Although I enjoyed much of the work, I could not feel settled. I was lonely, though I did not understand why, and I felt that I was in the wrong job. I wanted to be an author. (A mixture of Conrad, Kipling and Somerset Maugham, say.) I left the farm, and took a room in a country town 50 miles to the south. It was a place of antimacassars (crocheted mats to keep hair oil off the chair) and of doilies (crocheted mats to keep plates off the table). I struggled hard to produce a masterpiece. But I knew nothing of life and nothing of writing. I bought an American book on How to Write Short Stories but my brain was hazy after manual toil. A dreary sense of failure crept over me.
I had only one interesting adventure at this place. I was bathing in the river when a flood spate came down. There must have been a deluge from a thunderstorm in the hills, and because the country was new, with the hills stripped of their timber by the settlers, the water rushed down and flooded violently. I have seen a river, which I had crossed on foot without getting wet, become a raging torrent half an hour later, with a thundery rumble from great boulders pounding along the river bed. The spate swept me off my feet and carried me away. I swam to the riverbank, and grabbed at the boulders. The flood tore my grasp and rolled me over and over. I felt panic. My signet ring, with a cornelian stone, was torn off my finger. I resisted panic, which I knew was a killer, and kept swimming, not trying to buck the flood. At last I got into an eddy, and was able to seize a boulder and pull myself out of the water.
CHAPTER 5
GOLD AND COAL
Feeling rather a failure, I packed my things and, crossing from North Island to South Island by steamer, I set off for the west coast. This meant crossing the Southern Alps by stagecoach, with five horses. We made our way slowly up the mountain range to the pass, sometimes walking to ease the horses. The glacier-fed rivers were full of milky blue-grey water.
At Greymouth, on the west coast, I joined my second trade union, the Timber Workers. I got a job at a new mill that was being set up in the bush. To reach it, I travelled on the company's bush railway, running 10 miles into the virgin forest. I worked in the gang extending this railway farther into the forest to get timber out. I liked the bushwhacking, felling trees up to three feet in diameter with an axe. Even digging the cuttings, and laying the track had interest, but it was made dreary because nobody had any incentive and the gang slacked shamelessly. Most of the soil round about was goldbearing, and I used to amuse myself by panning off some of the dirt in a shovel. Every shovelful would produce a few colours of gold. My mates were a suspicious, dull crowd. They could not make me out, and treated me as if I was an enemy spy. We used to assemble in one of the wooden huts which each of us had to live and sleep in and would swop yarns by the light of the log fire at night, but no one became friendly to me. It was a dreary life, and when I got news of a gold strike in the bush, I packed my swag (that is to say, stuffed my blankets and belongings into a bag which I humped on my shoulders) and made off.
Ten miles along a track through the bush brought me to a road of sorts, and I kept on walking until I got to the Blackwater Gold Mine at the terminus of another road. The Blackwater was a warm quartz reef more than half a mile below the surface. From here I took off into virgin forest following a blazed trail. I was given directions that would take me to the strike. A blazed trail through dense forests, with a small nick on a tree every fifty or a hundred yards, may be easy to follow if you blazed it yourself, or if you first follow it with someone who knows it but not for a complete stranger to the area. I was trailing up a small creek trying to spot a blaze which would indicate where I had to leave the creek, but I could not find any blaze, and finally mistook a deer track for the right trail. I followed this for some time, but an hour or so later I had to admit that I was well and truly bushed.
Panic came in a big wave. It was a new overwhelming panic that paralysed my brain; I wanted to tear wildly through the bush. I knew that I had to fight this panic, so I set my whole mind to fighting it, and finally I had control. Then I unpacked my swag and, feeling intensely alone and lonely, rolled up in my blanket and went to sleep. This was beside another stream, which ran over a rusty-coloured bottom, apparently full of new-chum gold which glittered more than the real stuff: it was hard to believe that I was not lying beside immense wealth, though I reasoned that real gold would have worked through the gravel to rock bottom.
When I awoke at dawn I lay still, pondering, until I had worked over all my movements. If I could get a direction, I ought to be able to hit off the valley from which I had started, even though it was merely a thin streak running into a vast area of solid forest. I had no compass and it was impossible to see farther than a few yards. I decided to try to get a bearing from the sun. The only hope for this was to climb to the top of a hill. This west-coast bush was a rainforest, created by the westerlies sweeping in from the ocean and emptying their moisture as continuous rain for weeks on end as they lifted over the Alps. In places the forest was so dense that, without a slasher, it would take four hours to move a mile through it. From the ground I could not get the least sign of the sun through the dense growth overhead.
The surface of the hill that I knew I must climb was covered in moss a foot deep. My feet slipped on the roots under the moss, and I had to scramble over rotting tree trunks which lay all over the place. When I got to the top I climbed a tree with difficulty. But when I got near the top I could see that I was going to be no better off, because the leaves were too dense to see through, and the branches too frail to support my weight if I tried to get up higher. I climbed down, and started thinking again, I told myself that it was panic which usually killed someone who was lost, and I made up my mind that I ought to be able to find the stream where I had first gone wrong. I plotted all my movements in my head, and decided where that stream should lie. I set off in that direction. If I didn't find the stream within a certain time, I determined to follow a creek downstream until I came to the coast. That might take me three weeks, but I was bound to arrive there in the end if I could get food.
I set off, and within an hour located my lost stream. This was a sound lesson not to go off on such jaunts without a compass. In good daylight I followed the trail, and in due course reached the prospectors' log hut built of young trees with the ends sticking out at the corners. According to bush hospitality I moved into the hut and slept there without anybody asking any questions. I might have been there for years. In the end, I broached the subject of the reef. What I was told merely confirmed the opinion I had already formed; any idea of my pegging out a claim was fatuous. First because they had already pegged off claims for 6 miles along the line of the reef, and secondly, because the only way of finding a reef underfoot was to keep prodding through the moss with a long iron spear until quartz, which gave off a different note from other rock, was stabbed. It was then necessary to dig down and quarry a lump of this quartz, crush it, and assay it for gold. It would have taken me weeks to find their claim pegs; it was most unlikely that the reef would 'live' for anything like 6 miles; and if it did it was even more unlikely that there would be another outcrop which I could find. Finally, I had no tools. I was not unduly depressed; I had been to a gold strike, and enjoyed the adventure of getting there.
Years later I heard that the finders of this reef had turned down an offer of £50,000 for it. They set up a stamping plant themselves to mill the reef, but found that it did not 'live' down, that it petered out a few feet below the surface.
I came away richer in experience, and with two pieces of gold-bearing quartz in which the gold could be seen by the aid of a magnifying glass.
When I got back to the sawmill I was sacked for leaving without permission. I humped my swag again, and set off back through the bush. I kept going until I reached the Paparoa Coal Mine where I asked for and got a job.
This coal mine was quite different from what I thought a coal mine would be like. Instead of going down in a cage, we climbed 2,000 feet before entering the mountain by way of a long dri
ve or tunnel. The coal came from near the surface at the top. It was a thick twenty-fourfoot seam of soft coal, which could be used only for steaming purposes. There were a few soft lumps, but most of it came out like powdered lead pencil that blackened face and hands.
At first I thought it was like working in Hell with the fires and lights out. I had to get used to bending to avoid the beams. I was continually banging them with the top of my forehead as I walked along.
The miners were a humane lot, much more so than the bush workers. It was like being back in a public school, except that the surroundings were of coal and rock, the food was better, and rats ran over one's legs while eating lunch sitting on the floor of the mine. My comrades liked me, which was a big help; they thought I was a steward who had run away from a ship, which would explain my odd behaviour and speech. I didn't fancy having my Christian name Francis bellowed down the mine, so I called myself George, and as they could not pronounce Chichester, I shortened that to Chester. They liked my brand of humour, and I kept them amused. We had a strike meeting one day – I was now a due-paying member of my third trade union, the Miners' – and I got up to speak in favour of the strike. I was hotly on their side; there is nothing like sitting seven hours on a box marooned in a pool of water flooding a drive into the coal seam, working a hand pump in pitch darkness to make you feel communistic. And if there is no hope of getting out of the rut, why not pull the rest of the world down to your level? However, when I got on my feet to speak, I could not help seeing the funny side of the situation. I started to make the meeting laugh, and finally it broke up in a good-humoured scramble. Rather to my disappointment, there was no strike. Perhaps I can interpolate here that I think that most strikes are due to a longing for a break from the deadly monotony of a repetitive job.
There were one or two tough characters in the pit, among them an ex-docker from Sydney Harbour, a lean long-legged Communist, who was annoyed one day because a deputy ticked him off. He pushed over a race of boxes on the main jig. A 'race' was six trucks, each holding three-quarters of a ton, and they left the seam by way of a long tunnel, inclined at an angle of one in two and a half. The race was attached to one end of a wire rope, half a mile long, and when pushed over the edge at the top, pulled up a race of empty boxes on the other end of the rope. This Bolshie pushed over the boxes without attaching them to the rope. They made a fantastic sight as they gathered speed with a comet's tail of sparks streaming from the wheels on the iron rails. When the speed became too great, they jumped the rails, crashed to the side of the tunnel, brought the timbering down from the sides and the roof, and effectively closed the mine with all of us inside it. Fortunately there was a separate water drain, and we managed to escape by crawling through this headfirst.
One of the people who suffered from this escapade was me, because I was one of the gang of shift-workers given the job of repairing the damage. First, we had to erect sets of props of green timber, each fourteen-foot high, and then raise a similar bar to straddle the top. These slippery props and bars were fourteen inches in diameter, and being green timber each required five men to handle. On an incline of one in two and a half and in the faint glimmer from safety lamps, this was no joke. At the top of each set, we had to erect another set of two props ten to twelve feet high and a bar, and, worse still, we had to get a third set up on top again to reach the roof, over thirty feet above the rails. The timber had to reach right up to the roof. On this job one man had his back damaged, and was away from work for eight months, another had his leg broken; I was lucky and got away with one finger squashed.
There was nearly always a dash of excitement about this coal mining. The coal was worked by driving a network of tunnels to divide the seam into pillars. Two of the best miners would get out as much coal as possible from each pillar. The tonnage which a pair of good miners would shift from one of these pillars in a day was fantastic. For a while I was trucking for a pair, Jim Devlin and Jim Hallinan. All I had to do was to push the full boxes singularly along a short lead, and jig them down a slope with a wire rope to the next level, where another trucker took them over. Each full box was replaced with an empty one. The fact that I would have sweat streaming off me the whole day while doing only this job indicates, I think, how much coal those two men could shift. As the pillar got worked out, they had to slow down, through having to spend so much time 'listening', the idea being to get as much coal out as possible before the roof caved in. Experienced miners could tell when this was about to happen by the faint whisper that the rock made before it parted from the roof. Sometimes, I too could hear this whisper, but usually they could hear what was complete silence to me.
For a time I drove the pony, taking up full races along the level below. That was sport. I would call to the pony, or give it a friendly slap with my hand, and it would start off at a gallop. As the last box flashed past I took a flying leap for it, jumped on the back with a foot on each buffer, and buried my face in the coal to avoid being brained when passing under the bars of the roof. To stop the race I reached down with one arm and jabbed a sprag (an iron bar like a belaying pin) into the rear wheel of the truck. As soon as the pony felt the slowing down of the race of boxes it would stop galloping. Every now and then the train would be derailed, and the trucks would have to be manoeuvred back on to the rails. It took a knack to lift and shift one of these trucks, with fourteen hundredweight of coal in it, back on to the line. On my first derailment I called in my giant miner friends to help me – that a trucker had called in some miners to help replace a truck on the lines provided the pit with a laugh for weeks. I soon got the knack of doing it on my own.
This was a firedamp mine, and it was eerie to lift one's safety lamp to the roof and see the light go dim in the gas. We used to go and smoke in an air-duct tunnel. After I left, I heard that one of my friends, killed in an explosion there, was found with matches and cigarettes beside him, and it was assumed he had done it once too often. I was also told that one of my two Jims was killed by a fall of stone and the other invalided out with a damaged back.
At the time, I was still keen on boxing. I was the middleweight representative of the mine, and the two Jims, my mining pair, Devlin and Hallinan, were my sparring partners. I was entered for the west coast boxing competition at Westport, and my trainers took time off to escort me down to the ring. They rubbed me over with Elliman's embrocation before the fight (I'm not sure why), but they were as keen on my winning as I was. Unfortunately this ended in an anticlimax, because all my opponents withdrew at the last moment.
Some of the conditions at the mine were primitive. One Sunday I had an abscess in a back tooth and I went to the doctor at the big pit down the road. He used no painkiller or such-like nonsense, and set to work to pull out the tooth. Having crushed off the top, he tried to get the roots out. I remember his stopping after about half an hour, and having a long drink of water. However, the roots got the better of him, and he had to give up the struggle. Next day I took the day off and went to a dentist in Greymouth, the biggest town on the west coast. He said, 'Come back in three weeks and maybe I'll be able to see what has happened.'
After a hard day's work in the mine, my legs trembled walking down the 2,000 feet of mountainside. It was hard to pass the pub at the bottom. I used to have a pint of beer – it makes my mouth water now to think of it. Heavens, what nectar! After two or three days it became two pints, and gradually built up to six pints. Usually something then happened. One day, I fell naked on the fire in my hut. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds: each of us had an individual hut and on going to work, left the fire banked up under two four-gallon kerosene tins full of water. If done expertly, the fire would just be breaking through the soft coal by the time we got back, and the water would be just on the boil. I had half an old barrel in which I used to wash. I had stumbled in this tub, fallen and sat bang on the fire. Next day, no pint.
It seemed a healthy life; our appetites were prodigious. I never heard of any of the miners in our pi
t having lung trouble like the gold miners, who suffered from the fine stone dust solidifying in their lungs, I felt extremely lusty. However, one of the drawbacks of that community life was the scarcity of female society. In fact, for me, there was none. I was now in my twenty-first year. My twentieth birthday had been celebrated at the coal mine and perhaps it was memorable. I invited my friends among the miners, truckers and shift workers of the pit to my little wooden hut. I had a ten-gallon keg of beer to start with. There was whisky, but the miners mostly preferred beer. There were not many of us, but after midnight we had exhausted the keg, and I sent out for a second one. Either the publican, rousted out at 2 o'clock in the morning, recognised that it would be dangerous to refuse, or else he was a good sport. Perhaps both. Before the end of the party one of my guests, a huge miner, got DTs and went berserk. We had been playing poker and two-up and my guests got over-excited about some move in the poker game. In order to throw him out we had two men on each leg and two on each of his arms, and he was tossing us about as if we were pears on a fruit branch. It was an eye-opener to me – the incredible strength that can be latent in a human being. I made a note that if a man when mad (if only temporarily), can call up such strength, it must be possible for me to do the same if I used the right will power – if I could find out how.
One day I looked at one of my comrades who was drunk, and said to myself, 'My God! That's me in twenty years' time.' I depended entirely on what I could earn, and although this mining was well paid I could not save. There was the constant thirst for one thing, and sometimes five gambling schools would be in full swing at the same time. I decided that I must make a break.
The Lonely Sea and the Sky Page 5
