As we sat down to eat, the heavens opened for a few minutes and we all crouched under our blue awning holding our plates. Suddenly there was a piercing scream from Daisy who had been standing beneath part of the awning that had, we later discovered, been weakened by a burning cigarette butt thrown from the bridge above us at the Pont des Arts. The sudden shower had formed a large puddle in the canvas and the pressure had produced a fine jet of water which had gone down Daisy’s neck. Her scream passed practically unnoticed in the cacophony all around us. Bands were marching over the Pont Neuf; African groups were celebrating Sainte Cecilia’s night with the wildest heathen music; on the opposite bank a lone violinist was making a poor attempt at a spirited Hungarian melody; and a beautiful blonde flautist was playing under the plane tree to which we had moored the barge.
The night was clear and fresh now, after the rain, and this vast tempest of sound was being echoed from one disapproving building to another, bouncing away down the river, never quite dying away before it was replaced by another squall of sound. The new tablecloth that I had bought for the occasion was soaked and the plates that we had laid for the absent guests had puddles of water in them. We dried the seats, opened a bottle or two of the cheap champagne we had bought near Rheims, and settled down to watch the spectacle and to wave at the bateaux mouches, those enormous glass structures that glide past by the minute, their loudspeakers blasting out essential tourist facts in every language known to man.
Much later we returned to our mooring under the Pont des Arts. The noisy band was still just as noisy but the gaps between numbers had increased substantially. The possibility of sleep was remote, so Daisy and I decided to take a walk round the crowded streets. In the Rue de Seine a raucous band dressed entirely in red plastic, too tight for comfort or decorum, was playing to a crowd of dancing students. The lead trumpeter was disturbing the rhythm with his attempts to tantalize the crowd by pulling down the bottom part of his plastic outfit and giving them a glimpse of pubic hair. The crowd were distinctly untantalized and the lady tuba player, wearing dark glasses and a trilby, stepped forward and briskly pulled his trousers down, so indicating in a perfectly French fashion that there was nothing there to make a fuss about. The music improved and Daisy and I joined the dancers on that warm summer’s night. I was filled with admiration that French law has it that every month for one night, everyone is allowed to make as much noise as he likes. Bravo, Paris.
Chapter Seven
Paris to Montbard
One day we just had to leave Paris: the itch to start the motor and get on our way again, never knowing where we would stop for the night, was irresistible. We pulled away from the Pont des Arts in the dawn with the guardian clochard fast asleep in a huddled bundle on his favourite piece of cardboard. The morning light was slanting across the quais and the noise of the traffic was reduced to the sound of a single vehicle. The air was cool and fresh as we passed under the shadow of Notre Dame for the last time, and made our way up the Seine under the Pont de Bercy.
Just past the bridge, we passed a barge called the Sylphe which had been there when we loaded our barrel of wine on board. Her captain, a grumpy chap with a saint for a wife, told me he had to feed his family on the equivalent of four hundred pounds a month and, with five mouths to feed, found this very hard. I waved as we went past and he told me that he would be following us in a few days because he had got a cargo of barley to transport to Basel in Switzerland. A drought in the USA had caused panic in the grain futures market, and for some reason large amounts of wheat and barley were being moved from the huge Common Market silos to Switzerland. From time to time the mysteries of commerce elude me, but this batelier was a good deal happier than when I had last encountered him. Every cloud has a silver lining for someone somewhere, they say.
It took us longer to push up against the current than I’d anticipated, and it was early afternoon before we reached the junction of the Marne and the Seine. I then took the kind of decision that you can only take when you do not have hotels booked or appointments to keep: I decided to divert from our planned route, and turned left, or, more nautically, to port, up the Marne. I had always wanted to visit Joinville, famous for its film studios, and had once passed that way on one of my earlier voyages, but been unable to stop. It was not very far out of our way and we reached the suburb of Paris in time to moor early.
Joinville still has villas from the 1900s stretched along the banks of the Marne, which gives it a sleepy, long-ago feeling – of dusty roads rather than streets and shady plane trees. We tied up outside a jolly-looking restaurant where a huge, cutout plywood chef, dominating the skyline, announced that this was Chez Gegène. The whole scene could have been lifted from the pages of Babar the Elephant: even the scullers seemed to have slowed down to the pace of the summer’s evening, dipping the blades of their oars languorously into the glassy surface of the water with a satisfying swish.
Ray and I smartened ourselves up and went into the huge restaurant which was also a bal musette. There were half a dozen couples dancing to a live band. Inside the building and outside under umbrellas, people were eating and laughing. The menu, as in all good restaurants in France or anywhere else, was extremely simple: either lobster or steak and chips. The kitchen, which was outside, was manned by twenty swift and swearing waiters using the shortest slang abbreviations for their orders. The final dressings on the plates were dished out by the owner’s extremely pretty daughter. Ray and I ate our meal and reminisced about the trip so far while watching the dancers. There was a woman of fifty summers, who looked exactly like Toulouse Lautrec’s favourite dancer, La Goulue, dancing with a short fat man of the same age. His shirt, open to the waist, revealed a huge and hairy expanse of flesh. They made an odd couple, but they danced beautifully to an accordion version of a song called ‘Au près de ma blonde’, and one by one the other dancers sat down to let these two have the floor.
Somehow, the music and the setting made me feel extremely apprehensive about the journey I had planned. Would we ever find anywhere as accessible as France? Although Ray’s French was improving enough to be able to order his own meal, we both decided that now we were under way again, we would give up restaurants and live off our own cooking. We walked the few yards back to the boat and I pointed out the Joinville film studios to him. It is a mystery to me why film studios have to look so ugly from the outside. I suppose they are no more so than any factory, but somehow it seems odd that such varied and extravagant products should emerge from these utilitarian buildings.
The next morning we turned the Leo around and went down the Marne till we reached the Seine. Turning upstream we passed through the stockbroker belt, where trim expensive houses and trim expansive lawns stretched down to the river, its banks lined with weeping willows. There were many gorgeous females busy browning themselves for God knows what, but though we went very close and did our most charming waves, we never got so much as a flicker of recognition in return. Suddenly all my warm feelings for the French, from the night before at Chez Gegène, evaporated. Here were rich, superior beings who clearly believed that the sun was there to shine only on their posteriors, and that the very idea of a battered old boat like ours approaching within waving distance was too much. The rich are different, and their attitude prompted some wry and rudely accurate remarks from Ray, normally charitable about his fellow beings.
The beautiful wooded banks through Fontainebleau led us to our mooring, in the mouth of a stream near Montereau. Ray got out his fishing line and tried his luck, while I started to read a story called ‘The Two Hundred Pound Millionaire’. From a collection by Weston Martyr called The Pipe Pushers, it is a tale of courage and self-reliance which I highly recommend to any voyager, and also to anyone who tries to judge people by their appearance. It reminded me of an occasion when I was growing up in India: my father heard me complaining about the five-day journey that we were making from Bombay to the Himalayas, and insisted that I read The Worst Journey in the World by
Apsley Cherry-Garrard – the story of a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic, organized to collect the eggs of the emperor penguin. He was right to think that, having read that book, no one had the right to complain about discomfort while travelling.
The morning trip to the boulangerie took us through narrow streets to the usual comforting French square, its patch of sandy gravel dented by the impact of a myriad steel boules, thrown with accuracy and venom. Boules, or pétanque as it is known in the South, is the only game I know that rivals the subterfuge and meanness of croquet. I had, by now, fallen into the French habit of buying bread every day. French bread never seems to keep for more than a few hours, and croissants are at their best when still hot, the fat in which they have been cooked staining the sides of the plain white paper bags they all seem to come in.
As Ray and I strolled back from the village, we discussed the latest problem we were having with the steering of the boat. I felt that the fins that we had welded on to the rudder in London, and that had subsequently vibrated off, would have been a great help with the steering in the narrow rivers where we were having difficulty in turning. I had heard that there was a boatyard owned by a certain Mr Evans, who had to be English, in Sens – a town an hour or two away – and I thought that before we went into the wilds of the Canal de Bourgogne we ought to have the fins put on again.
Mr Evans was indeed English and from the British Navy. He had tried to set up his business on the Thames, but his speciality, namely repairing wooden boats, was considered too messy for the riparian authorities in the Home Counties, so he had tossed his curls, so to speak, ventured into the Common Market, found things much easier to manage, and really felt, he said, that he had the right to exist here. As luck would have it, he had ordered a mobile crane that day, to lift some boats that had been stored in his yard back into the water; so we soon had the Leo on the bank for a welding job on the rudder. Though we had all the apparatus for welding neither of us had enough skill, so we recruited a friendly Dutchman who was building a hotel barge nearby and had run out of money. He was an extremely good welder and had our job done in a very short space of time. In the half an hour or so that the boat was out of the water, he managed somehow not only to tell us his entire life story, but also to ring up the local newspaper and tell them that we, an English boat, had stopped here for him to make repairs. Two reporters arrived and interviewed the Dutchman, who seemed to be a natural for that sort of thing, about his life and hard times – and they took a picture of the Leo.
We gave the voluble Dutchman a lift back to his barge while he explained what his perfect woman would be like. She would have to be a non-smoking vegetarian with a degree in handling repairs to boat engines, and would only speak when spoken to. I could see, as he prattled away, that he was unlikely to find his ideal mate. His parting salvo, as he left us in one of the quaint, sloping-sided locks that they have on the upper reaches of the Seine, was about how to tie up. His advice, when we tried it in the next lock, was quite useless, but he did know how to weld – which is by no means as simple as it looks. My first job ever had been in a factory in Wolverhampton, spot-welding steel folding chairs. I think I must have ruined the production figures for the weeks I was there before being fired, because I never developed the necessary lightness of touch to stop the welding flame burning through the metal in the wrong places.
The sloping-sided locks were difficult for us, because we were not quite long enough to stretch from one end to the other as a normal barge would do, which prevented us from making fast on the upright portions at the ends of the lock. They were far from being a source of grief to all, however. The one we encountered after leaving the Dutchman provided recreation for a family of ducklings, who were having the greatest time skiing down the slippery, sloping sides of the lock. The mother stood watchfully on the top of the lock making sure all was well, and the goody-goody of the family stood next to her. I am always astonished by how much young humans resemble young things of all other species. As the lock filled, the ducklings rejoined their mother to wait for another vessel to go through, and more sliding fun.
The Dutchman’s work on the rudder had improved the steering and he had made all sorts of rash promises about what he would do if the fins fell off, though, as he had used much heavier steel plate to make the fins and had double welded the joints, it was, in his view, quite impossible that this should happen. Only time would tell.
Towards evening we met some Swiss damsels in distress. A brother and sister and the boy’s girlfriend had hired a holiday boat and had run out of diesel. Running out of diesel in a boat is bad news because in my experience it always leads to other troubles that you have not anticipated. We gave them some of our fuel, but the motor refused to start even with Ray’s nimble fingers stripping the filters far into the night. They were in some distress as they were far from any telephone and did not know what to do. We told them we would give them a tow in the morning, to somewhere they could ring the hire company and get their boat fixed.
The young man turned out to be a trainee chef, and the girls were training to be teachers of handicrafts. They offered to cook us a Swiss lunch the following day, while they waited for their boat to be repaired. As I lay in bed that night I remembered David Lean telling me how he had been walking round Shah Jahan’s gardens in the Red Fort at Delhi, with a famous bestseller writer who had been sent out to work with him on a script about the Taj Mahal. The distinguished writer had fallen madly in love with a Swiss girl in the hotel where he was staying, and as he walked round the gardens he was heard to mutter, ‘If there be paradise on earth, it is Swiss, it is Swiss, it is Swiss.’
Our Swiss girls, pretty and practical, leapt ashore when we reached the nearest town and went shopping for a memorable feast, in which there were a great many potatoes and raw carrots. A grumpy Yorkshireman came to mend their boat and complained that the boat-hire companies were a scandal: they never spent enough money maintaining their fleets and the boats were forever breaking down and spoiling holidays. It occurred to me that this dyspeptic monologue could well have been a defence mechanism and that he was probably one of the owners himself. He soon had the engine running again, however, and the Swiss went on their way.
Soon after setting off up the green and lush valley of the Seine, we encountered a dredger barge, which we accompanied through a number of locks. The family who ran it were the third generation of bateliers to work on this stretch of the river, preventing it from silting up. They were hired on a contract basis, being directed to whatever part of the river the authorities thought it necessary to dredge. I was impressed by the clever idea for stabilizing the barge which they had developed. The barge had a dredger grab on it, and when the grab lifted its bucket from the bottom of the river with upwards of five tons of silt in it, the barge would, without a stabilizer, naturally start to list – which could be dangerous, and very annoying for mum in the kitchen. To compensate, they had made some enormous legs out of steel pipes. These they lowered through holes in the bottom of the barge with their crane, and then fixed them so that they held the vessel steady.
They told me that they were kept busy all year round dredging away, even though the barge traffic was declining year by year. It would be a bad day if the powers that be stopped keeping the upper part of the Seine open for river traffic, although it must be extremely expensive and increasingly hard to justify.
At Cézy lock there was a letter waiting for me from my son Jason, who was in China researching a book he was writing on tea. I am always immensely impressed by postal services that can cope with mail for itinerants. The ‘poste restante’ system works extremely well in France providing that you remember to take your passport when you go to collect your mail. Of course when you have a boat the mail is given to the boat rather than an individual, but it is very important that the sender addresses the letter to a lock in a town and not some sleepy corner where the lock-keeper could easily forget to give it to you. My letter was handed to me by a very j
olly man who greeted the boat with, ‘Ah, ma petite Leontyne’, as though a long-lost lover had walked up his garden path. He turned the letter over and over in his hand before giving it to me, as though he was reluctant to part with it, and then told me that as there were no barges coming I could stay in the lock till I had read it. He was clearly very curious to know what was in this mysterious missive from the East. I told him that it was from my son and that he had written to say that he would be meeting us in Montbard, where I had said we would be for the celebrations on 14 July, Bastille Day. He seemed enormously gratified that someone so very far away from France had been thinking about the fall of the Bastille and the abolition of the monarchy.
It had rained a good deal that day and since there was a thunderstorm on its way, I decided to moor near some tourist boats, something that I try to avoid whenever possible. The barge and the tug together weigh about sixty tons and to make a firm mooring it is necessary to find a tree if there are no bollards about. In this case the trees were on the other side of the towpath – a problem, as it is completely forbidden to stretch ropes across the paths, as they are always being used by the lock-keepers and their families riding mobylettes – the motorized bicycles that everyone seems to own in the countryside in France. Many are the accidents that have been caused by mooring ropes catching the wheels of the bicycles and pitching the riders over the handlebars. I had had some long steel pegs made before leaving England for such emergencies and I used them now, although it was difficult to get a firm fixing in the crumbling bank of the Canal de Bourgogne and I had to use our fourteen-pound sledgehammer to drive the pegs into the side of the path. The noise of the hammer striking the steel pegs aroused a party of Germans on the tourist boat near us, and suddenly, as I bent over my work, I found myself staring into the malevolent face of a huge Alsatian dog. The beefy owner announced that he and his wife had locked up the children and were taking the dog for a walk, which seemed an orderly if somewhat inhuman way of going about things. I wondered what it is like to take one’s pets on holiday, something that I suppose very few Britons can remember doing nowadays.
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