Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  The generator started easily and the blower heater was switched on. Taking the 2CV off the barge, we went for a drive around the town and did some serious shopping. One thing we needed was some of Michel Sandrin’s excellent maps of the waterways of France and Belgium. They are very cleverly laid out so that they really make sense from the water, which makes it easier to estimate – barring incident – where one might get to each night. The other thing that we required was some heavy-duty cable to run an electrical supply to the radio. This consumed a lot more power than I had anticipated. It worked well whilst it was receiving signals, but as soon as I started to transmit, it activated the electronic device that gauged if there was not enough current, and the set was switched off. I wanted to fix this before we went too much further because I knew that it was essential to be able to speak to the lock-keepers at some of the bigger locks, so they knew when to expect you.

  In the late afternoon we set off from Calais with just enough time to get through the first lock before it closed for the night at 7.30 p.m. Leaving Calais we passed through two automatic bridges. This was easy for us, but there was a small, plastic French boat which was having a lot of trouble, because it wasn’t big enough to set off the signalling device. This required a big metal object like a barge to pass through its beam, so the skipper was very grateful to be able to follow us through. The usual bonhomie ensued, but our encounter was short-lived as he was able to go much faster than us. We soon lost sight of him as he sped down the long straight stretches of the Canal de Calais – built by Louis XIV and probably one of the oldest canals in Europe.

  The first true canal lock was opened by an unusually pretty girl. Ray inquired whether this standard of pulchritude was normal, but I’m afraid I had to assure him that it was not. That night we tied up in a little town called Watten on the main canal from the coalfields of Northern France to Dunkerque. We now had the choice of whether to go north, following the canal through Dunkerque and then along the coast to Bruges, or to go via the River Lys and St Omer to the south. I decided that the industrialization of the Dunkerque route would be a lot less pleasant than the Lys. I wanted, in any case, to have a look at the Anderton lift at Les Fontinettes.

  The next morning was one of those that make any trip magic. There was mist on the canal and sun on the trees lining the bank. The local boulangerie supplied us with fresh croissants and away we went. The good old Leo was chugging along very happily and we didn’t appear to have any electrical problems. Then, quite suddenly, the moment was gone. On the bank, on a crash barrier by the road which ran along the side of the canal, sat a teenage boy in obvious distress. On the road lay all the sad, telltale signs of a recent accident: oil, shards of glass. Later, when I inquired what had happened, I found that two young coach drivers, driving very close together and much too fast, resulting in one coach crashing into the back of the other, had killed seventeen people including the boy’s best friend. I felt I had intruded on his grief, but we were soon gone round the bend, probably never to pass that way again. I hope he never forgets his friend.

  Les Fontinettes is a massive lock with a thirteen-metre lift, which can take barges of up to 1300 tons. Before this giant was constructed, a Scots engineer called James Anderton had, in 1887, built a lift which did the same thing for the standard French barge. The barges are sealed into one of two water-filled basins which rise and fall under high-pressure hydraulic control. At first sight, one’s instinct is to assume that the basin with the barge in it must be heavier than the one with just water, but in fact a boat displaces its own weight in the water, so they balance perfectly. The mayor of the district is doing his best to preserve this masterpiece of riveted steel, but no one is very interested and I’m afraid it will not be long before it is condemned as unsafe.

  Ray and I took the car off and went for a trip to St Omer – a pretty little town, passed by the hordes on the motor routes without so much as a glance. The canal which used to pass through the middle of the town has been closed for a decade or two, but it is still a bit of France as it must have been before the 1939-45 war. I watched an old man buy his baguette and balance it on the handlebars of his bike whilst he did up his cycle clips, which he had taken off his trousers before going into the boulangerie. I wondered why it had been so important to him. Perhaps it was just habit or perhaps the woman who ran the shop had a certain twinkle in her eye. Buying bread in France is a very serious business and an anchor to the real world. In many places, the average family will buy bread twice a day, unless they shop at the local supermarket where the loaves come in a clingfilm sheath and taste of rubber.

  We set off again down the wide Grand Gabarit canal, and soon realized why it had been built so wide. Coming towards us was the most enormous tow: four really massive barges pushed by a huge power unit. We crept to the side of the canal but even so there was hardly enough room for us both to pass. The strong undertow seemed to draw us on to the barges but at the last minute pushed us away again. As we passed the wheelhouse the skipper gave us a cheery wave. Palely, I fluttered my hand in return. It is much wiser to listen for the arrival of these monsters on the radio, which gives you time to find a wide place to lurk whilst they go by.

  The River Lys looks a lot more enticing on the map than it is on the ground. For the first few miles it was very pretty, with quaint, old, manually operated lift-bridges and cross éclusiers, but soon we approached Merville, which is no more than an average industrial town in Northern France. Factories lined the banks and debris of all sorts floated on the river. We found a field outside the town, just as the sun was going down, and decided to stop. I went ashore with the sledgehammer, drove in a couple of stakes and hitched our mooring warps over them. One of the cardinal rules about mooring anywhere on rivers or canals is always to have two lines out. I have been cursed many times for only making fast the bows, which means that when a barge goes past the undertow pulls the stern of your boat out and it bounces against the other vessel. The other golden rule is to start looking for somewhere to tie up early in the day: if you don’t, you invariably end up in a really beastly place, next to a chemical plant.

  We crossed the Belgian border soon after we got under way the next day. Our papers were inspected by a morose-looking gentleman who was leaving this posting, where he had been for the last twelve years, the very next day. As he was going through my papers a band of his colleagues came bounding into this sleepy little customs post. They merrily produced some bottles of Calvados and we all drank to the gloomy douanier who explained that the equally morose fish in the plastic bowl on the window ledge was the last surviving fish this year in the grossly polluted Lys.

  Whether it was the Calvados or just plain stupidity, I made a wrong turning on the canal and had entered a lock before I realized my mistake. Coming out backwards caused a certain amount of ribald comment from the local barge community who were understandably annoyed at having to wait while this daft English boat sorted itself out. In the confusion I chatted to Freddie, a Belgian batelier, who was manoeuvring his barge, the Helga, with very considerable skill. He told me that his family had been in the marinier trade since the seventeenth century. He was the fifth generation and lived with his pretty wife Helga (his barge was romantically called after her) and their two children aboard their floating home. The children were having a holiday the next day so they were to be picked up in a taxi from school and brought to the barge that evening. The Helga was carrying 300 tons of soya pellets for cattlefeed to a distribution point near Lille. Freddie and Helga were to arrive at their dock that evening, and were looking forward to a few days’ rest before they got another cargo. They clearly had good contacts, but told me that they sometimes had to wait for up to three weeks for a cargo from a freight bureau.

  I thought Armentières was worth a visit, so we stopped for a few hours. It was hard to realize that the area we were passing through so peacefully had been the battleground in almost every European war for the last two millennia. The city, flattened in
the First World War, was bustling, bright, and swinging with young and extremely kissable mademoiselles (the original mademoiselle from Armentières won notoriety, as the song has it, by stealing a barber’s pole and chopping it up for firewood). The Belgians have obviously found the secret of Common Market prosperity by providing the Market headquarters and, no doubt, collecting a sizable rent. They also manage to have more television channels than anyone else in Europe – including all the British channels for which, apparently, they pay nothing at all.

  Under way again, we soon came to a halt in a long queue of barges in Dienze. A railway bridge about thirty miles ahead had been raised and the canal was to be blocked for three days. At least that is what I was told by the barge people we were moored behind. I knew from experience that nonprofessionals like ourselves never get told the truth in case they get in the queue ahead of the regular barges. I could see that we were in for a long wait, so Ray decided to go back to London for a couple of days, and as we were only six hours from Bruges, we arranged to meet there.

  I went to the station to help Ray with translation and buy some stores, and when I got back to the boat, hardly two hours later, the queue of twenty barges had disappeared as if by magic.

  I set off by myself the next day – something that I had promised myself not to do, but the canal to Bruges was very wide and there was only one lock. I was also able to use the VHF radio telephone to make link calls to London. This involved having a radio operator’s licence, a maritime VHF radio, and a licence for the radio. After that, providing your ship is within the range of the resident transmitter, in this case Radio Antwerp, it is relatively easy to make a call. One of the pleasant things about the system is that it takes at least six months for the bills to come through. It took quite a long time for me to be able to roll the necessary alphabet round my tongue, however. Lima Echo Oscar November Tango Yankee November Echo was how I had to spell my ship’s name; Mike Alpha Delta Mike Fiver our callsign. For some reason it is usual amongst the waveband fraternity to add little flourishes to the end of certain words, like the ‘r’ on the end of five.

  My journey to Bruges was uneventful and took me along wide canals, the high banks on either side blocking the view of Flanders field. When the banks disappeared Bruges came into view. A once very prosperous city whose fortunes were based on the wool trade, it was preserved from developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by its parlous state. Now, because it is so astonishingly unspoiled, it is in real danger of being stared to death by the millions of tourists who flock there every year. The lace that Bruges is famous for is made in Taiwan and sold to visitors desperate for some kind of souvenir that they can buy in the five minutes they have been allowed by their tour operators for shopping. Mercifully, the vast coaches that bring these bewildered sheep are not able to get into the middle of the town because, as Art Buchwald wrote to his mother, the streets of Bruges, like those of Venice, are full of water.

  I found a berth alongside a mown and grassy bank under one of the three windmills in Bruges. Charlotte and Bernard, boat dreamers from London, were there to catch my ropes and help me make fast. They had built a boat in Holland the year before, had just made their first trip over the Channel, and were now on their way to the Mediterranean for the rest of their days. This was their plan, a dream which would almost certainly not be realized because they both had far too much energy to sit around in the sun for long periods. However it is dreams of this sort that keep boatbuilders building boats which are becoming increasingly like suburban houses. Their floating palazzo was called the Kyamanzi, a name from Zululand meaning a home on the water.

  I found my way into Bruges through the neat little park which had so thoughtfully been provided as a mooring. As I strolled through the trees, I discovered about sixty men sitting silently on stools beside wicker baskets. It took me some time to realize that they were a group of pigeon-racing enthusiasts, awaiting the start of a race which they clearly took very seriously. I longed to ask them about their hobby, but speech would have been as much disapproved of as in the library of the Travellers’ Club. Carrier pigeons were used to bring the news of the result of the Battle of Waterloo to the House of Rothschild in Paris, so I suppose the pigeons have been navigating their way through Belgium for centuries. How they find their way will always be a mystery to me.

  I wandered through the pretty streets, which were full of the most surprising things. In one shop, which didn’t look like a shop at all, I found Willi, who had been a mechanic on a large farm. He agreed to try to mend the Leo’s hydraulic pump that lifted the crane arm, and also all the temperature gauges. Talking to him wasn’t the easiest thing because he spoke French with the guttural accent of the Flemish. I did discover that he was a pigeon fancier, however, and he mournfully told me of a misfortune that his pigeon-racing compatriots had suffered. Apparently thousands of racing pigeons had set off on some race the previous year and had not been seen since. No one has any idea what happened to them, though it’s thought that perhaps they flew into some freak magnetic field and became disorientated. He finished my job remarkably quickly and left everything working.

  While he was still at it, I took the dinghy and rowed round the canals of Bruges. When I started it was calm and peaceful but suddenly the tourist launches started to run: that made my progress uncomfortable because the drivers didn’t expect to find anyone rowing round these narrow canals and there was much cursing as they had to slow down to let me pass. The drivers were all the same type, handsome and sporting heavy dark glasses, spouting hackneyed commentary about the buildings they passed, and always ready to give that little extra attention to the lonely female tourist. By midday the town was full. The great landcruisers had brought their load of tourists for the day and they swayed through the alleys being harangued by their group leader. So much information, so many languages, so many heads swivelling to pointed fingers. There does come a point when there are simply too many people in one place at one time.

  I tied up the dinghy, and went into the Church of Our Lady to have a look at the splendid Michelangelo they have there. It had been bought by a member of a Bruges merchant family while he was working in Italy, brought home and presented to the church. In fact it is one of the very few Michelangelos that have found their way out of Italy. I found it extremely beautiful and happily paid my entrance fee to have a closer look. What a nice little earner it must be for the church, rather like having The Sound of Music in the library of a film distributor.

  I found myself walking through the car park to avoid the crowds, when I noticed a mechanical-organ museum. The door was opened by a fresh-faced woman whose gaiety was quite infectious. She took me to her boss, explaining that she was not yet qualified to do the tour. As I was the only person in the museum the tour didn’t seem to be very important but there was no way I could see that I was going to be allowed to wander round this enormous collection of fairground organs alone. As I waited for Mrs Hilbergen to descend from her office, which overlooked the collection, the girl who had let me in started up the largest of the organs with the triumphal march from Aida. In that confined space the decibels were all-embracing and it was impossible not to smile: this place is to be strongly recommended when feeling glum. Mrs Hilbergen, a briskly agreeable woman, had been an accountant in Ostend until the company that employed her acquired this collection of mechanical instruments from an enthusiast. She had been put in charge of the place and was turning what could have been a fairly staid exhibition into a place of entertainment. As Aida came to an end she started up her most famous organ, the Black Cat, with the ‘Violletten Waltz’, and taking me by the hand, suggested that we waltzed on the two-metre-square piece of dance floor. This was not at all what I had expected, and it proved to be very agreeable.

  The infectious gaiety of the music and my two companions made the morning rush by, and I was very sorry to leave when a coach party of old-age pensioners arrived from Brussels. As I left, my friends were giving the pensioners
a blast of ‘J’attendrai’ on the big organ, which had the old boys and girls in each other’s arms on the minuscule patch of floor in no time.

  They make delicious chocolates in Bruges, mostly by hand. The process is not at all simple. The biggest drawback to making them at home is getting the chocolate to shine. This only happens if the temperature of the chocolate is very, very precisely controlled. A tenth of a degree centigrade can make all the difference between a glistening triumph or what looks like a dusty old choc from last year’s Christmas boxes. The other closely guarded secret these chocolatiers pass through the generations to each other is the exact blend of cocoa beans. The buying of these beans takes place at the London Cocoa Market and the right blend of bean at the right price is all important. Once the beans are bought they are sent to an outside factory to be turned into chocolate, as the plant required is far too expensive for the small trader. The chocolate is then melted down to exactly the right temperature and poured into moulds. Once the thin layer of the walls of the chocolate has set in the moulds, the centres are filled with all sorts of delicious things and then another layer of chocolate is poured on the top. Though this may sound frivolous, in Bruges it is a métier that is taken very seriously indeed. But alas, chocolates and chips go straight to the hips.

  The other major pastime in Belgium is drinking beer, of which there are untold varieties – some stronger than Scotch whisky, or so it seemed. After a glass, I found myself talking to the most beautiful girl in the land as she leant across the counter at the Café Vlissinghe, where she was helping her mother who had been running the place for the last forty years. She was well over six feet tall and built extremely neatly. Her husband, who was an engineer on a supertanker, was due back the next day after six months at sea and she was positively purring with expectation. ‘Leontyne, what a beautiful name’ she sighed, when I told her the name of my boat. I fell for her, her pub and for Belgium at that moment, which was probably what the mischievous monks who brewed the dark and dangerous beer I was quaffing had in mind.