Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (12 page)

No, I said, you mustn’t, really you mustn’t. I like to do it, said the Dutchman, I insist I do it, I must do it, I will make no charge. Why are we here, if it is not to be kind to one another, and help the poor, and the lonely, and the inadequate, and the weak? That’s nice of him, said Monica. There is no such thing as a free lunch, I said.

In the mornings I held spanners and passed rags. In the afternoons I wobbled after the Dutchman on his wife’s bicycle, seeking spare parts where there were none, falling on to the pavement, crazy with heat and fatigue. I minded the bikes in the sun as the Dutchman, who had no French, spent two hours in a confectionery wholesaler trying to buy an oil filter. When Monica and I tried to catch a nap he banged on the boat, when we sat down to eat he called us over to see his screw cutter. In the dead of night I mopped out the drip tray, trapped under the engine block as in a car accident. When we ate together the Dutchman trained Jim to put his head in his lap and made me jealous. If I told a joke he was there first with the punchline. One morning I woke and he was lying between me and Monica, his eyes bulging, a spanner between his teeth.

I said to him Ryk I feel so obliged, so helpless—you won’t take anything and I want to do something to repay you but I am no good at anything—all I can do is write reports and poems and things and what bloody use is that? No use, said the Dutchman, no use at all.

More and more problems were being found, more spanners to be held, more fruitless errands, and the days were passing. We realized the Dutchman would never let us go and we had to leave Calais while we had our reason. We said that we must leave next day and organized a dinner to thank him and his wife helped pull him from our engine-room by the ankles.

In the restaurant I opened an envelope. It wasn’t much of a poem, but Ryk didn’t interrupt as I read it.

I sing this song when the days are long with no clouds in the sky

And we are afloat on our narrow boat with a pub to steer her by

We lay by the quay, Mon, Jimmy and me, with not a single care

But a sudden call from the harbour wall said English boat—beware!

For it was Ryk—he was strong and quick and his eyes were shining blue

Oh my dears, I am full of fears of what will happen to you

Your lights are low, your fuel won’t flow, you have no batteries

Your tunnel light is a dreadful sight and your little dog has fleas

Your valves they bang, your pipes they hang, your plugs and wires are wrong

Your diesel drips, your voltage slips, your flexes are too long

Alas the day, if you sail away, you will surely meet your maker

Your block will smash and will fall with a crash on your water separator

But here I am, the Holland Man, and I will sort you out

I am strong, I am quick, and my name is Ryk and I leap on board with a shout

Pass me my spanner, pass me my hammer, and pass my coffee too

And you will see the Zuider Zee need never frighten you

So here’s to Ryk, who’s strong and quick, and both his eyes are blue

He’ll sort you out with a cheerful shout and make things work like new

But when you try to say goodbye and thank him for what he has done

He says no fear, perhaps a beer—then a wave of his hand and he’s gone!

Ryk laughed and read the poem out loud himself and laughed and read it out loud again and laughed and folded it carefully and put it in his wallet and took it out again during dinner and looked at it under the table and folded it carefully and put it back in his wallet. To my surprise I had found a currency he could accept.

RYK WAS ON HIS DECK BEHIND A PIANO-ACCORDION, fingering a merry tune about clogs, and his wife was waving. The gates at the end of the yacht basin were open and the
Phyllis May
headed for the Calais Canal, where the slow heartbeat of the tides would move us no longer. We would berth at Audruicq in four hours’ time.

We knew little about the French canals, but we had heard the water was sweet and there were ducks and grass and draught beer of a sort, sometimes less than a kilometre away. The maps said that if we could sail seven hundred miles we would get to Carcassonne. It was the end of the beginning.

Across the sunny basin, waving to the other boats, through the gate and under the bridge, out past the pontoon of the stamping Belgians. To our left the harbour entrance and the sea. We turned right past two bloated ferries and the wind hustled us into the grand old lock that led to the last sea basin—the lock that is left open so you just sail through. But today it was not left open. It was closed at the far end, and there was a red light.

In the front deck Monica was on the phone to Voies Navigables de France. It’s shut all day because they are diving, she shouted—we have to go back. I can’t go back, I answered, there’s the shame, there’s the accordion. Two men on the quay yelled—Twenty minutes and you’ll go through. Ask them do they work here, I shouted over the wind. Yes they do, Monica answered, they say we can pass—I don’t know what is happening. Behind me a freighter was coming in from the sea. It came towards the lock and entered it, and as I slowed for the end of the lock I lost steerage and the wind drove me across its path.

The end of the lock began to open, and I waited for the red light to change. It didn’t and the ship was coming on me like an avalanche. I had a choice—I could jump the light and sail through into the last basin, meeting God knew what on the other side, or I could risk being overwhelmed by the freighter. I slammed down the throttle. As I did so the bridge over the lock broke apart and its supporting girders came at me, ready to rip us open like a can.

I don’t think I panicked but I came close. We bolted for the centre of the bridge, and escaped just in front of the freighter, the wind screaming and pulling us across its path, the girders passing by my shoulder. The next basin was empty and we went hard right and let the freighter pass. There was a lot of it and it took a long time. We fought the wind to reach a quay and tied up and had a cup of tea and a shudder as the boat heaved and thudded against the wall.

Monica shed a tear and said Those buggers at the VNF. It was our fault, I said, we should have checked at the last moment, and perhaps we were never really in danger, there was more room than there seemed. We had another shudder and another cup of tea, like in the war.

We were joined by a yacht and a motor cruiser. Five o’clock, said the lady on the yacht, and they’ll let us out the other end into the canal. She had just crossed the Channel. You came across in that? she asked—in that thing?

We sailed down in convoy and waited at the lock as the wind tore along grey and yellow hills on the quay and strafed us with sand and gravel and dust. At half past five two men in rubber suits appeared on top of the lock. It opened, let the other craft in, and shut in our face. The wind blew us across the basin by a welding yard, and cinders and dirt howled over us. I thought—Across the Channel in a narrowboat to be smashed up by a freighter or choked in a sandstorm before we reach the canals. But the gates opened and soon we sailed out of our first lock in France, on to fresh water. I raised my camera to record the basin and Calais Town Hall. I had run out of film.

Ten minutes later we were in a café. A Ricard for Monica, a beer for me, a bag of crisps for Jim to chase around the floor. In the corner a friendly wolf—blue-eyed, a malamute. In seven hours we have come five hundred metres, I said to Monica. At this speed we won’t live to get to Paris, and Carcassonne is in another star system. But here’s looking at you, kid.

The landlord dropped to the floor and lay there for a while with Jim, as is the custom in these parts. When Jim had licked his face he got up and said—I will tell you a story about my sledge dog Lady. One morning my wife woke me up and said My darling, Lady has been killed—a car accident, it’s all over.
Merde alors
, I said, and jumped from my bed. So young, I said—there is no hope? No hope, said my wife—so young, so beautiful, so much loved, the blue eyes, the beauty, all is gone. I held my wife and together we wept. We wept and wept—my heart was breaking,
monsieur, ’dame
. Poor Lady Di, said my wife. Lady Di, I shouted, Lady Di!
Monsieur, ’dame
, it was the poor princess Lady Diana who had been killed, not my Lady with the thick fur and the blue eyes. The Lady Di was not much connected with me, and I was very happy. Most fortunate, I said.

NEXT DAY THEY LIFTED FOUR BRIDGES AND we fled down the Calais Canal into Flanders. Why did Hitler let the British get away at Dunkirk? my son Clifford had asked me at Christmas. He was forty and beginning to ask awkward questions. Hitler wanted the British Empire as an ally, I said, and the RAF had Spitfires and Hitler didn’t have the guts and he was mad. He stopped the tanks at Watten, thirty kilometres south of Dunkirk. The panzer leader General Guderian was speechless. Did any narrowboats go over? asked Clifford. No, I said, their engines were too small and the canals go only to London.

As the
Phyllis May
sailed through Flanders I thought of my children and my grandchildren and the people who had died to save their inheritance. Along the dykes and drains millions of poppies bloomed, under a huge sky.

Little diagrams in the
Navicarte
waterways guide said that nothing lacked in the town of Audruicq. There was a supermarket, a restaurant, a hospital, tennis, swimming, a camp site, canoeing, walking, cycling, and horse-riding. There were floating pontoons, and the lady mayoress would give you a kiss. Across the turning to Audruicq there was a chain. We gave up and moored on the bank. Three
péniches
came by—black transport barges, over three hundred tons, a car on top, wheelhouse high above us. At speed they could suck us into their cooling systems and spit us out like a stickleback. But they slowed down and just tore out our mooring pins.

The next morning our first canal lock, shared with a
péniche
. We cowered in front and when he came out we let him go ahead. He waved and led us south down the Calais Canal, in the sunlight.

There was such depth that the
Phyllis May
would have gone faster along the green straights and round the long bends between poplars, but we hung back, and rows of white clouds got to Watten before us.

THE DUNKIRK—ESCAUT LINK IS PART OF THE
grand gabarit
, the French wide-gauge canal system. It runs through Watten, where Hitler lost the war. It’s as broad as the Thames at Windsor. Thousand-ton barges, three times the size of the
péniches
, sweep the water up the canals and drains which run away into the marshlands. Sometimes the barges are alone, sometimes in twos, sometimes in threes. The French waterways are wider than the British, and older, and nearly three thousand miles longer. We turned under a bridge into a backwater, and tied up behind a restaurant.

I ordered a large beer and the waitress brought a glass four inches high, filled just above the mark with an icy liquid. You can’t quaff French beer. You take a little into your mouth and the bubbles force it into your bloodstream between your teeth.

I still can’t get my mind straight, I said to Monica. There is a kennel on the lawn with a sheep in it. That bouncy castle wasn’t there when I sat down. What is that machine splashing around by the
Phyllis May
? It looks like a cross between a paddle steamer and a lawnmower. I swear I saw a submarine in the cut and a camel looking at me through the bushes. It’s the strain. I’ll be better when we move on. We’ve been three weeks in France and we’ve got nowhere. Tomorrow we’ll start to motor.

Tomorrow our water tank emptied two hundred gallons on to the bedroom floor
Squish squosh
and it would take a fortnight to repair. A bottle of fish soup exploded in the cupboard. I was bitten on the sole of the foot by something with two fangs, which made me itch into my armpits. I couldn’t walk or bend down because I had pulled something structural in my backside when under the engine for the Dutchman. Jim lost another nail and was standing on three legs and every time he tried to scratch himself he fell over. The boat stank of fish soup and dirty water and I was sitting around like a cripple and we could do nothing but wait for the water-tank repair and it rained day after day and Monica had an attack of the summertime blues and cabin fever.

You must go home, I said—it’s been three months. You always planned to have a break. Go tomorrow—you’ll be in Stone for lunch.

In five weeks in France we’ve come twenty miles, I thought, and lost half our crew. Bloody good start.

WIDOWED, UNCONSOLED, JIM AND I SAT ON the pontoon and watched the machine with a paddle wheel. It had come about the duckweed. It flailed around for a couple of days, but did not bother the fish. Nothing bothered the fish—they teemed and chased and flopped and I wondered if they might come into the boat one night and get us. There are catfish in the French canals that will swallow a dog, and lampreys that can empty you and spit your husk into the water lilies. I have seen them in an aquarium, grinding their teeth against the glass. When we had watched the machine for a while I would go and mop up dirty water and fish soup until I started to feel sick, then we would watch the machine again.