Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  The threatened thunderstorm arrived in style. We battened down the hatch, and as we listened to the rain pounding on the steel deck of the barge, Ray told me that lightning jumps upwards from the earth, rather than the other way about as I had imagined. It was not till the morning that we realized that in our haste we had left the cable that linked the barge and the tug on the deck, where the plug had dropped into a pool of water. This had caused a short and the batteries on the tug had gone completely flat. I am always extremely apprehensive about electrical supplies on boats and though I thought I had taken every precaution, it proved to be a problem to start the Leo’s engine. I had a 12-kilowatt generator on the barge but I did not have a suitable charger for the 24-volt batteries on the Leo. The batteries on the barge were charged with a trickle charger from the generator and from the engine on the tug when it was running. After trying to bring the tug alongside the barge to jump-start it, only to discover that the cables were not heavy enough and melting them – then having to pull the Leo out of the way of an angry, oncoming barge that did not have the room to pass – we were exhausted. I decided that, cost what it may, I would take the bicycle and buy some flexible welding cable from the nearby town of St Florentin. I find that the French have an extremely good distribution of professional equipment, and was pleased to find a shop almost immediately that could sell me what I required. The ten metres of half-inch-diameter flexible copper wire cost me over a hundred pounds. This was not what I was expecting but at least I now have the consolation of being the proud possessor of what are probably the most expensive jump leads in the world.

  During my chat with the shopkeeper he told me that they made an excellent cheese in this little town and that there was a cheese works at the back of his shop. De Gaulle once said in despair that it was hard to govern a country with so many different types of cheese, each with its own band of fervent supporters. The cheese they make in St Florentin is soft, white, bland, and has the consistency of foam rubber. Why it should be so sought after baffles me. Touching it reminded me of being acutely embarrassed as a young assistant director on a Western film in Spain, when the star, Jayne Mansfield, invited me to feel her magnificent bosom for the silicone implant that had recently been injected by the studio doctors. Her husband, Johnny Haggerty, was Mr Universe and was extremely proud of his wife’s figure: they were busily merchandising their superb physiques with the Johnny and Jayne bodybuilding kit. Despite this memory, I was forced to buy some of the cheese which, to my astonishment, Ray devoured with apparent enjoyment.

  With the right equipment, the Gardner engine started at once and we were on our way again, through countryside that was beginning to look like the tourist posters for France that you see on the underground. There were a large number of locks on this stretch of canal, manned by a variety of people, mostly women. At one flight of locks where there were two locks separated by two hundred yards of canal, I came across an ancient feud. The woman at the lower lock spent the whole time we were with her bitching about the woman at the next lock. She was obviously more engrossed in complaining about her neighbour than attending to her garden or house, which was a mess. When we got to the upper lock of this pair, the lock lady was trim, with dyed hair and a garden as neat as a pin. When I complimented her on the care she had taken of her domain, she said, with what I thought was a twinkle in her eye, that she had a lot of help from the chap who lived at the lock we had just come through. There was clearly a good deal going on on this little bief that I would never know.

  The Swiss boat we had towed had passed us when we broke down, and now we passed them as they were handing their boat back to the hire company where it had come from. We stopped to say goodbye again, and to fill up our water tank. As we did so, we chatted with the man in charge who had pulled up in his little van and left the engine running. After a few minutes, when we had agreed to pay for the water, the hooter in his van started to blow. I looked up to see a large Labrador at the wheel who was pushing the hooter button with its paw: something that it had apparently learnt to do itself when it thought its master had spent long enough on his business. A neat trick, but not one that I would care to teach a dog.

  That night I made a really stupid mistake which reminded me of a comment that Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote, about an extremely well-known and expensive London restaurant, in the suggestion book at the Travellers’ Club. He simply wrote the name of the restaurant and beside it, in the comments column, drew a skull and crossbones. I had purchased the Michelin Guide and noticed that, in Tonnerre, there was one of those grand restaurants with a top rating. Ray and I walked up the hill to the old abbey where the restaurant was, and as soon as I was inside I realized what a mistake I had made. The place was full of the kind of motorist who has taken the Hovercraft over the Channel, avoided the traffic in Paris, averaged so many miles per hour and so on, facts which they bray at each other over their quails’ eggs. It took us three hours to get some soup and chops. I think we would both have walked out before finishing the overrated, overpriced offerings served on vast plates, had it not been pouring with rain outside, and a long walk home to the Leo.

  From Tonnerre we went through one of the most beautiful parts of the Canal de Bourgogne, which many are trying to turn into a national monument, whilst others wish to reduce the running costs by installing automatic locks to do the work of the very varied selection of lock-keepers who currently look after them. One of the lady lock-minders was an out-of-work hairdresser whose salon, in the neighbouring town, had been closed down. I badly needed a haircut and had some scissors with me, so I asked whether she would oblige, and she did a very nice job whilst waiting for the next boat to come through. She told me that she had a free house with the job, that there was not very much to do, and that life was quite agreeable, although she had not yet experienced a winter there. A few locks further on we bought some really excellent wine from a woman who clearly caught the bottles as they fell off the back of a lorry. We stopped at Lock 72, having passed through thirty locks that day – and had a haircut! Not bad for one day. The exercise had purged the disgust I felt with myself for having gone to the expensive clip joint the night before. The pirate flag should have flown from those towers, but then I suppose they give their customers what they want: isolation from reality and a car park.

  The toothless lock-lady at number 72 had sold me some lemons and I cooked spaghetti with lemon and cream sauce which was a good deal more agreeable than our last evening meal. The locks shut at 7.30 p.m. in those parts, so apart from tidying the boat up and checking the engine, cooking, fishing and reading were our evening activities. Ray’s attempts to catch fish were not very successful, but he was practising for the Bastille Day fishing competition that we had seen advertised for Montbard, where I hoped we would be to meet Jason.

  It was a full day’s journey to Montbard and we had two days to get there before all the locks closed for the holiday, so I decided to visit the Forges de Buff on. As we arrived at the lock there, we seemed to be serenaded by an unseen accordion. Then, as we tied up, a diminutive figure appeared behind a huge accordion, playing a popular song – not very well, but recognizably. The player was nine years old and looked exactly like Shirley Temple, with a red spotted dress and curly fair hair. She had learnt to play the accordion at the local school in Montbard, where a professional lady accordionist taught on Wednesdays. The teacher had arrived in Montbard on some tour or other, had fallen madly in love with a chef, and settled down to start a restaurant with him. Their restaurant was very successful by all accounts, and her accordion lessons had produced the best young male accordionist in the all-European accordion championships. In Paris we had heard the great Marcel Adzola, who had been the accompanist for Edith Piaf, play quite superbly what must be the musical instrument of France. The accordion has set more moods – and in just a few bars – in French films and television than any other instrument. The little girl popped out with her accordion every time a tourist boat or hotel barge went by, hop
ing to get some money, which, of course, I gave her. I asked what she was going to do with it. Her mother could have done with the money, but this little girl said that she was going to buy a newer and better accordion. I hope she did.

  The Forges de Buffon are, or rather were, where the Comte de Buffon manufactured a special steel from local ore. This is what stopped the guns of the French army blowing apart when larger and larger cannonballs were needed. The Swedes had the secret of an especially hard steel required in the manufacture of safe cannon barrels, but before Buffon found a similar mixture, the French had to put up with using only medium charges in their cannons, otherwise they would blow up, with great loss of life to those working the guns. Buffon was born in Montbard and had become one of the luminaries of eighteenth-century France and also keeper of the Jardin du Roi in Paris, after his learned thesis on natural history had been published. In four years he built these forges and diverted the local river, so that the water could be used to power the bellows for the forge and also the hammers required for beating out the red-hot metal. In the true spirit of eighteenth-century enlightenment, he had had a gallery built in the main area of the forge so that his guests, with their jabots and their jewels, could watch the wretched toilers as they worked in enormously high temperatures, tending the furnaces. The incentive to work in the furnace room was that you got extra rations and privileged accommodation. All this information was pumped at me by an incredibly energetic woman whose family had owned the place for the last eighty years or so. She spoke extremely good English, which was not surprising as she had married a charming but rather vague Englishman, who spent his days being supportive and perplexed by his wife’s behaviour.

  We had arrived, by pure chance, in the year that was the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Buffon, and to celebrate, this lady had decided to breed a hinnie. I had no idea what a hinnie was until she told me that it was a cross between a female donkey and a horse, or in this case a Welsh pony from the neighbouring farmer’s fields. The great difference between a mule and a hinnie, she hectored me as though any fool should know, is that a hinnie can reproduce itself. I did my best to show that I was suitably impressed by this rare and extremely bad-tempered animal who, instead of nuzzling in the approved manner, chose to manoeuvre its hindquarters to let go a vicious kick. ‘Oh you are naughty,’ cried the owner, shooing the beast away. She was forced to repeat herself almost immediately as the loathsome hybrid turned on her, lashing out with a footballer’s kick to the groin, which narrowly missed. What energy my guide had, what unstoppability: little wonder her husband had perfected the art of English vagueness.

  Chapter Eight

  Montbard to Mulhouse

  Montbard is a pleasant old town of twisted roofs and moss-covered tiles, built on the side of a hill topped by a park which was once the site of a fortress. The Comte de Buffon is unquestionably Montbard’s most famous former citizen by a long chalk. In the eighteenth century he had been the biggest employer in the area, using hundreds of men to collect fuel from the forests to heat his furnaces. He had employed women to build the park, paying them practically no money until they protested so vigorously that he agreed to pay them a little more. This setback would appear to have been the only reverse Buffon ever had to suffer in his life.

  The canal at Montbard runs round the bottom of the town through a large basin. Here there were a number of hotel barges which left every few days, taking groups of passengers for trips up and down the Canal de Bourgogne. There was also a small harbour where a boat-hire company operated, as well as a berth or two for itinerants. All this looked a bit too clubby for us, so I decided to go through the first lock after the basin and tie up on the other side.

  The charming young lock-lady there, who was in her twenties and had two small boys, allowed us to tie up just the other side of the lock and even provided us with water. When I asked her how long she thought she was going to be doing this job she replied that she would surely do it for the rest of her days, which she seemed very happy about. In this lock we were moored next to Montbard’s main industry: a factory, still producing specialized steel, which it turned into tubes for nuclear reactors. The factory had just closed for the holiday and there was a feeling of excitement in the old streets as the children prepared for the torchlit procession that evening, and the older ones got themselves together for the Grand Bal Gratuit which Jacques Garcia, mayor for sixteen years, always laid on for the populace on the night before the glorious 14th of July.

  Ray and I, feeling that we should enter into the spirit of the occasion, dressed the ship, which in our case meant getting all our signal flags out, joining them together in no particular order, and stretching them from the raised crane arm to the top of the stubby mast on the Leo. I have never been able to get the meaning of the signal flags straight, but I reasoned that, so far from the ocean, there would be very few seadogs about to correct the obvious mistakes that I am sure we must have made. We also festooned the boat with a garland of coloured lights and we were well pleased with the festive result. I went off to get some supplies from the local charcutier who said that in spite of it being a holiday he would be open on the morning of Bastille Day, and invited me to come to see his kitchen the next morning.

  My son Jason and his girl Kate were arriving that evening from Paris, on one of France’s TGVs (high-speed trains), which really do go buzzing along. I was very much looking forward to hearing Jason’s traveller’s tales, which were always punctuated with a good giggle or two. He duly arrived and introductions were made. Ray and the kids got on well from the start and we had a splendid march round the town in the flambeaux (torchlit) procession. This was led by the fire brigade and the Trompettes Montbardois – arguably the very worst band in the land. The mayor’s daughter, who worked as her father’s assistant in the town hall, confessed that the band were not up to playing the Marseillaise at the ceremony the next day, so they would have to play a record of France’s anthem as the flag was raised. Outside the Hôtel de Ville we were handed coloured lanterns with candles inside, and set off with the crowd, marching round the town to the revolutionary beat of the drummers. The fire brigade had large flaming torches which had been dipped in kerosene and burned in a suitably flamboyant manner.

  The procession wound its way round the town, the town louts throwing firecrackers to frighten the young and elderly, and finally arrived outside the hall where the Grand Bal Gratuit was taking place. The appalling band played a last – discordant – chord, and shambled off. The mayor explained that they normally had a live band from out of town for the Grand Bal Gratuit, but this year the town hall funds had been sadly depleted celebrating the bicentennial of the death of Buffon, and so the dance band had been cancelled.

  We left the bal after a few minutes, as the music of Montbard was beginning to get us all down. We also had to be up very early the next day to enter Ray for the fishing competition, which was to take place a few yards from where the boat was moored.

  Ray was duly entered and drew number 47, which was considered to be a good draw. There were about one hundred men and women in the competition, which took place, on a morning that was anything but glorious, in freezing drizzle. I walked with Ray to the stake that marked his spot and found next to it, as with all the others, a small pot of begonias. He had brought his short fishing rod, but it was clear that he was well out of his depth as all his fellow competitors unleashed huge carbon-fibre rods which stretched over eighteen feet into the middle of the canal. One of Ray’s neighbours was a shortsighted gentleman who required an elderly pair of opera glasses to see his float, it was so far away. After an hour of serious fishing no one I saw had caught anything, and after a number of whispered conversations with the white hope of the Leo, we decided that he ought to change his bait from rolled-up balls of bread to red worms. These the lady on Ray’s right kindly supplied – or was it a ploy? As soon as Ray had changed his bait the woman jerked her rod and pulled out a fish measuring a good three inches.
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  The mayor came up with a few asinine, vote-catching jokes about the fish not wanting to jump out of the canal, but since he had been mayor for the last sixteen summers, I expect the competitors were used to it. Ray decided that it just was not going to be his day, and left whistling the Marseillaise. I believe the winner won about three hundred pounds in prize money, which was about six hundred times more than the weight of the fish that he caught.

  Jason, Kate and I went for our date with the charcutier, who showed us round the spotless kitchen where he was making large quantities of pâté de campagne, with pig’s liver, lumps of white fat, buckets of garlic, and parsley. His kitchen looked out over the valley and I could see Ray on the Leo hundreds of feet below us. The charcutier, who sported the most magnificent moustache, explained that they bought a whole dead pig on a Friday, and used every single bit of it during the week, except the bones which they sold for fertilizer and glue. The delicious items that they had on show somehow did not look quite so appetizing after we’d seen and smelled the boiling cauldrons downstairs, and realized that the jelly which made the langues de porc look so good was from the pig’s skin, rendered down over many hours. Hunger is the best cook, however, and by the time we had been to the ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville next door, we were all ready for what he had offered us.