Jack of Diamonds (94 page)

I finally agreed I’d lend a hand if someone got hurt in a fight in the single quarters, then handed over the money for the second-hand bedding and the wage – with, no doubt, a percentage taken out by the committee – for the cleaner. I would later learn that I’d made the correct decision and that any newly arrived guy who hadn’t had the benefit of a Noel White to advise him and so objected to the rules found himself dealt with by the committee in a cruel way.

The Nazi thugs would wait until he was under the shower, then grab him and hold him down while he was raped by one of their homosexual prostitutes. It was a way of warning the victim without leaving any outward signs of his ordeal. They also knew that he’d be too ashamed to go to mine management to complain.

With so many young guys locked up together without an outlet for their energy, drink was the usual form of relaxation and brawls were frequent. The committee possessed all the latest first-aid gear, to keep patients away from the redoubtable Matron Hamilton, and I would usually stitch up or bandage at least half a dozen young guys every few nights.

By agreeing to be the single-quarters medic, I’d once again taken the easy way out but, as a consequence, I was treated with respect by the greedy Nazi thugs and bullies I loathed. I guess the Las Vegas habit of not asking too many questions and keeping a low profile was hard to break.

For the first three weeks I attended the morning shift at the underground School of Mines under the direction of a tough-as-teak Welsh miner named Russell Howell – or Mr Howell, as he insisted on being called. He was a stern and uncompromising instructor, and I was glad I was only there as an observer to familiarise myself with the various underground activities in the mine. For some of the young foreign guys who didn’t speak English all that well, his Welsh accent made it pretty tough going. However, I could see that after this ordeal they’d either leave or be sent packing, or they’d sit for their international blasting licence and then be thoroughly capable of running a grizzly, a job so dangerous that never a week went by there wasn’t an accident or even a fatality. These guys, usually no older than twenty-three, couldn’t wait to get onto a grizzly with a box of gelignite, a roll of cortex and a box of fuses and start making money. Next to the true professionals, the diamond drillers, engineers and shift bosses, working a grizzly was the highest-paid job in the mine and a young guy could earn some serious money.

I hadn’t been with Mr Howell long when he approached me and said, ‘Boyo, I’ve watched you and you’re a good lad. Let me train you to be a grizzly man. You’ll make three times the money.’

Grizzly men were paid a nominal salary and then a copper bonus on the amount of rock they emptied out of the stope and through their grizzly; the ultimate achievement for a grizzly man being to leave his diamond driller’s stope empty after the night shift. This meant both he and the diamond driller got the maximum copper bonus for the shift. The South African diamond drillers would refer to their grizzly men as either ‘
eerste klaas
[first class]’ or ‘
kakhuis
[shithouse]’, cherishing the ‘good’ grizzly men and often seeing to it that the ‘bad’ ones were ‘relocated’.

A grizzly man always worked the same grizzly, because each set of tungsten steel bars was said to have its own peculiarities; you learned to ‘read your grizzly’ and understand its personality. The men also believed they had to become attuned to the ‘groan’ of the surrounding rock, the particular sounds it made, which could be a matter of life or death. Unfortunately, a good grizzly man was often a young guy who would take chances and break the rules, and a bad one was someone inclined to be more cautious.

Like most young men, the so-called ‘good’ grizzly men believed they were bullet-proof. The war – especially the aborted landing at Dieppe where I’d lost my earlobe – had cured me of any such foolish notion, and every morning as I looked in the shaving mirror I was reminded that if the bullet had been an inch or two to the left, I’d have been dead as a dormouse, or worse, brain damaged or quadriplegic, with a face not even my stepfather could have reconstructed. My maimed hand, courtesy of Sammy Schischka, was another reminder of how easily you could lose what you valued most. But as a medic I’d seen plenty of bravado and foolish heroism, and often had to patch up the results.

I thanked Russell Howell for the compliment and then politely refused his offer to train me as a grizzly man. The Mafia murders of my old buddies Lenny and Johnny Diamond – the main reason I was in the middle of nowhere, buried deep underground – gave me more reasons to cherish the idea of remaining alive.

Nobody talked about it, but a grizzly was a potential killer, the most dangerous way to mine copper. But with the Korean War dragging on and a world greedy for the essential metal, it was also by far the most efficient way of extracting ore from a stope. I’d seen a diagram of the layout of a stope, with the grizzly bars at the bottom like a giant sieve, allowing only the smaller rocks to fall through to the shaft beneath, but nothing prepared me for the reality.

The stope was a huge hole blasted out of solid rock. Diamond drillers forced their diamond-tipped drill bits up to twenty-five feet deep into the walls of the stope, then packed the holes with gelignite. The ensuing blast would enlarge the stope, and cause an avalanche of ore and rock to fall to the bottom, where it passed through or jammed in the bars of the grizzly. The ore that fell through to the shaft beneath would be transported away from the stope; the remainder had to be forced through the gaps between the bars by the grizzly man’s four black workers, using crowbars or mallets and balancing precariously on the bars. If that failed, the grizzly man had to clear the bars by blasting the rock with sticks of gelignite. After he lit the fuse he would have to scramble into a safety tunnel and hope for the best. When the shaft below the grizzly bars filled with ore, it was emptied in stages through a large steel bucket-like door that allowed through only enough ore to fill a single truck, one of fifty or so drawn behind an electric ore train, which would then shunt forward until the next truck was in position.

When full, the ore trucks were hauled to a vertical shaft to the surface, some eleven hundred or so feet above. The ore and rock were then fed onto a conveyer belt leading to the crusher, which pounded them to the consistency of coarse gravel. This was then loaded once again into trucks and hauled by train to the copper smelter. Here, the ore within the ‘crush’ was refined into copper ingots. The entire process was dangerous, but a miner’s best chance of being killed or badly injured was working the grizzly.

The midnight-to-dawn shift kept me as ‘busy as a blue-arsed fly’, as Noel White would say. The mine employed about four thousand African mine workers, around a thousand of whom worked on one of the various underground levels on my shift. Only a very few of them worked the grizzlies, but it was during the night shift that rock that had been blasted during the afternoon was cleared. During these shifts I would have to treat injuries of varying severity, ranging from bad lacerations, muscle sprains and tears to fractures, and there would even be an occasional death.

The medic who had preceded me, Koos Dippenaar, had trained my medical team extremely well; there was very little they hadn’t coped with in the past and I quickly grew to trust them implicitly. But here’s the paradox: while they were perfectly capable, the white miners’ union would not allow them to perform certain procedures; only white medics were deemed sufficiently skilful for these duties. Sutures, inserting a needle into a vein for a transfusion, using a hypodermic needle, administering aid in any way to a white man were all forbidden. This last one was the most stupid rule of all, and I decided that, should the situation ever arise where I was unable to supply the help needed, I would instruct one of my medics to do so in my stead. However, I was not naïve enough to let this be known among the white miners, particularly the diamond drillers, who, fortunately, seldom worked underground on the night shift.

My senior black medic was an impressive-looking man of around thirty named Daniel Mwanawasa from the local Bemba tribe, who was far more experienced and capable than I was, especially at the beginning when I had a great deal of trouble communicating with my medical team. One of my tasks at the School of Mines had been to study Cikabanga (pronounced Chi-ka-banga), a
lingua franca
used in the mines, consisting of words derived mainly from Zulu, with a sprinkling of English, Afrikaans, Portuguese and a few words from local tribal languages such as Chibemba. It was similar to Fanagalo, the pidgin used in mines in South Africa and the Belgian Congo. The name Fanagalo means, roughly, ‘to be or do like this’ in the Zulu language. Both have about two thousand words each.

For novice miners to develop a reasonable working knowledge of Cikabanga usually took all of the three months in the School of Mines and then some. Young miners generally had a minimal grasp of it, sufficient to get by underground, but the paucity of the communication between them and their gangs could be dangerous, leading to confusion and sometimes accidents. The professionals – diamond drillers, engineers and shift bosses – were, for the most part, fluent. I guess I was blessed with a musician’s ear, and my ability to speak Cikabanga fairly well in just a few weeks was probably one of the reasons I impressed Russell Howell at the School of Mines.

But for the first six months or so, until I could speak quickly and easily, it was very difficult to work efficiently with my fellow medics. Still, I always enjoyed working with my team, who were generous in sharing their knowledge, anxious to acquaint me with local conditions. When we weren’t working – bandaging, stemming haemorrhages, stitching wounds, resuscitating, injecting, stabilising fractures – we laughed a lot; nice guys, all four of them. They’d given themselves European names for their white bosses, and were known as Daniel, Samson, Milo and Jacob. Jacob was a Luba, from the Katanga region across the border in the Belgian Congo, and when things got difficult he would curse in French, oblivious to the fact that I had studied French to a fairly proficient level in high school and could understand most of what he said, some of it directed at white guys when they were being difficult:
branleur –
wanker;
casse toi –
piss off, get lost;
débile
– idiot; and of course the well-known
merde
– shit. I never let on that I understood these less-than-complimentary expressions, and when they were directed at me in the beginning, after I’d made some fundamental mistake, I took the criticism as part of my education.

What the other three may have said in their own language I shall never know. But after a while, all my training as a medic came back to me. With my eidetic memory, the various courses I’d taken under Nick Reed’s direction during the war came back to me in detail, so that I was able to cope reasonably well. When there were no white guys about, I taught my team stuff I knew and that they were not permitted to do. The idea that someone should be banned from potentially saving a life because of the colour of their skin was anathema to me.

Life on the night shift wasn’t all that different from working at the GAWP Bar at the Firebird, except that I had the early evenings to myself. Noel White and his wife, Judy, would often invite me to dinner. I made a few friends at the Club, not the recreation room and bar in the single quarters run by the Krauts, but the social club for all the miners and their wives. I’d spend a couple of hours at the pool (referred to as the ‘swimming bath’) or in the Club gym, but mostly I read my Penguin paperbacks or something I’d taken out of the Club library, or I’d study medical stuff.

When I’d settled in, I bought a record player in Ndola and ordered a stack of the new long-playing records – classical, jazz and blues – plus some sheet music by mail-order from a catalogue I found in the Club. The firm that produced the catalogue, Polliacks, had stores in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria, and claimed to be the biggest music shop in Africa. They even featured a Steinway grand in their catalogue, though I couldn’t help wondering who would buy such an expensive instrument by mail-order. I’d asked them on the order form if they stocked jazz and blues sheet music, and when the records arrived, they’d included the score for George Gershwin’s opera
Porgy and Bess
, ‘With compliments’. It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind but I was to find that much of it could be adapted for the harmonica.

I was corresponding with my mom and Nick through using a private post-office box, and I’d often ask Nick for detailed medical information. With the doctor only visiting twice a week to attend to white patients, and the African hospital for black patients thirty miles away in Ndola, I was having to do rather more than I was trained to. Matron Suzanna Hamilton was a marvel and seemed to have every certificate a nurse could possess. But sometimes, when it came to a black miner, it was a choice between doing what I could and his certain death.

Of course, some miners died despite my attempts to save them and this caused me a great deal of distress, whether it was my fault or not. In some cases they’d have died even if we’d had a surgeon standing by. I can’t tell you how bad it feels to see a man die in front of your eyes, just because you lack the necessary skills to save his life and you know he’d never have reached the hospital in Ndola in time.

As the year drew on, the wet season began, with constant rain, mud and slush. There was mould everywhere, and everything felt damp. It was the time of year when the ambulance had to be loaded onto a train because the road to Ndola, or anywhere else, was impassable.