Living in the Dark

By Roger Russell

A collection of short stories and some poems written in Africa; some are real and some fictional. Most of them are based on events that happened far below the surface of the earth in a world that is in fact stranger than fiction. They are of random events and thoughts with no particular theme.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roger Russell
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311068781

Roger Russell

Born in 1947 in Eldoret, Kenya Roger attended school in Bournemouth, UK and St David's College in Johannesburg, SA. Roger Russell fell into a long drop toilet when he was three years old, out of a car when he was four. He went on to almost drown himself at six, cut through his left leg when he was seven and crush his right arm when he was nine. By the time he was eleven he had spent over a year in hospital and had been the recipient of many hundreds of stitches. He was banned from playing soccer or rugby and could not run to save his life. He started in the mines at nineteen and lost his finger in an accident before a month had passed. He joined the U/G Rescue team and was gassed, trapped and lost underground within the space of a single year. Roger married in 1968 and is the father of four children by his first wife, Sharon, to whom he was happily married for twenty five years before she died of cancer in 1993. He has since remarried and lives with Cynthia on a 30 foot motor cruiser in Hermitage Marina near St Ives in the UK. They have one child, a boy named Gordon after Roger's father. In 1993, after the death of his wife, Roger walked from Beit Bridge on the Northern border of South Africa to Cape Town, a distance of 2000km. He slept alongside the road and walked alone and un-armed through one of the worst political times the country had ever seen. He saw then and has continued to see immense power in common people. In 1999 he walked right around South Africa to support a much maligned South African Police Services. He was mugged by a squatter camp gang, attacked by a policeman in a remote station in the Transkei and swept away in a flash flood in the Orange Free State. He has seen police barracks that were worse than some prison cells, met and spoken with criminals, saints and politicians. The British media called him a South African hero and Steve Tshwete, the South African Minister of Safety and Security at the time said he was truly a South African patriot. Roger has also walked in America on two occasions, promoting South Africa and cancer awareness to the people of California, Nevada, New Mexico and other states. Roger has written several books all of which he plans to publish with Smashwords in time.

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LIVING IN THE DARK

A collection of short stories by

Roger Russell

Published by Roger Russell at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Roger Russell

Discover other titles by Roger Russell at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/rogerrussell

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Table of Contents

STORIES

CHILD OF AFRICA

ONCE UPON A TIME IN A CRYSTAL CAVE

The Creation

A Pocket Full of Stardust

In Pursuit of What?

DUEL WITHOUT GLOVES

THE PASSENGER

SHIFTBOSS

AN EMPTY CUP

NURTURED

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

GENTLE GIANTS

CALLUS

THE FIRST TIME

A TOUCH OF GREATNESS

POEMS

THE FALL

STILL A CHILD

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THE FALL

The river is before me; struck by sunlight, dappled with darkness.

The water flows through all, it has promises of joy and tears.

Still it feels nothing for me; it rushes to its own destiny.

I understand and accept the impersonality of its gift.

But it is before me; I see it, I thirst and must drink.

I move into it, still clinging to what I know…

One foot, then both and then finally all of me;

It enfolds me, the magic and the illusions of control.

I know how much it can provide as it takes me forward.

I am alive and want all of it; I thirst and so must drink.

Sinking, I spread my arms wide; absorbing all I can.

I have been here before, felt the care and remember my place.

I am still loved; I speed, a floating soul borne up for a while.

No more on the bank, looking and waiting, no more an outsider,

Yet the thirst remains, but diminished and still I drink.

The warmth surrounds me, but the flow is faster, turbulent.

The ripples splash close by; they wet my face and feel like tears.

Something comes; I hear the thunder of it, the falling water.

So soon the price for all of it, the joy and the grief will be paid.

Still the thirst remains and even now, desperately I drink.

My fear cries out for a lesser flow; deep pools and calm waters.

There must be a place of peace alongside the river’s edge.

The river answers; cold and relentless denial and rushes on.

It tells me your body will soon be broken but not your soul,

Your thirst will remain and you will drink of this river again.

This collection of stories reflects some the thoughts and events accumulated on a river of life I could not always control, so I would live again and try for just a few changes…

CHILD OF AFRICA

What it means to me to be born and have lived in Africa, understanding the depreciation of many values I thought were inviolate…

I am an African! Born on a farm in the mountains of Kenya; grown and nourished by maize porridge and meat stew. Memories of shorts and bare feet, running with village children through pale brown puddles, raising clouds of yellow butterflies to scatter across muddy roads. Kitchens and toilets placed outside the house. Curious wonder at ants, snakes and a myriad of other creatures come out in the sun to be poked or turned over and chased from steps and pathways with shrieks of fear or joy. Cook and Nanny and the houseboy: With hearts of gold and deep knowledge of a little boy’s needs.

Games of so many different kinds; all from stories told or read; some providing adventures in trees and along hidden footpaths. Not a white boy in Africa but Mowgli living in this cave or Tarzan on that branch.

Vast plains and tall grass flashing by forever alongside dirt roads headed to strange sounding towns. Land Rovers, hard seats and long drives; starting in daylight and continuing into the night. Sleeping in the car, sometimes waking and lifting bleary eyes to see the vehicle stopped, headlights picking out a lioness crossing the road with her cubs close behind. Outside the kitchen, torn remains of the Dalmatian; perhaps it was Hyenas or a Leopard.

Then an Arab port and Navy ships, parties on aircraft carriers and always: my Grandmother; a little bit of reluctant England in a savage land. She was treacle pudding, rock cakes, milk and biscuits at teatime. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, Christmas and the railway club, parties, drunken parents, raffles and dressing up; Beauty and the Beast, Snow White or perhaps a sailor. A screeching monkey secured on a long chain in the garden. Tables set standing with their legs deep in tins of paraffin to foil the little raiders.

Now, the youth sit with cellphones and tablets and Tarzan is dead, Mowgli belongs to Disney; the stories are lost. Animals are curiosities in Zoos or special parks because the King of the Jungle is a poacher and violence has spread across the once vibrant veld. Wholesale slaughter of a species for small body parts or sex, corruption and wasted life everywhere you look. Guns now kill for profit and not for food.

Drug dealers and gangsters are role models, permeating life in crowded squatter camps; looked up to by the innocent. Suspicion, fear and segregation are what is taught and ably learned. Possessions mean walled security around clustered houses for some but not for all. Cardboard blankets and flyovers or culverts are homes that keep thousands alive. Streets are jungles and real jungles are dying. Mines and exploitation; pathetic wages and huge profits; Black and White joined by desire for power and money; International and racial collusion to depose leaders with vision and keep leaders in power who provide access to resources and profits. Where are our children right now and what do they see, what games do they play that tell them; man is noble, their leaders honest and parents sincere; perhaps nothing in Africa, not anymore.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN A CRYSTAL CAVE

In the late seventies I spent time underground at a copper mine in Namibia, or South West Africa, as it was known at the time. Part of every miner’s life there was the recovery, collection and sale of the wonderful mineral specimens found deep in the earth. The Management did not like it because miners were paid to work, not gather crystals. These stories are based on real events and characters but have been told from different viewpoints.

The Creation

Someone said this to me once: Such a place as you have described could easily be the origin of a legend similar to that of King Solomon’s mines.

There are no facts that support this. There are however my emotions: emotions of awe and humility that most men have felt when confronted with a creation of divine proportions, emotions of greed and selfishness when struck by the magnificence of riches far beyond the normal allocations of their life styles. I who have experienced all these can say with conviction: Yes, this could have inspired a legend; this could have brought hungry men from far and wide, full of hope and destruction.

At about the time that the Roman civilization was feeling the fatal thrust of Barbarian swords and Gildas was writing his Ruin and Conquest of Britain a less threatened and far simpler people were mining copper from a Green Mountain. They used the metal for trade and as is normal in such matters continued doing so quite happily until the European arrived and took over.

However, production requires more than a scratching of the surface. The mine expanded into a town and deepened into a network of shafts and tunnels. Instead of a dusty lean figure patiently scratching at the rock in the shade of a wild thorn tree we find a sprawling town and below it torn nerves in the depths of the earth.

But this mine had a longer history than that. In fact man was still wisely standing in the wings and would not come on stage for another 600 million years when the first twinges of labour started to disturb the womb that was to carry this unique creation. A long fracture extended itself from the earth’s surface to many thousand metres below and waited. Water from surface finding an underground passage slowly filtered its way through this new avenue and in its lengthy exploration took away with one hand and gave with the other. The water invaded with erosion, both chemical and physical, it also colonized by deposition, both chemical and physical. It carved great cavities and small fissures, filling them with sediments from other distant sources. The patience of the earth was not as endless as the water however and it intervened, sending wild heavings of heated rock and fluids up from below. These forays of hot and relentless plunderers changed the nature of all the inhabitants in that slow, aged community. New minerals were born, others were transformed. The water dripped and filtered its way through fresh materials, strange pockets and offshoots that had not existed before.

The earth, bored with its new toy, pulled back but the water stayed and when all was quiet and calm and the water could hear only itself, it pondered a new creation. Look around, it thought. Look at the lead and the zinc, at the copper and germanium, here are the riches of the world, here is peace and time, endless time. Here will I create flowers from stone, rainbows from sand and grit, here will I build palaces of glass and light, the like of which have never been seen or ever will be seen on the surface of all the world.

In later years two men confronted one another in an office directly above this ancient collection of masterpieces. One was, for want of a better term, its owner, the other its agent. Neither of them had more than fifty years of existence to their credit and neither of them could or would create anything that would see out the end of the century. They both had other abilities: the owner the ability to formulate policy that would destroy every flower and rainbow that existed below his feet and the other the ability to sell and distribute those same works of time to the world. How much either of them felt for the charge placed in their hands is hard to say.

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