Leontyne (15 page)

We gave the voluble Dutchman a lift back to his barge while he explained what his perfect woman would be like. She would have to be a non-smoking vegetarian with a degree in handling repairs to boat engines, and would only speak when spoken to. I could see, as he prattled away, that he was unlikely to find his ideal mate. His parting salvo, as he left us in one of the quaint, sloping-sided locks that they have on the upper reaches of the Seine, was about how to tie up. His advice, when we tried it in the next lock, was quite useless, but he did know how to weld – which is by no means as simple as it looks. My first job ever had been in a factory in Wolverhampton, spot-welding steel folding chairs. I think I must have ruined the production figures for the weeks I was there before being fired, because I never developed the necessary lightness of touch to stop the welding flame burning through the metal in the wrong places.

The sloping-sided locks were difficult for us, because we were not quite long enough to stretch from one end to the other as a normal barge would do, which prevented us from
making fast on the upright portions at the ends of the lock. They were far from being a source of grief to all, however. The one we encountered after leaving the Dutchman provided recreation for a family of ducklings, who were having the greatest time skiing down the slippery, sloping sides of the lock. The mother stood watchfully on the top of the lock making sure all was well, and the goody-goody of the family stood next to her. I am always astonished by how much young humans resemble young things of all other species. As the lock filled, the ducklings rejoined their mother to wait for another vessel to go through, and more sliding fun.

The Dutchman's work on the rudder had improved the steering and he had made all sorts of rash promises about what he would do if the fins fell off, though, as he had used much heavier steel plate to make the fins and had double welded the joints, it was, in his view, quite impossible that this should happen. Only time would tell.

Towards evening we met some Swiss damsels in distress. A brother and sister and the boy's girlfriend had hired a holiday boat and had run out of diesel. Running out of diesel in a boat is bad news because in my experience it always leads to other troubles that you have not anticipated. We gave them some of our fuel, but the motor refused to start even with Ray's nimble fingers stripping the filters far into the night. They were in some distress as they were far from any telephone and did not know what to do. We told them we would give them a tow in the morning, to somewhere they could ring the hire company and get their boat fixed.

The young man turned out to be a trainee chef, and the girls were training to be teachers of handicrafts. They offered to cook us a Swiss lunch the following day, while they waited for their boat to be repaired. As I lay in bed that night I remembered David Lean telling me how he had been walking round Shah Jahan's gardens in the Red Fort at Delhi, with a famous bestseller writer who had been sent out to work with him on a script about the Taj Mahal. The distinguished writer
had fallen madly in love with a Swiss girl in the hotel where he was staying, and as he walked round the gardens he was heard to mutter, ‘If there be paradise on earth, it is Swiss, it is Swiss, it is Swiss.'

Our Swiss girls, pretty and practical, leapt ashore when we reached the nearest town and went shopping for a memorable feast, in which there were a great many potatoes and raw carrots. A grumpy Yorkshireman came to mend their boat and complained that the boat-hire companies were a scandal: they never spent enough money maintaining their fleets and the boats were forever breaking down and spoiling holidays. It occurred to me that this dyspeptic monologue could well have been a defence mechanism and that he was probably one of the owners himself. He soon had the engine running again, however, and the Swiss went on their way.

Soon after setting off up the green and lush valley of the Seine, we encountered a dredger barge, which we accompanied through a number of locks. The family who ran it were the third generation of
bateliers
to work on this stretch of the river, preventing it from silting up. They were hired on a contract basis, being directed to whatever part of the river the authorities thought it necessary to dredge. I was impressed by the clever idea for stabilizing the barge which they had developed. The barge had a dredger grab on it, and when the grab lifted its bucket from the bottom of the river with upwards of five tons of silt in it, the barge would, without a stabilizer, naturally start to list – which could be dangerous, and very annoying for mum in the kitchen. To compensate, they had made some enormous legs out of steel pipes. These they lowered through holes in the bottom of the barge with their crane, and then fixed them so that they held the vessel steady.

They told me that they were kept busy all year round dredging away, even though the barge traffic was declining year by year. It would be a bad day if the powers that be stopped keeping the upper part of the Seine open for river
traffic, although it must be extremely expensive and increasingly hard to justify.

At Cézy lock there was a letter waiting for me from my son Jason, who was in China researching a book he was writing on tea. I am always immensely impressed by postal services that can cope with mail for itinerants. The ‘poste restante' system works extremely well in France providing that you remember to take your passport when you go to collect your mail. Of course when you have a boat the mail is given to the boat rather than an individual, but it is very important that the sender addresses the letter to a lock in a town and not some sleepy corner where the lock-keeper could easily forget to give it to you. My letter was handed to me by a very jolly man who greeted the boat with, ‘Ah, ma petite
Leontyne'
, as though a long-lost lover had walked up his garden path. He turned the letter over and over in his hand before giving it to me, as though he was reluctant to part with it, and then told me that as there were no barges coming I could stay in the lock till I had read it. He was clearly very curious to know what was in this mysterious missive from the East. I told him that it was from my son and that he had written to say that he would be meeting us in Montbard, where I had said we would be for the celebrations on 14 July, Bastille Day. He seemed enormously gratified that someone so very far away from France had been thinking about the fall of the Bastille and the abolition of the monarchy.

It had rained a good deal that day and since there was a thunderstorm on its way, I decided to moor near some tourist boats, something that I try to avoid whenever possible. The barge and the tug together weigh about sixty tons and to make a firm mooring it is necessary to find a tree if there are no bollards about. In this case the trees were on the other side of the towpath – a problem, as it is completely forbidden to stretch ropes across the paths, as they are always being used by the lock-keepers and their families riding
mobylettes
– the motorized bicycles that everyone seems to own in the
countryside in France. Many are the accidents that have been caused by mooring ropes catching the wheels of the bicycles and pitching the riders over the handlebars. I had had some long steel pegs made before leaving England for such emergencies and I used them now, although it was difficult to get a firm fixing in the crumbling bank of the Canal de Bourgogne and I had to use our fourteen-pound sledgehammer to drive the pegs into the side of the path. The noise of the hammer striking the steel pegs aroused a party of Germans on the tourist boat near us, and suddenly, as I bent over my work, I found myself staring into the malevolent face of a huge Alsatian dog. The beefy owner announced that he and his wife had locked up the children and were taking the dog for a walk, which seemed an orderly if somewhat inhuman way of going about things. I wondered what it is like to take one's pets on holiday, something that I suppose very few Britons can remember doing nowadays.

The threatened thunderstorm arrived in style. We battened down the hatch, and as we listened to the rain pounding on the steel deck of the barge, Ray told me that lightning jumps upwards from the earth, rather than the other way about as I had imagined. It was not till the morning that we realized that in our haste we had left the cable that linked the barge and the tug on the deck, where the plug had dropped into a pool of water. This had caused a short and the batteries on the tug had gone completely flat. I am always extremely apprehensive about electrical supplies on boats and though I thought I had taken every precaution, it proved to be a problem to start the
Leo'
s engine. I had a 12-kilowatt generator on the barge but I did not have a suitable charger for the 24-volt batteries on the
Leo
. The batteries on the barge were charged with a trickle charger from the generator and from the engine on the tug when it was running. After trying to bring the tug alongside the barge to jump-start it, only to discover that the cables were not heavy enough and melting them – then having to pull the
Leo
out of the way of an angry,
oncoming barge that did not have the room to pass – we were exhausted. I decided that, cost what it may, I would take the bicycle and buy some flexible welding cable from the nearby town of St Florentin. I find that the French have an extremely good distribution of professional equipment, and was pleased to find a shop almost immediately that could sell me what I required. The ten metres of half-inch-diameter flexible copper wire cost me over a hundred pounds. This was not what I was expecting but at least I now have the consolation of being the proud possessor of what are probably the most expensive jump leads in the world.

During my chat with the shopkeeper he told me that they made an excellent cheese in this little town and that there was a cheese works at the back of his shop. De Gaulle once said in despair that it was hard to govern a country with so many different types of cheese, each with its own band of fervent supporters. The cheese they make in St Florentin is soft, white, bland, and has the consistency of foam rubber. Why it should be so sought after baffles me. Touching it reminded me of being acutely embarrassed as a young assistant director on a Western film in Spain, when the star, Jayne Mansfield, invited me to feel her magnificent bosom for the silicone implant that had recently been injected by the studio doctors. Her husband, Johnny Haggerty, was Mr Universe and was extremely proud of his wife's figure: they were busily merchandising their superb physiques with the Johnny and Jayne bodybuilding kit. Despite this memory, I was forced to buy some of the cheese which, to my astonishment, Ray devoured with apparent enjoyment.

With the right equipment, the Gardner engine started at once and we were on our way again, through countryside that was beginning to look like the tourist posters for France that you see on the underground. There were a large number of locks on this stretch of canal, manned by a variety of people, mostly women. At one flight of locks where there were two locks separated by two hundred yards of canal, I
came across an ancient feud. The woman at the lower lock spent the whole time we were with her bitching about the woman at the next lock. She was obviously more engrossed in complaining about her neighbour than attending to her garden or house, which was a mess. When we got to the upper lock of this pair, the lock lady was trim, with dyed hair and a garden as neat as a pin. When I complimented her on the care she had taken of her domain, she said, with what I thought was a twinkle in her eye, that she had a lot of help from the chap who lived at the lock we had just come through. There was clearly a good deal going on on this little
bief
that I would never know.

The Swiss boat we had towed had passed us when we broke down, and now we passed them as they were handing their boat back to the hire company where it had come from. We stopped to say goodbye again, and to fill up our water tank. As we did so, we chatted with the man in charge who had pulled up in his little van and left the engine running. After a few minutes, when we had agreed to pay for the water, the hooter in his van started to blow. I looked up to see a large Labrador at the wheel who was pushing the hooter button with its paw: something that it had apparently learnt to do itself when it thought its master had spent long enough on his business. A neat trick, but not one that I would care to teach a dog.

That night I made a really stupid mistake which reminded me of a comment that Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote, about an extremely well-known and expensive London restaurant, in the suggestion book at the Travellers' Club. He simply wrote the name of the restaurant and beside it, in the comments column, drew a skull and crossbones. I had purchased the Michelin Guide and noticed that, in Tonnerre, there was one of those grand restaurants with a top rating. Ray and I walked up the hill to the old abbey where the restaurant was, and as soon as I was inside I realized what a mistake I had made. The place was full of the kind of motorist who has taken the
Hovercraft over the Channel, avoided the traffic in Paris, averaged so many miles per hour and so on, facts which they bray at each other over their quails' eggs. It took us three hours to get some soup and chops. I think we would both have walked out before finishing the overrated, overpriced offerings served on vast plates, had it not been pouring with rain outside, and a long walk home to the
Leo
.

From Tonnerre we went through one of the most beautiful parts of the Canal de Bourgogne, which many are trying to turn into a national monument, whilst others wish to reduce the running costs by installing automatic locks to do the work of the very varied selection of lock-keepers who currently look after them. One of the lady lock-minders was an out-of-work hairdresser whose salon, in the neighbouring town, had been closed down. I badly needed a haircut and had some scissors with me, so I asked whether she would oblige, and she did a very nice job whilst waiting for the next boat to come through. She told me that she had a free house with the job, that there was not very much to do, and that life was quite agreeable, although she had not yet experienced a winter there. A few locks further on we bought some really excellent wine from a woman who clearly caught the bottles as they fell off the back of a lorry. We stopped at Lock 72, having passed through thirty locks that day – and had a haircut! Not bad for one day. The exercise had purged the disgust I felt with myself for having gone to the expensive clip joint the night before. The pirate flag should have flown from those towers, but then I suppose they give their customers what they want: isolation from reality and a car park.