The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  ‘Oui,’ Alain and Benedicte responded, pleased with my progress. From outside in the dusk came that ear-splitting scream, the scream of the foolish, jealous peacock in all his finery, angry that the Crow was here in the house being so well entertained.

  Ah! I remembered something. I might muddle eggs and ears, but I was hot on French birds. ‘Et cet oeuf?’ I burbled happily in my newfound tongue, pointing at the last one on my plate. ‘Cet oeuf, est-ce que c’est un oeuf du paon?’ I asked, remembering with some pride the word for peacock.

  Alain and Benedicte glanced at each other with amused pity. ‘Non, monsieur, ce n’est pas possible,’ Alain gently explained, and then mimed an instructive biology lesson to the effect that peacocks, being male, are not generally relied upon for their egg-laying qualities. Outside, the cry of le paon had in it a note of derision. We changed the subject.

  In the morning I was awakened from deep slumber by the smell and sizzle of breakfast being cooked, which turned out to be another three eggs, fried this time. What is the French word for cholesterol? After breakfast Alain offered to take me back on his bike to where I had left Jack de Crow, but just as I was leaving Benedicte became terribly formal and presented me with a small red-leather notebook. It was, she explained, for me to keep a journal of the voyage so that one day I might write a book, and it is this very notebook, much battered and travel-stained, that sits beside me now as I write.

  The next four days were four days of blistering slog along canals made hideous by the hand of industry. For the most part the Canal du Nord that I found myself joining ran between straight high banks of sloping concrete, often too high for me to see any of the surrounding countryside. What little view I did glimpse was of flat featureless fields baking in the scorching sun and, hazy in the distance, what at first I took to be the spires of a remote cathedral, but which turned out to be yet another pylon or factory chimney, the only lofty landmarks in all that wasteland.

  Another disagreeable feature of this region’s canals was the number of drowned creatures bobbing in the murky waters. Many of these were small, anonymous creatures, unidentifiable in their distended forms – hairy, slimy balloons, bloated and swollen with gas – but there also seemed to be an inordinate number of drowned dogs among the flotsam. I rowed gingerly through an ever-increasing flotilla of these ghastly buoys – dachshunds, poodles, Alsatians, Rhodesian Ridgebacks – terrified that an incautious oar stroke might burst one of the carcasses and send it spurting and wheeeeing foetidly about my head like a released balloon at some ghoulish party. At one stage my oar briefly scooped up what, to this day, I would swear was the corpse of a long-dead platypus, though I do not pretend to guess how such a creature came to be in the Canal du Nord.

  Another menace was the péniches, the large industrial barges that I here encountered for the first time, but which were to become all too familiar on the way to Romania. These are long grim barges of black iron, the freight-trains of the waterways, and ten times bigger than the little narrowboats of the English canals. Their speed was frightening and there was no question of them slackening their pace for the likes of a little rowing boat. While on the major canals, I was as out of place as a donkey cart on a motorway and had to accept that here the péniches had right of way at all times. As they steamed past, their wake, echoing and ricocheting from the steep concrete walls of the canal, would send my little dinghy pitching and tossing in a dredged-up stew of scummy water and dead spaniel, leaving me unable to row on for another ten minutes until the wash had subsided.

  It was slow progress I made in those four days, hot and frustrating and gritty for the most part. Nevertheless, I also remember passing a hot dusty field in which grazed, unmistakably, a zebra, calmly feeding amid a ragged herd of brown horses. (How very French, I mused. Even the horses here wear black-and-white stripy tops.) A little while later I pulled down a side arm into the sleepy town of Aire to find some lunch and discovered that the town fountain runs a bright Curaçao blue, quite the least tasteful thing I had seen in a long time. I siesta’d there beneath a shady willow tree in a park, setting the pattern for the next few months – it was simply too hot to row in the middle of the day.

  Occasionally the concrete walls would give way to a pleasanter stretch of bank. One day I rowed past an endless avenue of mag-nificent horse-chestnut trees, each one laden with candles in pink and creamy-white that threw welcome shadow over the waters. Here a man was exercising his German Shepherd by the novel method of pushing it into the canal and, whenever it tried to clamber out again, pushing it back in with a stout stick. This continued unabated, although after ten minutes the dog was clearly exhausted and beginning to founder. At one point the poor creature sensibly gave up on its master and swam after Jack de Crow, attempting to clamber aboard. I was on the point of hauling it into the dinghy and not releasing it until we had found it a new owner when the man whistled from beneath the chestnut trees and the dog launched itself loyally back into the water to swim to the bank. The last I saw of it, it was yet again being laughingly fended off from the bank by its master. Here perhaps was an explanation for the number of drowned dogs I had been bumping my way through, if this was standard French dog-exercising practice.

  At St Omer I encountered my first major lock. It was what is known as an ascenseur and was vast, unlike anything I had encountered in England. I thought for a minute that the canal had come to a dead end. Before me rose a giant wall of solid iron, black, riveted in plates and set between two great concrete pillars. Above this wall, three or four storeys up, was perched a little control-tower office with green glass. I was beginning to turn my dinghy around, thinking that perhaps I had missed the main turn-off some miles back, when the black water beneath me started welling and bubbling in alarming swirls, and I saw that the iron wall was beginning to rise. It was like the moment in a James Bond movie when a large section of a volcano glides smoothly aside to reveal the arch-villain’s hideout. Once the gate had ascended fully, I found myself looking into a chasm between black walls, about three hundred metres long and sixty metres high. There was no sign of human life, nobody waving me in or shooing me away, so I rowed gingerly into the canyon, my oar-clops setting up sinister echoes across the dark, slapping waters. Once I had rowed about fifty yards, there was a low, loud humming and I glanced back to see the massive iron gate sliding down in its grooves until the way was closed behind me. And before me. And on either side. This is the point where in all the best films an Eastern European voice booms out over some hidden speaker: ‘Welcome, Mr Bond! You have rowed into my little trap with less than your customary prudence. I am, I must confess, a little disappointed. Still, it will be all the more amusing to watch you die. Farewell, Mr Bond.’ Then water starts pouring in on all sides and the walls start closing in and James has to do something awfully clever with his watch, his belt and a shoelace to escape.

  At this point water did start pouring in on all sides, or at least began to well up from unseen depths with frightening rapidity. After a moment of panic I was able to steady the boat and keep her balanced in the middle of the ascenseur and note that the massive bollards set in the walls at intervals were actually rising with the water: they were attached to floating drums that rose or fell in long hollow vertical grooves. Thus a ship could tie up to a bollard and not fear being pulled under when the water rises, or being left hanging when the water drops. I was extremely grateful for the existence of these things; they made my experience in the biggest locks a safe and easy one for, despite the vast quantities of water involved and the extraordinary rate of filling, there was very little turbulence and Jack rode up as sweetly as a gull on the tide. And each time the unseen evil mastermind apparently changed his mind and let me row out the other end unscathed.

  Now for the first time since leaving London I started sleeping aboard Jack. Each evening I would take the planks from under the thwarts and lay them across the boat to form a temporary decking. If the night was fine, that would be the full extent of my pr
eparations. If, however, I wished to protect myself from dews and chills, I would pull the tarpaulin tautly into place. A strip of Velcro at the mast end of the tarpaulin closed that end off completely. The stern end remained open to the night air, a triangle of starry darkness and river reflections beyond my muffled feet.

  When the weather was fine, I took the much simpler option of finding a level stretch of grass on the bank, spreading the tarpaulin out and making my bed there, leaving Jack to her own devices. And the weather was fine. Each day was hot and sunny, and the nights were cool, clear and starry. St Omer one night, Bethune the next, and thence to Lens where I slept in a leafy park beneath an ash tree where a grey cuckoo chimed late into the starry evening and recommenced at dawn. Then on to Douai after which I turned with relief off the main Canal du Nord onto a quieter waterway that wriggled its way southwards to Cambrai and St Quentin.

  Now there were pastures and woods and banks frothing over with cow-parsley and hawthorn and elder trees all in bloom, their umbels like heads of clotted cream on every bough. I pulled into the little town of Cambrai and found to my surprise another English boat there, a smart little narrowboat called Oyster, whose owners, Mike and Judy, kindly lent me a power drill to mend the pintel which yet again had begun to wobble loose. Then, somewhere south of Cambrai, I came across the first lock on this stretch of the canal so far. All the locks on the Canal du Nord had been fully manned giants but here, on this smaller pastoral waterway, the locks were homely – willow-framed, fern-sprouting, sunny. I approached the gates with steady oar strokes, wondering as usual how long I would have to wait before the lock-keeper would spot me and start emptying the lock in order to permit my entry. The lights here, however, stayed resolutely red. I waited about fifteen minutes, idling on my oars, and then lost patience. I rowed up to the bank, tied up and strode along to the lock to see what was happening. There was nobody there. Really! Typical French, I thought to myself without a shred of fairness. A small office stood on the sunny lock quay, but its door was locked and a glance through the windows showed me a dusty room empty of all but an ancient swivel-chair, a stack of empty bottles and five or so dead flies on the sill.

  Puzzled, I explored the lock itself. It was empty, but the lower gates were fast shut and there seemed to be no winches or beams with which to open them. I found two iron rods that dangled down the sides of the lock, one blue, the other red, and obviously important. I tried to make out the signs painted in flaking paint on battered tin plates above them, but apart from strongly suspecting that the red rod was there strictly for emergency purposes, I could not understand their function. Tentatively I jiggled the blue rod. Nothing happened. There was also nearby a large steel box with perforated holes in it and a few buttons which seemed to serve no obvious function apart from humming gently.

  I stood and pondered in the warm sunny stillness, wondering where the absent lock-keeper was. Suddenly a mechanical whirring broke the silence, and I watched as the lower gates started to open of their own accord. And there downstream was my friendly Oyster chugging up the canal, approaching the lock in a steady glide. Hardly stopping to wonder where the phantom lock-keeper was who had spotted it coming, I raced back to my dinghy, cast off and rowed like a maddened windmill to follow Oyster into the cool moss-smelling depths of the lock. I was, I confess, a little hurt by the fact that Mike and Judy chose to start closing the massive gates while I was still ten feet from them – it was not cool common sense but a spurt of indignation that sent me driving forward between those black crushing jaws and allowed me to squeak through with mere inches to spare.

  Once in the lock Mike and Judy were cordial enough, seeming to ignore the fact that the doors they had just slammed had come within a whisker of killing me; they seemed more anxious to talk about eyes and electronics and something else – to be honest, it was hard to hear as the water boomed and rushed in the echoing chasm of the filling lock.

  By the time the water level had risen to the top, there was a splendid breeze blowing from astern and I was in a forgiving mood. In fact, I was in a mood for showing off. As we waited for the gates to open (where was that lock-keeper hidden?), I unbundled the sail and made ready to hoist it so that I could glide out of the lock under full sail, a resplendent sight in anyone’s book. The gates swung wide. Oyster churned out in a flurry of wake, and I hauled the sail to the masthead. The breeze caught the sail, swung it wide and Jack de Crow began to glide along the lock, heading for the open gates. Mike and Judy, glancing back, applauded the fine sight and then turned their attention forward again to the bend ahead – and so missed the next stage. The mainsheet, dragging along the quayside, neatly looped itself around a bollard and pulled the dinghy up with a jerk. She bumped heavily nose first into the concrete and was held fast for a minute while I tried to free her. By no means a disaster, but the gates ahead started swinging shut again. I was trapped in the lock, and yet again it seemed that a phantom lock-keeper was doing all he could to thwart my progress. By the time I had freed the straying loop of mainsheet from the bollard, the gates were firmly shut and I was locked in. Oyster had vanished around the bend ahead, and I was left alone cursing the momentary showing-off and the trap it had left me in.

  Fortunately, just above the lock was a family of picnickers enjoying the warmth and the waterside, spread out on the grassy bank with bottles of wine and baguettes and lumps of white brie. After a little while I worked out in my head enough French to ask for their aid, and they were kindness itself in helping me unload Jack, de-rig her and drag her bodily over the gates and into the canal beyond – even feeling that all that effort warranted a glass of wine and a brie sandwich. I rowed away from that lock feeling cheerily replete but still without the faintest clue about the strange behaviour of the haunted lock mechanism.

  It took me four more such experiences that day and the next before I understood. Let me explain.

  The French locks are, as narrowboat owners throughout Europe will tell you, the best, the safest, the most convenient to be found anywhere between the North Sea and the Mediterranean. They operate on a rather nifty electronic-eye system. Any boat approaching a lock automatically activates an electronic eye set in the bank some fifty metres from the lock itself. Thus activated, the lock fills or empties (as appropriate), the gates open and the barge can glide in, activating a second eye set near the gates as it does so. This second eye will, after a short time-delay to allow safe entry, close the gates, and it is at this point that the skipper of the boat must put down his morning paper and do something to assist the process. This involves strolling along the deck to where the long iron rods run up the side of the lock wall. A quick tug on the blue rod activates the next part of the process – the filling (or emptying) of the lock, the opening of the gates, and the stately glide out of the lock and into the next section of the canal. The departure of the barge activates the eye at the open gates once more, which closes both gates for safety and re-sets the whole system for the next boat to come along.

  It is a system of the utmost simplicity, and should win several major design awards. It was not, however, designed with Jack de Crow in mind. Being small and wooden, she was utterly unable to set off any of the electronic eyes so vital to the process. It had been the steel bulk of Oyster that had activated the gate-opening-and-shutting of the last lock and not some secret spite on their part – nor the work of a hidden lock-keeper lurking in the loosestrife. Though I felt a little better when I realised this, it didn’t make my progress through the locks any easier. I did find over the next few days that if I was very observant, I could detect the position of the electronic eye on the bank and by rowing right up and waggling an oar in front of it for some minutes I was sometimes able to trigger it to open the gates for me and show a green come-along light. Then I would have to ensure that as I rowed into the lock itself, I triggered the second eye at the lock gates. Unfortunately, the only way of knowing whether I had triggered it was by seeing if the lights had changed back to red. As the traff
ic lights were usually set ten feet or so back down the canal, I would have to row back to glance at the lights. If sure enough they had gone red, there would be only fifteen seconds before the gates started closing, and I would have to make a dash for the narrowly closing gap like some nautical version of Indiana Jones diving under the traditional descending tomb door.

  More often all the oar waggling in the world would not trigger the eye and I would be forced to land, climb up to the lock quay and make use of the large steel box with perforated holes that I had noticed earlier. This turned out to be a sort of phone. Into it I would speak in very slow and painstaking French and be countered by a babble of static-ridden, crackly French spoken extremely quickly of which I understood not one word. However, after a while I learnt that such an exercise would invariably result in the appearance some fifteen minutes later of a small white Fiat hurtling along the narrow dusty track that bordered the canal. Out of it would climb possibly the most patient man in the solar system. This was the éclusier, the lock-keeper, whom over the next three days I disturbed some twenty-seven times in the same manner, and who seemed utterly unconcerned about having yet again to drive to yet another remote lock to operate manually for the thirteenth time that day the supposedly automated lock for the increasingly apologetic and grovelling Englishman in le chapeau drôle. He waved aside my attempts to abase myself, smiled serenely into the middle distance, ushered me in and out of the lock at the appropriate moments and struck me altogether as an enormously contented soul.