by Wilbur Smith
I’d taken his advice and was now an accountant with a degree—something that still surprised me. On graduation, I didn’t head home first, I went down to Port Elizabeth where I’d got a job as an executive trainee at Goodyear Tire and Rubber. My first salary was £27 a month; it was OK, I lived well on it. I ran a car and was able to romance a few ladies, buy a few drinks. I was having a good time. Such a good time in fact, that within six months of adult life I was married—and I wasn’t even twenty-four.
I might have moved to Port Elizabeth, but it was only 110 kms away from Grahamstown and I hadn’t really left my student days behind. I still had an impetuous sense of adventure.
That Easter, I headed up to Johannesburg to spend time with a dear old varsity friend of mine called Larry King, who was 5′2″, Jewish and a natural comic. He was hysterically funny. We were at the Rand Easter Show, bellied up to the bar in the tent. Also attending the event was an American wrestler who had entered the tent and was looking around for a drink. His name was Sky-High Lee and he stood 7′2″ in his socks.
Larry and I were talking about a trick where you slip behind a fellow when he’s not expecting it. You stand back to back and grab him by the seat of the pants and start walking forward. He ends up off balance and you can take him anywhere you want.
Sky-High Lee wandered over to the bar and I whispered to Larry, who had already had a couple of jars, to do the trick on him. Larry eyed Sky-High Lee, craning his neck as he looked up, and said: “You’re joking.”
“No, nonsense, of course you can do it, don’t be all talk,” I said.
Larry considered, then said: “You know, come to think of it, I could do it!”
“Well don’t tell us, show us!”
Larry put his drink on the bar counter and began backing up to Sky-High. He couldn’t reach high enough to get him by the seat of his pants so he grabbed the back of his coat. He then started walking. Sky-High was just lifting his glass to his lips, when he felt the tugging behind him. He slowly put his glass down and nonchalantly turned around to see this strange little man, flushed in the face, standing there plaintively apologizing: “Sorry, Mr. Lee, sorry, Mr. Lee.”
Sky-High bent down, took Larry by the lapels of his coat and lifted him up in the air. He held him aloft, with Larry’s feet dangling about a foot off the ground, and looked at him with amazement, like he’d discovered a new species of insect. Then he shook his head and dropped Larry right onto his feet and turned back to his beer.
I’ll never forget that. I wanted to applaud. It was the perfect put-down. He didn’t punch him. He just couldn’t believe that this little guy had tried to intimidate him.
Larry and I had some memorable times together, pranking each other, drinking too much; we were unleashed and carefree, refusing to accept we were no longer students. Tragically Larry would later die in a car crash. I miss him.
6
THIS UNDERWORLD LIFE
I stood on the precipice, staring into the swirling blackness of the mine below. In the world beneath the surface, miners were following rich veins in the earth, toiling in their cramped, poisonous tunnels to bring out the stone which has filled man with lust and envy since the dawn of time: gold. Up on the surface, I had been following my own rich vein. I had moved to Cape Town and was spending a lot of time on the gold mines of Johannesburg, going underground with the miners, diligently researching my latest novel Gold Mine. I wanted it to be real, authentic, to show respect for the truth of the miners’ lives I was chronicling. Suddenly I lost my footing, the handwritten manuscript slipped out of my grasp and 150 pages, the only copy I had, fell down the mineshaft, the pages scissoring apart into the darkness. They spiraled down past the point where the mine bosses climbed in; past the level where the white mine overseers began their descent; and past the level where the black workers joined the skip to make the final descent to the heart of the mine. The pages returned to the earth, becoming dark matter. Those pages were my first attempt at telling the story of Rodney Ironsides, the ambitious and hard-living mining expert who compromises his career by agreeing to flood his own mine as a stock exchange scam. As I listened to the last whisper of the pages fluttering down the shaft, I thought about the special moments of character and plot that would be lost forever. I would have to rewrite it, but it could never be quite the same again.
It was the summer of 1969, five years after When the Lion Feeds had become a runaway success. That morning in Salisbury, reading the telegram from London with disbelief, had been the first in a succession of golden moments, each one of them more surreal than the last. Two days later, the postman had pedaled up the drive of the house which I shared in squalor with four other bachelors, and asked me to sign for yet another buff telegram form. He presented me with an envelope that changed my life forever. Inside was a check from William Heinemann, my first advance payment for my first published novel. It was equivalent to just under three years’ salary. My life was taking an exciting new direction.
A week later, the postman returned with another telegram. Readers’ Digest had taken my novel as one of their Condensed Books. In uncontrolled excitement, I tipped the postman a pound. During the weeks that followed, he came more and more regularly. He arrived with letters of notification of a sale of film rights in Hollywood, of a Book Society Choice, of acceptance by Viking Press in New York for an eye-rolling sum of dollars—relative to my then financial situation—of new publishers in Germany and France, of a paperback sale to Pan Books in England. Soon, the postman and I became fast friends. He would holler outside my door—“Another one, Bwana!”—and, when I opened the door, he was already holding out his hand for a tip.
The Courtneys had changed my life irrevocably, and I was determined that now I was going to do nothing but write. On my return from England in 1964, where I met my publishers and finally held a copy of the novel in my hands, I had officially resigned my job. I had not taken leave from the Tax Department for three years—I had never been able to afford the luxury of a vacation. Now was the time to cash in all that leave. Between that and the money coming in from When the Lion Feeds, I had enough to live on for a few years. I gave up being employed as an accountant. The success of When the Lion Feeds was enough that Heinemann wanted more, and I secluded myself far away from the distractions and everyday chaos of Salisbury to commit more stories to the page.
I borrowed Dad’s caravan and headed out for the Inyanga Mountains in the east, a magical space of mountains, waterfalls, rolling grasslands and trout dams. I parked at a caravan park and started writing with a vengeance. I would occasionally drive back into Salisbury to see my family and relax a little with friends.
It was during one of those trips home that I bumped into a young prosecutor, John Gordon Davis. Gordon Davis and I were at Rhodes University together, but we hadn’t really been friends.
He asked me what I was doing, so I told him about When the Lion Feeds and being out at Inyanga. About twenty years later, Gordon Davis, in an interview with a reporter, mentioned how I had inspired him to start writing.
Gordon Davis, who was then a junior public prosecutor in Bulawayo, was coming down the main road in Salisbury when he saw me and waved. After hearty handshakes, or as he put it to the reporter, “we fell on each other’s necks,” we made for the nearest bar.
Over large, cool beers, he said he had just come back from Canada where he had gone looking for adventure but hadn’t found it, and was now working in Bulawayo at the magistrates’ court. He was bored and restless, with that feral look in his eye I’ve seen many times in frustrated creative people. “And you, what are you up to, Smith?” he asked. There was a skepticism in his voice as if I was the last person he thought would be successful with any enterprises. “I’m living off the royalties from my first novel which has sold 10,000 copies in the US and 25,000 in the UK, and the film rights advances,” I said, genuinely not meaning to boast, just stating the facts. I could see Gordon Davis’s eyes open wide in astonishment; he didn’t th
ink anyone could make a living out of writing, especially in Africa.
He became even more attentive when I told him that after I’d sent When the Lion Feeds to the publishers, they’d asked me for more work.
He said: “Well if a jerk like you can do it, so can I.” His language was slightly more choice. What he actually said was: “Jesus, if an asshole like you can publish a book, imagine what I could do.”
“Well, Gordon Davis,” I replied, “don’t tell me about it, go and do it.” And to his credit, he did just that, writing what would become Hold My Hand I’m Dying, a bestselling novel based on his work as a native commissioner up near Kariba, and then as a prosecutor during the turbulence in Rhodesia, when Prime Minister Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front government decided to issue their Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. Gordon Davis would leave Rhodesia and work as a crown prosecutor in Hong Kong, writing all the time, until eventually retiring to Andalucia in Spain where he ran very successful writing courses for aspiring and published authors. Sadly he passed away in 2014.
Returning to the subject of my writing “office”: the beautiful Inyanga mountains sit on the eastern border of what was then Rhodesia, forming a natural barrier of sheer cliff faces, gullies wreathed in mist, and dense upland forest with Portuguese East Africa on the other side. Here, banked by black wattle and pine, listening to the holler and cry of Samango monkeys somewhere out in the forest, I lived and worked in the caravan, and soon I had written my second novel, The Dark of the Sun. It was about Bruce Curry, a thirty-year-old Rhodesian lawyer turned mercenary, seeking redemption in the bloodbath of the Congo’s diamond-rich Katanga province while civil war erupted all around him. The solitude of the Inyanga was the perfect backdrop to lose myself in these imaginary vistas, to truly inhabit the characters on the page. Soon after finishing, I was writing my third novel, The Sound of Thunder, and in it returning to the world of the Courtneys. The Sound of Thunder found Sean and his brother Garrick resuming their fraternal battle, this time set against the theater of the Second Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century. Next had come Shout at the Devil, the story of two freebooters making their living hunting in German East Africa, and the implacable Commissioner whose land they are poaching. These were novels set under the endless African skies—but, for my next story, I had been planning something a little different. I was going to take readers to a part of Africa few of them would ever have seen—the world underneath the surface.
•••
I had spent the early years of my life around the mines of the Copperbelt, in a place much the same as these gold mines. Those had been days spent following my father as he marshaled his men and dropped ventilation pipes deep into the earth, but I was here on the Witwatersrand as a guest of the Western Deep Levels Gold Mine Company. Being a successful novelist was opening doors that had until now remained closed, allowing me to get closer to my source material.
I had first written about the South African gold rush in When the Lion Feeds, as Sean Courtney and his partner, Duff Charleywood, joined the stampede to exploit the goldfields of the Witwatersrand. Gold had been discovered on this vast escarpment in 1886, and the sudden influx of fortune hunters from all over the world had given rise to the dusty mining village of Ferreira’s Camp, which grew into the city of Johannesburg. As I stood here, now, the gold rush had been over for almost a hundred years, but there was still gold in these hills, and the men tramping into the tunnel ahead of me were here to bring it out. My new novel, Gold Mine, was going to be about men just like these and, if I was to get inside their heads, I needed to know the workings of the mines as intimately as any miner. I needed to live with their rhythms, learn their speech patterns, their attitudes, the tiny details only a seasoned mine worker could know. The Western Deep Levels Gold Mine Company had allowed me to join them for an extended period—so I climbed into the skip that would take me to the mine’s lowest levels and prepared to descend.
Up on the surface the mine was its own world—a closed town of thousands of workers, with many more in the outlying villages run by the mine. Married miners often lived in those local villages with their families, but even they could not escape the control of the all-powerful mine itself. Single miners shared boarding houses closer in and I lived in these quarters, in between bouts of publicity for Shout at the Devil. They were pretty basic buildings, but they were leagues better than the traditional huts most of the miners had grown up in. In an age of apartheid, black workers had separate accommodation to the whites, but that did not impact on the sense of community in the complex. I had been here for several days already and was planning on staying a full two months. In the evenings, when the work was done, the miners congregated to play cards, sports and, in the single quarters, to drink. I sat among them each evening, listening to the talk.
Western Deep No. 3 Shaft plummeted more than a mile into the ground. As we rattled down, the air around us seeming to harden as the pressure built up, I was reminded of the first time I had gone underground. The unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach was frighteningly familiar from the days I had accompanied my father down a mine shaft much the same as this, and the long, tiresome hours I had spent trailing after him as he made his rounds. Those networks of tunnels, shorn up with wooden props, and the suffocating heat which the miners endured, had been no place for a boy. Yet, later—when we had moved to my father’s ranch and the prospect of what lay beneath the surface no longer seemed so dull—I had joined a caving club and gone on spelunking expeditions with companions from school, exploring natural crevices and tunnels in the rock. It had been on one of those first trips that my eyes had been opened to the fascination of the depths.
At last, we reached the bottom of the mine shaft. The skip gates clattered and came apart. The miners who had been crowded in with me trudged out into a narrow tunnel and, one after another, disappeared into the darkness, the lights on their helmets fading to points. It was eerie and strange, an unreal world of blackness, shadows and unexpected glaring illumination. When they were gone, there were only two figures left in the cavern: me and the mine overseer who had been given the responsibility of showing me around the tunnels.
George Orwell wrote about English coal mines in The Road to Wigan Pier and his words were ringing in my ears: “The place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air and above all, unbearably cramped space.”
“Stay close,” the overseer said. “There are five hundred miles of tunnel down here. Some of those boys will have to walk two miles before they even start work.”
We began our tour of the mine. It was baking hot, and the walls themselves seemed to be perspiring as if they too were gripped with the effort of extraction. Water was sprayed liberally throughout the mine, not just for its cooling effects, but to damp down the clouds of dust that billowed through the tunnels. That dust could be cancerous to the miners who might spend long days breathing it in. The atmosphere was muggy, but that was something the miners were acclimatized to. Coming in from the bush, many of the untrained mine workers would have to spend long periods in the compound’s steam rooms, so that their bodies became attuned to conditions this far underground. The pressure of the rock overhead could amount to as much as 12,000 pounds on a single square inch, and the risk of cave-in was something miners lived with daily.
The gold mine was a honeycomb, its cells and tunnels spreading out in every direction. We set out following the signposted tracks where ore was being transported back to the surface. On occasion the tunnels resounded with explosions from even deeper inside the mountain, the after-effects of dynamite being laid and set off, all part of the mine’s never-ending quest to expand. The mine around us seemed alive, organic, constantly looking for places to infiltrate, always growing with new shafts and tunnels. As soon as a mine like this stood still it would grind to a halt. Only by going deeper, wider and richer could it co
ntinue to exist. It was a hungry beast with no sating its appetite, much like the gold market it was supplying. Today, Western Deep Levels are working the earth more than two-and-a-half miles beneath the surface, one of the deepest complexes in the world. In the years to come, they will plunge deeper and deeper still.
Most of the men working these tunnels were black workers from the rural homelands of South Africa. Although South Africa’s racial tensions would soon explode with fire and blood in the world up above, in these tunnels there seemed to be no enmity between black and white. A miner was a miner, and that eclipsed the racial divide. The workers we encountered had come from all over: they were Zulu and Matebele, Sotho and Shona, Portuguese, Poles and Europeans from even further afield. Often the overseers were the educated white miners, and the men from the different African tribes seemed to have gravitated together so that gangs of Matebele men would work on the mine face, while a cohort of Zulu boys transported the ore.
After tramping through endless cramped, claustrophobic tunnels, the overseer and I reached the mine face, where more tunnels were being advanced into solid rock. This was dangerous work. There was no natural oxygen, it was pumped down through ventilation pipes of the kind my father built to make his fortune, and the air hung thick and heavy around us. The lights strung up from the wooden rafters flickered and strobed, sometimes short-circuiting and sending the world into a darkness more absolute than any I’d ever experienced on the surface. Down in these depths, the water leaching up through the rock was coppery and poisonous, laced with natural arsenic from the minerals in the earth. And there was the constant fear of tunnel collapse lurking around every corner.
The men seemed heedless to the everyday hazards. The mines attracted a hard breed of man, capable and uncomplaining, bolstered by the relative riches of their wages. The true gold rush might have been over for generations, the land now monopolized and controlled by companies like Western Deep Levels, but the rewards for the miners were compensation for hardships in a grueling world.
