Whitethorn (74 page)

I'm going to skip telling you about the almost four-day train journey to the Copper Belt except to say that it was hot and slow. The country in Southern Rhodesia was much like that in the northern part of South Africa, but on the afternoon of the third day we crossed the bridge across the Zambezi into Northern Rhodesia with the Victoria Falls only a few hundred yards away on our right. The Africans call it ‘the smoke that thunders' because the spray from the falls rises to 1000 feet and gives the appearance of smoke, while the roar of the tumbling water may be heard fifteen miles away. The two minutes crossing the bridge spanning the gorge immediately below the falls remains among the most spectacular things I have ever seen.

Once within Northern Rhodesia we seemed to stop at every little tin-shed siding on the way to pick up half a dozen or so frightened blacks clustered together, each clutching the traditional recruiting gift: a new blanket and a brightly coloured tin suitcase. These were future mine workers garnered from the bush where drought had driven them from their villages to be trained to work in the copper mines. They were known as bush monkeys, raw recruits who, when confronted by their own face in a mirror for the first time, reeled back in terror. They had never climbed a ladder or seen a train – ‘the snake that runs on iron'. They would be brought to the mines and trained to do work they'd never imagined existed, and in order to communicate with their fellow mine workers, tribesmen recruited from all over Africa who spoke a dozen different languages would learn a new language, Kiswahili, the
lingua franca
of the mines. They'd be driven onto the train by a recruiting officer, jeered at by recruits gathered earlier who were by now accustomed to the rattle and the roar of the iron monster and considered themselves old hands at this sophisticated business of travelling without using your own legs.

The Northern Rhodesia landscape was largely flat with an occasional range of low hills and appeared to be covered by largely equatorial forest, not quite the jungle of the Congo basin, but nevertheless tall trees with open woodland beneath them that took on all the autumnal shades of the Northern Hemisphere in midsummer: yellows, maroons, deep purples, rusts and reds. It was as if the seasons had gone haywire, autumnal colours under a blazing tropical sun.

The train took me as far as Ndola, a sleepy town that serviced the surrounding copper mines and served as one of the outposts of the British Colonial Service. I was destined for the Roan Antelope Mine situated adjacent to the small mining town of Luanshya, about half an hour's drive along a dusty dirt road from Ndola.

I was met on the Ndola station by a mine official who, extending his hand, introduced himself as Ian de la Rue. De La Rue is a South African name of French Huguenot derivation and so I was surprised when he spoke with a strange and distinct twang until moments later when he introduced himself as an Australian. He announced this in a manner that suggested this single fact was perhaps the most important part of the introduction. I was to learn that this wasn't too far off the mark.

There were over forty Western nations represented in the mines and a great many of the men who found themselves in Central Africa had left other parts of the world in an unseemly hurry. I was to discover that truth was a very rare commodity among the men who lived in the single quarters and that a simple rule prevailed: you never asked a man anything about his past and you accepted what he was prepared to volunteer about himself. If a man talked about his past history, this invariably proved to be an elaborate fabrication told during the course of a bout of heavy drinking. In this manner, ex– German SS officers turned into Polish Jews who had survived Hitler's concentration camps. Ian de la Rue, by telling me he was Australian, was in effect telling me I could trust him and that he had no past to hide.

He indicated to a black porter to take my suitcase and led me to a
bakkie
with the insignia ‘Anglo American Mines – Roan Antelope Mine' painted on the door of the small truck. A few minutes later we left the town and were travelling along a bumpy, rutted dirt road.

‘Tom, there's a couple of things you should know that the Anglo American recruiting officers in Johannesburg probably didn't tell you,' Ian de la Rue began when we were finally on our way.

‘
Ja
, I'm sure you're right, Mr De La Rue, apart from a medical and testing the speed of my reactions, they really didn't tell me very much.'

‘By the way, Tom, please call me Ian, Australians are not big on formality.'

‘Thanks, Ian,' I replied, thinking that he seemed like a friendly sort of guy.

‘Did they explain why they needed to test your reactions?' he then asked.

‘Not really, I guess it seemed a sensible thing to do, after all, I was going to work underground and I imagine it's a place where you need to keep your wits about you.'

Ian de la Rue grinned. ‘You can say that again, brother! You're going to be trained to be a grizzly man.'

‘Yeah, that's what they said.'

‘Did they explain what a grizzly man does?'

‘Not really, only that it was the first job the young guys do when they go underground.'

He turned and glanced briefly at me before his eyes returned to the road. ‘Do you know why that is?'

‘Well, I guess most young guys don't have any previous mining experience?'

‘Yeah, right, apart from the diamond drillers. But grizzlies are different, it's a job where older blokes are too careful and so the ore tally suffers.'

‘Ore tally?'

‘The amount of muck you move out in a shift. Young blokes will take chances, matter of pride, they won't leave the mouth of a stope blocked so they . . . well, take chances and get themselves injured or killed.'

‘You mean it's a dangerous job?' It was all I could think to say; the terms muck, stope, diamond drillers and even the word bloke were new to me.

‘We've got a young bloke in hospital in Ndola at the moment, two broken legs and fifteen breaks in his left shoulder and arm, as well as a broken pelvis. That's where I was before I met your train. Another young grizzly man died last month, climbed up into the mouth of the stope and while he was up there the muck started to run, poor bastard never had a hope.'

I looked at him. ‘Ian, what are you trying to say?'

‘Mate, I'm trying to warn you to be fucking careful. Scare you, I suppose. We've lost six young blokes on grizzlies in the past two years and dozens have been injured, some so badly they're in wheelchairs for life. This is Central Africa and the price of copper is going through the roof. A grizzly is the most efficient way to get the muck out of the stope, it's also the most dangerous but the company doesn't care, there's no miners' union and you can't even insure your life, no insurance company will take the risk on a miner working the grizzlies.' He was yakking on as he wrestled the steering wheel from one side to the other across the rutted road. ‘Rainy season, road's history,' he said, suddenly jerking the wheel to miss another deep rut. ‘Sixty per cent of grizzly men are injured in one way or another. You're supposed to do three months on and then three months off. But we never have enough young blokes to do the change-around. Then, if you're any good, there's pressure from the bloody diamond drillers to keep you on.' The
bakkie
hit a sudden bump and our heads nearly hit the roof of the cabin. ‘Fucking road!' Ian exclaimed. ‘You'll end up doing five or six months without a break, and that's mostly where the trouble starts. Your nerves are shot, and you're so bloody whacked you're not thinking straight. Six months of night shift where you're setting off a blast every few minutes is hell on your system.'

‘What's your job, Mr De La Rue?' I asked, forgetting to call him Ian and not quite knowing what to say. Was he suggesting I turn back while I still could? It seemed odd that he would be talking to me in such a manner when he was the mine's official representative.

He grinned. ‘Name's Ian,' he corrected. ‘Can't you guess what I do?'

‘I know nothing about mining, Ian. I'm afraid most of the terms you've used don't mean very much to me.'

‘I'm the mine safety officer, mate.' He glanced at me again. ‘You've just received lesson one, which is don't try to be a hero. You're going to be trained under Gareth Jones, a Welshman, in the underground School of Mines. I can personally guarantee it will be three of the hardest bloody months of your life. You'll have good reason to hate him by the time you're ready to go onto a grizzly on your own, but remember his job is to see you stay alive in a very dangerous environment. The Roan Antelope Mine has the lowest grizzly injury record on the Copper Belt, and we can thank Mr Jones for that. You'll think he's a bastard – no, correction, he
is
a bastard, but his bastardry may well save your life one day.'

I instinctively liked Ian de la Rue. I'd never met an Australian, but would later learn that he was a fairly typical representative of his corner of the British Commonwealth and, furthermore, his refreshingly direct vernacular didn't sound in the least crude.

Ian de la Rue drove me to my hut in the single quarters, which was close to the recreation club and at the opposite end of town to the homes of the married miners. ‘Hut' is a correct description, my home-to-be was built as a traditional
rondavel
, with a small enclosed veranda attached. That is to say, a single brick room in the round with two barred windows and a steel door leading out onto the veranda, which was a simple construction made of wood and mosquito wire. Ian opened the screen door to the veranda, and then handed me the keys to the hut, and I unlocked the heavy steel door to enter the hut. The room contained a single iron-framed bed and bare mattress on which two folded blankets lay, the remaining furniture consisted of a wardrobe and a dresser, and from the ceiling hung a rotating fan. The floor was red polished cement. No thought whatsoever had been devoted to comfort, and on first appearance it seemed more like a prison cell than what was to be my home for the next year. The only concession to any thought of comfort was two old wicker chairs on the veranda. Uninvited, Ian plonked himself down in one of these. I left my suitcase in the hut and joined him in the vacant wicker chair.

‘Just a couple o' things you should know before I take you to the mess, Tom. Sort of rules of behaviour. Firstly, never leave your hut unlocked when you go out.' He pointed to the door. ‘It's not made of steel for nothing, mate. Next, don't use the
chimboose
late at night. During the week you'll be on night shift, so I'm talking mostly weekends.'

‘
Chimboose
?'

‘Lavatory, shower block, there's several known turd burglars among the German miners, they're an evil mob and bloody dangerous when they're pissed on
schnapps
. You'll hear them singing “
Deutschland über alles
” and other kraut songs, and my advice is to stay well clear of the bastards at all times.' He glanced at me and said, ‘Now a bit of town and club advice. Leave the married sheilas alone.'

‘Sheilas?'

‘Yeah, women. Fraternising with a married woman is not on. If they come on to you a bit pissed at the club, get on yer bike, quick smart. You don't want some big South African diamond driller and his mates pissed to the gills on Cape brandy breaking down the door of your hut because he thinks you've fumbled his missus. The single sheilas are all mostly taken, well the good sorts anyway, but if you do get one, remember, if you get her up the duff it's either leave town without bothering to pack or you marry her the next day. Schoolgirls are out! Even if they are over the age of sixteen, touch one of them and you're dead meat.' I think he must have seen the rather embarrassed look on my face because he said, ‘Mate, I told you, I'm the mine safety officer and this is as much a part of keeping you alive as going underground.' He grinned. ‘Now, as a young healthy bloke you are probably wondering what, apart from taking yourself in hand, the alternative is? Well, it ain't any of the above and, of course, it ain't black velvet either, but as a South African you'd know that. Officially there's no colour bar but that's bullshit, the Brits are as bad as the Afrikaners when it comes to that sort of thing.' He paused and grinned again. ‘The alternative is the plane from Brussels.'

‘Plane from Brussels? What do you mean?'

‘Every four weeks a DC-4 lands with a plane-load of sheilas from Brussels,' Ian de la Rue explained. ‘Some are your genuine whores, the older European miners like them, no name, no pack drill, they know how to get drunk, get laid, get paid and get going. But most of them are young Belgian girls working for a dowry. Good sorts mostly, although they're a tad worn-out by the time they get to us. You see,' he explained further, ‘there's more sheilas in Europe than there are blokes, I guess that's because of the war. To get a good bloke a girl has to have something to offer, usually a house or a flat she personally owns or money in the bank. She's also got to be respectable and from a good family. That's a big ask in the war-torn Europe of the present. So, to cut a long story short, there's an agency in Brussels that charters a Sabena DC-4 to Katanga province in the Belgian Congo which is an extension of this Copper Belt. The agency in Brussels takes a percentage based on every girl getting laid thirty times for the same fee by the French miners. If a girl happens to do a bit better than that she keeps the rest. Now, the “bit better than that” is obtained by giving a nice tip to the pilot to make a short hop over the border to our part of the Copper Belt, where they spend two days at each of the mines on this side. It's fifty quid an hour and they'll leave here with a bundle of banknotes that would choke a draught horse.'