'Goons' and 'inies' could make you lose your marbles

When I was a schoolboy from Plumstead, nobody had an iPad because, back then, the fax machine hadn't even been invented, never mind the iPad or Facebook.

Back then, for a few months a year, boys of my age would become avid marble collectors and traders. We would all spend large parts of our pocket money buying marbles and sometimes we would shell out, over the odds, for a thing called a goon. A "goon" was basically a large marble and could be worth between three and 10 times the value of an ordinary marble. They were greatly prized.

A goon, for the historical record, was pronounced, not as in Goon Show but much quicker. A few years later, when we boys realised we had testicles, we used to refer to these, somewhat vulgarly, as "goons". (If you think about it, most men, even those of the most limited vocabulary, are masters of the synonym when it comes to describing, shall we say, their meat and two veg, crown jewels, etc.)

Back in the days of which I write we had marbles and we had goons. And then a lucky few, whose dads or uncles worked in factories or workshops, would bring to school things called, as I recall, "ironies".

Nobody ever wrote the word down so perhaps the things should be spelt "ironys". What I do remember is that the word consisted of two, not three, syllables and that the "r" was never pronounced - it came out as something like "inies". Essentially, an inie was a large steel ball that was worth more than even a goon.

At school the most popular marble pastime was the "arly shyer". (Again, I have no idea how to spell either but the "arly" was slang for marble and the "shyer" bit referred to the fact that punters (other schoolboys) were invited to try to win a small stack of marbles. (The "shyer" bit must have shared an etymological root with "coconut shy" and one still hears cricket commentators talking about a fielder having a "shy" (throw) at the stumps.

What would happen is that somebody wanting to have a go at your marble shyer could win it by throwing marbles at the stack. If they hit the pyramid of marbles without a bounce they won but the vendor collected all the marbles that missed. If you were going for a four-arly shyer you had to stand four paces back; a 10-arly shyer required you to stand 10 paces back, which was much more challenging. A big inie required you to stand a very long way back. It was entrepreneurial risk and reward on a grand scale.

What made me think of marbles and arlys and goons and ironies was a visit I undertook last week to Marikana, that place of great mineral wealth and, so sadly these days, of great infamy.

I've visited a few mines in my time but never before been granted proper access to a mine processing facility.

I knew that ore from a mine got crushed and milled (and, later, refined) but what exactly the milling process entailed - what was inside those giant steel milling drums and how they worked was quite beyond me.

But last Wednesday I found out, chancing upon an "inie" of magnificent size just lying around.

At more than 7cm in diameter and weighing 2kg this inie was a thing that was beyond the wildest of my once 12-year-old Cape Town imaginings.

It turns out that the mills at a chrome or platinum mine contain thousands of large inies that are agitated against the ore that is continuously fed into the thing, breaking up the bits of rock and releasing the important stuff.

I took my inie to show my kids. They were unimpressed and, after paying me and my giant steel ball a cursory glance, went back to their iPads and TV, which I sometimes think they love more than me.

They're too young to understand how valuable an inie was when I was their age, and they're too young to understand how large steel balls are used every day at our mines to unlock immense value, value that underpins our national economy.

Three hundred-odd years ago a Hollander called Peter Stuyvesant bought a place called New York for a few glass beads.

When I was a boy, one measured one's worldly success in little glass balls and inies. Funny how our ideas of value change...

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