The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  It was shaken vigorously under my nose, but only when the man grew tired of my dim-wittedness and stopped agitating it did I notice that there was a slit in the top of the bird’s head. It was a piggy-bank, or rather a pidgy-bank. I dropped a couple of deut-schmark into the pigeon’s head, and now that the business of the phone call was concluded, turned my attention to the bar.

  ‘Um … ein bier, bitte,’ I said, ‘if that’s okay.’

  The barman looked taken aback (even I flinched at my attempt to speak German), but soon the beer was produced and I dug into my pocket to pay. To my surprise, out came the plastic pigeon and I was invited once more to insert my deutschmarks in the creature’s head. As I took the first welcome swig, I pondered the eccentric cash-till procedures of these otherwise efficient Germans. Soon I was invited to sit down at a table with the others – they seemed happy enough to suspend the quiz for a while out of courtesy to a stranger – and my life story was dragged out of me. There were the usual exclamations of admiration and disbelief, and for the next half-hour we conversed in a mixture of broken English and German. After my second drink, once more paid for by a donation to the pigeon, I relaxed enough to take stock of my surroundings. It began to strike me as a rather odd pub. There was very little coming and going – in fact, nobody had arrived or left since I’d been there – and everyone seemed to be taking turns behind the bar, helping themselves as they pleased, with the sole proviso that each time the pigeon appeared like the Holy Spirit to claim its due. And as I looked around, I noticed that there was a definite theme to the décor. A series of shining silver trophies along one wall were topped by little winged hats. Various pennants hanging from the rafters each displayed, as a symbol of peace, the winged dove fluttering upwards. Lastly I focused on a large faded poster on the far wall, which showed the breeds of pigeons, wild and domestic, from around the world: fantails, pouters, wood-pigeons, rock-doves, bronzewings, turtles and, of course, racing pigeons. A horrid doubt crept into my mind as I sipped my second beer. The quiz still hadn’t recommenced. A long pause had opened in the conversation and there was now the indefinable air of well-bred patience wondering how to be frank.

  When the silence had extended long enough, filled only with the nervous shuffle of papers and the clatter of a dropped pencil, I took the bull by the horns.

  ‘Excuse me, this is a pub, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  Shuffles of embarrassed feet. Then one of my hosts spoke up. He spoke very kindly.

  ‘ Well, now zat you ask, nein, zis isn’t a pub actually. This is ze Kelheim Racing Pigeon Club, and’ – here he glanced around his fellow members – ‘vell, zis is our Annual General Meeting. But please,’ he added hastily as I rose to my feet and started backing out the room, ‘it has been a pleasure to have you here’ (hasty nods all round). ‘But now’ (as he picked up paper and pen) ‘if you haf had enough beer, perhaps ve get on with ze meeting, ja? ’

  After Kelheim, the Danube – or Donau, as we must now call it – flowed across a wide plain between green fields and low dykes. Here and there were solitary steep hills, as abrupt as loaves of bread, and each of these was the seat of some Schloss or Kloster with red roofs, perched high above the flat expanse and looking over a watery vista of silver and blue and flooded green stretching to the horizon.

  I had continued my learning of Keats’ poetry all this while. I was only four verses off knowing the whole tedious length of The Eve of St Agnes by heart but had also been concentrating on Ode to Psyche as a break from Madeline and her vague regardless eyes. As I was revelling in the last stanza of Psyche, I rounded a broad bend of the river and saw a sight that made me gasp. There ahead of me was one of these great isolated hills, and it looked as though it had fallen there from the gilded frames of a neo-classical painting, a Gainsborough perhaps. Flanking its steep slopes were groves of pine trees, luxurious in their sable fur, and great cedar trees soaring like scented green thunderclouds supported on redwood pillars.

  Sitting on its crest against black pines and blue sky was the Parthenon. Not, you understand, that flaking ruin baked in the blinding glare and taxi fumes of Athens, crawled over by hot tourists picking their way through fallen columns and construction-site debris; no, this was the real Parthenon, a gleaming temple in white marble, every pillar and cornice intact, and looking as though it had been completed last week. A great flight of stairs swept up the hill beneath the cedars to the portico with its familiar colonnade of pillars and shallow-pitched roof, displaying the perfect proportions of the Golden Ratio. The background of dark pines and verdant grass, and the vista it commanded of meandering river and wide, wide skies, made it the very embodiment of Arcadia.

  At the foot of the hill there was a wooden jetty awaiting my magic barge. Feeling like Parsifal in a dream, I moored up and climbed the three hundred steps, from terrace to terrace to terrace, with a sense of awe:

  Who are these coming to the sacrifice? …

  What little town by river or sea-shore

  Or mountain built with peaceful citadel

  Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

  And, little town, thy streets for evermore

  Will silent be …

  As I approached the top, the sheer size of the place struck me. I was to find out that it was an exact full-scale copy of the original Parthenon, but it seemed three times bigger than the dusty Athenian ruin I remembered. Inside I found a spacious hall, a splendour of gilding and mosaic and carved capitols, and on pedestals ranged around the four walls countless busts and statues. But here at last there was a diff erence. For where the ancient statues would have been of gods and goddesses, divine youths and mighty Olympians, smooth-limbed and lissom, or thunder-browed and haughty, the statues here were of famous German statesmen of the last few centuries: chancellors, generals, philosophers, writers and economists. Full of the German virtues of thrift and efficiency these good men might have been, but as models of physical beauty they could barely muster a divine feature among them. Balding heads, stout tums, ridiculous whiskers, bulging eyes, double chins, full-fed faces – they looked as commonplace as any modern-day meeting of town-planners. The temple was clearly devoted to celebrating the inner qualities of German greatness rather than the external aesthetics, and the sculptor had gone for realism rather than flattery.

  I discovered that this marvellous fantasy was commissioned by none other than King Ludwig the Sane, the same man who had built the Rhine-Main-Donau Canal. I was pleased to find that he seemed to have inherited some small streak of madness from his namesake after all. Nevertheless, as I stood there in the portico,

  Valhalla gazing out across the wide and sunlit plain under an afternoon sky borrowed from Canaletto, I couldn’t help thinking that this was the finest building between here and North Wales. Had Ludwig turned aside briefly from his economists and his engineers to read a young English poet and then made the dreamer’s vow a reality?

  And in the midst of that wide quietness,

  A rosy sanctuary will I dress …

  With buds and bells and stars without a name …

  And there shall be for thee all soft delight

  That shadowy thought can win,

  A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

  To let the warm Love in!

  Ah yes. Love. Even the double chins and gooseberry eyes could not diminish the love that had so evidently gone into the temple’s making.

  The river quickened its pace once more, sluicing down between banks of osier and willow, occasionally passing through a town or village, but I had caught the river’s mood and I too was hurrying, reluctant to stop until fifty miles a day was under my belt. The rowing was easy – I could slot into an automatic rhythm which took me for hours, sometimes so dreamily that I would wake with a start to wonder where the miles had gone. A feature of the river now was the presence of channel-marker buoys, red for port and green for starboard. These were large hollow cylinders of tin with conical noses, surmounted by a fin-like flag rising o
ut of their rounded backs. With the current racing past them, they gave the appearance of forging through the water upstream, the water spurting from beneath their tin noses and their bodies skidding and swaying with apparent velocity. They looked for all the world like squat antique torpedoes. I was musing on this when there was an almighty clang and I was propelled out of my seat into the bilges. I clambered up in time to see that one of these missiles had struck me a glancing blow on the bows: even from here I could see the smear of yellow paint against the green. I checked Jack’s woodwork: apart from a crunching dent in the prow there seemed to be no damage done, but I woke up after that. It would be a pity to sink, torpedoed by these tin sharks.

  One of the nicer things about travelling downstream in a dinghy rather than zooming about on well-signed motorways was that one was never fully aware of where one was about to get to. Quite often I found myself in the unusual position of arriving in some picturesque fortified town and, like some ancient traveller in a fairy-tale, asking, ‘What fair town is this, pray?’ The startled look on the faces of those I questioned seemed to ask, ‘Well, how did you arrive? Out of the sky? From beneath the cobblestones?’ No one ever seemed to think of the river as a means of ingress. To the townsfolk, it was as static and permanent a feature as the town park or the castle gates. It would be like a stranger standing at the foot of the Pyramids and idly commenting, ‘Hmmm. Interesting structure. So what do you call these then?’

  In this way I came to Passau, another of the great medieval cities of Germany, surpassing all that I had seen so far. It sits on the junction of three rivers, as here the River Inn and the minor River Ilz flow into the Donau from either side. This fact was much lauded in the tourist brochures of the town. ‘Passau! Witness the Natural Miracle of Three Rivers Conjoining!’ they cried in a passion of exclamation marks, apparently unaware of other features that have a better claim to be called natural miracles: Angel Falls, the Great Barrier Reef, the Grand Canyon, to name but a few. It was odd, too, because Passau was not short of sights worth seeing. The Stephans-dom with its twin bronze-green onion-domes had inside a giant gilded pulpit, every inch of which was carved with figures of the four Evangelists and their fabulous menagerie: lions and bulls, eagles and winged spirits, rioting in a baroque tangle of allegory and allusion. The location of the town, perched on a narrow spit between the deep green of the Donau and the milky turbulence of the Inn, gave it the charm of an island fortress. Quiet walkways ambled between the river and gracious waterside residences, where weeping ornamental trees uncoiled their foliage down walls of warm buff stone. Twisting wisteria hung from trellises, dropping its purple confetti into the stream, and small archways ducked up into some courtyard where a bronze fountain played to an empty house.

  Rowing away from Passau the next day, I passed the point off the southern end of the town’s spit where the Inn flowed in from the west. Here the milky waters of that fierce river, laden with chalk sediment from the far-off Alps, mix with the bottle-deep Donau, and from that point on the river beneath me was never clear again. It remained a murky hue, like paintwater at the end of the art lesson, sometimes a delicate grey-blue, sometimes a choppy fawn, but never again the limpid clarity of old glass. And a few miles downstream, the river in its new khaki marched briskly out of Germany and into the fair land of Austria.

  There is an elfin piper who haunts the steep woods below Schoning.

  ‘Tweet-toot!’ I would pipe on my tin-whistle, and a perfect two beats later, back would come from the cliff y woods, ‘tweet-toot!’

  ‘Tiddle–iddle-tweet-toot’

  and ‘Tiddle-iddle-tweet-toot’ would come the reply.

  The hidden faun and I played this game of echoing melodies for a full blissful hour as I swanned along in morning sunshine through the gorge. Here, a day’s sailing from Passau, the Donau curves around in a series of sharp hair-pin bends between U-shaped valley walls clothed with thick forest. Like everything else in Austria, this looked neatly brushed; dark pine and fir mostly, with the odd swathe of silvery-green ash streaked up the hillside or the lime-gold splash of maple. The forest came down to the river’s edge, but every now and then I sailed past a flat open meadow where stood perhaps a single inn, primrose yellow or lily white, with carved window-boxes of scarlet geraniums and a white cat. Between the house and the steep forest there might be a tiny orchard of apple trees rosy with fruit, or a huge neatly stacked pile of wood, a few timber outbuildings, three caramel horses grazing and sometimes a church with square white tower and bronze-green onion dome. The inn or farmhouse looked newly painted, the horses freshly groomed, the grass new-cut and the cat just fed on thick cream. The innkeeper’s wife had been out that morning polishing the apples to a gloss on each old tree. This was Austria.

  And oh, so silent, so peaceful, so tranquil in the bright morning sun. No noise … no noise that is, except for the pure high notes of a tin-whistle echoing down from upriver where a man in a little red-sailed dinghy is rippling downstream before a light wind, steering with an idle elbow as he plays. And somewhere high up in the sylvan darkness, in a sweet Purcellian contrapunto, the teasing echo of the faun.

  This enchanted valley lasted only till noon. The lock-keeper at Aschach explained that I would have to wait three hours before he could let me through and pointed helpfully in the direction of the boat trolley, an inadequate device designed more for a child’s kayak than the portly timbers of Jack de Crow. A passing family out on a day’s cycling were quickly dragooned into helping me haul and heave Jack onto the pram. Their early enthusiasm for the task, spurred on by father, had waned long before the task was completed and a threatened mutiny on the part of the teenage daughters nearly left Jack stranded in the wayside blackberry bush into which the runaway pram had tilted her for the third time. We eventually carted her the remaining distance and launched her once more, the poor father trying to apologise simultaneously to both me for his family’s impatience and his family for having got them involved with the bossy Englishman in the first place. Once launched, I struck out to see if I could make it to Linz by nightfall. This was, in hindsight, a stupid thing to do.

  Determination sent me oaring steadily through the afternoon, past banks of sheltering willows, past pretty hamlets where horses grazed, past the lovely Schloss-dominated village of Ottensheim at sunset where cheerful café lights begged me to tie up for the night and halt my headlong slog – and so eventually at ten o’clock, arms aching, shivering with cold and exhaustion, illegally rowing through the darkness, to arrive at the much-lauded Winterhafn of Linz. Here I looked around me in dismay. Where was the brightly lit clubhouse winking gold and copper out into the frosty night? The lively bar breathing warm gusts of beer and tobacco and chatter from its welcoming doorway? I searched in vain for the spotless bathrooms and hot showers I had been striving towards all day, the Swedish sauna perhaps, the yachties waiting to offer a fellow skipper hot toddies, free life membership and the hands of their daughters in marriage.

  I found myself rowing instead into a dank industrial arm of the river, empty and desolate except for the silent hulks of gravel-dredgers and scrap-metal barges. The sole amenities consisted of a small portacabin of toilets (locked) and lots of cyclone-wire fencing. The nearest lights, orange sodium lights with their ugly glare, were a mile away along a windswept road between warehouses and wasteland. Thinking of the cosy villages I had spurned all that afternoon, I wept.

  Starving and cranky, I trudged off down the road towards the distant lights and found, surprisingly, a huge hotel just as the cyclone wire ended. It was a vast and soulless aff air, rather like an airport hotel, and there was absolutely no way I was going to allow myself to be tempted to book in to one of its overpriced, over-amen-itied rooms, not an intrepid adventurer like me. But they did allow me to buy a bowl of warming soup … and a beer … and another beer … and a warming whisky … and before I knew it, I had succumbed. A hot power shower, sachets of complimentary shampoo, soft white towels, a hair-dryer, a remo
te control TV, a digital alarm clock-radio, a mini-bar with salted peanuts and cans of Heineken, and crackly sheets and stiff pillows. I was, for one night at least, back in the late twentieth century, an anonymous businessman on a routine trip to sound out possibilities in the expanding European market. As for the owner of that ridiculous little dinghy abandoned down in the deserted Winterhafn, he had stepped off the world for a little while and could not be contacted.

  I found it hard to warm to Linz. It was grandiose in a wedding-cake way, with monumental public buildings and white marble everywhere, but lacking the cobbled-together charm of German towns. The weather matched the city; a bright but chilly sky, and a brisk policeman of a breeze keeping the blood tingling and the shoppers from loitering in the streets. Busking, I was told, was out of the question, so I decided to spend my time there more profitably. I sorted all my dirty laundry and hauled it into town but could find no laundromat anywhere. Eventually I was informed by the official in the Tourist Office that most Austrians possessed their own washing machines so that public laundromats were hardly necessary, and probably – like buskers – a danger to public health and safety and just one more reason why Austria was a superior country to all others. But welcome! Welcome to our warm and beautiful country, not in any way to be confused with that of our cold and humourless neighbours, the Germans.

  As the river widened, I seemed to become less and less fortunate at finding places to moor up at night. One night I ended up in a deserted industrial boatyard, so crowded with rusting gravel-boats, half-sunken hulks and abandoned barges that I could not tie up anywhere near the bank but had to moor up alongside an old tug. From there, my only route to the shore was a labyrinthine route. I clambered over railings, along gang-planks, up onto iron decks – no, a dead-end – back down this hatchway and over onto the next boat, along the deck – blocked by a pile of crates so back onto the original tug, and so on. Under gantries, down ladders and across pontoons I swarmed, negotiating at least seven different craft along the way, and involving several giddy leaps across gulfs of rust-stained water until I finally reached the sodden bank. A light drizzle had started and the nearest village was a mile away. I trudged there. Everything was closed. I trudged back. Was it a weekend? A holiday? Or had my luck changed for good? How long had I been doing this daft journey and when could I legitimately call it a day? When I got back to the dinghy, having threaded the rusty maze once more, I crouched under my tarpaulin hating the whole world and got out my diary to record that fact. It was the second day of the month, the 2nd of September – a familiar date? I realised that it was exactly a year ago that I had set out from Colemere Woods on that fine evening, waving goodbye to my friends standing on the canal bridge in the twilight. Thinking of this, my crankiness gave way to tears and I became horribly maudlin. I was sick of rowing, sick of being alone, sick of travelling, sick of never getting any mail via Poste Restante – all my friends had seemingly forgotten about me – and I was sick of the drizzle and the damp and the whole damn dinghy. I was too tired even to bother making supper; besides, I suspected I was out of groceries. I would just go to sleep and blot out the miserable world for a time.