Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  The elegant carillon towering over Bruges has forty-seven bells and is the biggest in the world, according to the carilloner, Aimé Lambaert. Aimé also confided that his friends called him ‘Lovely’ – odd, as he looked like Abraham Lincoln and was a muscular man from playing his carillon and climbing the 365 steps up to the loft two or three times a day. He sits at his machine, which looks like a loom, and hits the keys with the sides of his hands. He told me that he heard the music through the vibrations in his arms, because his loft is below the belfry. When he plays, the keys that he hits pull down wires attached to the clappers inside the bells. He obviously felt extremely powerful up there in his loft, spreading his magnificent peals over sleepy Bruges. In the belfry itself there is a huge bronze drum made in the seventeenth century, with small pegs in its perforated surface like an enormous musical box. Aimé Lambaert changes these pegs every two years so that the bells play a different tune on the hour. When the drum plays, the bells are struck by hammers on the outside, which makes a subtly different sound to that made by the clappers.

  It all sounded powerfully perfect to me as I watched Bruges’ big parade on Ascension Day. The parade itself was a pleasantly homely affair which had attracted thousands of tourists from all over the world. Religious in content, it revolved round the usual tales and the parading of an authentic relic. This was carried in turn by a group of elderly high priests, who were only able to carry the heavily ornate gold casket for a few steps before passing it on to one of their colleagues. Somehow the parade organizers were able to cope with this stopping and starting and kept the parade moving forward. As the relic came through the main square under the carillon, Aimé Lambaert had his bi-annual treat and pealed the victory bell (what Belgian victory was commemorated by this bell was not explained).

  The Leo was now beginning to work as she should: the oil and water gauges had been fixed by Willi, and I had bought a new outboard engine with a little more power for the dinghy. Ray was still in London when I set off on a sparkling spring day for the south. As I glided past the fortress towers of old Bruges, I watched a family of tiny moorhens being shepherded by their mother as they bobbed about in the Leo’s wash. The time I had spent in Bruges had been full of interest, but the joy of being on board the Leo again and under way on such a day had me singing tunelessly, songs of my youth. The excitement of adventure and not being certain where or how the day would end still caught me by surprise.

  Chapter Three

  Bruges to Agimont

  Soon after midday, an incident occurred that raised the adrenalin to almost unacceptable limits. A pusher barge with a large tow was coming towards me and from behind a Dutch barge was hurrying down the canal. The Dutchman decided to overtake just as the other barge was passing. There wasn’t really enough room but in spite of a lot of horn blowing on my part, the Dutchman pushed past; as he did so the turbulence sucked the Leo on to him and even though I slowed down, I was stuck to him and drawn alongside in some horrible marine embrace until we had passed the other barge. We parted, shaking fists at each other. Just like motorists, I thought. The trouble with dreams of vengeance on canals is that you inevitably meet the offending barge at the next lock, when you have to be ready with the customary cheery wave: I couldn’t pointedly shut the wheelhouse door to show ill humour, since I had to steer from the deck.

  That night I stopped at Kortrijk, where Ray rejoined me. We moored next to a barge with swaying palm trees painted on the hull, which announced itself as the Waikiki Disco. I had a quick look to see whether I would be awake all night with the rhythm of the South Seas but clearly the proprietors had either fallen on hard times or it was too early in the season for grass skirts. Next to the bridge ahead of us was a mobile frites shop. It was clearly very well thought of as streams of expensive motorcars drove up for their portions of frites cooked in rendered horse fat. Wandering round this prosperous town and gazing into several shop windows, which were devoted to silver golf balls turned into lighters and other icons of our consumer society, I found myself quite suddenly in the quiet courtyard of a Béguinage. The Beguines were an order founded in England in the middle ages, for girls of families who could not afford to pay the dowries that the nunneries required to shelter their daughters. The girls who went to a Béguinage were subjected to a regime very similar to a nun’s except that every day they went out to work, always in pairs, in the local community.

  As I walked round these calm and beautiful courtyards, I realized I was being watched furtively by a pair of black beady eyes concealed in the shadowy doorway of the chapel. I approached, but as I did so I heard the faintest scuffle, and their owner had disappeared by the time I reached the door. Intrigued now, I went to have a look in all the doorways, until I found one that had the sounds of an harmonium coming from it. I knocked and a tiny Beguine opened the door. She told me that she and the pair of eyes I had seen were the last two Beguines in Kortrijk, in this establishment which had been here for at least four hundred years. She was very frail and so asked me into her tiny cell so she could sit down while she told me of her work and her life. She was practically blind now but she had such a sweet smile that it was a pleasure to listen to her telling her life story.

  She had come to the Béguinage when she was eighteen in 1939, and giggled as she told me of the first veil she had to wear as a novice, which was so restricting that she was only able to look forwards. No glancing out of the corner of her eye. She told me proudly that her grandfather had been in the special French Unit of the Papal Guard, of how she had learned to play the guitar and harmonium to entertain the sick and how happily she had given her life to the service of God and his creatures. The Béguinage was now occupied by elderly ladies who had come to spend the rest of their days in a sheltered environment, and she left me to go and see that they were comfortable. This tiny, cheerful person had a profound effect on me and as I left and walked back to the Leo past the shops with the gold dinner services, I wondered at the state of our society today and how long it would be before some greedy property developer would put forward a proposal to turn the Béguinage into a block of offices with a hostel for old people beside it.

  Puzzled by Kortrijk I left through the centre of the town along a beautifully built brick wall by the canalside. The bricks in Belgium seem to be smaller than the good old London stock brick. I hope this splendid piece of canal construction does not get swept away by the enlargements that the Belgian government is making to the waterways system. In the heat of the day, we came to a lock alongside which an enormous new lock was being built, big enough for ships of 1300 tons, and which would do away with four of the existing locks. Either the Belgians have found a cupboard full of Common Market money, or they must very sensibly believe that there is a future for cheap transport by water. The system these new locks use is worth recounting: the locks themselves are so vast that, when they are emptied, an enormous cubic metreage of water is lost, which causes serious problems for the reaches further up the canal or river. The modern systems have enormous electrical pumps which compensate for this by pumping the water out of the lock and into tanks nearby, or into the upper reach. When the lock is filled again the water is pumped back into the lock.

  The portly lock-keeper who showed me round this marvel told me of a Czech friend of his who had recently taken his car to the USSR. Normally a sober person, this friend had returned with over ninety tickets for motoring offences. Apparently the Soviets had decided that he was a person worth keeping an eye on and had placed a bug on his car. The friend could not imagine why, in the middle of nowhere, a traffic policeman would invariably spring out at him and hand him a speeding ticket. Apparently he did not have to pay the fines, but it made him extremely cautious.

  That night we had a setback. We arrived at Bossuit, an unmemorable place, and the lock-keeper asked me whether I should like to stop on the upper side of the lock or the lower. When I said that I was going to continue he told me that the lock at Espierres had been closed as a barge h
ad run into one of the lock gates, and that there was nothing to do but wait whilst a new gate was installed, which would take at least two days. I unloaded the 2CV and went to have a look at the damage, which was quite impressive. A huge mobile crane had lifted the mangled gate out and laid it on the ground; a new gate was to be installed the following day. The force of a 1300-ton barge, even when it is creeping into the lock at a snail’s pace, can be quite enormous. If a checking rope slips or snaps, or a gear cable parts, there is nothing that can be done to stop it crashing into the gates. Nothing, that is, unless you are German: the Germans have a very efficient system for lowering a huge wire hawser across the lock, about two metres from the gates opposite the entry side. It is raised before the gates are opened, of course, but it’s strong enough to stop these very expensive accidents from happening.

  All round the lock were waiting barges. Some of the wealthier bateliers had taken their cars off with the extensive lift arms that they had installed, and driven off. Others were painting and scraping their main asset. No wonder their barges look so spick-and-span: the number of man hours that go into lacquering the decks with special varnish, clearing every speck of rust off the hull, and keeping the paint fresh, must be enormous. Delays of this kind are very annoying however, because the bateliers can be penalized for not delivering their cargoes on the appointed day.

  The canal was opened sooner than expected and we made our way through Tournai, which lies at the southernmost part of Flanders. The river, with all its heavy barge traffic, runs right through the middle of the town and makes a fine sight. I went into an antique shop on the quay, to have a look at a particularly fine bit of lace in the window, but was sidetracked by some postcards of the town during the 1939-45 war. The streets in which I had been walking had been virtually destroyed by successive American, British and German bombardments. I have often wondered what it must have been like to live in a town that had been invaded and occupied by enemy forces. This is something that neither the British nor the Americans had to experience in either of the World Wars. What would one’s attitude have been to the occupying force?

  By now we were heading east through the ‘cockpit of Europe’. Neat signs from the war graves commissions reminded one of the huge costs of war. From time to time, we could see the rows upon rows of white crosses on the green, rolling countryside. It was hard to imagine that this place was once a sea of mud, where screaming shells replaced the spring birds.

  We were now in old canal country and the Leo felt at home. The barge traffic was light and when barges passed us they were mere 300-tonners making a short cut to one of the main canals. It soon became apparent why the larger craft did not use this canal, when we were faced with a flight of four Anderton lifts. These marvels of Victorian engineering closed at 5.00 p.m., which is early on the canals, and we were caught at the bottom level. This delay gave us the opportunity to investigate what was causing the vibration we could feel in the propeller shaft. I was quite sure that we had picked up a bit of rope that had entwined round the propeller. Ray and I tried a very unsuccessful experiment, namely trying to lift the stern of the Leo out of the water with the crane that was installed on the barge. Of course, it was not nearly powerful enough but at least we had made the attempt, because we knew that one of us would have to plunge into the still chilly, murky waters of the canal to feel what was wrong. Ray bravely volunteered and, after some minutes of diving under the Leo’s stern, told me that the propeller blades were badly dented by a stone and that we would have to change the propeller as soon as we could. This meant we would have to lift the Leo out of the water as it was extremely difficult to change the propeller under water, even with a diver.

  In the early morning, we let a barge pass us in the queue, as indeed one should: they have to earn a living and, more to the point, they pay for the use of the canals. Our ascent through Anderton’s four masterpieces was uneventful. The lifts are so massively built and kept in such good repair by the authorities that it is surprising that they are not a much bigger tourist attraction, although once the new lift that is under construction at this point on the canal is finished, this will doubtless happen. The new lift will replace the four Anderton lifts and will be capable of taking 1300-ton barges. It stands like some vast blockhouse awaiting another German invasion, this time the invasion of the inevitable superbarges.

  We were now up on a plateau and since we had been through a series of lifts, I thought we should visit Belgium’s other hydraulic curiosity: the nearby lift at Ronquières which joins the canal from Brussels to the Meuse. This is really a huge bathtub on wheels into which the barges are driven and sealed. The whole apparatus is then allowed to slowly slide down the hill to the canal at the bottom. The bath is checked by a system of massive counterweights and safety devices, but I was nevertheless relieved when the Leo was back to the safety of more conventional means of lifting river traffic.

  Leaving Ronquières, we came upon a breakdown truck by the side of the canal and a boy with a flag waving at all the passing barges to slow them down. I decided to tie up and see what was going on. As I reached the boy a frogman appeared from the canal and flopped his way up the bank. Mr Van Damme had found himself a job for life clearing the canals of Belgium of ‘hot’ cars. His method was simple. He would drive down one side of the canal and his assistant would drive down the other, with a steel hawser running between the two vehicles. From time to time, the cable would snag on a car and Mr Van Damme would slip into his wet suit. His first priority was to collect the number plates from the car (I think he was probably paid by the plates). Then he would plunge again, attach a cable around the chassis of the car and winch it up on to the canal bank. I watched him pull a very new looking BMW up on to the bank. He told me that it had probably been in the canal for about six months. I was surprised when he attached the winch cable to the boot of the car to prise it open. ‘What do you think is inside?’ I asked, thinking of swag, but he explained that the only things of interest that he ever found were live eels. Sadly when the lid of the boot sprung open, it was empty. However, within the hour he had a top-of-the-range Toyota up on the bank and this time the boot disgorged six eels for Mrs Van Damme to cope with. Because of its isolation, this part of the canal was a favourite dumping ground for car thieves, explained my diving friend, who was very proud of his job – though I must say it is not one that I should fancy, especially during the winter.

  Charleroi is, from the canal at least, an industrial nightmare. All one could see were huge buildings, chimneys belching clouds of noxious vapour, and bright points of light from molten metal being poured. Welders were repairing a conveyor belt high above and evil clankings and bangings deafened me. The fact that humans are persuaded to work in places like these, inhaling the grime in the air day after day, convinced me of how lucky I was to be merely passing through. Later, in a lock outside Charleroi, I asked the skipper of a tug that was towing a huge barge of liquid mud if there was anything of interest between where we were and Namur. ‘It is all very much the same,’ was his morose reply.

  We wound our way down the Sambre to the Meuse at Namur. Ray was making a little headway with his French and came back triumphantly with some eggs which he had purchased with the aid of the Paul Daniels ‘Learn a language by word association’ book which he had been studying while at the helm. He had bought the eggs to make one of his famous lighterman’s omelettes: none of the salmonella-inhabited, runny, French-style versions for Ray. His were solidly delicious and a real meal in themselves. Already the allure of meals in restaurants had begun to pall. The cost was one factor, but by far the most irksome element in restaurant eating was the time it took to order something and then to eat it. I suppose it is all part of good living, spending ages over a meal and savouring every aspect of its presentation, but the eternal inquiry as to what each dish contained and above all whether it contained any garlic, which made Ray ill, became increasingly tiresome.

  We were moored under the magnificent citadel
in Namur, which no doubt had had a glorious past, but in the recent World Wars had had only a very short history of combat. It stands perched high on a hill at the junction of the Meuse and the Sambre, and must have looked very daunting to any invaders approaching from the river, but it was attacked from the rear in the First and Second World Wars. The defenders thought they had everything catered for, but were surprised by a parachute attack directly into the middle of the fortified area. Between the Leo and the citadel was one of the casinos that earn this part of the country the title ‘Belgium’s Côte d’Azur’. Ray and I went to see whether we could get into this vast modern gambling hall, but we were not properly dressed and the men on the door obviously did not like the cut of our jib, so we decided to let them keep their money and moved on to Dinant further up the Meuse.

  Probably the most knowledgeable man about the nuts and bolts of film making that I know had heard we were in the area and came on board for lunch. Lee Katz has spent most of his life in Hollywood, sometimes writing scripts for Warner Brothers ‘B’ pictures and sometimes acting as assistant director or producer on major movies. Some were good, some bad and some indifferent but Lee was a true professional who had known all the greats of Hollywood in the golden studio years. He is always amusing company and was in Europe on business of one kind or another. He told me of his days as assistant director on Casablanca and of how neither Humphrey Bogart nor Ingrid Bergman had been the first choice for their parts, nor had they wanted to play them, but they, like Claude Rains, were under contract to Jack Warner and had been obliged to make the film. Casablanca was entirely shot in the studio, though it has been praised many times for having the authentic feel of the Paris streets just before the war. He told me with some pride that it had been his idea, when the script arrived at the last minute for the final scene in which Bergman and her film husband leave from the airport, to make the studio set look authentic by hiring a group of dwarves to load the plane, and so give the correct perspective. Nobody at the studios ever thought the film would be successful and so even the choice of music was limited to what was cheap and already belonged to Warners. ‘As Time Goes By,’ Casablanca, Bogart, Bergman and Rains somehow made a magic that will last forever. The film is a brilliant example of how nobody, but nobody, knows what the public will like and respond to before the work has been completed. Lee caught the train to Paris and I was sorry to see his dapper figure disappear with his memories.