Leontyne (7 page)

That night we had a setback. We arrived at Bossuit, an
unmemorable place, and the lock-keeper asked me whether I should like to stop on the upper side of the lock or the lower. When I said that I was going to continue he told me that the lock at Espierres had been closed as a barge had run into one of the lock gates, and that there was nothing to do but wait whilst a new gate was installed, which would take at least two days. I unloaded the 2CV and went to have a look at the damage, which was quite impressive. A huge mobile crane had lifted the mangled gate out and laid it on the ground; a new gate was to be installed the following day. The force of a 1300-ton barge, even when it is creeping into the lock at a snail's pace, can be quite enormous. If a checking rope slips or snaps, or a gear cable parts, there is nothing that can be done to stop it crashing into the gates. Nothing, that is, unless you are German: the Germans have a very efficient system for lowering a huge wire hawser across the lock, about two metres from the gates opposite the entry side. It is raised before the gates are opened, of course, but it's strong enough to stop these very expensive accidents from happening.

All round the lock were waiting barges. Some of the wealthier
bateliers
had taken their cars off with the extensive lift arms that they had installed, and driven off. Others were painting and scraping their main asset. No wonder their barges look so spick-and-span: the number of man hours that go into lacquering the decks with special varnish, clearing every speck of rust off the hull, and keeping the paint fresh, must be enormous. Delays of this kind are very annoying however, because the
bateliers
can be penalized for not delivering their cargoes on the appointed day.

The canal was opened sooner than expected and we made our way through Tournai, which lies at the southernmost part of Flanders. The river, with all its heavy barge traffic, runs right through the middle of the town and makes a fine sight. I went into an antique shop on the quay, to have a look at a particularly fine bit of lace in the window, but was
sidetracked by some postcards of the town during the 1939-45 war. The streets in which I had been walking had been virtually destroyed by successive American, British and German bombardments. I have often wondered what it must have been like to live in a town that had been invaded and occupied by enemy forces. This is something that neither the British nor the Americans had to experience in either of the World Wars. What would one's attitude have been to the occupying force?

By now we were heading east through the ‘cockpit of Europe'. Neat signs from the war graves commissions reminded one of the huge costs of war. From time to time, we could see the rows upon rows of white crosses on the green, rolling countryside. It was hard to imagine that this place was once a sea of mud, where screaming shells replaced the spring birds.

We were now in old canal country and the
Leo
felt at home. The barge traffic was light and when barges passed us they were mere 300-tonners making a short cut to one of the main canals. It soon became apparent why the larger craft did not use this canal, when we were faced with a flight of four Anderton lifts. These marvels of Victorian engineering closed at 5.00 p.m., which is early on the canals, and we were caught at the bottom level. This delay gave us the opportunity to investigate what was causing the vibration we could feel in the propeller shaft. I was quite sure that we had picked up a bit of rope that had entwined round the propeller. Ray and I tried a
very
unsuccessful experiment, namely trying to lift the stern of the
Leo
out of the water with the crane that was installed on the barge. Of course, it was not nearly powerful enough but at least we had made the attempt, because we knew that one of us would have to plunge into the still chilly, murky waters of the canal to feel what was wrong. Ray bravely volunteered and, after some minutes of diving under the
Leo'
s stern, told me that the propeller blades were badly dented by a stone and that we would have to change the
propeller as soon as we could. This meant we would have to lift the
Leo
out of the water as it was extremely difficult to change the propeller under water, even with a diver.

In the early morning, we let a barge pass us in the queue, as indeed one should: they have to earn a living and, more to the point, they pay for the use of the canals. Our ascent through Anderton's four masterpieces was uneventful. The lifts are so massively built and kept in such good repair by the authorities that it is surprising that they are not a much bigger tourist attraction, although once the new lift that is under construction at this point on the canal is finished, this will doubtless happen. The new lift will replace the four Anderton lifts and will be capable of taking 1300-ton barges. It stands like some vast blockhouse awaiting another German invasion, this time the invasion of the inevitable superbarges.

We were now up on a plateau and since we had been through a series of lifts, I thought we should visit Belgium's other hydraulic curiosity: the nearby lift at Ronquières which joins the canal from Brussels to the Meuse. This is really a huge bathtub on wheels into which the barges are driven and sealed. The whole apparatus is then allowed to slowly slide down the hill to the canal at the bottom. The bath is checked by a system of massive counterweights and safety devices, but I was nevertheless relieved when the
Leo
was back to the safety of more conventional means of lifting river traffic.

Leaving Ronquières, we came upon a breakdown truck by the side of the canal and a boy with a flag waving at all the passing barges to slow them down. I decided to tie up and see what was going on. As I reached the boy a frogman appeared from the canal and flopped his way up the bank. Mr Van Damme had found himself a job for life clearing the canals of Belgium of ‘hot' cars. His method was simple. He would drive down one side of the canal and his assistant would drive down the other, with a steel hawser running between the two vehicles. From time to time, the cable would
snag on a car and Mr Van Damme would slip into his wet suit. His first priority was to collect the number plates from the car (I think he was probably paid by the plates). Then he would plunge again, attach a cable around the chassis of the car and winch it up on to the canal bank. I watched him pull a very new looking BMW up on to the bank. He told me that it had probably been in the canal for about six months. I was surprised when he attached the winch cable to the boot of the car to prise it open. ‘What do you think is inside?' I asked, thinking of swag, but he explained that the only things of interest that he ever found were live eels. Sadly when the lid of the boot sprung open, it was empty. However, within the hour he had a top-of-the-range Toyota up on the bank and this time the boot disgorged six eels for Mrs Van Damme to cope with. Because of its isolation, this part of the canal was a favourite dumping ground for car thieves, explained my diving friend, who was very proud of his job – though I must say it is not one that I should fancy, especially during the winter.

Charleroi is, from the canal at least, an industrial nightmare. All one could see were huge buildings, chimneys belching clouds of noxious vapour, and bright points of light from molten metal being poured. Welders were repairing a conveyor belt high above and evil clankings and bangings deafened me. The fact that humans are persuaded to work in places like these, inhaling the grime in the air day after day, convinced me of how lucky I was to be merely passing through. Later, in a lock outside Charleroi, I asked the skipper of a tug that was towing a huge barge of liquid mud if there was anything of interest between where we were and Namur. ‘It is all very much the same,' was his morose reply.

We wound our way down the Sambre to the Meuse at Namur. Ray was making a little headway with his French and came back triumphantly with some eggs which he had purchased with the aid of the Paul Daniels ‘Learn a language by word association' book which he had been studying while at the helm. He had bought the eggs to make one of his famous lighterman's omelettes: none of the salmonella-inhabited, runny, French-style versions for Ray. His were solidly delicious and a real meal in themselves. Already the allure of meals in restaurants had begun to pall. The cost was one factor, but by far the most irksome element in restaurant eating was the time it took to order something and then to eat it. I suppose it is all part of good living, spending ages over a meal and savouring every aspect of its presentation, but the eternal inquiry as to what each dish contained and above all whether it contained any garlic, which made Ray ill, became increasingly tiresome.

We were moored under the magnificent citadel in Namur, which no doubt had had a glorious past, but in the recent World Wars had had only a very short history of combat. It stands perched high on a hill at the junction of the Meuse and the Sambre, and must have looked very daunting to any invaders approaching from the river, but it was attacked from the rear in the First and Second World Wars. The defenders thought they had everything catered for, but were surprised by a parachute attack directly into the middle of the fortified area. Between the
Leo
and the citadel was one of the casinos that earn this part of the country the title ‘Belgium's Côte d'Azur'. Ray and I went to see whether we could get into this vast modern gambling hall, but we were not properly dressed and the men on the door obviously did not like the cut of our jib, so we decided to let them keep their money and moved on to Dinant further up the Meuse.

Probably the most knowledgeable man about the nuts and bolts of film making that I know had heard we were in the area and came on board for lunch. Lee Katz has spent most of his life in Hollywood, sometimes writing scripts for Warner Brothers ‘B' pictures and sometimes acting as assistant director or producer on major movies. Some were good, some bad and some indifferent but Lee was a true professional who had known all the greats of Hollywood in the golden studio
years. He is always amusing company and was in Europe on business of one kind or another. He told me of his days as assistant director on
Casablanca
and of how neither Humphrey Bogart nor Ingrid Bergman had been the first choice for their parts, nor had they wanted to play them, but they, like Claude Rains, were under contract to Jack Warner and had been obliged to make the film.
Casablanca
was entirely shot in the studio, though it has been praised many times for having the authentic feel of the Paris streets just before the war. He told me with some pride that it had been his idea, when the script arrived at the last minute for the final scene in which Bergman and her film husband leave from the airport, to make the studio set look authentic by hiring a group of dwarves to load the plane, and so give the correct perspective. Nobody at the studios ever thought the film would be successful and so even the choice of music was limited to what was cheap and already belonged to Warners. ‘As Time Goes By,' Casablanca, Bogart, Bergman and Rains somehow made a magic that will last forever. The film is a brilliant example of how nobody, but nobody, knows what the public will like and respond to before the work has been completed. Lee caught the train to Paris and I was sorry to see his dapper figure disappear with his memories.

As we pushed on up the Meuse we came to the Ardennes. Steep wooded hills swept down to the river's edge, making the landscape look as though someone tidier than I had folded it away in a drawer, like socks. I remembered how my mother who had been a fine watercolourist had explained the principles of the vanishing point to me whilst she was sketching the blue hills of the Nilgiri range in South India. With a few deft brush strokes, she had made the ranges of hills fall behind each other, somehow managing to create a distance on a flat surface. Perspective to me is a truly mysterious subject, but the Meuse in the sunset that evening seemed to wander enticingly up the sky, like the backdrop of a clever ballet set at Co vent Garden. At an isolated lock,
the lock-keeper told me how worried he was for the magnificent apple tree outside his little house. The tree was covered with blossom but he felt that the weather was sure to be unkind and there would be snow in July which would deny him the obvious bounty that was coming his way. He sold us some free-range eggs and some home-made cider and we felt enormously relieved to be in the deep country away from the roar of industrial Charleroi and the swank of the casino in Namur. The Ardennes on an evening such as this is as beautiful as anywhere that I have travelled. I wonder if the crew of the American tank that has been left beside the road at Agimont appreciated the beauty of the place.

Agimont is a very small hamlet on the border between Belgium and France. There is an agreeable chandler there who caters for the barge people as well as pleasure craft. We refuelled and bought a few items from his shop which was one of those places that has everything stacked away with no apparent order. We started to talk about the tank and the war over an excellent glass of Prunes de Bourgogne (this was the only place I have been able to find it). I wanted to know what it had been like to be a civilian in the war and to have occupying forces in a village of this size. He told me that I should talk to the local schoolmaster who had been at the school in Agimont for forty-four years and remembered both world wars.

The next morning the chandler came to the boat and we walked to the schoolmaster's house. The house was at one end of a neat little terrace of brick houses and had a courtyard at the back. At the side of the court there was the entrance to a living room that was jammed with furniture and an enormous stove which was burning merrily away. The schoolmaster was bright-eyed and very clear-thinking and immediately started to talk about his recollections of seventy-four years before. The old boy had so much authority that the chandler (an ex-pupil) and I sat on the floor spellbound.

He told of how the French army had arrived dressed in the
red and blue uniforms of the Napoleonic pattern with their fixed bayonets glinting in the sun. He told us of how he had helped the soldiers, who had had no field kitchen, to fill their waterbottles and start cooking on fires beside the road. How quickly it all changed, he said. The French were pushed back and the German army of occupation took over.