Gold or Just Can't See For Dust!

Hi – been reading one of my birthday presents; Maize Turns to Gold, a fascinating insight to the beginnings of South Africa’s most optimistic mining venture, the Free State goldfields. Proven by deep-hole drilling and later, through extensive geophysical exploration, the future of the Free State goldfields was expected to rival the production rate of the already famous Witwatersrand.

That was back in 1947 – for South Africa, the good times were about to roll, and for sixty years they did. Mining towns such as Odendaalsrus and Welkom sprang from the dust, seemingly overnight, but now the wheels are in reverse; mines are being closed, capped and left to marauding bands of out of work locals to strip and thieve whatever they can. Looks like the vicars are spot-on – ‘Dust to Dust’ about fits the bill. Below I have included a quote from General Smuts in a Cape Town Address, March 23^rd, 1947.

GOD’S  BOUNTY

‘I sometimes think that God had something left over and emptied His pockets over this southern continent. He scattered over South Africa not only gold and diamonds and minerals, but beauty and something to appeal to the human spirit.’

If only...

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And on a lighter note, another edit of my own adventures in Africa:

... With pee-stops and tea-stops it took us and our little Morris two more hours to reach Mashaba. First impressions were not good; Rhodesia’s Wild West.

Mother stared through the window in abject horror, for the first time that day she was totally speechless.

‘I’ll find us something cold to drink,’ said dad and parked in front of Mashaba’s hillbilly version of the Co-op. Had a big sign above the door: Gruber & Sager. More cars parked alongside ours and the people stared; we were something new to look at – outsiders. Reckon they were sizing us up as stand-ins for their local ‘hoedown pig-on-a-spit fest’. A skeletal dog sauntered over and peed up our front wheel.

‘You’re new here?’

Mother wound her window down; ‘Yes,’ she said, then, like some recumbent tortoise, drew in her head. The woman climbed out from her pick-up truck and the springs rejoiced. Twenty stone of small-town woman took up the space between the cars.

‘You’ll like it here.’

‘We hope so.’

‘One big happy family. Lived here myself for five years now.’

‘That’s nice,’ mother whimpered and reached for her cigarettes. I watched from my unreachable back seat. As long as the doors held I was safe. The woman’s head was wrapped inside a scarf, haggis-like. Those curler things stuck out the front – end-on like spiky plastic pipes.

Mother opened the box and offered her cigarettes.

‘Thank you,’ the woman nodded. Four fat fingers scrabbled for a grip on a filter. ‘Got no matches.’

Mother lit it for her. Dad came back with bottles of Coca-Cola and mother breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Hello,’ the woman said to my dad. She was bigger than him, broader across the shoulders. Her dress had red flowers on it – a bit like splatters of blood. When she smiled her teeth looked really big. I can remember thinking that maybe she’d eaten her kids. She sort of hovered over my dad like a grizzly bear.

My dad nodded and smiled politely. ‘Is that the road to Gath’s Mine? I’m looking for the General Office.’

‘About four miles,’ the woman nodded, ‘the offices are on the right. Can’t miss them.’ Her eyeballs bulged with obsessive need-to-know-right-now syndrome. ‘Are you looking for a job?’

‘Got one,’ dad said. ‘I start next Monday.’

She seemed disappointed, ‘I could have told you who to see. What do you do?’

‘Carpenter.’

‘That’s nice.’

Dad handed out the cokes and climbed inside. Mother pleaded with her eyes for him to start the engine.

‘We’ll be seeing you then,’ said mother.

‘Friday night at the mine club,’ the woman held on to the door. ‘The company does a free draw for ten pounds, but you have to be there to win it.’

‘We’ll try to remember.’

Dad let out the clutch and the woman let go of our car...

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Profanity & Little Bridges!

Had a short email from one of my readers, a sort of thank you note for writing a reasonably clean book. I know there’s sex, but there has to be – even in the eighteen nineties people ‘did it’. However, profanity and sex beyond the norm just leaves me cold – don’t see the point in lewd descriptions, or maybe it’s me? The odd four-letter word in the right place can bring a story to life, too many and the story falls apart. Better to leave some things locked away in your personal cupboard of private imaginings. Stick with Occam’s Razor – less is more.

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A modified extract from An English Boy’s Wanderings...

 

... Down went our little car for what the Rhodesian authorities defined as a low-level bridge, which in reality meant the bridge was too small;  for that, read: wide enough for one vehicle.  And for chrissakes don’t be halfway across when a thirty ton, trailer-dragging Oshkosh is coming the other way – or when the river’s flooding. Neither of these would be good – especially if one is of a nervous disposition.

‘What in God’s name is that!’

‘A bridge, my darling.’

Mother waggled her fag at the windscreen. ‘I meant the name, dearest. Not the death trap we’re about to drive over.’

Dad got his lips around the pronunciation, Umzingwani River.

The bridge was a long one; a sort of tarred strip on concrete legs – trees jammed underneath, left there by the last flood. The water was brown, deep enough to hide crocodiles and other boy-biting creatures. Mother stayed quiet. I think she held her breath all the way across. Then we rose up, phoenix-like and crested the far bank.

‘Goes all the way down to join up with the Limpopo,’ said Mother, with what was now her favourite map pressed against her knees. ‘And there’s another big river just before we reach Mashaba.’

I craned my neck and tried to read the names.

‘What is it called?’

‘The Lundi,’ mother chirruped, pleased with her map reading. Her cigarette wriggled south-eastwards over the paper. ‘Then it joins up with the Sabi down here in the corner.’ She folded the map and shoved it under the dashboard, for the time being satisfied with her discoveries.

The clouds had turned a sort of, ripe plum colour. I watched them boiling up in front. Outside our car nothing moved. Trees hung their leaves straight down and dead still. Just the drone of our little engine hummed through the quiet.

‘We’re coming into some rain.’

Mother thought it necessary to lean as far forward as possible and peer upwards through the top edge of the windscreen – just as sixty zillion gigawatts of lightning blatted the sky. For the second time that day mother screamed, banged her head and bust her cigarette. But onwards we went; our little Morris like a bedraggled spaniel bounded through the puddles and with barely glowing headlights took us through and eventually, out of the storm. From almost pitch blackness to bright, roasting sunlight in a matter of minutes. The strips steamed, the trees glittered and again the sky was there, that limitless, egg-shell blue above us.

‘God, that was terrifying!’ mother blurted. ‘Is it always like that?’ As if my father knew.

I looked back over a tissue box and oranges piled against the window. Like a black, demonic wall the storm chased after us then swung sideways and sulked away to the south east. In front, like some outdoor sauna the road steamed on and on and on; up and down from river to river. When I wound my window down the smell of rain and rich red earth rushed in at me...

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A Dilemma!

Everything’s waking up again; voles, birds, rabbits, hares and many creatures in between; blue tits and robins have muscles to die for from all the nuts, fatballs and seed they have devoured at my expense. However, we now have a more sinister beastie living alongside us; ‘Ratty’ has taken up residence at the corner of our rockery – just a metre away from the bird feeders. On the wall, happily sharing breakfast are robins, blackbirds, finches, woodpeckers, nuthatches, chaffinches, dunnocks, tits and now, Ratty; a healthy, Brown rat - Rattus norvegicus.  

At the base of the rockery wall are Pheasant, English and French partridge, two pigeons, a crow and a kestrel hovering over his own, private fly-through takeaway. The owls are asleep – they come out later and hoover up whoever’s still out there.

Ratty takes a piece of toast back to his larder, the blue-tits, nuts and bread to theirs and the kestrel, when he scores a direct, airborne hit, a blue-tit or two to the top of his telegraph pole or cow shed roof, depending on the morning’s preference.

Ratty bothered me. Rats, plague and paranoia are all, to us humans, much inter-related, so like the hunter I once was, I dragged from my gun safe a .458 side lock Winchester Magnum, slid two soft point 500 grain cartridges into the breach and opened the landing window (for that little lot, read: .22 air rifle – doesn’t sound nearly as impressive though). Within a couple of minutes the eye piece of my scope was filled with furry, puffed up cheeks, little ears and two sparkling eyes that bored right through my wussy, unable-to-pull-the-trigger soul. So, two weeks later, guess who’s still with us and on a daily basis, happily plunders the bird food. Think I’ll hire a professional hunter to do the dreaded deed, but there again, Ratty didn’t ask to be Ratty and as long he or she stays in the singular... Let’s see what the summer brings.

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An English Boy’s Wanderings; another re-written excerpt:

 ... Our little Morris Minor took us into and out of Bulawayo without mishap. The streets were amazing; all of them really wide and straight as arrows – streets and avenues at right angles to one another. All, from what we had been told were wide enough to turn a wagon and full span of oxen through one hundred and eighty degrees with space to spare. But that was in the old days. Now the middle bits are filled up with car-park spaces.

‘Turn left into Selborne Avenue,’ Mother instructed and father swung us in line with one hundred and sixty seven miles of road that would, all being well, take us into our new, adopted mining town – Mashaba.

Mother had bought half a dozen steak and kidney pies from Downing’s Bakery. Her Thermos was un-stoppered and to go with the pies, everyone got their part-filled cup of lukewarm tea. Within twenty minutes Bulawayo had disappeared.

Mother unfolded a Caltex road map across her knees, her finger now the non-stop seeker of unknown highways and new names.

‘Essexvale,’ she smiled to herself. ‘That’s the first town we come to. Then a place called Bala Bala?’ She looked sideways at my father. ‘What kind of name is that?’

‘Bit like Wagga Wagga in Australia,’ said my Dad and got glowered at. ‘Must be one of those native names?’

The road was wider now; full tar – no missing piece in the middle, but not for long.

‘Slow down there’s a sign.’ Mother craned her neck, bumped her head on the windscreen and bent her cigarette. ‘Detour?’ A line of forty-four gallon oil drums had been strung across the road. ‘Must be road works.’

We followed the arrows. The tar macadam disappeared. Now the road, like a giant skiffle-board threatened to shake our Noddy car to pieces – like driving over a corrugated iron roof but twice as bad. Then we hit a smooth patch and a single-decker, ‘Shu-Shine’ logoed juggernaut from Hades thundered past. I looked up from my little window and caught a glimpse of glassed in, black faces staring down at me; white eyes and coloured headscarves – then the bus was gone. What dust there had been on the road was now in the air and stones the size of butter beans thrashed our windscreen. Mother screamed, my father cursed and I learned a string of new, exciting words...

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Towards the Light!

Hi – my need to batter the little white ball has been re-awakened by youngest son, so decided to have a one-blog-break from my wanderings in Africa and take you along to my modest golf club for a short, but hopefully, humorous insight. Anyhow, having dusted off my clubs and harvested a dozen balls from around our garden, with spring in the air and jaunty bounce to my step, yours truly set off with Tiger-like intent for 18, unsuspecting fairways...

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The Over the Hill Gang:

... Four minutes late for tee-off time. Having parked my van, changed my shoes, lashed together trolley and bag, I merge with six other grumpy golfers. Now there are seven, ‘Victor Meldrew’ look-alikes huddled around the first tee.

‘You’re late again.’

I give Geoff my best ‘so-what’ look and manage to mouth obscenities at him without the others cottoning on.

‘A quid on the game?’

Everyone nods. Geoff looks surprised, even though it’s been ‘a quid’ as far back as anyone of us can remember.

Les has got his blue, thermal vest on; the sleeves are sticking out from those on his shirt. When he laughs his eyes water and his top teeth drop; tough old sod but he’s eighty one for chrissakes! Pipes and tubes, tablets, teeth and sprays, I can’t wait to get that old – so much fun to look forward to. I pinch my nostrils closed and mimic Peter Allis:

‘On the first tee from...’ wherever – doesn’t really matter and I get another dirty look from Geoff, I guess his waiting for whichever god he believes in is driving him nuts.

So this is it. The moment we have all dreaded and dreamed of since last Wednesday. Trolleys of varying colours, makes and price tags are parked and preened like Mayfair Rollers. Batteries are coupled, engines revved and wheels checked for fear of flying off halfway down the Glorious Fourth.

‘Show us the way, Tiger!’ I grin at Geoff and egg him onto the first tee.

He glowers at me for talking and with a driver modelled on Picard’s Starship Enterprise lurches at a little ball no bigger than a pullet’s egg. 

‘Great shot!’ I lie and get muttered at when Geoff’s ball makes a spiteful swerve for squirrel country. Now he’s sucking his teeth and glaring. Him the Great White, me the unfortunate seal; I can see by the look in his eyes that I’m to blame for his crappy shot and he would, if he could, devour me.

‘Do you ever stop talking?’ he asks me. My reply of ‘only-when-having-an-orgasm’ has obviously offended him because his grip on the driver is really tight now.

Eventually, we’re off. Most are in the trees but there’s a lone ball on the fairway. Ian, being dragged at break-neck speed by his runaway electric trolley is first to reach it. He checks the logo and dribbles venom.

’It’s yours.’

‘Titleist 3?’

‘Yes,’ he growls and the urge to stamp on my ball turns his ears red. 

‘Behind that tree,’ I point to his ball, ‘I think that’s yours.’ It is and another gargantuan slash with the Callaway equivalent of a Scottish broadsword squirts his ball towards the pond, skips it three times on the water and sticks it in the bank. I daren’t repeat what Ian said for fear of being locked up. However, an hour and three quarters later with spikes off, hands round balls in pockets we all traipse into the golf club dining room.

Les orders for all of us; always the same – soup, roll and a cup of tea. Seven mushroom soups – seven ageing men on the verge of a feeding frenzy. Roger flashes a smile at the waitress; not impressed by his Brad Pitt, plastic look-alikes she twirls her pencil and stares through him.

‘Whadjawant?’ She’s texting while she speaks. Clever girl – multitasker. Miniature, chromed dumbbells through her lips and both earlobes.

‘Some extra rolls would be nice?’

‘Gedjasum in a minute,’ she replies and carries on texting.

The soup arrives; hot enough to melt down Chevy engine blocks. John burns his mouth and shouts out something that rhymes with duck. The waitress laughs, Geoff threatens to eat her liver and drops his spoon in his soup. Ian and Owen spring to life, wipe their chins and both shout, ‘Drink!’ to what they think is the waitress.

‘That’s the Captain’s portrait,’ I tell them. Both go back to their soup. Drinks forgotten; hands shaking in unison they stipple the table cloth with mushroom soup.

Les smiles and nods his head. Soup finished and rolls dismembered he talks to his invisible friend at the doorway.

‘Time for another nine, then?’ 

Outside, the sun’s come out through a hole in the clouds, startlingly bright just above the tenth green; maybe God’s sent someone down for us. There’s no one else on the course; ‘millionaire golf’ everyone points out – same as they pointed out last week. However, it matters not, the air is fresh, the colours stunning. I shrug off the inevitability of me reaching my own, life’s ‘final hole’ and with the rest of the over-the-hill-gang trundling along behind, walk as a grumpy old git of a golfer down towards the light...

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Goodbye Wankie Colliery!

Hi – full of a cold so my blog story will be short and sweet this week, reckon I’ll crawl back into bed and stay there ‘til spring. This is when I really miss living somewhere hot and dry – taste the dust instead of the damp – the sun on my back instead of a minus ten wind gnawing at my neck.

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An English Boy’s Wanderings... continued.

(Partly rewritten so some of the below you may well have read before; the editing goes on and on and...)

... Two weeks later and we were gone; tearful goodbyes were said and with our Morris loaded to the gunnels with sandwiches, flasks and mother’s fags we headed straight for the rising sun. The mango trees, swimming pool and first love were now just memories. Our sun-bleached Morris Minor went bravely into the heat and onto a road we had never seen before. Mother sat with her fifty-box of Matinee cigarettes clutched to her bosom and an austere stare for everything beyond the windscreen. She had the quarter window fully open to suck out her smoke and fag ash. The back seat, piled up like some pawn shop counter, left just enough space for me.

‘What in God’s name have they done to the middle out of the road?’

‘It was built that way on purpose.’ My father did his best.

‘Without a middle?’ Mother retorted.

Dad nodded and I leaned between the two front seats for a better view. Two, single strips of tar macadam stretched away to the front like wobbly liquorice sticks in the heat haze.

‘Called a strip road. Built during the recession. Saved the government a fortune.’

‘And what happens when we meet a car coming the other way?’ She grabbed at her seat. ‘Like right now!’

The car bombed towards us, whipping up dust from the missing bit in the middle; a black Chevrolet, all chrome and leering headlamps – the car from Hell.

‘For God’s sake pull over before we all die!’

We closed to within a hundred yards of the Chevy before both cars gave up their respective ‘right hand strip’; with barely the length of an outstretched arm between us, we passed as stately ships in the night. The Chevy driver waved and grinned and mother retrieved her cigarette from its neat little burn in the carpet. For the next fifty miles no one spoke...

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Fishing For Bugs!

Hi – today’s been a cold one; snow, sleet, rain and everything else related to freezing your socks off. Makes me wonder how birds survive – stuck outside with nothing more than a flimsy feather jacket and bare legs. In theory, their feet should freeze solid and snap off at the ankles, but they don’t. However, costs me a small fortune to keep them fed and warm via their calorie intake. Nuts, seed, fat-balls and crumbled up toast – and if they’re really lucky some chopped up bacon, all to keep their engines running. Even the crows drop in for a crust; guess they know I’m a soft touch. Oh, and the owls are back to decimate the local vole population.

 Stuck in a picture for you – handsome as ever in his winter plumage – the barn owl, not Jones, who just this minute whispered to me that none of you know what he looks like, so to make his day in it goes – another picture, one of the man himself, the Jones of Indiana. Drew the line at hat-and-whip though; told him you wouldn’t believe me.

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My Wanderings; an extract:

... Scorpions come out at night; they like the dark when no-one can see them stabbing their suppers to death. Baboons eat them, they flip over stones and when they find one, pull off the stinger bit and crunch up the rest, but that’s in the daytime. At night, the baboons are asleep and the scorpions know this so they all come out of their holes and, like I said, it’s their turn to crunch things up. Some of them are really big and black with big nippers; they look a bit like crabs with long tails. Uncle Ron told me it was the ones with small nippers that stung you the hardest – little nippers, more poison – big nippers, not so much. ‘The littlest bastards sting the hell out of you...’ I heard him tell my dad, ‘...and brown ones are the worst.’

Most scorpions like to make holes in the ground where they can sleep ‘til the sun goes down. Catching a live one was, to us kids, on a par with a Masai warrior initiate hunting his first lion. At the edge of our picnic site the ground was suited for just such an occasion. So, armed with glass jars and grass stalks, in we went.

The holes were sort of flat, oval shaped mini caves, dug at a shallow angle, that’s how we knew they were scorpion houses. They had to be oval and wider than they were tall because scorpions are flat-wide bug things and their stingers stick out straight when they crawl inside. Anyway, we selected the biggest hole and the biggest of us bullied his way to the front of the queue and claimed his rights to first go at scorpion fishing. I held the jar and with my heart up round my tonsils watched the big kid slide his piece of grass inside the devil’s lair.

‘Can you feel it?’

‘Dunno yet – not sure.’

‘Did you chew the end?’

‘He didn’t chew the end,’ another kid challenged. ‘It won’t grab hold if you don’t chew the end.’

Out came the grass, the end was chewed and back in it went.

He let go of the grass and we all watched and waited – hearts thumping – five kids in a clump.

Minutes later... ‘I saw it move.’

‘Nah, it didn’t.’

‘It did! I saw it move you had a bite.’

The big kid reached for the grass and like a fisherman sensing his line, held the stalk gently between his thumb and forefinger. He looked up and grinned.

‘I can feel him.’

‘Pull him out!’ the rest of us piped, ‘but slowly or you’ll break his legs off!’

Inch by inch, whatever had grabbed the grass stalk was towed from its burrow. Scratchy noises; bony needles on glass, then, like a cork from a bottle out it came and the arachnid from hell landed on my arm. The words ‘panic’ and ‘mayhem’ joined forces and all my supposedly, steadfast comrades legged it.

Petrified, I was left alone with my now redundant jar, thumping heart et al.  The big kid laughed, the littlest whimpered, one kid peed his pants and the other ran off yelling adult swearwords until he bumped into his dad’s leg.

At the tail-end of one extremely peed off scorpion, like a saddler’s curved needle the stinging bit arched above the creatures bony back; at its very tip, a jewel of bright, extruded venom hung there, trembling in the sunlight.

The creature’s eyes, I swear, were firmly locked to mine...

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Monkey Bread & Ant Lions!

Hi. Outside our house, the ground’s frozen solid, but at least the sun’s coming up and for once it ain’t raining. Have a view of three or four miles across the valley, then the hills start; their top bits covered in pine forest and snow. Between the hills and me, a good sized river where we’ll take the dogs for a swim once the warm weather comes back.

Good place to write, but it never comes easy – not the quality stuff. So far so good though; I write what I think people will enjoy. What I enjoy – just stories, with a beginning, middle and satisfactory ending. There is no secret recipe, no mystical, magical way to writing success. Everything hangs on the readers, not the publishers’ ideas of what will be the ‘next big thing’.

If the writing’s good, the story entertaining and the cover catchy, then you, the reader, will part with hard-earned cash and give the book a home – sort of sells itself – that’s the way I like it. Hope your day is a good one.

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More of our day at The Falls – an extract:

After decimating the food supplies, the adults flopped into deck chairs with their beers, fags and burgeoning bellies; us kids, with our batteries recharged went off to do things that, by our parents, were looked upon as the sum of all their nightmares. Scorpion catching and feeding ant lions ranked as all time favourites, hunting for snot apples and monkey bread came in as a close second, both of which tasted crap, but we ate them anyway because they were free and our mothers told us not to.

Here’s a shot of our gang. The kids with bottle-on-string contraptions are water bug catchers – the Zambezi was full of them (bugs not kids). I’m the cool kid leaning against the tree.

Ant lions live at the bottom of cone-shaped death traps. From an insect’s point of view, once you step over the edge you’re history; no matter how many nippers or stings you’re packing, the creature waiting at the bottom will grab you, stick you with its ‘sticker things’ squirt you full of venom and then suck out your insides (a bit like the tax man). We, as delightful, well-balanced children spent many giggle-filled hours herding unsuspecting ants towards their cone of doom, poking them with grass stalks to hurry them up, urging them on to the more exciting, being eaten bits. From a more sensible, scientific view, ant lions are the larvae of a winged, damselfly type creature. Hatching from mother-bug eggs they excavate cone-shaped traps in sandy ground and wait for some poor sucker of an ant to fall in.  Once the insides are all sucked out the ant lion chucks the empty out of his hole and settles down to wait for the next ‘full one’. Almost forgot to mention; ant lions don’t have bum-holes. My mother in particular found this fact quite disturbing and dragged her chair to the other side of the table. However, scorpion hunting was an altogether different game...

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