Leontyne (16 page)

The toothless lock-lady at number 72 had sold me some lemons and I cooked spaghetti with lemon and cream sauce which was a good deal more agreeable than our last evening meal. The locks shut at 7.30 p.m. in those parts, so apart from tidying the boat up and checking the engine, cooking, fishing and reading were our evening activities. Ray's attempts to catch fish were not very successful, but he was
practising for the Bastille Day fishing competition that we had seen advertised for Montbard, where I hoped we would be to meet Jason.

It was a full day's journey to Montbard and we had two days to get there before all the locks closed for the holiday, so I decided to visit the Forges de Buff on. As we arrived at the lock there, we seemed to be serenaded by an unseen accordion. Then, as we tied up, a diminutive figure appeared behind a huge accordion, playing a popular song – not very well, but recognizably. The player was nine years old and looked exactly like Shirley Temple, with a red spotted dress and curly fair hair. She had learnt to play the accordion at the local school in Montbard, where a professional lady accordionist taught on Wednesdays. The teacher had arrived in Montbard on some tour or other, had fallen madly in love with a chef, and settled down to start a restaurant with him. Their restaurant was very successful by all accounts, and her accordion lessons had produced the best young male accordionist in the all-European accordion championships. In Paris we had heard the great Marcel Adzola, who had been the accompanist for Edith Piaf, play quite superbly what must be the musical instrument of France. The accordion has set more moods – and in just a few bars – in French films and television than any other instrument. The little girl popped out with her accordion every time a tourist boat or hotel barge went by, hoping to get some money, which, of course, I gave her. I asked what she was going to do with it. Her mother could have done with the money, but this little girl said that she was going to buy a newer and better accordion. I hope she did.

The Forges de Buffon are, or rather were, where the Comte de Buffon manufactured a special steel from local ore. This is what stopped the guns of the French army blowing apart when larger and larger cannonballs were needed. The Swedes had the secret of an especially hard steel required in the manufacture of safe cannon barrels, but before Buffon
found a similar mixture, the French had to put up with using only medium charges in their cannons, otherwise they would blow up, with great loss of life to those working the guns. Buffon was born in Montbard and had become one of the luminaries of eighteenth-century France and also keeper of the Jardin du Roi in Paris, after his learned thesis on natural history had been published. In four years he built these forges and diverted the local river, so that the water could be used to power the bellows for the forge and also the hammers required for beating out the red-hot metal. In the true spirit of eighteenth-century enlightenment, he had had a gallery built in the main area of the forge so that his guests, with their
jabots
and their jewels, could watch the wretched toilers as they worked in enormously high temperatures, tending the furnaces. The incentive to work in the furnace room was that you got extra rations and privileged accommodation. All this information was pumped at me by an incredibly energetic woman whose family had owned the place for the last eighty years or so. She spoke extremely good English, which was not surprising as she had married a charming but rather vague Englishman, who spent his days being supportive and perplexed by his wife's behaviour.

We had arrived, by pure chance, in the year that was the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Buffon, and to celebrate, this lady had decided to breed a hinnie. I had no idea what a hinnie was until she told me that it was a cross between a female donkey and a horse, or in this case a Welsh pony from the neighbouring farmer's fields. The great difference between a mule and a hinnie, she hectored me as though any fool should know, is that a hinnie can reproduce itself. I did my best to show that I was suitably impressed by this rare and extremely bad-tempered animal who, instead of nuzzling in the approved manner, chose to manoeuvre its hindquarters to let go a vicious kick. ‘Oh you are naughty,' cried the owner, shooing the beast away. She was forced to repeat herself almost immediately as the loathsome hybrid
turned on her, lashing out with a footballer's kick to the groin, which narrowly missed. What energy my guide had, what unstoppability: little wonder her husband had perfected the art of English vagueness.

Montbard is a pleasant old town of twisted roofs and moss-covered tiles, built on the side of a hill topped by a park which was once the site of a fortress. The Comte de Buffon is unquestionably Montbard's most famous former citizen by a long chalk. In the eighteenth century he had been the biggest employer in the area, using hundreds of men to collect fuel from the forests to heat his furnaces. He had employed women to build the park, paying them practically no money until they protested so vigorously that he agreed to pay them a little more. This setback would appear to have been the only reverse Buffon ever had to suffer in his life.

The canal at Montbard runs round the bottom of the town through a large basin. Here there were a number of hotel barges which left every few days, taking groups of passengers for trips up and down the Canal de Bourgogne. There was also a small harbour where a boat-hire company operated, as well as a berth or two for itinerants. All this looked a bit too clubby for us, so I decided to go through the first lock after the basin and tie up on the other side.

The charming young lock-lady there, who was in her twenties and had two small boys, allowed us to tie up just the other side of the lock and even provided us with water. When I asked her how long she thought she was going to be doing this job she replied that she would surely do it for the rest of her days, which she seemed very happy about. In this lock we were moored next to Montbard's main industry: a factory, still producing specialized steel, which it turned into
tubes for nuclear reactors. The factory had just closed for the holiday and there was a feeling of excitement in the old streets as the children prepared for the torchlit procession that evening, and the older ones got themselves together for the
Grand Bal Gratuit
which Jacques Garcia, mayor for sixteen years, always laid on for the populace on the night before the glorious 14th of July.

Ray and I, feeling that we should enter into the spirit of the occasion, dressed the ship, which in our case meant getting all our signal flags out, joining them together in no particular order, and stretching them from the raised crane arm to the top of the stubby mast on the
Leo
. I have never been able to get the meaning of the signal flags straight, but I reasoned that, so far from the ocean, there would be very few seadogs about to correct the obvious mistakes that I am sure we must have made. We also festooned the boat with a garland of coloured lights and we were well pleased with the festive result. I went off to get some supplies from the local
charcutier
who said that in spite of it being a holiday he would be open on the morning of Bastille Day, and invited me to come to see his kitchen the next morning.

My son Jason and his girl Kate were arriving that evening from Paris, on one of France's TGVs (high-speed trains), which really do go buzzing along. I was very much looking forward to hearing Jason's traveller's tales, which were always punctuated with a good giggle or two. He duly arrived and introductions were made. Ray and the kids got on well from the start and we had a splendid march round the town in the
flambeaux
(torchlit) procession. This was led by the fire brigade and the Trompettes Montbardois – arguably the very worst band in the land. The mayor's daughter, who worked as her father's assistant in the town hall, confessed that the band were not up to playing the Marseillaise at the ceremony the next day, so they would have to play a record of France's anthem as the flag was raised. Outside the Hôtel de Ville we were handed coloured lanterns with candles inside, and
set off with the crowd, marching round the town to the revolutionary beat of the drummers. The fire brigade had large flaming torches which had been dipped in kerosene and burned in a suitably flamboyant manner.

The procession wound its way round the town, the town louts throwing firecrackers to frighten the young and elderly, and finally arrived outside the hall where the
Grand Bal Gratuit
was taking place. The appalling band played a last – discordant – chord, and shambled off. The mayor explained that they normally had a live band from out of town for the
Grand Bal Gratuit
, but this year the town hall funds had been sadly depleted celebrating the bicentennial of the death of Buffon, and so the dance band had been cancelled.

We left the
bal
after a few minutes, as the music of Montbard was beginning to get us all down. We also had to be up very early the next day to enter Ray for the fishing competition, which was to take place a few yards from where the boat was moored.

Ray was duly entered and drew number 47, which was considered to be a good draw. There were about one hundred men and women in the competition, which took place, on a morning that was anything but glorious, in freezing drizzle. I walked with Ray to the stake that marked his spot and found next to it, as with all the others, a small pot of begonias. He had brought his short fishing rod, but it was clear that he was well out of his depth as all his fellow competitors unleashed huge carbon-fibre rods which stretched over eighteen feet into the middle of the canal. One of Ray's neighbours was a shortsighted gentleman who required an elderly pair of opera glasses to see his float, it was so far away. After an hour of serious fishing no one I saw had caught anything, and after a number of whispered conversations with the white hope of the
Leo
, we decided that he ought to change his bait from rolled-up balls of bread to red worms. These the lady on Ray's right kindly supplied – or was it a
ploy? As soon as Ray had changed his bait the woman jerked her rod and pulled out a fish measuring a good three inches.

The mayor came up with a few asinine, vote-catching jokes about the fish not wanting to jump out of the canal, but since he had been mayor for the last sixteen summers, I expect the competitors were used to it. Ray decided that it just was not going to be his day, and left whistling the Marseillaise. I believe the winner won about three hundred pounds in prize money, which was about six hundred times more than the weight of the fish that he caught.

Jason, Kate and I went for our date with the
charcutier
, who showed us round the spotless kitchen where he was making large quantities of
pâté de campagne
, with pig's liver, lumps of white fat, buckets of garlic, and parsley. His kitchen looked out over the valley and I could see Ray on the
Leo
hundreds of feet below us. The
charcutier
, who sported the most magnificent moustache, explained that they bought a whole dead pig on a Friday, and used every single bit of it during the week, except the bones which they sold for fertilizer and glue. The delicious items that they had on show somehow did not look quite so appetizing after we'd seen and smelled the boiling cauldrons downstairs, and realized that the jelly which made the
langues de porc
look so good was from the pig's skin, rendered down over many hours. Hunger is the best cook, however, and by the time we had been to the ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville next door, we were all ready for what he had offered us.

The ceremony of the flag-raising went off well. The Trompettes gave a short, off-key blast on their instrument, the mayor's daughter turned on the gramophone, and we all stood to attention for the Marseillaise. The mayor made a speech with a lot of references to faith and hope, and then bestowed medals on the police and on the fire brigade (in France, the fire brigade seem to do everything that the police do not, including rushing people to hospital after emergencies
of any kind). The star of the show was a pretty woman, a captain-doctor in the fire brigade, who seemed to be getting all the honours and a good deal of over-zealous, congratulatory kissing from the male brass. The gathering broke up and people drifted back to their homes for a good, solid meal before the afternoon's events, which were to be held in Buffon's park after everyone had digested their dinner, and included the
Grand Concours de Pétanque
and the
Vin d'Honneur
.

Ray and I decided to enter for the
pétanque
competition. Ray was drawn with a pretty neat couple of players and went off to one end of the park, and I became the handicap of a practically professional
pétanque
player, a wiry Algerian called Zappy. He soon saw that my standard was less than amateur and tried to show me a few tricks of the trade in the last minutes before the game. We lasted one round, thanks to the brilliance of Zappy, but he very kindly said that had I had professional
boules
, which were heavier, rather than the supermarket variety I was using, I would have made a much better show. The truth is that
pétanque
is a vicious game, and I was way out of my depth, both in my throwing skill and in the devious tactical gambits required. Ray and I have since spent many hours practising with professional
boules
. Perhaps one day we shall be asked to play again and make a better showing of ourselves.

The mayor and his daughter set up the tables and brought the bottles of Burgundy that had been promised, together with bottles of lemonade for the children, and once the last
boule
had been thrown the wine started to flow. The fire chief's daughter had just been promoted, which was an occasion for further fervent kissing. There is no doubt that when you are promoted in the fire service in Montbard you get more kisses if you are the fire chief's daughter and pretty as well; there is also no doubt that you get promoted. The crowds drank their glass of wine and wandered off down the hill into the town, and the crew of the
Leo
said farewell to their
new-found friends and prepared for a morning departure. As we reached the barge our friend the
charcutier
appeared, bringing us a couple of bottles of wine for the journey and a special pâté. It looked delicious: our memories of the manufacture had dwindled.