Leontyne (10 page)

Ray remarked when I got back to the barge that there was a lot of traffic coming up the canal in the opposite direction to the way that we were going: was there something we didn't know? This turned out to be very perspicacious of him as it very soon emerged, after a few inquiries, that a barge had crashed into a lock gate quite near Paris, where we were
heading along the River Marne. One of the most depressing things when travelling is to have to turn around when one's route is blocked, but having to turn round in a canal is particularly depressing, especially as, if I had asked the lady who sold us the live chicken at Berry-au-Bac, she could probably have told us. I reminded myself always to ask, in future, whether there were any blockages on the route ahead. Most lock-keepers have never been up their canals and probably don't know the countryside the other side of the nearest big town. Of course some of the lock-keepers are retired
bateliers
, who, as fellow
mariniers
, always pass on any vital scraps of information which might be of use on the voyage.

We retraced our way to Berry-au-Bac, waving a cautionary finger at the lady who had not told us about the closure on the Marne, but since I had not told her where we were bound it was not her fault in any way. She probably took it as a friendly gesture for there was a good deal of smiling and shrugging of shoulders. The Canal Lateral de l'Aisne brought us to Soissons, a pleasant town for those afloat, with a fine quay right in the centre. We arrived at the town just after passing beneath a bridge that Joan of Arc is supposed to have crossed. As we finished mooring, an elderly gentleman came up to us and told us that his ninety-two-year-old mother had become very excited because our boat was called the
Leontyne
, which was her name, and she had never seen a boat with that name in all her life of looking out of the window at the River Aisne. Deeply honoured I bought her a bunch of flowers, but when I came to deliver them, I could get no reply from the door where her son said they lived. They probably bolted the door early and retired to the television.

The next morning we left really early and had not gone more than a few hundred yards when the engine's usual regular, reliable throb suddenly spluttered to a halt. The unforgivable had occurred; we had run out of diesel. There is a strong current on that stretch of the Aisne and we had
to drop the anchor quickly. As the current was coming up our stern, the barge slowly swung round to face into the stream, and when we were settled we started the process of pumping fuel out of the tanks on the barge. These were very large and supplied the generator and the fuel for the Perkins cooker which is the maritime equivalent of the Aga cooker. It produced hot water, cooking facilities and a focus in the saloon which kept us warm and, above all, dry. It was not long before the Gardner engine, the best there is for maritime purposes of our sort, came to life again and we were ready to set off.

Unfortunately, as we had dropped the anchor we had drifted downstream, and now had reached a part of the river where it was too narrow to swing round under our own steam. We had no choice but to go astern (which was something that the sixty-three-year-old
Leo
was very bad at) until we reached a disused wharf where we made fast and had some breakfast. Ray had decided that the best way to get out of our predicament was to swing the barge, which in any normal circumstances is a fairly simple procedure. We tied a rope from the stern of the barge on to a bollard and then let the current swing us round. The idea was that at the crucial moment, Ray would flick off the line that was attached to the wharf and we would head sideways into the cut on the other side of the stream, which led into the next lock.

In a matter of seconds, a number of most unfortunate events occurred. Just as Ray was about to flick off the rope a large barge came hurtling downstream and started to blow at us frantically. There was just time to complete our manoeuvre but unfortunately Ray couldn't get his line off, and so there was nothing to do but tie the rope to the stern of the tug again and go ahead, so that we went back to our original position – thus avoiding the leviathan that was bearing down on us. In the excitement of getting out of the way of the barge, we had both forgotten that we had moved the dinghy to the other side of the barge and now as we swung towards
the quay, it was obvious that the dinghy was going to be crushed by the weight of the barge hitting the wall. Ray rushed up and succeeded in moving the dinghy forward but he was not able to avert the inevitable crunch. Luckily, the dinghy, which was a solid fibreglass dory, survived – although I have a flash-frame image in my mind of the moment of impact when the dinghy seemed to bend in half and then spring back again. Because we were now back to square one, we picked ourselves up and started all over again. Second time round, we succeeded.

In these days of voyaging, Ray and I were under way for upwards of twelve hours a day so that we could keep up to our schedule of getting to Vienna before the winter set in. The locks opened at 6.30 a.m. and closed at 7.30 p.m. with a flexible break at midday depending on the type of canal; the busy ones kept going all day, and on the Seine it was possible to travel at night for an extra charge. For us it was all free, except for the
pourboire
to the
éclusier
, which was not obligatory. The trick to speedy progress was to arrive at a lock just before it closed for the night and go through it. Then one could cover the stretch to the next lock that evening, where we would wait till morning for the lock to open. This usually meant making contact with the keeper of the lock where we intended to pass the night to tell him of our intentions. These evening chats were sometimes very amusing and sometimes downright dangerous, when guard dogs on extremely long chains would wait unseen till one was in their arc of attack, and then spring, gnashing their teeth and showing incipient signs of rabies. As a child in India, I had been bitten by a dog of questionable background, and had to have fourteen painful anti-rabies injections in the stomach. Since that time I have been extremely cautious of man's faithful friends.

When morning came, breakfast would consist of coffee
with honey and a running snack till midday when we would stop, if we could, for a meal of some sort – usually on the boat but sometimes in a café if there was one near the bank. In this way, providing there were not too many locks, we could cover about eighty kilometres a day. At the end of a day like this, there was no need whatsoever for sleeping pills.

I could tell that we were approaching Paris when, in Pontoise, I saw the first Vietnamese restaurant – a sure sign that we were close to a big city. We passed down the Oise and came to the barge capital of France, Conflans-Ste-Honorine, which lies at the junction of the Oise and the River Seine. Conflans has always been a favourite place of mine. The row upon row of barges moored there, with their brightly coloured bows and flags, are sadly increasing every time that I go. The barge people who used, when they retired, to be able to afford a little bungalow somewhere they had selected on their ceaseless roaming, were now, because of the decline of traffic on the waterways, only able to afford to live on their barges.

A complete barge community has been built up, even to the extent of having a chapel on a huge concrete barge called
Je Sers
. Père Duvallier is a massive priest of about sixty, who spends most of his days in a boilersuit helping his elderly parishioners to replace empty Calor-gas bottles, or mending generators for those who are not lucky enough to be positioned where they can get electricity from the town's supply. This splendid priest told me of his voyages as a young man, and in particular about the Danube and all its hazards. It was he who first made me realize that the horrors of the Rhine would be nothing to those we would encounter on the Danube. As we stood beside the map of the waterways of Europe, he pointed out how the French government's transport policies, ruled since the war by the railway and road lobbies, have isolated Paris from the rest of Europe as far as waterways for the now nearly standard 1300-ton barge
are concerned. In the heyday of the French waterway system, the late nineteenth century, a French official called Freycinet had standardized the lock measurements so that a 350-ton barge could pass anywhere. Now the canals approaching Paris from the north and south were woefully small by modern standards and it was becoming harder and harder for the one-family-one-barge outfits to win freight away from their competitors on the railways and the roads. There
was
work but it usually meant waiting for at least fourteen days before they got another cargo.

In the stern of the church-barge, the ladies of the barge fraternity were having a jumble sale, and one of them told me about the graze on the side of the Padre's face. He had caught a couple of louts trying to break into his church and given them a hiding such as they would never forget. He never told the police, of course.

The Padre told me to go to talk to Monsieur Noisette at the
Bureau d'Affrètement
to learn about the freight system on the French canals. M. Noisette was a small, intelligent and surprisingly young man who explained very clearly how it all worked. When a barge was unloaded it was allowed to put its name on the list waiting for a further cargo. Three times a week in a special hall (which looked a bit like the room where the bookmakers call over the prices of horses in the Classic races on the British Turf), the barge fraternity would gather to have a good grouse about how hard things were. The names of the barges would be called out and the captains would come forward and accept the freight, or they would pass and let someone else have it if they did not want to go to that destination. They did not lose their place in the queue for the next callover.

Freight rates are fixed by the various associations involved throughout France, representing the
bateliers
, the people who wanted their freight transported, and the government. To even things out, a ton of something very voluminous has a higher freight rate than a ton of sand and gravel.

The position with barges from another country is more complicated. A Belgian barge, for instance, can only take a cargo back to Belgium, and not take freight to another part of France. I must say I doubt very much whether this sort of restriction will change in 1992 when all these rules are meant to be swept away. It seems unlikely, for example, that Ray will be able to take a cargo in a British barge from one side of France to another.

Many of the
bateliers
have, in recent years, turned their barges into pusher barges with dumb barges at the front, like one of the
bateliers
whom I met in Conflans, M. Ollivier of the
Baikal
. This allows them to take bigger cargoes, but it limits where they can go because they cannot fit into one of M. Freycinet's smaller locks. I went to visit the
Baikal
which had been laid up in the shipyard because Ollivier had struck a floating tree and smashed his propeller, which was now being changed. He had met his pretty wife on the canals and they had done what many courting couples amongst the
batelier
families do: they had scribbled secret messages on the lock gates whilst waiting for the locks to fill up. Barge families tend to stick together, with families marrying into each other and fathers leaving their barges to sons-in-law they approve of. The women have as much to do with navigation and generally running the boat as the men nowadays. In some cases I have seen whole crews made up of women, but they must be pretty tough because there is inevitably a lot of heavy work to be done, from time to time.

Mme Ollivier had told me that, for her wedding, her parents had looked about for a friend's barge which had been recently transporting flour. The residue of white dust inside the hold had given a suitably bridal aura, and a tradition had been extended for another generation. ‘Today' she told me, ‘it would be much more difficult to find such a barge, because flour is transported by road and rail.'

Weddings are very important to barge people, and a certain M. Chantre told me of how his parents had made arches of
roses up the gangway for the bride to walk through. M. Chantre is the grand old man of the
batelier
world and had known that I would knock on his door: I suspect that there was very little that went on on the river that he did not know about. He has written books about his life on the waterways and he paints a great deal, mostly in oils. One of the lasting images that all voyagers have is of the great piles that are driven into the sides of the rivers, away from the banks, for barges to moor against while they are waiting for a lock to open. Usually, when the
batelier
gets up in the morning, these are the first things that he sees, and that is why they are called
‘les dues de l'aube'
, the dukes of the dawn. M. Chantre had included these in most of his evocative paintings which he proudly showed me in the minuscule studio at the back of his council flat in Conflans. He told me that there were many poets amongst his colleagues because barge people are very often alone in the midst of nature and have time to think grand thoughts. He also told me proudly that his feet did not touch
terra firma
till he was fifteen days old. He had been born in Le Havre and his brother had been born in the south, at Sète. His grandparents had been buried where they died, so his family had been dotted all over France, but nowadays, with refrigeration, everyone came home to Conflans. Sainte Honorine herself had been martyred in Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine and the monks had brought her bones to Conflans by barge.

He told me stories for hours about the old days on the canals, of how in the Bourgogne, where I planned to go, the
bateliers
would have a complicated double act which they performed with great skill. The area fifty metres either side of a lock is generally regarded as being in the gift of the lock-keeper, and therefore the fishing belongs to them. The best place to catch fish on a canal is close to a lock because that is where the best food supplies are, so while their barge went through, one of the
bateliers
would get on to the bank and engage the lock-keeper in some enthralling story which
kept his mind off what was happening in the lock, where the other
batelier
was busily hauling in his net full of fish.