On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures

by Wilbur Smith

  I heard a low growl.

  I turned my head slowly. In the long grass to my right, a pair of large, golden eyes stared at me over the mangled flesh of an ox.

  I had been close to lions before, and flashes of that night, five years ago, came back to me. This time there were no tent flaps to hide behind. My father would not stride defiantly from the dark and face them down. Instinctively I reached for the rifle slung over my shoulder. It was my father’s rifle, and the same one that had felled the man-eaters that night.

  I was lifting it carefully, positioning my aim, when the lion charged. He was a demon, his mane matted with the blood from his kills. In the corner of my eye, I could see two others in the field, both lionesses, their attention drawn by the snarling alpha male.

  Fear did not come into it. It was my father who had taught me to shoot, after all.

  I took the shot.

  No sooner was it dead than one of the lionesses leapt at me. I wheeled around, shot again, and she fell at my feet. I did not wait for the other lioness to charge. She was watching me and pawing, creeping forward ready to strike: so I shot her as well. Only afterward, as I was looking at their bodies, did I breathe out, and the adrenaline started to make me shake. But I had no regrets. It was me or them.

  Two weeks later, my parents returned from vacation, and I was sitting on the veranda when my father approached. I told him what I had done. He looked at me in disbelief. He insisted I tell him the whole story. Afterward he nodded, as if he was trying to convince himself it was OK. I had been foolish, he said, to confront the lions. What had I been thinking? What if something had gone wrong? He stared at me for a while as if I was from Mars, someone he didn’t recognize.

  Later that day, he came over to me with a package which he was carrying with both hands. “It’s a gift,” he said, “you may be a fool at times and you’re going to get yourself killed if you’re not more careful, but you’ve earned some respect.” I took off the wrapping. There, in my arms, was a brand-new rifle, its metalwork gleaming, its woodwork shiny with fresh varnish. It was the first rifle I’d owned that was not an heirloom, that belonged entirely to me. I could have cried with joy, not only because I now had my own rifle but because my father’s approval was a rare and precious thing.

  It was one of the defining moments of my life, and one I’ll never forget.

  •••

  It was 1996 and I was writing the novel that would become Birds of Prey, my return to the world of the Courtneys. Birds of Prey reached further back in time than any Courtney novel before it, back to the middle of the seventeenth century when the English and the Dutch were at war for the rich provinces of Southern Africa.

  The words I was staring at were Francis Courtney speaking to his son Hal. “If I’m being cruel to you,” I had written, “it’s because I know there is a destiny ahead for you.” They were deeply personal because they were inspired by what my father might have said to me. My father, of course, had been more prosaic: “You’ll get your ass kicked,” he had said, “if you don’t pull yourself together.” He had been gone for eleven years, and Birds of Prey was to become my epitaph for him.

  I had been chronicling the history of the extraordinary Courtney family since When the Lion Feeds, first with a trilogy focusing on Sean Courtney’s life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then with a five-book sequence that began in 1985 with The Burning Shore, continuing through to Golden Fox in 1990. The second series had been about the modern African world, but by 1996 I was keen to go back to the past. Many of my novels had followed the history of southern Africa to the present day so it seemed natural to return to the time of the early settlers. Since my experiences in Walvis Bay and my foray into the Antarctic sea, I’d been fascinated by the high seas and sailing, and seafaring in the seventeenth century provided a particularly rich source of drama and stories. It was also a good place to explore the relationship between fathers and sons. In writing the novel, I would recall the times when my father had pushed and punished me, instilling in me his own unstinting work ethic, as well as principles like duty, honesty, loyalty and never being lazy or indulgent. Looking back, as poorly as I had responded to his attitudes sometimes, my father had been equipping me for life, and I felt that more keenly than ever now that he was gone. Though it had been more than a decade, I still regretted that we had not grown as close as I’m sure we would be if he was around now. The lawless world of the seventeenth century, where patriarchy reigned, men could be men, and where families prospered or failed on the strengths of the bonds between their fathers and sons, was the perfect place to remember him on the page.

  Birds of Prey was my homage to him, and it didn’t matter that, if he was around, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to read it.

  •••

  By 1972, I had made £1 million as a writer, a huge amount of money for anyone, particularly a writer, and more than I could ever have imagined making as a tax assessor, or even working for my father. I was not fabulously wealthy—at that stage I suppose I could have been compared to a successful doctor or a top lawyer—but it wasn’t about the money for the money’s sake: it was more the freedom that I had been able to buy, the freedom to travel, research and write. I had adventured and traveled from Europe to Alaska, from Africa to Russia, explored China and the United States, hunted, dived, flown and sailed. More to the point, I had done it before I turned forty—a mythical milestone that I had always believed was a critical indicator of whether you were going to make anything of your life—or be consigned to mediocrity and unfulfilled expectations. I had my dad to blame for that; he used to say, “If you don’t make it by 40, you’re not going to make it.” He’d done both, made it by forty and then lost it.

  My father built his first fortune on the Copperbelt, that strip of sun-blasted Africa that I grew up on—and it began with a prizefight. Dad was a boxer of some repute in the mine workshop where he worked, respected for the size of his forearms and the powerful right hook he’d developed over years of being in the ring. When an old boxing pro arrived on the Copperbelt, taking on all-comers in a winner-takes-all bout, my father’s friends cajoled him into signing up. The man was rugged and gnarled, hard as nails, and called himself Battleship Walsh.

  The entry fee for these kinds of fights was normally a pound and if you went two rounds with Battleship or whichever bruiser had arrived on the Copperbelt, you’d get £5. If you knocked him out the prize money would double to £10. That was a lot of money in those days.

  The night of the bout arrived, and there, under the African sky, the most influential people of the mining community had gathered, mingling under the canvas tents set up around the ring. The mine manager, Mr. Walpole, was in his dinner jacket and bow tie, surrounded by his friends smoking cigars and drinking whisky. On the other side of the ring, my father’s supporters from the mine workshop were deep into their cups and baying encouragement. My father stepped into the ring and walked around, clasping both his hands together above his head like a prizefighter, playing up to the crowd. They were hollering: “Give him one, Smithy, give him one!”

  Dad was busy acknowledging all his fans when the bell went. He hardly knew what was happening. Old Battleship Walsh came charging forward and straightened him out with a right to the nose, boom. His face erupted in blood, his Roman nose recast forever and he went flying backward, over the ropes. It was virtually a king hit. Dad looked up to discover he was in the front row sprawled on top of the mine management, his blood spraying over their dinner jackets.

  The managers grabbed him and pushed him back through the ropes. Battleship thought it was all over, his guard was down and he was looking forward to his prize money. Quick as a flash Dad danced across the ring and nailed him flat out with one solid punch.

  There had only been two blows in the contest. With his smashed nose still pumping blood, Dad went around the ring with his hands held high again, acknowledging the fans for real this time. The cheers were so raucous it was
as if the doors to a madhouse had been flung opened. The only one who didn’t join in was Battleship Walsh: he was still laid out cold on the floor of the ring.

  It was a memorable Saturday night—the £10 prize was in my dad’s pocket and he was standing everyone drinks—it wasn’t every day that a prizefighter got knocked out by a challenger. Everyone was slapping him on the back, even hoisting him on their shoulders like some conquering hero from the old times.

  On Monday morning, a messenger came from the mine’s head office to the single quarters where the unmarried men bunked to tell Dad the general manager wanted to see him. Dad dressed, picked up his bike and pedaled to the offices.

  Inside, Old Walpole said: “Smithy, you had a very good fight on Saturday night. You know, I enjoyed that very much. I think I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  The mine engineer was sitting in the office and Old Walpole let him explain how the mine needed someone to make ventilation piping in 22-gauge galvanized iron to take fresh air along the underground drives, into the stopes (the open spaces or “rooms” made in the process of extraction) and onto the faces where the miners would drill. Without it, the mine could not expand.

  My dad could not refuse the offer. He started working in what was effectively a big thatched hut, where he taught a team of black guys brought in from the bush to cut, rivet and solder, and he soon built up a thriving factory, churning out thousands of feet of piping to ventilate the growing warrens underground.

  The work was long and hard but soon Dad was making serious money. In a deal that would one day inspire the story of Rodney Ironsides and his stock-exchange scam, my father devised a way of turning this opportunity into his fortune. Whenever the mine was expanded, teams of men called blasters would go in, drill shot holes all day, charge them up with dynamite and then detonate it. The next shift would go in about four hours later once the dust had settled, and clean everything out. The blasters were supposed to remove all the ventilation piping before they planted their charges but the workers often overlooked this part of their job. Thousands of feet of piping were destroyed with each blast, and it all had to be replaced.

  My father earned so much money he could become his own boss, and buy the ranch that would be our future home.

  My father held strong views, knew his own mind and wasn’t afraid of hard work. He was an artisan, the toughest man I ever met, and he bent the world to his own design. He schooled me in the same way too, never ceding an inch to another man in his life. He would do to them what he did to the Battleship Walshes of this world, not with his fists, but by beginning one step ahead, catching them unawares and being smarter. I thought he was the sun and the moon and the stars. I’d done a lot of stupid things in my youth, but my father was always there with a stern word and his belt in his hand to make sure I stuck to the right path. Not once did I resent it; my father was a staunch Victorian with a strict code of discipline—but a sense of fairness and justice as well. On our ranch, there were all kinds of ways for a boy to get himself killed. His rules were the best way of ensuring I didn’t fall prey to any of them.

  On one occasion, in my early teens, I’d seen a local farmer demolish termite mounds with dynamite. His son was my friend Barry, and we hatched a plan to steal a stick of dynamite and make our fortunes by blowing up fish in the Kafue river and selling them.

  With the explosive tucked under my shirt, Barry and I hired a canoe and the services of two paddlers. We took to the water and when we reached midstream I produced my depth charge. I lit the fuse and threw it overboard, but the paddler in the stern was so terrified he dropped his paddle over the side. The man in the bow desperately tried to paddle us away but he only succeeded in rowing us around and around in a tight circle over the smoking dynamite.

  The dynamite exploded and hurled the canoe and everybody in it twenty feet into the air. Up above, in a spray of river water and debris, I began to think we’d made a mistake, and then we plunged back into the river with about two tons of dead and dying fish flopping around us.

  Somehow, we made it to the bank without further casualties. The two paddlers were already scrambling off, as far away as they could get from these insane white boys. Barry and I were both so dazed we forgot to collect any of the fish.

  •••

  My halcyon days on the ranch came to an end one year when, with me away at boarding school, my father sold the ranch, landing a second fortune to go with the first he had made on the mines. Our ranching days were over, and so, my father thought, was his working life. Content with the retirement fund he had built up, he took my mother down to Kloof, outside Durban in South Africa. But he made some bad calls on the stock market and went back to the sheet-metal trade he knew so well. He set up a business with me as partner in “HJ Smith and Son” but ten years later it failed. Rhodesia had imploded into a long drawn-out war of independence, and my parents took their chance and returned to South Africa to live out their days. By then I had other means by which to help them out. My early novels had been very successful and I was finally able to give my parents what they had once worked so hard to give me: a home.

  I would look back and know that my relationship with my father influenced the way I thought about the characters in my novels. Families at war, loyalties and rivalries, jealousies and love, these are the things that have dramatized all my novels. Like everything else, they are drawn from experience. The elemental conflicts of life—brothers against brothers, fathers against sons—have defined human beings since the beginning of time, and classic texts like the Bible and the Greek myths, and authors like William Shakespeare, have shaped the way I’ve constructed my stories.

  •••

  My father died on April 12, 1985. I stood at his grave, with tears rolling. A great man had gone and the yawning absence in my life would never go away. I loved him and admired him and the world was smaller now. Dad had stopped smoking twenty years before, but the damage had been done. In his last days, he had become frailer, slighter, though in my eyes his soul never diminished and he remained the giant of a man who, on one terrifying night fifty years before, gunned down three man-eating lions and, in doing so, saved his young son’s life.

  Though we were dissimilar in many ways, in our later years we had come to recognize the same qualities in each other—the desire to work for no man that had driven my father to build his business on the Copperbelt and become his own boss was the same one that had driven me to writing. We both wanted to dictate the paths of our own lives. My father had little interest in novels, not even mine, although my mother said he carried around a copy of When the Lion Feeds in the trunk of his car to show his friends. I was grateful that he’d seen me succeed even though it was in a profession he’d scorned, and I think there was some pride hidden in there somewhere. He had always been reticent with praise, perhaps he thought it encouraged laziness. There is one moment though that will always stay with me. On my fiftieth birthday, he’d called me an idiot for the millionth time. I said, “Dad, you can’t call me that anymore. I’ve proved you wrong. An idiot doesn’t write bestsellers.” He grinned, looked at me keenly, and said, “I guess you have!” And then he gave me a bear hug. Dad didn’t hug much. It meant a lot to me.

  And now he was gone. For some time now, I’d been picking him up regularly on Saturday afternoons, taking him for a drive in my Rolls Royce, or heading out fishing together. When he passed away, my world changed forever, leaving me with the regret that we had never been able to become true friends. Time, as it always does, had slipped through our fingers.

  I often wonder what my father would have made of the twenty-first century. He would have been a man out of time. When my first child was born, my father took me aside. He had some important information to impart, the sort of advice you didn’t get from Matron.

  “My boy,” he told me. “They’re going to bring that baby back from the hospital any day now. When they do, wait for it to soil its diaper. Then confidently announce to your wife: ‘Stand bac
k! This is my child as well!’

  “Then, undo the baby’s diaper and stick the safety pin into the baby’s bottom. The baby will squeal and your wife will never let you near a dirty diaper again!”

  He was being totally serious.

  In the end, I didn’t take Dad’s advice, but I had some sympathy with his view of a man’s role in society. My father never bathed me, he never fed me, and he never changed my diaper.

  •••

  I think one of the worst inventions of our century is political correctness. It has forced a generation of men to keep their masculinity under wraps, made them too timid to admit their true views about the world. Today, even the concept of “hero” is not politically correct. In my father’s time, our heroes were served up to us directly from the battlefield, commanding victorious armies, like Admiral Nelson, Wellington and Churchill. Or they were performing amazing acts of derring-do, discovering hidden parts of the globe, like Livingstone, Stanley and Baker. Growing up in southern Africa, I was in awe of the Victorian explorer and conservationist Frederick Selous—and not just because my father had met him when he was a little boy, and spoke of him as if he was a family friend. But where are the titans in public life today? Where is Winston Churchill? Where is Franklin Roosevelt? Where is Nelson Mandela?

  If you look hard enough, there are people to admire—but they are private heroes, quiet lionhearts: the young British soldier who puts himself in harm’s way in Afghanistan; the South African paratrooper, fighting a desperate rear-guard action in the Central African Republic, when he and his comrades shouldn’t have been there in the first place; the police officer answering an emergency call without knowing where it will take him or what lies in wait when he gets there; the midwife who drives through a winter blizzard at night to deliver a baby. In South Africa, we have the unsung public protector, Advocate Thuli Madonsela, who, while raising her two children as a single parent, took on the ruling party and President Zuma over profligate spending on his private rural retreat.