during most shifts and often three or four times the rock would become blocked at the mouth of the stope. That is, at the very top of the funnel some thirty feet above the grizzly bars. In mining terms this was known as a hang-up or a bunch of grapes. Rocks of every size jammed the mouth of the stope. The safety procedure required to dislodge the rock and get the stope flowing again was to make up a parcel of gelignite. This is then tied to the end of a thirty-foot bamboo pole. The sticks of explosive are then wrapped with cordtex, which is explosive made into a cord which looks like white electrical flex. The idea is to push the parcel of gelignite against the rocks jamming the mouth of the stope. Then to light the fuse attached to the end of the cordtex which has been trailed from the parcel of gelignite to the level of the grizzly. Whereupon, if you’re very lucky, the blast against the hang-up hopefully dislodges the rocks, causing the mouth of the stope to open again and the muck to flow.
But life on a grizzly isn’t meant to be easy, and dynamite or gelignite, when it is not sealed with a mud pack, blasts outwards away from the rock, taking the line of least resistance. Blasting a hang-up with the bamboo pole technique is seldom successful. The pressure on the grizzly man is enormous, he must get the muck flowing and, using the bamboo pole technique he could blast away unsuccessfully all night. He is paid by the truck load, and if he doesn’t empty his stope the diamond driller will lose his day shift, which often results in a grizzly man losing a couple of teeth. Apart from all this the grizzly man’s pride is involved. A grizzly man who leaves a grizzly hung up is the lowest form of life in a mine. As Thomas would say, ‘It’s just not fuckin’ done, boyo!’
After unsuccessfully trying to bring a hang-up down with a bamboo pole bomb, the grizzly man fills the front of his thick woollen miner’s shirt with mud and a gelignite bomb strung with cordtex, and scales the sheer face of the funnel until he reaches the hang-up. This is the dangerous part, if the hang-up comes down while he is fixing the explosive against it, the grizzly man is dead, thrown sixty feet down through the bars to be buried under fifty tons of rock. Fighting the panic of being totally committed with nowhere to go, you find a jamming point between the rocks and insert the gelignite bomb. Then you wind the cordtex around it and let enough cordtex fall to the grizzly below so that you can attach a fuse to it. Finally you seal the bomb with mud to make it airtight so that the blast will go inwards into the rock. Having set it and packed it you then have to come down again, each precarious step up and down the sheer face of the funnel a gamble that the hang-up will hold. Back at the grizzly level you connect the cordtex to a fuse, signal the African to blow the warning hooter, light the fuse with a cheesa stick, a flare the size of a thick pencil which, once lit, cannot be extinguished. Then you have thirty seconds to retire into the safety tunnel before the blast goes off.
If the hang-up still doesn’t come down you are forced up again, aware that with the added blast it could be teetering and on the point of crashing down. You soon learn to make only one trip up the funnel laying several blasts across the face of the hang-up and stringing them together with cordtex. This means you spend ten or fifteen minutes up against the hang-up with each second increasing the tension and the danger. But this way, when the four or five bombs go off simultaneously, you have a good chance of bringing the hang-up down. It all depends on nerve… yours. If you have the nerve to stay up the funnel for fifteen or twenty minutes, carefully laying a blast pattern and sealing each bomb with mud, it takes a very big hang-up to defeat you. In the year I was to work grizzlies, five of the twenty grizzly men working the mine were killed when a hang-up gave way while they were up the funnel laying charges against it.
Mine rules did not permit grizzly men to climb up into the mouth of the stope: caught doing it meant instant dismissal. But because you were forced to at least twice during a shift, the shift boss would stay away from the grizzly levels so that he wouldn’t catch you. Everyone’s copper bonus depended on the grizzly man getting the ore out of the stope. No shift boss would police the rules when he knew that the bamboo pole technique was so ineffectual that a hang-up might remain all night and not a ton of ore would be moved out of the stope.
When I wasn’t shitting myself I took a perverse pride in being a successful grizzly man. I was the youngest in the mine with one of the best ore tallies. The diamond driller who worked the stope above my grizzly was an Afrikaner called Botha whom I never met as he worked day shift and I worked nights. The diamond drillers were the underground elite and never spoke to the grizzly men personally, the work was too dangerous and a driller didn’t want the responsibility of knowing who was working his stope. But if you kept your ore tally up and his stope empty, he would send you a case of brandy at the end of each month.
A case of brandy from your diamond driller was the badge of honour every grizzly man worked for: in the crazy crud world of the Central African copper mines it became an approbation even more important than money.
I gave the brandy to Rasputin, the giant Georgian who lived in the hut next to me. Rasputin worked as a timber man on the same night shift as I did and we cycled to number seven shaft about three miles out of town where we both worked. From the night he had saved my rear end virginity, we had been friends, our friendship based less on words than on the things we shared. Rasputin spoke very little English and rather than learn any more he simply didn’t talk. He’d sit on my stoep or I on his and we’d play chess. He was a good enough player to keep me interested and if I lost concentration he would sometimes take a game. Often we would simply sit and I would read a book or he’d play his collection of Tchaikovsky symphonies and concertos on his new portable record player. He never played anything but Tchaikovsky and would sit with a huge block of native timber in one hand and kindling axe in the other, and without ever releasing the block of wood he would chip away until three hours later it became a perfect ball. Rasputin was almost as tall as Doc had been but he was twice as broad, even bigger than the Afrikaners, and the axe would have weighed five pounds. The act of carving the block of wood into a ball was one which took almost unimaginable strength. When Rasputin wasn’t carving a ball he was sharpening the axe. He would work away to the music, going through the entire repertoire of concertos and of the three symphonies. Sometimes silent tears would roll down his cheeks and spill into his shaggy beard. These he never bothered to wipe away, but he simply continued to carve at the block of wood, occasionally putting down the axe long enough to pick up a tin mug filled with VSOP brandy which he would half empty in one gulp and then refill to the brim. When Tchaikovsky came to an end, which meant sitting through all three of his piano concertos and his violin concerto and at least three symphonies, mostly his number one in G minor, two in C minor and always ending with his sixth, the grand and brilliant Pathetique, a bottle of Botha’s brandy would be empty and the wooden ball would be complete.
Rasputin would carefully pack away the record player, dust the records and slip them into their jackets and lay them on top of a towel in an old suitcase. Then he would take the wooden ball and add it to a pile on the floor inside his hut. There must have been six or seven hundred of these about the size of a bowling ball, stacked in separate heaps of about one hundred each, one ball added each day. Some of the older ones had turned a lovely silver grey colour and others bore beautiful markings from the native timber he used. Each ball was identically sized and beautifully made, you could pick up two carved months apart and their perfect roundness and size were so close the eye couldn’t pick out the difference, each ball a testimony to his enormous skill and strength. His hut smelled of the sap of young timber, not unlike the smell of a forest. Rasputin would step into his hut and take a deep breath, inhaling the sappy odour of the uncured native timber.
‘Smell like Roosha, Peekay.’ I often wondered if in his native Russia he had once lived among the birch forests of the Taiga, but I could think of no way of asking him.
I became fascinated by the beautifully carved balls and found that I could hold the axe in position to work a piece of wood for no more than three minutes before the hand holding the wood would no longer function and the pain in my right wrist from holding the axe became unbearable. I realised that the exercise involved would strengthen my arms, wrists and even my hands for boxing, so I purchased a smaller and lighter axe and Rasputin sharpened it for me until it was like a razor. The idea that I wished to emulate him gave the huge bear of a man great pleasure. We’d sit on his verandah whittling away, listening to Mr Tchaikovsky, Rasputin drinking brandy and shedding tears which fell like drops of liquid silver down his cheeks to disappear into his huge black beard.
Eventually I worked out that the wooden balls were Rasputin’s calendar, one ball for each day he had spent in the mines. By my reckoning he had been there about three years.
We would meet after our shift came up at seven a.m. and cycle back to the mess for breakfast. Rasputin would always be showered and waiting for me as my cage came up from underground, somehow he managed to finish his shift early and get up to the surface before the grizzly men.
‘Much muck move, Peekay. You good boy,’ he would say without fail as I stepped out of the cage. Then he would take my miner’s lamp from me and put it on charge in the battery room so that I could go straight to the shaft office, check my ore tally, sign off and quickly get to the showers. When I emerged from the change rooms twenty minutes later he would be standing outside in the morning sunlight with my bicycle, ready for a quick getaway.
