off and to sit for their Local Blasting Licence. But I need to go to them with something.’

  ‘Something? What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if they pass the Local, can they sit for the International the following fortnight? They’ll need your approval to do this.’

  ‘You’re blowing hot air the wrong way up your own arse, Boyo.’

  ‘They’ll be on grizzlies, on night shift, and the exam is during the day, so they won’t be losing any mine time, and they just need your approval, Mr Jones.’ Then I added, ‘You’ll have your usual quota of passes, and as you say they’re not likely to pass anyway and you’ll be proved right.’

  Gareth Jones looked at me shrewdly. ‘You mean you’ll pass it, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I hope so, that is if you permit me to go with the others to take the Local?’ There was no point in saying that I thought some of the others would pass as well.

  ‘Rugby? You seem to know a bit about it. Do you play?’

  It was such an unexpected question that I was somewhat taken aback. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Scrum-half?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any good?’

  I shrugged, not knowing where his questions were leading. ‘I played for my school and then the Old Boys Club.’

  ‘What grade?’

  ‘First,’ I replied. While it was true, in fact I’d played for the University Club. But letting him know I’d been to university would have been the final blow to any hopes of convincing him to allow me to sit for my blasting licence.

  ‘Fancy playing here on the Copper Belt?’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’

  ‘Season starts in three weeks. I’m the backline coach.’ He shrugged. ‘We need a scrum-half.’

  ‘The blasting licence examination takes place in three weeks.’

  ‘I can see you understand, Fitzsaxby.’

  ‘Sure, I’d like to try for the team, Mr Jones.’

  ‘And you’ll get the other trainees to sit for the Local licence?’

  ‘If you’ll let them go for the International two weeks later?’

  Jones laughed. ‘I told you, you’re blowing hot air the wrong way up your arse, Boyo,’ he repeated. ‘But, okay.’ He extended his hand. ‘You’d better be a bluddy good scrum-half, Fitzsaxby,’ he grinned.

  Three weeks later we all sat for the Local Blasting Licence, and to the enormous credit of Gareth Jones we all passed, even Dirkie de Wet. Only four of the trainees, now all grizzly men, volunteered to go back two weeks later to sit for the International and three of us passed – Karl Joubert, Kolus Pienaar and myself. This result was put down to our being a rare and untypical intake. So Mr Jones managed not to lose face, the previous fortnigh
t’s 100 per cent success having served to cement his reputation as the best mining instructor on the Copper Belt. I also made it onto the rugby team.

  That’s the trouble with theory, rules and procedures, they seldom translate into real life and a grizzly proved the perfect example of this. It was simply impossible to stick to procedure and at the same time to work for a required ore tally. That is, put sufficient ore through the grizzly bars from the stope to get the required count of fully loaded ore trucks waiting to be filled on the main haulage below the grizzly. If your grizzly shift didn’t empty the diamond driller’s stope so that he could drill and blast the next day he wanted to know why. Moreover your copper bonus as well as his was affected. The rules we were taught that applied to working a grizzly were complete nonsense. Everybody knew that you were expected to cut corners and to take chances and that the possibility of being injured or killed from falling rock, by a badly timed blast, or falling through the grizzly bars and dropping 60 feet to be crushed to death was extremely high. Three months was thought to be the maximum time a grizzly man could safely work, and for many this proved too long. I would often set forty blasts on a single shift and end it almost too weary to climb down the 60-feet length of ladders onto the main haulage and walk to the cage. Invariably my head would be splitting from a powder headache, a throbbing pain of migraine proportions caused by working with gelignite.

  Older miners wouldn’t or couldn’t work a grizzly because their reactions were too slow. The job was given to young guys, myself included, who thought themselves bulletproof. Besides, we were too proud not to get the required tally from our grizzly by the end of each shift, even when to do so meant placing your life in jeopardy at least a couple of times a shift. We took a certain perverse pride in being the gunslingers whom no life insurance company would cover. But slowly the stress began to tell, and by the time I’d completed my three-month tour of duty I was close to being a nervous wreck. Kobus Pienaar, the smartest of the Afrikaners among our trainee group, was dead, caught halfway up the walls of his grizzly to set a charge where a bunch of grapes (rocks seemingly jamming the mouth of a stope) sat. The jammed rocks suddenly collapsed, scraping him off the wall of the grizzly and smashing his body against the grizzly bars below. He would have died instantly. Big Dirkie de Wet had lost an arm at the elbow from a premature blast and was back on his parents’ farm in the Orange Free State. The rest of us were pretty battered and bruised, physically and mentally, and jumped at any sudden sound, while some of my group had grown so morose they barely spoke.

  A grizzly man coming off his three-month stint was given an easy job supervising a gang of African mine workers lashing, or working as a pipe-fitter keeping the water and air pipes in repair or building new ones. This was meant to give us the required time to recover for the next three months on grizzlies, whereupon I’d have completed my year in the copper mines. If I managed to stay alive and uninjured my worries would be over and I’d be on my way to Oxford, with sufficient money to live and travel without having to work while I was in Europe.

  Ah, the best-laid plans of mice and men. A week after finishing my three-month stint the guy replacing me on my grizzly was injured, and the mine captain came down to the 1100 level where I was working as a pipe-fitter.

  ‘Bad luck, Tom, you’re back on your grizzly,’ was all he said.

  There was no point in arguing, each grizzly is different and you learn to know its peculiar character. An experienced grizzly man never works a grizzly he doesn’t know, except when he first goes onto one straight from the School of Mines. Besides, the diamond driller was demanding me back. It seems the new guy had tried working to the book and hadn’t emptied the diamond driller’s stope for four nights running. The Afrikaner, a man named Koos Kruger, put in a complaint and the young grizzly man had been given a bollocking. In an attempt to improve his tally he’d left his safety chain off, and had fallen through the grizzly bars. It was extremely fortunate that the grizzly was two-thirds full so he’d only fallen 20 feet and was in hospital with a broken arm and pelvis. Of course, none of this was explained officially, he’d just had an unfortunate accident. But it meant I was back on the grizzly for three more months and I knew I was in big, big trouble.

  But then the fickle hand of fate reached down and plucked me out of the grizzly, out of the mine and out of Northern Rhodesia and into Llewellyn Barracks, the territorial army base on the outskirts of Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. My call-up papers to do my three months’ military service in the name of Queen and Country had arrived, and attendance was compulsory. What’s more, the mine was required to pay my full copper bonus while I was learning to protect a country I would leave three months after I’d completed my military service. Sometimes in life a person gets lucky.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Love Can Be a Lonely Stranger

  I HAD INSTRUCTIONS TO report to the Ndola airport with no more than one small suitcase containing an extra shirt, underpants, civilian socks and personal toiletries. Nothing else, I was told, could be contained within my barrack-room locker except the clothes in which I arrived at the army camp.

  What appeared to be a well-used World War II DC-3, with khaki paint peeling in patches on the nose and the tail of the fuselage, awaited us at the airport. A stiffly starched sergeant in tropical uniform took my name and ordered me to join a bunch of guys lined up on the tarmac. I must have been one of the last to arrive, because shortly afterwards he made us up into three rows of ten, told us to place our suitcases on the ground on our left-hand side, then brought us up into a ragged and uncoordinated attention. Sighing heavily at the result of our efforts, he commanded us to stand at ease.

  ‘Right then, it just so happens you make up a complete platoon, and for the sake of convenience that’s how you’re going to stay when we get to Llewellyn Barracks. I am Sergeant Bolton, your training officer. As of this precise moment you are in the army, the Rhodesian Army, you are not privates, you are riflemen and will be so addressed at all times, everything I say to you or command you to do you will do without prevarication and instantly. Stand at ease. Any questions?’

  We stood at ease and one little guy three places from me in the centre row immediately put up his hand.

  ‘What’s your name, Rifleman?’ the sergeant barked.

  ‘Vermaak, Sir,’ the recruit answered in a thick Afrikaans accent.

  ‘Not Sir, you blockhead. You will call me Sergeant,’ the non-commissioned officer barked. ‘You’re not in a classroom and need permission to go for a wee-wee.’ His tone became less strident. ‘Besides, Rifleman Vermaak, take my advice, in the army you never put up your hand. There will be plenty of opportunities to get yourself killed without volunteering. Now come to attention and I will ask you what it is you wish to ask me. You will now do as I have just told you!’

  Vermaak came to attention and said, ‘What was that big word you jus’ said again, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’m losing my patience fast, Rifleman Vermaak, I haven’t given you permission to talk!’

  ‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ the recruit said.

  The sergeant sighed. ‘Rifleman Vermaak, you still don’t have permission to talk. You need my permission to say you’re sorry! Now what big word, Rifleman Vermaak?’

  ‘Prevari-something, Sir.’

  ‘Sergeant, not Sir, you cretin! Sergeant!’ Bolton roared, making me jump inwardly. ‘It means instantly, at the double, and don’t argue!’ I told myself that I had serious doubts that Vermaak would know the meaning of cretin.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Sergeant.’

  Sergeant Bolton shook his head despairingly. ‘Don’t thank me! Just say, “Yes, Sergeant!” I can promise you will never have any reason to thank me for anything, Rifleman Vermaak. Now stand at ease and pay attention.’

  I wasn’t game to push my head forward to glance at Vermaak. It was, of course, a name that brought back several earlier traumatic memories from The Boys Farm. Vermaak is a fairly common Afrikaner surname and I had no re
ason to suppose the guy Sergeant Bolton was taking apart was the infamous and epileptic Pissy Vermaak of my childhood. I quickly told myself that they would never allow an epileptic into the army so it simply couldn’t be. But I was nevertheless aware that I was trembling slightly at the recall of the name.

  ‘Righto, now listen carefully,’ Sergeant Bolton said, raising his voice slightly. ‘The DC-3 hasn’t any seats, that’s because you’re not entitled to them, not being gentlemen. So you will sit on your arses on the deck. You will note that there is a webbing wall across the back of the plane and a door that opens up at the arse-end. You will stow your suitcases in the back and then enter,’ he pointed to the hatchway in the centre of the plane, ‘by the centre hatchway. The walls of the plane are also covered with webbing so you will sit against the wall, one man next to the other, holding onto the webbing if this proves necessary. You will do this on either side of the aircraft, leaving a corridor down the centre. Do I make myself understood?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant!’ we all yelled like a bunch of schoolkids, the Vermaak lesson having been suitably absorbed.

  ‘Right then, I will hand you a brown-paper bag when you enter the aircraft and this is to be used in case of turbulence.’ He turned to Vermaak. ‘That means in case you are airsick, Rifleman Vermaak. Now, if any one of you is sick on the floor of the aircraft, I will make you clean up the mess when we land using your own shirt, and you will be placed on report. Do you understand me?’