not have been able to articulate the idea, the mines represented a return to fear of that first boarding school. But this time it was I who would win. The grizzly I worked would be the Judge, but this time I would not be broken. I had come to the mines to find out who the hell I really was.
It is curious that in the retelling of a dangerous situation the explanation is often made to include a premonition of the disaster. Whereas, in truth, most accidents strike like a viper of lightning from an apparently clear blue sky. It is as though human beings like to pump up the importance of a near escape or even a catastrophe by placing the hand of destiny at the helm of calamity.
The day before the grizzly got me I dreamed I was bent over a routine charge to light the fuse. A normal length of fuse is designed to take two minutes to reach the dynamite charge but for a routine explosion of rock resting on the grizzly bars a good grizzly man will cut the fuse to a burn-through of thirty seconds, which is enough time to get into the safety shaft. During a single underground shift on a hard night when the muck refuses to run, a grizzly man can make forty or fifty separate rock blasts. With a saving of ninety seconds for most of these he can easily cull an extra hour’s tally from the shift. In ore terms this can make a considerable difference to the night’s final tally.
In my dream I held the lighted cheesa stick to the fuse, waiting for the familiar kick of sparks to indicate that it was alight. But the fuse turned instead into the black mamba of the crystal cave of Africa: it rose as it had done outside the cave, its head weaving and its darting tongue becoming the spluttering sparks of the lighted fuse. Mesmerised, I was unable to move until I realised it was too late. I jabbed the cheesa stick at the head of the snake as it struck. The lighted stick of sulphur blended with the explosion as I was blown to smithereens.
I awoke, my heart pounding furiously. Grizzly men often talked of the dreams: ‘When the dreams come it’s time to quit.’ I had not dreamed before and now I was afraid: the grizzlies had started to invade my subconscious. That night I told the shift boss I wanted off and gave him a week’s notice. He didn’t question me but simply nodded and said, ‘You earned it, Peekay, we’ll give you a soft option, maybe lashing on a main haulage hey?’ I thanked him but he suddenly looked alarmed. ‘Shit! Who’s going to tell Botha, he thinks you’re Jesus Christ.’ He grinned. ‘Someone else can tell the sonovabitch, that’s the day shift’s job.’ While I had received two cases of brandy regularly for the past five months, I had not met Botha. As I mentioned, it was a tradition that a diamond driller and his grizzly man didn’t meet. Nobody seemed to know quite why this was, but like most time-worn behaviour it had turned into a superstition and both men would go to some pains never to meet while they worked in conjunction with each other.
‘Rasputin will miss the brandy,’ I said, conscious that now that I had made the decision to quit, a weight had lifted from my mind.
The shift boss laughed. ‘You can bloody well tell him that!’ Rasputin was the best timber man in the mine, but the scourge of shift bosses whom he wouldn’t allow near his work site when he was building a bulkend or timbering a new haulage. But they had all come to accept Rasputin: what he did, he did well, without taking unnecessary chances with his gang. That was the first rule of mining, the rest was simply the niceties of deferring to authority, a concept the huge Georgian seemed not to understand.
There was nothing exceptional about the first part of the shift following my talk with the shift boss. I stopped to rest my gang as usual between three and four in the morning, the time known everywhere men work underground as ‘dead man’s hour’. It is the time when the human pulse is said to regulate by running slow and the circadian rhythm to falter. It is the time, old timers insist, when the bad accidents happen. To work through dead man’s hour would be sorely to tempt fate. While we are meant to be rational humans there lurks in each of us a covert superstition which probably began when man worshipped rocks and trees and which we ignore at our own peril. For the grizzly man, better the hour saved by cutting fuses short than one used when death stalks the dark underground tunnels at the same time every night.
At four-fifteen I completed laying the mud pack over a routine charge, cutting the fuse short as usual. I had inserted it under the mud-covered gelignite and took the lighted cheesa stick from the number one boy, whom I called Elijah because he liked to light the cheesa stick himself, forfeiting his chance to retire to the safety of the escape shaft. He waited with me until the fuse began to splutter. With the cheesa stick Elijah handed me I touched the notched and splayed end I’d cut to reveal the granules of black gunpowder which ran through the body of the fuse. Nothing happened. No flare as the gunpowder caught, no familiar splutter as it tore down the centre of the fuse. Even before I could question the reason, the vision of the black mamba filled my mind’s eye, ‘Christ! It can’t be. It’s a running fuse!’ A running fuse is when a fuse burns inwards and appears from the outside to be inert while in fact it is moving just as quickly towards the charge of gelignite. It is extremely rare, most grizzly men have never seen one, or if they have, haven’t lived to tell the story.
I grabbed Elijah by his shirt collar and propelled him towards the safety shaft, tackling him the last few feet into the shaft as I dived for safety a split second before the charge went off. The explosion roared fifteen feet from where we lay. Had the snake not returned to me in my dream I might have persisted with the shortened fuse. Three seconds longer and Elijah of the burning bush and I would have been history.
Rising to his knees and dusting his hands on the seat of his trousers, Elijah started to babble with excitement as the rest of the gang came running towards us. He told them how a devil fuse which did not light had set off the charge, but how I had known of its magic and thwarted its evil intention by pulling him to safety. The gang listened with open-mouthed astonishment. Then each in turn came over to me and touched my arm, dropping their eyes as they did so. Once again I had confirmed my magical status, was this not yet more proof that their collective safety was assured? The Tadpole Angel was back at work again.
I am forced to admit, I too felt hugely elated by the experience, enchanted with the meaning of the dream. I kept asking myself whether I would otherwise have recognised a running fuse? It was a mining occurrence so rare Thomas hadn’t even mentioned its possibility in the school of mines. I had seen it noted briefly before being dismissed as extremely unusual in one of the numerous textbooks we’d been issued, a textbook possibly only I, amongst the class, would have taken the trouble to read.
Instead of seeing the near disaster as a real life warning, I became so elated I decided to withdraw my notice to quit grizzlies. I felt a tremendous sense of my own destiny, of the rightness of the path I had chosen. I had gambled and won, my slate was wiped clean, the accident designed to happen had been thwarted, the original odds were once again restored. I would see this old bitch grizzly through until the fifteenth of February, one week over eleven months, to the day. Screw Fats Greer, I’d make it a new record.
I admit to the unsoundness of my reasoning, but it wasn’t all stupidity. The pay for a soft option job on a main haulage was less than half the amount I was receiving each month working a grizzly. With my double copper bonus as well as my tally bonus I could add another forty percent to this as well. Giving all this up would mean staying on at the mines another three months and by doing so missing the commencement term at Oxford.
Feeling good all over, I walked up to the grizzly, and standing on the bars shone my lamp up at the hang-up which had developed at the mouth of the stope. It looked unsafe, a bunch of grapes where the loosening of one small rock might bring the lot down. Fifty tons of rock could be held suspended above my head by a mere pebble. The old bitch was playing with me, teasing me, my ears strained to hear her talk… a creak, a moan, the echoed clatter of a single pebble… so I might read the constraint of the rock avalanche poised above my head.
It came at last, the sudden sharp, erratic clatter of a single rock as it broke free from the hang-up to ricochet against the steeply funnelled rock sides leading from the stope. One, two, it would take three bounces before landing on the grizzly bar furtherest from where I stood. My intimate, almost instinctive knowledge brought about from working more than two thousand hours on this one grizzly told me the rock was about the size of a large grapefruit and that it almost certainly preceded the collapse of the hang-up.
I moved fast, leaping instinctively across the bars towards the protection of the safety shaft. Above me the hang-up groaned momentarily, a second or two’s warning before the roaring avalanche followed. My feet had already left the bars in the final leap to safety when the single rock hit the grizzly and, bouncing erratically off the tungsten steel bar, flew through the air to hit me in the stomach.
The roar of the rock breaking free reached my ears before I was knocked unconscious through the bars, to fall sixty feet down the almost empty shaft.
The fall should have killed me. The ten tons of rock which followed me through the bars should also have done so. I had been unconscious the moment the rock struck me and had fallen through the bars like a sack of potatoes, bouncing against one wall of the down shaft. My hard hat had miraculously stayed on and prevented my head from being smashed in as I landed in about three feet of fine shale at the bottom of the grizzly. The shale had been the result of the huge rock I had blasted through the bars with the running fuse. I had been conscious at the
