But perhaps its fierce heart is being subdued gradually. Apparently, no one can even remember, these days, the nasty incidents connected with the dump, incidents that were fresh in memory during our childhood. Perhaps there is no need for anyone to remember, for the town now has more vicarious and less dangerous excitements to offer children than the thrill of running quickly across a pile of black dust that may at any moment cave in and plunge the adventurer into a bed of incandescent coals. In our time, we knew a girl to whom this had happened, and our mother remembered a small boy who had disappeared entirely under a sudden landslide of terrible glowing heat. Not even his bones had been recovered, but the girl we knew survived to become a kind of curiosity about the town. She had been playing on the dump with her friends, and all at once had found herself sunk thigh-deep in living coals and hot ashes. Her friends had managed to pull her out of this fiery quicksand, but she was horribly burned. When we saw her in the street, we used to be unable to keep our eyes from the tight-puckered skin of her calves, and the still tighter skin of her hands, which drew up her fingers like claws. Despite, or because of, these awful warnings, my sister and I longed to run quickly across the lower slopes of the dump for ourselves, and several times managed to elude surveillance long enough to do so. And once, in the unbearable terror and bliss of excitement, we clutched each other on the veld below while, legs pumping wildly, our cousin Roy, come from Natal to spend the holidays with us, rode a bicycle right to the top of the dump and down the other side, triumphant and unharmed.
In the part of South Africa where we lived, we had not only fire under our feet; we had, too, a complication of tunnels as intricate as one of those delicate chunks of worm cast you find on the seashore. All the towns along the Witwatersrand, and the older parts of Johannesburg itself, are undermined. Living there, you think about it as little as you think about the fact that, whatever your work and whatever your life, your reason for performing it where you do and living it where you do is the existence of the gold mines. Yet you are never allowed to forget entirely that the ground is not solid beneath you. In Johannesburg, sitting eight or ten storeys up, in the office of your stockbroker or in your dentist’s waiting room, you feel the strong shudder of an earth tremor; the vase of flowers skids towards the magazines on the table, the gossip of the tickertape machine is drowned. These tremors, never strong enough to do any serious damage, are commonplace. By ascribing them to the fact that the Witwatersrand is extensively undermined, I am inadvertently taking sides in a long, discreet controversy between the seismologists and the Chamber of Mines. The seismologists say that the tremors are not, geologically speaking, earth tremors at all but are caused by rocks falling from the ceilings of either working or abandoned mines. The Chamber of Mines insists that they are natural and not man-caused phenomena. And jerry-builders take advantage of the dispute, greeting the evidence of cracked walls in houses with a shrug of the shoulders that lets the responsibility fall on God or the Chamber of Mines, take your choice.
Our life in the mining town, in one of the ugliest parts of a generally beautiful continent, was narrow and neighbourly — a way of life that, while it commonly produces a violent reaction of rebelliousness in adolescence, suits young children very well. The town had sprung into existence because of the mines, had grown up around the mines. The shopkeepers had come — first with their tents, then with their shanties, and, at last, with their corner sites and neon signs — to fill and profit from the miners’ needs. At the start, the miners wanted only the necessities of life — stoves and workmen’s clothing and meat. Soon they wanted everything — cinemas and shiny wooden cocktail cabinets and tinned asparagus. My father’s little business was a good example of how trade grew into the full feather of provincial luxury from scrawny beginnings in utility. When he arrived in the town, just before the Boer War, he used to tramp from mine to mine carrying a cardboard suitcase full of pocket watches. The watches sold for less than a dollar each. They ticked as loudly as the crocodile who pursues Captain Hook in Peter Pan, and they were as strong as they sounded. They were a necessity for the mine-workers, who found that ordinary watches became rusted and ruined in no time by the damp and heat underground. So my father, a tiny, dapper, small-featured youth with feet no bigger than a woman’s, made his living by selling watches to, and repairing watches for, the great, hefty Afrikaners and the tough Scots and Irishmen who produced gold. He had a little wood-and-iron cottage, where he lived with a black retriever named Springbok, two German roller canaries, and his watchmaker’s worktable.
By the time my father married my mother, he was living in the newly built local hotel, owned a horse and trap, and had rented a glass-fronted shop, where he sold diamond engagement rings. By the time my sister and I were old enough to notice such things, his shop had showcases full of silver sports cups, walnut mantel clocks, stainless-steel cutlery, and costume jewellery from America and Czechoslovakia. A stone-deaf relative had been imported from Leningrad to do the watch repairing; he sat behind an engraved glass partition, out of sight of the customers, who were now townspeople — the families of other shopkeepers, municipal officials, civil servants — as well as white workers from the mines. The white miners wore the new Swiss water-and-shock-proof watches. The only potential customers for cheap pocket watches were now the tribal Africans — migrant labourers who were employed to do all the really hard work in the mines — and these bewildered men, still wearing earrings and dressed in ochre-dyed blankets, mostly made their purchases at government-concession stores on mine property and did not venture into a jeweller’s shop in the town.
The mine people and the townspeople did not by any means constitute a homogeneous population; they remained two well-defined groups. Socially, the mine people undoubtedly had the edge on the people of the town. Their social hierarchy had been set up first, and was the more rigid and powerful. There was a general manager before there was a mayor. But even when the town did create civic dignitaries for itself, even when we did get a country club, there were those among us who neither knew nor cared about the social scaffolding that was going up around them, whereas at each mine the G.M. was not only the leader of society but also the boss, and if one did not revere him as the first, one had to respect him as the second. The dignitaries on both sides — the G.M.s and their officials from the mines, and the city fathers, the presidents of clubs in the town, and so on — invited each other to dinners and receptions, and the teams of the sports clubs of mine and town competed with each other, but there was little mixing on the more intimate levels of sociability. The mine officials and their wives and families lived on ‘the property’; that is, the area of ground, sometimes very large, that belonged to each mine and that included, in addition to the shaft heads and the mine offices and the hospital, a sports ground, a swimming pool, a recreation club, and the houses of the officials — all built by the mine. The G.M. lived in the largest house, usually a spacious and very pleasant one, situated in a garden so big that one might almost have called it a park. The garden was kept in full bloom all year round, right through the sharp, dry Transvaal winter, by African labour diverted from the mines, and the liquor stock indoors was ample and lavishly dispensed. The assistant manager’s house was smaller, but decent enough; then came the underground manager’s, and then the compound manager’s (he was in charge of the four-sided barracks, with all its windows opening on a courtyard and only one gateway, always guarded, to the world without, in which the African labourers were fed and housed in celibacy, having left their families in distant kraals), and then the mine secretary’s, and so on down the salary and social scale, the houses getting smaller, the gardens getting less elaborate. Most of the mine families lived only a few miles out from the town, but their self-sufficiency surrounded them like a moat. Their offspring could go from the cradle to the grave without having anything to do with the town other than attending its high school, placing weekly orders with the butcher and the grocer, and paying three visits to church — one for christening, one for marrying, one for burying.