To get our own back on this growling curmudgeon, we announced our departure for half past six in the morning, when the locks opened. For some reason quite beyond me, he then became extremely affable, had the lock all ready before the opening time, and was all smiles. I shall never fathom why his attitude towards us changed so rapidly. Perhaps his father had an unpleasant experience with the British during the war.
I had heard, of course, that we would have to get papers for our trip down the Rhine, and Mulhouse seemed the appropriate place to sort things out. In rough terms, any boat displacing more than fifteen tons of water has to have a licence to travel down the Rhine, and the captain of the vessel has to be licensed to steer the ship. This meant, as the captain of the Sylphe had told me, knowing where to anchor in a dense fog, if all that could be seen were the kilometre posts on the banks. You also had to prove that you had completed sixteen journeys up and down the Rhine as an assistant. Suddenly we were into the big stuff, and it was like being on the Thames again. We were through the last Freycinet-size lock of the journey and the width of the canal had quadrupled in size. How sad it will be when this large canal is extended the way we had just come, down the beautiful valley of the Doubs to link the Rhine to the Mediterranean via the Rhône. I am afraid that, commercial reasons aside, it will be an environmental disaster.
We stopped at around midday in an odd place called the Île Napoléon, which seemed to be the mosquito capital of Europe. There was a marina there run by an old river man called Jacob. He knew what the rules were, but our unorthodox craft made him suck his teeth a bit. We already knew that we would have to get a signalling board, which has replaced the blue-flag system. On the Rhine a ship coming up against the swift current has the right to choose its passage. If the captain wants to pass starboard to starboard (the wrong way), he puts up his blue board and the ship going downstream has to acknowledge the manoeuvre by displaying their own. The ships then pass blue board to blue board.
At this mooring were half a dozen waiting French barges. I asked M. Jacob why they were there, and he told me they were all waiting for permits to take their craft on the Rhine, and that they, like us, would first have to get a pilot. Slowly the awful truth began to dawn on us that there would be someone else on board. The inspector for all these boats was due that very afternoon, so we collected the blue board that M. Jacob conveniently had in stock, and tidied up the Leo ready for the inspection. I talked to our neighbours on the commercial barges and they told me that the inspector who was coming was a real terror. Ray was getting very hot and bothered about the idea of having to have a pilot and I was very anxious about the unorthodox way the boats were coupled together.
When the inspector arrived, he and Jacob had a quick conference which I was sure was significant. Then he started on us, and I must say he was thorough, very thorough. He looked at everything, from the anchor chain to the stern gland, and then went off, announcing that he would be back in an hour after he had given one of the other barges a good going over. Ray was incensed: we had come all the way from London and across the Channel without the slightest sniff of an inspection, and now, when we were about to go one way down a wide river, our boat might be pronounced unseaworthy, and, whatever the outcome, we would have to employ a pilot.
On his return the inspector, who obviously had had another chat with Jacob, came and told us what his verdict was. He told us that the Rhine Commission were very tough and that, with luck, he might be able to persuade them to give us a permit to make one trip, providing that we doubled up on the coupling holding the two boats together. This was not a problem, but then came the crunch. He said that the Commission would have no alternative but to consider us a convoy, and bound by the rules that applied to convoys of ten to fifteen thousand tons. To our horror he then calculated that on the stern of the Leo we would need a two-hundred-kilogramme anchor with a huge winch, to drop in case of emergency. When I told Ray he just laughed, but the inspector looked very stern and said that those were the rules, that he was bending over backwards to help, and all the usual jargon that officials use when they are trying to explain the ludicrous. I had to accept what he said, and also the suggestion that Jacob might be able to help us out. When I agreed to see Jacob, the inspector said that, while he could not officially allow us to go down the Grand Canal d’Alsace without the necessary permits, he would turn a blind eye – if we turned up in Strasbourg for a final inspection before he gave us the clearance for the Rhine proper. I felt duly grateful and then wondered why: it all seemed a bit unreasonable, but since neither of us had ever been on the Rhine it was just possible that it lived up to its name of the ‘Rhin sauvage’.
Imagine our surprise when Jacob said that he had just the size anchor and winch and just the amount of chain that we now required. Ray, with the cunning of a London river man, was convinced that all this was a ‘stitch-up’, but I prepared for the worst: this monstrous impediment that we would now have hanging on the stern of the poor old Leo was going to cost five hundred pounds. The anchor would take a day to arrive from Strasbourg, where I am sure Jacob had a friend whose business it was to break barges up for scrap, so Ray and I decided to go and have a look at the French Railway Museum.
The SNCF are a vastly powerful and efficient body in France. The service they offer is a model of how a railway should be run, and the same can be said of their railway museum. It is extremely well housed, in a disused railway shed on the outskirts of Mulhouse, and had grown considerably since the last time I was there, when we were doing research for the film of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. The superb rolling stock of the Wagon-Lit company was gleaming, and since there were not many people about, I asked the curator whether I might have the carriages opened so that I could show Ray some of the features of the construction. When we had made the film, I had bought a complete wagon-lit carriage from the breaker’s yard, sold back the bogey, and transported the top half to the studios where it was reassembled by a Belgian specialist. When the film came to an end I kept all the pieces, and in fact used some of the specially toughened glass windows in the interior of the barge. The care with which these carriages were built is quite astonishing by today’s standards. All the metal fittings were cast brass, with a dull chrome finish that would be prohibitively expensive to duplicate today. The train was entirely first class, and each compartment had its own washing cupboard. The splashplates on the doors of these cupboards were made from real sharkskin, with the roughness carefully sandpapered off so it did not catch on your legs. Plastic is much more practical no doubt, but somehow I have never felt frightened of sharks since I learned that their skins could be used in this way.
I can remember travelling on the famous Blue Train from Marseilles to Paris with my mother and sister. My mother had not wanted to travel through the Bay of Biscay and had disembarked from the P&O ship on the way back to England. The excitement of walking through the slightly swaying corridors, past the conductor warming himself by his little coal stove, and on to the dining car, is with me still. The dining cars in the museum are the ultimate in design for a travel environment. Built in the late thirties, all the glass panels were made by the Lalique glass company, using their famous ground-glass effect. Slim nymphs were everywhere, gazing into pools or holding up lampshades. The tables in the restaurant were all laid with that special chunky, plated cutlery, the famous WL logo engraved on the handles, which I had such difficulty in lifting as a child.
Ray and I sat in the compartment while the public filed past the windows; the raised platform outside had a switch in the floor which automatically turned the compartment lights on as they went by. I told Ray of how, when John Brabourne, my partner, and I were raising the money for Orient Express, we had gone to see Charlie Bludhorn, the financial wizard who had bought Paramount Pictures. We did not expect him to have heard of the railway, but we were in for a surprise. Ensconced in an incredibly expensive office on top of his fifty-five-storey skyscraper in New York, this czar of
all he surveyed scoffed, and said that he remembered the glamour of the train very well – from the days when it used to come through the station at Vienna when he had been a waiter there. He gave us the money to make the film, which was an astute move and very fortunate for us.
The next day dawned to a heavy drizzle – not exactly what we would have ordered to do our fixing of the winch and anchor. The latter arrived swinging from the bucket of a mechanical digger, and was greeted by a look of incredulity from Ray. When we loaded it all on, with the required thirty metres of chain, the stern of the Leo sank about four inches in the water. We had to rummage about in the storage area under the afterdeck and take everything off the boat on to the barge to improve the situation. We were able to halve the amount the stern had sunk, but even so the boat was too low for anything but the calmest waters. We had complied with the regulations, however, so we parted with the five hundred pounds and made ready to set off again for the Grand Canal d’Alsace, along the branch canal that runs to it from Mulhouse.
The Grand Canal itself runs north from Strasbourg and very nearly reaches Basel, in Switzerland. Basel, surprisingly, is the port with the second highest tonnage figure in Europe. As soon as we were through the giant lock into the main canal we could see why. There was a procession of very large barges churning up and down, much faster than we could ever move. The barges had two, sometimes three crews, and ran non-stop from destination to destination. They usually took four days from Rotterdam to Basel against the current, and two days going the other way. All the locks were prepared for their arrival, which they announced over their radios, and it was very rare to see a barge waiting for a lock to open. This created a new problem for us: all the lock-keepers spoke German, and very quickly at that. We just had to wait till the commercial barges had gone into the lock and nip in behind them, hoping that the lock-keeper did not close his massive gates on the Leo and crush her to pulp. They never did, of course, but I was glad when we finally reached Strasbourg on the evening of the next day.
‘Strasbourg – France’s gateway on the Rhine’ announced a large placard as we crept into the city on a lovely golden evening: past the parliament for the European Community and on into the centre of the town, where we tied up alongside the Quai des Pêcheurs, who have long since ceased to ply their trade from here. All we had to do now was to wait for the Rhine inspector to come and inspect the wart that had grown on our stern. The restriction of having to wait for permission was something that had not happened to us before, and it was very annoying. Ray and I decided to cross the Quai des Pêcheurs and have a drink in a lively bar where the students of Strasbourg University were having an end-of-year farewell party. They drank too much, we drank too much, the songs were blue, and though we did not understand the words, the sense was clear enough. We were glad it was only a short walk back to the barge.
The inspector called the following morning and said the work looked satisfactory. All he had to do now was to convince the authorities that they should allow us to have our one-way permission. I felt that the battle was over and it was now only a matter of time before we were on our way again. The inspector had told us that we could moor here, but the authorities wanted us to move on. I decided that, while this might be a poor trump card, I could at least say that since we did not have the permission, we could not move. I explained all this to the inspector and told him that he had better get his colleagues to hurry up with their weighty decision.
There were pleasure boats taking rides round the canals, so we decided to go on one. It was exactly the same as a pleasure trip anywhere else, with instantly forgettable facts being shouted through a loudspeaker. Ray and I preferred to look at what interested us rather than listen to all this indigestible information. I did notice a rather pleasant looking family who had their home in the bottom part of a building right on the edge of the canal. I resolved to try to find out where they lived and call on them to find out what they did. After our busman’s holiday I walked down the street where I thought their house should be. I asked a gentleman who was getting out of his car if he could help. It turned out that he was a Lutheran pastor who, because of an odd series of coincidences, had been drafted into one of the more bizarre forms of the ministry to which he belonged: being a Protestant, he spoke both German and French and had been chosen to be the Padre at Spandau Prison. He had worked there for five years in the early fifties, when the seven famous Nazi war criminals were incarcerated there. None of them, he said, showed the slightest remorse – except for Raeder who told him that he had given Pastor Niemöller the chance to escape. Niemöller had been a naval commander in the First World War, and Raeder told him he could leave Dachau provided he stopped all protest against the Nazi regime. The Pastor, a very brave man, refused – and spent the rest of the war in the concentration camp. The Padre also told me that it was the Americans who first gave the prisoners turkey for Christmas, in 1950, the fourth Christmas that they had been there. It must have been an odd job to be in charge of the spiritual needs of these men.
The Pastor told me how to reach the house which I had seen from the canal. I went and talked to the family there, who told me that their modern home, with its balcony overlooking the canal, had been an old garage which they had converted. The father’s trade was very high-quality lithographic printing, and he took me out to see his works on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Strasbourg. Artists and painters came and worked with him to manufacture prints of their work. This was what he specialized in, though he had to earn the rent by printing advertisements for the usual inanities. I found his large facsimile of the original design for Strasbourg Cathedral quite fascinating. The detail that the draughtsman of four hundred years or so ago had put into the plan was quite extraordinary. Strasbourg Cathedral, as the design showed, should have had two spires, but when they came to build the southern spire the foundations began to sink. The front of the cathedral is so ornate that one rarely looks up to see that there is a missing spire. Where the spire should have been, two hundred feet above the street, someone has built a postcard kiosk, which looks quite grotesque perched high over the town like that, though perhaps its earnings keep the roof in good repair.
Once a year Strasbourg has a market in the heart of the city, which is completely closed to traffic for the day. Thousands of people come from all over the area. Gypsies, Algerians, Turks from across the Rhine in Germany, and representatives of every other nationality under the sun. The crowded medieval city had the feeling of how I imagine the famous fairs of the middle ages to have been, with throngs of wide-eyed people genuinely amazed by what they were seeing. It is very sad to see so little wonder in people’s eyes these days, but I suppose it’s because everyone thinks they have seen everything there is to see on the television. Voyaging slowly on the Leo, one felt every nuance of the change in the countryside, every tiny influence of the changing population and their habits. Outside in the open, the weather, too, had a very strong bearing on how one felt about a place. This physical involvement, the air round the people and places, is the essence of travelling and something that cannot be substituted.
Monday morning again. We were still waiting for the Rhine inspector to return with the papers, and, worse still, the name of a suitable pilot for our descent of the Rhin sauvage once, two or three locks downstream, it was flowing freely, uncorseted by canalization. The papers finally arrived in the afternoon and we had a clean bill of health from the Commission, whoever they were. There is a British representative on this commission, which is considered a sinecure by the French as there is precious little British involvement in shipping on the Rhine. Our inspector had put on a gaily coloured shirt and I suppose, like all prisoners and their captors, we had grown quite fond of this meticulous man with his rules and calculations. He had the grace to admit that these had been mistaken by 25 per cent in regard to the size of the anchor. Ray and I looked at each other, thinking that this mistake might have been made because that was the only anchor that Jacob had ha
d in stock at the time, but that was an ungallant thought. There was nothing to do but grin and bear it, and hope that we would never have to drop the anchor in anger, because if we did there was a very good chance that the poor old Leo would be pulled in half like some saint in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
Our pilot followed close on the heels of the departing inspector. He was a small French batelier who spoke German and lived in Strasbourg Harbour on his barge, which was too small to make much money with. He supplemented his income by piloting French barges, and the odd voyager like ourselves, up and down the Rhine. He came to us through an agent, so he must have been quite well known. His fee was fifty pounds a day plus travelling expenses, and we arranged to start from the harbour at six thirty the following morning. Ray was, by this time, quite rightly feeling that the pilot’s arrival was an unnecessary expense, and had taken a dislike to the man. I could see that I was going to have to dance about a bit to keep tempers from fraying. Luckily my younger daughter Sabine and her boyfriend Robert, returning from a youth orchestra concert in the South of France where they had both been playing the violin, were due to arrive that evening. I hoped that this would cause a distraction for Ray, and take his mind off the vagaries of the EEC bureaucracy.
The following morning we were all up at 0.600 hours. Shipshape and Bristol fashion – as much as we ever could be – we left the centre of Strasbourg for the harbour, to pick up the pilot and to tackle the much vaunted Rhin sauvage. He was there waiting for us, carrying a small holdall, which seems to be the sign of all boat people everywhere. We discovered later that he lived on little packets of soup that were dissolved in boiling water. He never ate or drank anything else, except water. I found Ray trying to explain that when you put the Leo astern, she always cut to port. The pilot was not listening: he was one of those men who knew how to do everything better than anyone else.
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