Its Been a Blast

By Jack Shaft

Jack started his mining career at the tender age of 18 in the deep gold mines of the Transvaal in South Africa. At the time of writing he still works in the industry... sometimes. It's been a bunch of booze-ups, fights, and mining mishaps from the very beginning, set against the backdrop of the cultural miasma of mining locations all over the world. This book recalls some of the stories, the lies, and the exaggerations from those years. Some of which happened to him, some to other people, and some probably only occurred in the imagination of the storyteller from whom he heard them. What he can't remember accurately, he has made up and will no doubt will come to believe in future years. These memoirs therefore represent his unreliable recollections and should be taken with a bucket load of Siberian salt. His lawyer tells him that this is therefore a work of pure fiction, and no reference to any person living or dead is intended.

 

The book itself covers the three stages and ages of his life in the mines. First up is the story of how he descended into this profession, despite family pressure to take to the skies to fly fast jets in the Royal Air Force. Next are stories from underground where the more robust (for want of a better word) characters in life dwell. Finally, the view from the bridge running small and medium sized mining businesses. The lonely feeling you get when you are the officer of the watch charting your ship through an ocean-load of super-tankers captained by lunatics. Tankers that is.

 

Here are some quotes from Jack from the book that should give you an inkling of what you are in for:

 

I read the book, "Don't Tell Mum I work on the Rigs, She thinks I'm a Pianist in a Whorehouse" by Paul Carter, with enormous delight. It's entertaining and funny on most pages, and so it got me thinking. My own experiences in the mines were similar in many ways to this oil rig guy, with some (at least to my mind) equally amusing anecdotes. The major difference is that my mother doesn't think I am pianist - she thinks I'm a penis. So, here are some tales from the tunnels. Hopefully you'll find them as comical and interesting as I do, or maybe I really am just the prick my mother thinks I am.

On that note, allow me to make a toast to all those hardy souls who toil in the mines, digging value from the bowels of the earth:

 

May the roof above your head never fall in,

And the people below it never fall out,

So, raise a toast,

To those we love most,

For a long life, and a merry one,

A quick death, and an easy one,

A pretty girl, and an honest one,

A cold beer, and another one.

 

Gluckauf!

 

(Gluckauf! Is a German miners' toast that means literally 'luck above you')

 

Warning: This book clearly contains some adult content and should be read by miners, but not minors. Enjoy.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack Shaft Publishing
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393746423

Jack Shaft

Jack Shaft is a miner, manager of mayhem, and author of the memoir, It’s Been a Blast. Jack started as a face miner in the deep goldmines, and, over 40 years, climbed the greasy corporate pole to become the CEO of mining companies. This set of memoirs charts the course of that career in a self-deprecatingly humorous manner, as Jack digs himself into one hole after another. Jack has gotten into scraps in South Africa, Australia, Russia, Afghanistan, Morocco, Nigeria, Ukraine, Kosovo and Macedonia to name but a few. Today, he lives in the Pyrenees where he and his family run a pub… that is until he can find another mining job to wander off to. It’s a story of mining mayhem and madness.

Book preview

It’s Been a Blast

By

Jack Shaft

Era 1

The formative years, from adolescent to graduate

May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, the foresight to know where you’re going, and the insight to know when you’ve gone too far. – Traditional Irish Blessing

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

Sometimes you only find out what you’re supposed to be doing by doing the things you’re not supposed to do. — Oprah Winfrey

I want to be a publican I tremulously wrote to my father who was labouring in the Nigerian bush. I was a 16-year-old about to embark upon my A-levels. I had been incarcerated eight years at boarding school by that time, and he had never written or communicated with me when I was away. My father was not a communicative man. At the beginning of each term, I waved goodbye to my family with two Cornish pasties in my pocket and a trunk full of ginger-nut biscuits, expected to return three months later a bit taller and a bit wiser. I only ever seemed to get taller.

I can only imagine that, on receipt of this news, my father spat out his metaphorical dummy, because the 20-page letter I received by return post used language somewhat more emotional than his usual style. Suffice it to say, he thought it was a really shit idea.

This led to some protracted navel-gazing angst on my part. My father, being in the RAF but on loan to the Nigerian Air Force at the time, had wanted me to become a jet pilot. I, on the other hand, thought that I was temperamentally unsuited to such a role, although some who know me now might disagree. Every jet pilot I had met was arrogant to the point of narcissism. So full of self-love that they probably got hard just looking at themselves in the mirror each morning. These guys were the big swinging dicks of the skies, and my bathroom was far too small a place in which to turn around in such a state. I certainly couldn’t compete with them, being the skinny small-dicked runt that I was. Runt, I said.

So, writing off the idea of becoming a rocket jockey, I set about analysing the alternatives. I decided that the last thing I wanted to do was get stuck behind a desk. What I really sought was a life full of scrapes and adventures, in which I could be physically active.

I honed it down to three options: farmer, fisherman, or miner. I liked the idea of growing things to create value, and so I asked a farmer friend what it was like. It seems that if you have livestock you spend your whole life shovelling shit into one end, and then shovelling the shit that comes out the other end, with never a day off. He also advised me that life was hard on the farm and the wages were rock bottom. Clearly, unless born into a farming family or being fabulously wealthy – preferably both – farming was out of the question. I then thought about life at sea, but gallons of testosterone were coursing through my veins and I was hormonally driven towards horizontally jiving with the fairer sex. I had also discovered what was to become a lifelong love for craft beers. The thought of spending weeks away from women, beer, and song was about as appealing as jumping into a hot tub full of sick. So the idea of life on the open waves was also shelved fairly quickly. That left mining.

That summer, my father arranged a visit to the tin mines of the Jos Plateau in northern Nigeria with some miners that he had come across while drinking in a Kaduna bar. I recall the day with great fondness. During that first shift the crew had to work around an elephant-sized rock that was causing a nuisance in an open pit. As the day waned, we placed five sticks of powder and a detonator with a long ignitor fuse on the rock and heaped muddy clay on top of this small mound. We retired a supposedly safe distance to a rudimentary tin clad shelter. The shift supervisor lit the cord and walked nonchalantly back towards us. I watched the sparkling fire on the cord inching closer to the mud pile with mounting excitement. It reached the mud and fizzled out. The watchers, except me, casually yakked amongst themselves. Thirty seconds, which felt like an hour, ticked by.

A misfire I thought and was just about to turn away when the evening sky lit up with a glorious flash and a large plume of dust was thrown a hundred metres or more into the sky. Almost immediately a concussive thump hit me in the chest like an All-Black thumping himself during the haka. The land rumbled and shook as the evening sun was dimmed by a cloud of pulverized material. Golf ball sized rocks landed on our rudimentary shelter, hammering it like a demented hard rock drummer. It was like a Bonfire Night display with added danger and I was hooked. I loved the idea of creating something valuable out of dirt, dust and rocks. Dust to dough, ashes to tin. There followed a revolving round of parties and pubs. Big bangs didn’t require much nous and were also a good deal of fun. In fact, I seemed ideally suited to it. I could visualise an active life full of laughs and joy, one which would lead to a contented retirement running a country pub, all the while regaling my loyal customers with tales from the depths, having quietly made my fortune.

Thus, in an act of defiance that was to define my entire working life, instead of taking to the air, I decided to do the opposite and go underground. Later that year, I discovered, quite by accident, that there were two scholarships to encourage young people like myself to embark upon a life as a mole. Clearly, the industry was running short of future victims. I applied and was to my immense surprise, invited up to London for two days of assessment. On checking in at the hotel the evening before the interviews, it rapidly became apparent to me that there were 29 other highly motivated candidates who had also been shortlisted. I got into conversations with a few of them and discovered that most were potential jet pilots with projected A-grade results. Clearly, there had been some sort of mix-up. My teachers had predicted that Jack might pass if they only ask him what his name is, but we expect to see him in re-sits next year. I rapidly came to the conclusion that I was the outlier in this august body and therefore destined for early rejection.

I decided on the only course of action open to a bloke with my feebler mental capacities when faced with such unlikely potential for success. I set about getting royally drunk at the welcome dinner, smoking foot-long cigars and drinking industrial quantities of port. After all, why not make the most of a free piss-up while you can, for they would surely throw me out first thing in the morning? To my incredulity, and that of every single other person who attended the assessment, I lasted the full two days, and was one of the two candidates to receive a scholarship from the Mining Educational Association Trust (MEAT for short – the clue was clearly in the name) with the recommendation that I should go to the South African gold mines to get some real mining experience under my belt. It would appear that the criteria for candidates was not intellectual rigour, and upon just clearing the hurdle for my A-levels with a couple of passes, I set off for South Africa with two pasties in my pocket and a couple of packets of ginger nuts. My life in the tunnels was about to begin.

Chapter 2: The Deep Gold Mines of South Africa

When you find yourself in a hole, the best advice is to stop digging. – The Bankers’ Magazine (1964)

I landed at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg (now renamed OR Tambo International) and worked my way through immigration to the arrivals hall. There was a quiet buzz in the reception area with people hugging and kissing hello. Standing motionless in the centre of this heaving mass of sentiment was a grizzly-looking fellow with a slightly vacant stare. Acting on the hunch that he was my reception party, I approached him and asked if he was waiting for someone. It came as no surprise when it turned out that he was waiting for me.

In an unlikely turn of events, my meeter and greeter, Herr Van de Merwe, proved to be an amusing character and storyteller. Not only was he missing a leg below the knee, but he was also missing a couple of fingers and had a glass eye that I discovered, he would regularly drop into a person’s beer glass, thereby securing himself many a free drink from the disgusted recipient. The original eye and leg were blown off when a miner drilled into a misfire, an explosive charge that had failed to detonate during the blasting process. This occurred in a development end (known by the uninitiated as a tunnel) on one of the rare occasions when he was visiting a working area, but more on that later.

Quite why the company thought it was a good idea to send such an emissary, who was both maimed and darkly cynical, to pick up the new blood is one of the many imponderables of this life. Perhaps they had heard about my penchant for stag-do quantities of booze and cigars and didn’t really want me. It backfired spectacularly. Van and I immediately found a common language, stopped off in the nearest bar, the Jolly Rogerer, for a few cool refreshers, quickly becoming muckers.

The South African gold mining industry nestles predominantly in the Witwatersrand Basin, south and west of Pretoria. The Kloof gold mine, where I was to work, was at the very heart of this old inland sea. The gold reefs found in this basin are generally less than two metres thick and extend to depths in excess of three kilometres below the surface, with approximate dips (the angle of inclination from horizontal) ranging between 20 and 35 degrees. However, it would be a while before I would be let loose in that playpen.

For the first few months, while incarcerated with a bunch of other ne’er-do-wells in a room euphemistically termed the Learner Official Training Centre, the mine indoctrinated me. We certainly didn’t learn very much, and we were the least official group of trainee troglodytes it’s been my duty to goof off with. This was the era of apartheid in South Africa, an appalling, ugly and disgusting regime in which white people lived completely separately, with the system preventing black people from achieving anything. This evil arrangement has thankfully long gone. Notably, the wisdom of a white miner in those days did not exceed his beauty. They even made me look passably intelligent.

The indoctrination included instructing and drilling in the regulations of the mining industry and being taught to speak Fanakalo, a creole language which is a chaotic mix of English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa and slang. Gunster and I, a cynically humorous German who had also breezed up at the mine at roughly the same time quickly renamed it Funfuckalot, and had endless fun creating new words. Lo fly machine ka lo nightshift for a bed. Columbussing – when a white person pretends to discover something that has been known about for centuries by the indigenous folk. Askhole – someone who asks really stupid questions. We had quite a lot of need for that one. There were also some incredibly strange phrases in the textbook issued for our edification. My favourite was Dij kamel im likimbat bo dat kanggaru irrahol, which literally translated means The camel is licking that kangaroo’s ear. Undoubtedly it has connotations, but I still have no idea what they are or when you might ever need such a phrase. Gunster and I became lifelong buddies during this year of experience.

As a brief aside, anybody who thinks the French have a sense of humour and the Germans don’t, has got it completely wrong. After all, who else could sell the idea of sharing a currency with the Greeks and the Italians with a straight face. The French, meanwhile, suggest that someone has ‘swallowed a clown’ if that person is being funny. This tells you all you need to know about French humour. Whereas German humour is relatively sophisticated as the following Gunster joke illustrates...

The United Nations initiated a poll with the request, ‘Please tell us your honest opinion about the lack of food in the rest of the world.’ The poll was a total failure. The Russians didn’t understand ‘Please’. The Chinese didn’t know what an ‘opinion’ was. The Europeans didn’t know the word ‘lack’, while the Africans didn’t know about ‘food’. Finally, the Americans didn’t know anything about the ‘rest of the world’.

Oddly enough, Gunster’s mum was French. Given his humorous outlook, I wondered if she had swallowed a clown.

The Learner Official Training Centre was an extension of chalk-and-talk teaching and was, bluntly put, torture. Fortunately, this deskbound torment didn’t last, for there is only so long you can listen to some barely upright hominoid comrade fail to remember his two times table. In a fairly short timeframe, I found myself underground, shadowing real miners in order to achieve the two hundred ‘dusty shifts’ that would enable me to sit the blasting exam. That test at the end of the obligatory training and dust dosing was mostly a single choice answer test. It was like multiple choice, but there was only one choice. I just had to get my name right, tick the boxes and answer a couple of open questions to achieve a blasting ticket and become a miner. I didn’t quite score a hundred percent though. My answer to the question, What steps would you take if you saw a two centimetre blue flame on your miners’ safety lamp? of Bloody long ones was not seen in the comic light I had intended. Incidentally, the Davy lamp, invented by the renowned Cornish scientist Sir Humphrey Davy, gives the user a strong indication of methane gas levels by burning more brightly with a large blue halo on the flame. Apparently fucking off quickly was only fifty percent right. I scraped a pass.

On my first day as a certified miner, I made the cardinal sin of arriving at the shaft at five minutes past five in the morning. I was late for the five o’clock cage, the metal box suspended by a rope in the shaft that takes people and materials down the mine to different levels. The shaft mine captain approached and did a traffic light impression, going from orange to deep red and then green. From three millimetres in front of my nose, he bawled me out:

Why are you late, Shaft? Did you need your beauty sleep? Is five o’clock too early for your delicate English constitution?

Sorrysirwonthappenagain, tumbled out.

Where are you from, Shaft?

Er, England, sir.

Did you miss the bit about your English constitution? I fucking know that, you shit-for-brained berk, where in England are you from?

Suffolk, sir.

Suffolk. If I’d known you were from Suffolk I could have explained that we’re not on a farm now. Did you milk the cow before you set off? Have you been out looking for the lost sheep of your dreams? Did you ride your tractor here? The fucking cage waits for no fucking one, he finished.

I was sent back to my flat with the admonition that if I was ever late again it would be cause for instant dismissal. Boet van Rensburg, a kindly hoist driver (a hoist is very large winch, which lifts and lowers the cages with people, materials or rocks in the shaft), took me to one side and told me not to worry, and that the captain’s bark was worse than his bite. Boet was a solid Afrikaner with a beard like Father Christmas. He was considerate and helpful, which was a rarity in those hard days, and I really appreciated his fatherly guidance. He advised me to spend the rest of the day looking for a vehicle to get me to and from the shaft changing rooms on time. I did find a rust bucket in the local paper, an Alfa Giulia, which according to the ad was a good runner. This was partly true. You needed to be a good runner to own it, as the only way to start it was to park it on a hill and then bump it into life. It was barely better than a tractor, but it solved a whole heap of other problems. I called the clanking banger Julia the Giulia.

To say that Julia had challenges was an understatement. Her radiator didn’t work properly, so I took great care when going uphill in the summer. While driving up inclines I’d have to pull over and shut the car down so she could cool off every ten minutes or so. Failure to do this would result in the release of copious volumes of steam from her front grille, which could be pretty disconcerting for nearby pedestrians.

Julia also had a leak in the driver’s side door, which would leave a small pool of water where my feet were after any rain. This was especially bad in the winter on the frosty Highveld. On a cold morning, the water would freeze and create a mini ice-skating rink in the footwell, which added additional degrees of complexity for gear