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.