Leontyne (21 page)

The hotel was near the main station and in the red light district of Frankfurt. The Germans, in public at least, seem to treat sex like some brisk muscular activity which must at all times be efficient – or so the brochures that I had been given would have it. In the streets where I found myself there were many bars which seemed to cater for the ambling American servicemen who roamed the streets in twos and threes. Next there were the brothels which were somehow industrialized, many containing the sexy French word
‘amour'
in their names: ‘Palais d'Amour' and even ‘Sauna d'Amour'. After the
d'amour
group there were a number of establishments which had woven, equally inappropriately, ‘Paradise' into their billboards. ‘Paradise Garten' was a six-storey building; the girls who were not busy leaning out of the windows and whistling at the crowds were instead trying to catch the eye of some likely chap in the street below.

Near the underground entrance at the top of the Kaiser-strasse, opposite a ribbon of multi-screen porno cinemas, I met some angels – at least if they were not, they were surely blessed with a ticket to heaven. A minibus announcing that
it was waging war against AIDS was parked in the middle of the pedestrian zone. There was an orderly queue of heroin addicts waiting to exchange used needles for new ones, a cup of tea and a packet of condoms. I was fascinated by all this, and went to ask the beautiful woman who was running the show with three helpers to tell me about her efforts. She was called Crystal and, curiously, held my hand while we talked, trying to see whether I was genuinely curious or some sort of police spy. She explained that her clients never had any peace from the authorities. In Germany it is against the rules to shoot up ‘H', and that meant that you were sent to prison if you were an addict. No attempt was made by the authorities to cure the addicts, and, according to Crystal, there was no use of heroin-substitute drugs to get these poor people off their deadly habit.

Crystal's big breakthrough had happened when she had persuaded the police to give her a hands-off zone ten metres round her little bus, three times a week, so at least the junkies could exchange their needles. She readily admitted that her successes were limited but she told me that she had been pleased when a group of women she had been working with had stopped a man giving a young girl a shot of heroin for the first time. Making people aware of what was right and wrong, and getting them to do something about it themselves, was the only way forward, she said. While we were talking, Crystal's team, Connie, Rosemary and Hubert were dishing out their giveaways, counting the used needles and dispensing the tea. Nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed to shock them more than the police brutality towards these poor wretches – especially in winter. The ways that the addicts had to steal and sell themselves to satisfy their craving were just a way of life, and they had heard all the stories of depravity a thousand times before. In a city where there are 392 different banks, you would think it should be possible to fund an operation like Crystal's, but all she could raise was a small amount from federal funds in Bonn.

When I got back to the boat I found that I had some neighbours from the German yachting fraternity, including the beauty who had hailed me in her bikini with that husky ‘Hallo boys'. Her husband was a jolly restaurateur who invited me on board his cabin cruiser for a beer. By the time I had drunk with them and all the other owners of the small flotilla that had moored against the barge, and had returned the compliment with the crate of beer I had bought on our last refuelling stop, a good deal of alcohol had been consumed. One of the owners of the boats, I cannot remember which, had bought a synthesizer but did not know how to work it. The girl in the bikini could play a keyboard and soon became the star of the party, while the men flashed torches over the instructions to turn her perfectly pleasant piano into a large string orchestra. I sat on the deck watching them, and then slipped off to bed, making sure that I had locked myself in as I was sure there would be calls to have yet another nightcap. There were, and I was glad I had battened down the hatches for these hollow-legged hearties were more than a match for me. In the early hours, I heard the boats being untied as they went off to their regular moorings and presumably their normal day's work.

The next day I went by tram to the Leather Museum in Offenbach. The museum was started by a gentleman who got into collecting leather objects early, just after the First World War. He had very little money but managed to assemble, amongst other things, one of the very best collections of genuine North American Indian items including a beautiful pair of beaded moccasins. Since then the collection has grown and houses such diverse items as Napoleon's handbag, as well as a huge range of other things, from Mexican carved leather saddles to the thumbs and sinews of some wretched British officer that a Chinese warlord had cunningly turned into a belt. There were ravishing red leather boots from Hungary and the most delicate ladies' shoes from
fin-de-siècle
Paris. This odd and often eccentric collection demonstrated
so great a variety of uses that mankind has made of leather that I thoroughly recommend any who pass nearby to visit it.

On my tramride back to Frankfurt, I sat next to a bright young French student who had a part-time job in the town to learn German and German business methods. She helped me with my inquiries on how to get to Frankfurt Zoo and then very kindly came with me. I have never been fond of zoos but had frequently been told that the zoo in Frankfurt is very splendid. The buildings are extremely efficient and everything was beautifully laid out, but somehow I felt even sorrier for the animals than usual. Now that it is possible to see them in their natural habitat every five minutes on television, I should have thought that the demand for zoos would have dwindled, but I was to discover this did not seem to be the case in Germany.

On the way to the zoo, the French girl prattled on authoritatively about the benefits of the EEC and about how big and efficient everything was going to be, and my heart sank because she really believed it would be the case. How wonderful the Channel Tunnel was going to be, she said, how it was going to bring Europeans together! I remembered the great sense of achievement I had felt when we had successfully made our crossing, and how glad I had been that Britain was an island. I realized that what I was discovering on the journey I was making through the byways of Europe was a million miles away from the economic dreamworld that this girl was telling me about. We arrived at the tram stop outside the zoo and mercifully she had to go and do some more homework for the bright new tomorrow that she and her generation were building.

Ray was returning the following day, so I rose early in the morning to cross the bridge above the boat for a look at the Film Museum on the other side of the river. As I had been sitting on the deck of the barge, thinking about this and that, I had spotted an odd-looking pipe sticking out at right angles from the museum building. I found that on the first floor the
museum had constructed a display about the origins of photography, and the pipe that was sticking out was holding the lens for a mock camera obscura, through which I was delighted to be able to see the
Leo
moored on the other side of the Main. The museum cinema was showing their copy of
The Blue Angel
and I spent what my mother would have called a thoroughly sinful morning, watching that marvellous, moving film. I suspect that one of the main reasons that I came into the film business was the sheer bliss of being able to see films in the morning. Now, of course, anyone can see whatever they wish on the television whenever they want, but in my day the idea of even being in a cinema or watching a rehearsal in a theatre before noon sent a tingle of excitement down my spine.

After the film, I had a chat with the librarian of the archive, who told me that there were only two films in their library from the National Socialist era that were still banned. One was virulently anti-Semitic, called, in English, ‘Jew Suss' (Jesus), which was blocked for obvious reasons, and the other was a film that the British had banned at the end of the war, about the Boers in South Africa who had found themselves in a British concentration camp at the beginning of the century. My librarian friend felt that the ban should remain, not for political reasons of any sort, but because the film makers had copied the scene from
Battleship Potemkin
where the sailors find weevils in their food. He said that anyone could see these banned films if they wanted to. He was a Berliner and carefully explained to me how only Berlin could have produced Lubitsch and Wilder – probably two of the greatest comedy directors the cinema will ever have. I had to tear myself away from this engaging, witty man, as I could see that Ray had returned and was standing on the deck of the barge on the other side of the river, unable to get in. I had taken the secret key that we kept hidden under the box where the hydraulic controls were kept, as I was afraid that someone had seen me put it away one day.

It was hot and sticky in Frankfurt that August afternoon and Ray was as keen as I was to shake off the smell of the city and press on up the Main to Bamberg and beyond. The Gardner engine on the
Leo
started up with its familiar throaty chug, and we left the last metropolitan city we would pass through till we reached Vienna, which seemed as far away as it did when we had started out, four months before. Ray's weekend at home had only heightened his resolve to see the famed Danube: his stories of our descent of the Rhine had clearly impressed his waterman friends.

Our first few miles out of Frankfurt were uneventful. The River Main wound through carefully controlled green landscapes until we were about ten miles from Aschaffenburg. I had learnt by now that when things were going smoothly with all the
Leo'
s various systems, it was time for caution. I was proved right, for suddenly, in one of the huge locks they have on the Main, Ray shouted to me that there was something wrong. He told me that the engine was running beautifully but that the unimaginable had happened: the propeller had fallen off. This is something that never happens, or at least it should not. We had to get out of the lock as quickly as possible because we were holding up vast Euro-ships waiting to come in.

There were two ways to get the boat out of the lock: one, to drag it manually, the other to take the dinghy off the deck, clamp on the outboard, and push the whole rig from the stern. There was not time for the latter course. Already they were calling in German for us to get out of the lock. So Ray and I got a rope and pulled the wounded
Leo
slowly out of the enormously long lock with all the people in the control tower laughing and pointing at the old-fashioned British way of moving boats on canals. Later, when I explained the very unusual situation in which we found ourselves, they were much more helpful and rang the local diving club who promised to come and dive for the propeller.

We discovered that there was a big harbour at Aschaffenburg, still another two hours away at the speed we were able to push the
Leo
and the barge using the dinghy strapped on
the stern. Ray and I took it in turns to steer the dinghy and the
Leo
, and we finally reached the harbour to find to our delight that there was an enormous crane of the most modern variety, used to load blocks of granite from barges on to railway wagons. It was by now late on Friday evening and I did not think there was any chance whatever of getting the
Leo
lifted out of the water before Monday when the office staff of the harbour would be back. On Saturday morning I walked round the harbour and found a huge scrap yard and went into the office and explained my predicament with the aid of drawing and fractured German to the owner, an extremely pleasant man whose daughter lived in England. He told us that he would fix the foreman and get the tug lifted out of the water that morning and put back again on Sunday morning. This was something that would never have happened in England, or indeed anywhere else that I had been to. He also said that he had been cutting up some old British machine tools and we might be in luck and find the 1¾-inch British Standard Fine nut we would require to secure our propeller – if we could find the propeller, that is. We did have a spare propeller but it was one of the ones that I had experimented with earlier and had decided was not big enough.

While the scrapdealer rang the local diving club, who very obligingly arranged with the lock-keepers to dive for our propeller that afternoon, Ray and I pulled out the immensely heavy yellow webbing strops that I had made in London. The crane had the
Leo
out in no time and we soon saw what the trouble was. We had not only lost the propeller and the nut but the key as well. The key is an oblong piece of metal that fits into a slot in the propeller shaft and the propeller itself and stops the propeller twisting off. Now that we knew what we needed, we set out to comb the scrap heaps to try to find a nut that would fit. Eventually we found a heap of old guillotine machines, called ‘The Victoria', that had been used to cut up paper. After we located a suitably sized nut
the problem was how to get it off. I fetched our blowlamp from the boat and a huge Stillson grip (that is the kind of tool that plumbers are always forgetting). Ray found a long pipe and, while I heated up the rust-and-paint-covered nut with the blowlamp, he put the pipe on the handle of the Stillson and with a huge effort the nut moved free. We hurried back to the boat and tried it on: it fitted – not quite as well as an engineer would have liked, but it fitted. Now we had to get the propeller back.

To our astonishment a smart white Mercedes drew up and a man stepped out dressed in a German huntsman costume complete with hat and feather. It was our scrap merchant friend who was off to his domain, since it was Saturday afternoon, to try his hand at a bit of sport, which I suppose meant shooting anything that was in season. The lock where we had lost the propeller was on his way and he wanted to have a word with the diving club to be sure that everything was in order. The frogmen were ready, Ray told them where he thought the propeller would be, and the lock was emptied so the divers would not have to dive so deep. The constant flow of shipping was diverted through the parallel lock. Almost at once the first diver flipped over backwards into the murky water and after about two minutes came up with our propeller. We could not believe our luck and gave the divers a suitable present for their club.