The Lonely Sea and the Sky (7 page)

  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 drive 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 pit 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.

  I had an offer to join Dibbs Jones on a gold-prospecting expedition into the mountains. It was called 'fossicking'. This coincided with a day when I felt it was a poor life disappearing into a hole in the ground just after the sun had risen on a fine spring morning. I went off fossicking with Dibbs into the bush.

  We were eight hours from the nearest other human being, an eight-hour foot slog through the bush, carrying all our food and gear. Dibbs went to an abandoned hut, built by some gold diggers years before. Dibbs's speciality was crevices, and we set to work washing the pay dirt in the river. We shovelled the gravel into long boxes with 'riffles', small pieces of wood across them, which stopped the heavy gold when the pay dirt was washed through the box by the river. When we got down to rock bottom we worked into the crevice with a pick to find the gold which had sunk there. Dibbs was said to be able to smell gold, but, if so, the scent was not strong. Once, however, I thought he had smelt some out. I had been off to the store to get food. I used to go off for the supplies by myself for several reasons, one being that I could hump much more than Dibbs. I made the eight-hour trip with 100 lbs on my back with only one halt. Really it was better not to stop; with that load it was hard to get going again. I packed the stores into a sugar sack, with straps made of green flax leaves from the bottom corners of the sack to pass over the shoulder blades to a point in the middle of the sack. Success depended on getting the load high up on one's shoulders. Secondly, although I could pack so much more than Dibbs, he was more skilful with a shovel and could produce twice as much pay dirt for panning off as I could. The last reason for my going was that Dibbs always went on a bender when he reached 'civilisation' and once was away for ten days.