Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

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.

‘Okay shit for brains, you’re so fucking smart, how much gelignite is required to blast a twelve hole end?’ In the first week I had read the textbooks Gareth Jones had issued to us from cover to cover, and Thomas soon discovered I knew the answers to the simple questions he threw at us when we went underground each day. He didn’t like a smartarse in his class and seemed determined to get me. He would ask questions which appeared in the books weeks ahead of our learning them, but I usually knew the answer. The rest of the crud were not known for their brains and reading isn’t generally a strong point among such men. I knew I couldn’t goof the answer just to satisfy Thomas’ need to put me in my place. The crud derived enormous pleasure from my getting the answers right and therefore, in their minds, getting the better of Thomas.

‘Six foot drills or nine, sir?’ I’d ask.

‘You being a smartarse, boyo?’

‘No sir, but it would make a difference wouldn’t it?’

‘Of course, you half-wit, of course it would make a difference!’

‘Well, that’s why I asked, Mr Thomas.’

Caught in his own verbal trap. Thomas would answer angrily, ‘We don’t use too many nine-foot Jackhammer drills, now do we?’

‘If the rock is a bit cakey we do, sir,’ I answered.

Thomas would jump up in glee. ‘There’s precious little cakey rock in a fucking copper mine, boyo!’

‘In that case eighteen pounds, sir,’ I would answer smoothly. The men around me would wear smiles as big as water melon slices.

‘Correct!’ Thomas would yell. ‘But don’t you be a smartarse with me, boyo, or you’ll be lashing ends until your arms fall off and you have to use your shoulder stumps to pick your nose.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I’d say, but I knew he would have the last say, moving me over to a badly blasted end where the ore had broken in large lumps too big for a shovel so that I had to break and lift the rock all day until I collapsed from exhaustion.

‘No malingering, boyo, back on the job in five minutes or you’re fined a quid.’ In the school of mines we were paid a token salary which just covered the cost of the hut and our mess bill with a couple of quid over for essentials. If, by the end of the month, you were down five pounds it made things tough.

I told myself that nothing Thomas said or did could wear me down. I convinced myself that the hard work was why I’d come, and indeed, after two months in the school of mines my body had never been harder and I knew the muscle bulk would soon begin to follow. While I kept a speedball and a punching bag in my hut where it wouldn’t be noticed and worked out every day with weights in the club gym as well as doing five or six miles of road work three times a week, I made no attempt to join the boxing club.

Sport was the one thing both miners and good citizens shared and the club, heavily subsidised by the mines, was the social centre of the small town. The club affected all the traditions and mannerly ways anglophile institutions of this sort demand from lower middle-class members who find themselves fortuitously thrust into the upper echelons of a colonial backwater society, and it solved the problem of having to accommodate the multi-national crud by building a separate bar for them. This was in a separate building from the club, with its own entrance where men could come without being seen by the town establishment, mine officials and the more acceptable of the miners’ families.

The crud bar, as it was known, contained a fifty-foot bar counter, cement floor and white lavatory tiles six feet up the walls. It also featured swing doors like a Western saloon. The bar room itself was empty and permitted standing room only. Outside was a beer garden with a hundred tables or so, each one sporting a permanent tin umbrella welded into the centre of a steel table which, in turn, was bolted onto the painted green cement yard. The chairs too were made of steel, their legs permanently bolted to the cement. Each table and six chairs were painted a different colour so that from a distance it all looked very gay. Above the tables, suspended like tall washing lines, were strings of coloured lights which at night gave a weird sort of green and mauve cast to everything.

Three barmen, all Germans, all called Fritz and all fat, worked the bar like an ordinance office. Each Fritz operated his third of the bar and behind him was a complete stock of liquor and a cash register. He never left his own territory to pour a drink, draw a beer or make change. Each Fritz was known by a number, Fritz One, Fritz Two and Fritz Three. Each had a crud following whom he came to regard as regular to his part of the bar. The Fritzs boasted there wasn’t a drink in the world they didn’t have or couldn’t make. But mostly they served brandy, beer, rum and vodka, in that order. If you did your drinking standing in the bar you could get your liquor served by the measure and your beer by the glass. But if you wished to sit outside, you got a jug of beer or bought a full bottle of spirits, unless you wanted to keep fighting your way back into the bar for single serves. No Fritz was ever known to move from behind the long bar. The crud bar stayed open from seven a.m. until midnight when one Fritz would hose it out, removing at the same time the crud too inebriated to leave on their own.