Free The Pillow Fight by Nicholas Monsarrat Page A

was emerging as one of the bigger stars in the gold-mining firmament. Working and playing there was always a tonic, after the more leisured pace of Cape Town. The Reef mines of the Witwatersrand were only sixty years old; the city which had grown on top of them was still a glorified mining camp, wide open, available for all corners. It wore always a flushed and hectic air, like a bride who might die tomorrow or an actor grown famous overnight.
    People – young and old, thin or fat – threw their bodies on it at eight o’clock each morning, extracted every ounce of gold or profit during the next eight hours, and then rushed home in the evening to gamble it all away again. It lived perpetually on its nerves, hopes, fears and suspicions; and since there was no limit of any sort to human greed and gullibility, the whole place was jumping, on a round-the-clock, twenty-four-hour basis.
    Civic happiness was geared to the mining section of the stock market; not just for operators or investors, but for everybody. When the market was up, even the poor whites running the lifts were buoyant as bees; when it was down, there was not a smile to be had from a derelict taxi driver. To hold aloof from this fever was an eccentric blasphemy; even the silliest women, restless, wayward and palpably insincere, chattered of margins and coverage, stopes and assaye-reports, a clean-up in this and a sell-out in that. I sometimes wondered whether their terms of endearment, their loving words-on-a-pillow, were not darling West Driefontein, beautiful Blyvooruitzicht, dreamy De Beers…
    To match this nervous financial tic, there were some astonishing crimes and misdemeanours. ‘Salted’ bore-holes, peppered with alien gold, sent mining shares rocketing, only to plunge earthwards again when the perpetrators went to jail. Huge bets went awry as horses responded too readily to doping, and jumped the railings or sped backwards round the course. Only in Johannesburg would a horse, having broken its leg in a scuffle at the finishing-post, be shot dead by a spectator who ran across with his revolver from the Ten Shilling Enclosure.
    Members of ‘sherry gangs’ kicked each other to death, and blamed it on tropical rain. ‘Fishing-pole burglars’ angled for loot through open bedroom windows, hauling out trousers, bedclothes, lovers … A combination of altitude and aptitude gave people the world’s strongest heads; there might be heavy drinking in other parts of the globe, but here it touched unique peaks of glory, and the altitude took care of the hangover.
    Above all, it was a generous town. Involved in any kind of charity, I would rather raise ten thousand pounds in Johannesburg than ten shillings in London or Paris – particularly Paris. Partly it was due to a very strong Jewish community – acquisitive, cultured and open-handed. A by-product of this was an anti-Semitism of an odd and disgusting kind; not the unselfish disliking the acquisitive, but the acquisitive disliking the ones who had out-manoeuvred them. Johannesburg, however, had room for them all.
    For two days I worked and wandered in this unique climate. We succeeded in sewing up the Anglo-African account, in the teeth of convulsive opposition from another firm; and I discussed with Joel Sachs about a dozen different layouts which were now due for production (the actual artwork was done in the main studio down at Cape Town). Gerald Thyssen gave an exceptionally pleasant dinner party for me; we all went racing at Turffontein, where I lost at least a week’s profits on one of Eumor’s ungenerous crocodiles. Then it was the eve of my departure, and by way of farewell I dined with the boys and took them all to watch a wrestling match.
    Like the act of love, all-in wrestling in South Africa was the same as all-in wrestling in any other part of the world; predominantly crooked, patently rehearsed and (as far as I was concerned) hilariously amusing. We arrived at the end of one bout (the