Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  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.

  He described how terrible it had been for civilians in the first war in those parts. There had been many brutalities and reprisals on a much worse scale than in the second war. This was the reason that, as soon as it became clear that the Germans would again overrun the Ardennes in the Second World War, the population immediately left for France. The old man told us how in mid-May, forty-eight years before, the French army had again come along the road through his village and, convinced that there would be no war, had pushed sprigs of lilac down the muzzles of their field artillery. He had gone with the refugees and had returned after a couple of months, to start up the school again, but was infuriated to find that his house had been looted and his prized camera had been taken as well as his mattress – two things which were almost impossible, in those days, to replace.

  He spoke with great passion about the inadequacies of the military mind, how little the generals had profited by history, and about the inaccuracies of the bombing and shelling by both sides. The Germans had a large ammunition dump in the forest near Agimont and this had been communicated to the Allies, who bombed the area a number of times but never anywhere near the dump: some of the bombs fell near his school and smashed the windows.

  I left the old man’s house thinking that I would never be able to understand what it was like to be living in a country that was under occupation. Would one be heroic or passively resistant or, perhaps, collaborate? How did he explain the situation to his pupils then, and how did he place it in historical terms now? In eighty-eight years he had hardly strayed from this place of, at the most, two thousand inhabitants, and yet he had probably had more real things happen to him in his life than most people would dream possible.

  Chapter Four

  Agimont to Rheims

  We left Agimont in a swirling mist and crossed the border back into France without incident. I had decided to donate our coil of manila rope, bought at Chatham Dockyard, to the courageous old schoolteacher, who ran a cultural circle, and had left the huge bundle and a note with the chandler. I hope it was possible to sell it to a passing barge and that the circle could do something with the money.

  Our entry to France was at a charming village called Givet. It looked perfectly French with wide avenues, plane trees and men playing pétanque. It was hot enough for the umbrellas to be out on the café tables and the drowsiness of summer in France was just beginning. Jauntily I stepped into the customs post and started speaking to the young officer behind the glass partition who took not the slightest notice of me. He never so much as glanced in my direction until a slightly older and less pimply douanier arrived. The less pimply one stroked his bumfluff beard as he examined my passport and the ship’s papers. The more I explained that we had already entered France once, the more inquisitive they became. It was a Saturday morning and I did not want to be stuck here for the long weekend – it was Pentecost and the locks would be shut for forty-eight hours. I started to become less than my usual patient self but it was like grinding mud. More senior douaniers were called and it was decided a thorough search of the boat was to be made after lunch, which was at least something, even though it meant waiting another two hours. Ray, quickly assessing the situation in practical terms, suggested that they were causing the delay on purpose so that they could claim Saturday afternoon overtime.

  Ray was clearly cross that the boat should be searched and glowered as the group came on board. The youngest member, who had ignored me when I had arrived at his bureau, had changed into rummage gear for groping around in the bilges. The customs men were obviously hoping that they had stumbled on a major drug-trafficking ring, but became rather unsure of themselves when they got below. Just as they started to take everything apart, their walkie-talkie squawked and they stopped at once, explaining that their big chief was arriving. Fearing the worst, I went up on deck and waited. The chief was a charming man in civilian clothes who told me that he had been pottering around in his garden when the message had come through from these rather over-zealous colleagues that they might have caught a big fish. With enormous Gallic charm he called off the troops and apologized for any delays they might have caused. Hands were shaken all round and we were officially back in France. As we slipped away from the quay, I could almost feel the shrugging shoulders and the gesticulations in our wake.

  I was anxious to get to Fumay for the Pentecost celebrations which started the following morning. We pushed on and made it worth the last lock-keeper’s while to let us through his lock after closing time. He was very sympathetic when we told him that we were passionately interested in their famous cycle race which was being held the next day. This interest was a lucky invention on my part, but most villages have a bicycle race of some sort on these occasions.

  Fumay is famous for its slates and must have been a big centre for barge traffic. It has a superb mooring with a wide grass lawn and the town beyond. We tied up and decided to put the dinghy in the water. This went terribly wrong: we were both very tired and neither of us had checked that the outboard was properly attached, nor that the safety rope of the motor was tied on to the dinghy. The r
esult was that the engine ended up at the bottom of the canal. Depressed, we decided to tackle the problem in the morning.

  The next morning we became the centre of attention and the chief of the fire brigade was sent for. He told us that he could get someone who knew how to use a grappling iron. This infuriated Ray who redoubled his efforts in this direction: within minutes his little anchor snagged on to the motor and he had it inboard in no time. While he got the engine going again, I went for a walk round the town to find out what was going on. There was a procession from some shrine about three kilometres away to the main church and I could hear the chanting as a statue of the Virgin was carried down the steep streets. Two naughty boys who had obviously been forced to join in were being hissed into line by a stern priest.

  After some inquiries, I discovered that the main event was to be a strange race where the contestants ran for a while, then mounted their bikes and, depending on what class they were in, cycled off into the woods and hills for either eighteen or forty kilometres. This meant that it was very difficult to discover who was doing what. The first batch set off amid a good deal of incomprehensible chat on the Tannoy system, interspersed with jolly music. The second batch left just as the first lot were returning. The exhausted runners were given cups of water by pretty girls stretched out along the road and then, to my bafflement, the contestants ran to their bicycles and immediately changed their trousers, vigorously assisted by their wives and girlfriends. Once the pants were on, the cycling shoes, which had been neatly laid out, were quickly laced up and off they pedalled. The hours passed, exhausted runners came and went, cyclists returned, the running buffet got going. The prizes were displayed. There is, in France, a huge industry in manufacturing cups for sporting events such as these. In this event alone, in little Fumay, there were at least thirty trophies to be dispensed. I could see it was all going to take a very long time and returned to watch the proceedings from the barge.

  The prettiest of the girls who had been dispensing the cups of cold mineral water to the runners turned out to be one of the representatives of the sponsors of the event, Citroën, and she was drafted into the job of chief trophy-giver and kisser. The casual observer can be confused by the protocol of cheek kissing in France. It would appear that in Northern France the norm is three kisses starting on the right cheek, but from Paris southwards it is four kisses, two on either cheek. By this time there was a sizable crowd picnicking on the grass by the boat. The families of the contestants cheered their men and the teams they were in, and everyone basked in the sunshine of that May afternoon in this beautiful place. Fathers took toddlers for tiny walks, holding their babies’ hands above their heads to steady them; a Moroccan woman sterilized her baby’s bottle by giving it a good suck before she put it in her offspring’s mouth. The buffet cooked sausages and frites and the girls behind the counter flirted with the men of their choice. Even the police broke out a case of Orangina and smiled a bit. Gradually the crowd drifted away. As the buffet was packed up, the organizers played old-fashioned bal musette accordion music over the loudspeakers, and the buffet girls picked their partners and danced on the platform where the prizes had been given.

  I left Fumay with a tinge of sadness. Liberté, égalité and fraternité seemed to be working admirably in this little town with its high unemployment and beautiful valley. My French is passable, and it was a real pleasure to converse with people and not be able to hear the slightest trace of class in their voices, as one does in England.

  The Leo ploughed up through the valley of the Meuse and through the part that is called Les Dames de Meuse. Here there are three ill-defined ridges in the heavily wooded hillside which are Les Dames. They were so named after God had turned three unfaithful wives into parts of the hillside when their husbands had returned from the wars and found out what they had been up to. This ravishingly beautiful stretch, or bief as the French call the stretch of water between two locks, is what makes the barge people dreamy when they talk about the Meuse. While their lives are undoubtedly very hard, such beauty must make them catch their breath as they pass through it: alone at the helm for hours on end, they have time for nobler thoughts than many mere workers labouring away at their allotted tasks in the daily grind. The sky was blue, the sun was hot, the country green and unspoiled; the only thing missing were ducks. Ever since we had crossed the border from Belgium into France, there had been a noticeable absence of duck families, with their proud mums taking their broods for swimming lessons. I do not think we were passing through a region with a passion for duck soup but rather through a wooded and wild part, where the foxes and other predators took their toll of these charming birds.

  We stopped alongside an old barge which had been converted by a strange-looking gentleman with a long white, wispy beard and sandals, who lived there with his pretty young wife, their baby daughter and a Japanese boy. This strange group were potters, something I had not guessed when I stopped, the signs for their establishment being on the land side. Pottery is not something that I find very exciting and what they were producing fell well within the dull belt. Inside the barge, which was vast, were shelves and shelves of this firing and that, all neatly arranged in unsold rows. I felt sorry for them and desperately looked around for something I could buy that would make them feel that their endeavour was bound to succeed, when in fact it was clearly going to founder. I found a special kind of butter dish in which the butter is scraped into the lid and some water is put in the bottom of the pot. The water keeps the butter cold and therefore fresh for much longer than it would on a plate. I was very surprised to find that this device worked extremely well over the coming months, so perhaps the potters are on to a winner. Still, I somehow doubt it.

  We stopped at Charleville-Mézières and I went to have a look at its famous square which had been built at the same time as the celebrated Place des Vosges in Paris. The square is large, with a colonnade around the sides full of cafés and shops. The walls of the houses are crumbling a bit and still have the peeling paint of the signs of former establishments, which I found very charming. The cafés were full and I fell into conversation with a group of kids who were pleased to be offered a coffee in exchange for a bit of local chat. I marvelled at the splendour of the square but they immediately contradicted me saying that the town was a dump and that they were dying to leave and make their fortunes in Paris, I told them that everyone wanted to go to the big city at their age, but they were adamant. They had no work, they told me, and the prospects of ever getting a regular job in their lifetime in this town were dim. They said they did not want to end up like the group of winos sitting round the base of the splendid fountain in filthy, unshaven heaps. They had just seen Michael Douglas in Wall Street and felt that his was the kind of life they were cut out for. I told them what I was doing and they said it was far too slow for them and they preferred to see that sort of thing on the television. Their aim was only to find a way out of Charleville-Mézières and go to the big city where it all happened. I doubt that they will ever stay away for long, but their high spirits and excitement made me start to think about being in Paris myself again soon.

  Under way again, in the cool of the evening, we passed a couple from the Midlands in a steel yacht, who had decided to start a boat-hire firm on one of the canals and were looking around for a suitable site. I admired their courage and hoped inwardly that they did not find that the market was already saturated with plastic boats ‘sleeping six in comfort’. How often I had seen families in these hire boats in the midst of the most magnificent countryside, with the father miserably driving, and the rest of the family watching television.

  That evening we moored in a perfect sunset in the midst of fields, far from signs of habitation. We seemed to have come a great distance in a day; from being in the heart of the Ardennes to the real France. It all seemed too good to be true. The only thing that was apparently amiss was the terrific vibration on the propeller which we had first noticed in Belgium. I decided that we shoul
d be able to reach Pont-à-Bar before the famous French ‘at-midday-everything-stops-for-lunch’, the next day.

  We reached Pont-à-Bar in good shape and went to see the chandler in this remote place, which is famous simply because it is a canal and river junction that anyone who passes up and down the waterways knows as a milestone. There was a crane there, and the man who owned it was extremely helpful and in no time the Leo was dangling by one of the strops we had bought in London. The crane-driver had put one strop only under the stern of the tug and had just lifted the boat a little out of the water, so that the bows were practically submerged. To show that he did not really relish putting my dear Leo in this extremely ungainly position, he donned a pair of completely unnecessary dark glasses. A quick glance at the propeller showed that it was indeed badly bent on the tips of the blades. A good two inches on two blades had been bent over as though some giant had twiddled it round a finger. Ray and I undid the nut that held the propeller on to the shaft by wading thigh-deep in the muddy sludge of the Pont-à-Bar canal. Taking the old propeller off and putting a new one on was a simple job – but if only I had noticed, even in those unpleasant circumstances, the little flaw that was to cause us so much trouble later in the voyage!