Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  Our journey had taken on a new aspect. The countryside was no longer familiar and our attempts with the language were extremely basic. Many people that we met spoke English but I was acutely embarrassed by my rudimentary German and wished I had worked harder at it while I was at school. We did not take long to cover the twenty kilometres into Frankfurt but we had no idea where we could moor, which made it a rather nervous trip: unlike Paris, Frankfurt does not have many bridges and along the north bank of the Main there are neat gardens surrounded by trim walls of the regional red sandstone. I decided to stop, in what looked like the city centre, alongside a promenade. I was slightly concerned about the possibility of things getting stolen but I need not have worried. The boat became an instant point of interest and for a couple of hours Ray and I sat talking to passers-by from all over the world. A beautiful girl dressed in the briefest of bikinis went by, draped over the bows of a small speedboat, and greeted us as she passed in a surprisingly low voice. Her ‘Hallo boys’ turned our heads and our attention from the middle-aged Persian sisters who were telling us about the difficulties they had had in raising money for the poor in Iran from this enormously wealthy city.

  It was a holiday weekend and, as luck would have it, I broke a bit off my tooth on some hard German bread and had to have it fixed. There was no possibility of going to a dentist because they had all taken the weekend off, and anyway it is against the rules for good German teeth to break over a weekend. As we approached our mooring, I had noticed that there was an immense hospital on the south bank. I made my way over there and at once became embroiled in the Euro-nightmare of getting free medical care in another European country. It very soon became extremely clear to me that there was no chance of cracking the problem of having no permanent address, and so I asked whether it would be possible to be treated privately. I was told to sit in a huge waiting room, quite empty, in the front row of row upon row of shiny plastic chairs. After some minutes of wondering if this expedition had been a good idea, I heard brisk footsteps approaching. Their owner was a nice Irish girl who had been a dental nurse in Dublin but had not been able to get a job in a hospital here till she spoke German, which she had learned by working in a German butcher’s. I liked her at once, and as we walked to the surgery she told me I was in luck as, according to her, the most brilliant young dentist in Germany was going to look after me. The surgery was a gleaming, modern affair and I was told to sit in the chair, where I was left alone. I closed my eyes for a minute and must have dozed off. When I opened them again I found myself looking into the most beautiful pair of clear blue orbs. Their owner turned out to be the brilliant – and beautiful – dentist, who gently fixed my tooth assisted by her Irish handmaiden. I happily paid her, and, for the first time in my life, left a dental surgery walking on air.

  Ray decided to fly home to see his family, and I stayed with the boat which meant I could wander about Frankfurt for a few days. Moored up as we were in the equivalent of Hyde Park or Central Park, I had one slight disadvantage – the lack of a hall porter who would have an idea of what was on and what to do. I saw Ray off at the central station on his way to the airport and then, having smartened myself up as best I could, walked into one of Frankfurt’s swankiest hotels. It had a large circular lobby and as I paused, uncertain of my direction, I could feel disapproving eyes boring into my baggy blue jeans and unpolished shoes. How could they know that I was one of the few people in the last fifty years who had come from London by water to their hotel lobby? The concierge was a charming Indian which was not what I had expected, and I immediately felt at home. I explained that I wanted to know what was going on in the city and told him how I had arrived. He produced several brochures and a tram timetable and promised to visit the boat on his day off. For a moment I felt tempted to stay in this comfortable hotel and use the hotel telephones instead of having to struggle with the German telephone boxes which are strangely inefficient, but I had a water supply on the quay and I felt it would be abandoning the Leo to leave her during the night.

  The hotel was near the main station and in the red light district of Frankfurt. The Germans, in public at least, seem to treat sex like some brisk muscular activity which must at all times be efficient – or so the brochures that I had been given would have it. In the streets where I found myself there were many bars which seemed to cater for the ambling American servicemen who roamed the streets in twos and threes. Next there were the brothels which were somehow industrialized, many containing the sexy French word ‘amour’ in their names: ‘Palais d’Amour’ and even ‘Sauna d’Amour’. After the d’amour group there were a number of establishments which had woven, equally inappropriately, ‘Paradise’ into their billboards. ‘Paradise Garten’ was a six-storey building; the girls who were not busy leaning out of the windows and whistling at the crowds were instead trying to catch the eye of some likely chap in the street below.

  Near the underground entrance at the top of the Kaiser-strasse, opposite a ribbon of multi-screen porno cinemas, I met some angels – at least if they were not, they were surely blessed with a ticket to heaven. A minibus announcing that it was waging war against AIDS was parked in the middle of the pedestrian zone. There was an orderly queue of heroin addicts waiting to exchange used needles for new ones, a cup of tea and a packet of condoms. I was fascinated by all this, and went to ask the beautiful woman who was running the show with three helpers to tell me about her efforts. She was called Crystal and, curiously, held my hand while we talked, trying to see whether I was genuinely curious or some sort of police spy. She explained that her clients never had any peace from the authorities. In Germany it is against the rules to shoot up ‘H’, and that meant that you were sent to prison if you were an addict. No attempt was made by the authorities to cure the addicts, and, according to Crystal, there was no use of heroin-substitute drugs to get these poor people off their deadly habit.

  Crystal’s big breakthrough had happened when she had persuaded the police to give her a hands-off zone ten metres round her little bus, three times a week, so at least the junkies could exchange their needles. She readily admitted that her successes were limited but she told me that she had been pleased when a group of women she had been working with had stopped a man giving a young girl a shot of heroin for the first time. Making people aware of what was right and wrong, and getting them to do something about it themselves, was the only way forward, she said. While we were talking, Crystal’s team, Connie, Rosemary and Hubert were dishing out their giveaways, counting the used needles and dispensing the tea. Nothing, absolutely nothing, seemed to shock them more than the police brutality towards these poor wretches – especially in winter. The ways that the addicts had to steal and sell themselves to satisfy their craving were just a way of life, and they had heard all the stories of depravity a thousand times before. In a city where there are 392 different banks, you would think it should be possible to fund an operation like Crystal’s, but all she could raise was a small amount from federal funds in Bonn.

  When I got back to the boat I found that I had some neighbours from the German yachting fraternity, including the beauty who had hailed me in her bikini with that husky ‘Hallo boys’. Her husband was a jolly restaurateur who invited me on board his cabin cruiser for a beer. By the time I had drunk with them and all the other owners of the small flotilla that had moored against the barge, and had returned the compliment with the crate of beer I had bought on our last refuelling stop, a good deal of alcohol had been consumed. One of the owners of the boats, I cannot remember which, had bought a synthesizer but did not know how to work it. The girl in the bikini could play a keyboard and soon became the star of the party, while the men flashed torches over the instructions to turn her perfectly pleasant piano into a large string orchestra. I sat on the deck watching them, and then slipped off to bed, making sure that I had locked myself in as I was sure there would be calls to have yet another nightcap. There were, and I was glad I had battened down the hatches for these holl
ow-legged hearties were more than a match for me. In the early hours, I heard the boats being untied as they went off to their regular moorings and presumably their normal day’s work.

  The next day I went by tram to the Leather Museum in Offenbach. The museum was started by a gentleman who got into collecting leather objects early, just after the First World War. He had very little money but managed to assemble, amongst other things, one of the very best collections of genuine North American Indian items including a beautiful pair of beaded moccasins. Since then the collection has grown and houses such diverse items as Napoleon’s handbag, as well as a huge range of other things, from Mexican carved leather saddles to the thumbs and sinews of some wretched British officer that a Chinese warlord had cunningly turned into a belt. There were ravishing red leather boots from Hungary and the most delicate ladies’ shoes from fin-de-siècle Paris. This odd and often eccentric collection demonstrated so great a variety of uses that mankind has made of leather that I thoroughly recommend any who pass nearby to visit it.

  On my tramride back to Frankfurt, I sat next to a bright young French student who had a part-time job in the town to learn German and German business methods. She helped me with my inquiries on how to get to Frankfurt Zoo and then very kindly came with me. I have never been fond of zoos but had frequently been told that the zoo in Frankfurt is very splendid. The buildings are extremely efficient and everything was beautifully laid out, but somehow I felt even sorrier for the animals than usual. Now that it is possible to see them in their natural habitat every five minutes on television, I should have thought that the demand for zoos would have dwindled, but I was to discover this did not seem to be the case in Germany.

  On the way to the zoo, the French girl prattled on authoritatively about the benefits of the EEC and about how big and efficient everything was going to be, and my heart sank because she really believed it would be the case. How wonderful the Channel Tunnel was going to be, she said, how it was going to bring Europeans together! I remembered the great sense of achievement I had felt when we had successfully made our crossing, and how glad I had been that Britain was an island. I realized that what I was discovering on the journey I was making through the byways of Europe was a million miles away from the economic dreamworld that this girl was telling me about. We arrived at the tram stop outside the zoo and mercifully she had to go and do some more homework for the bright new tomorrow that she and her generation were building.

  Ray was returning the following day, so I rose early in the morning to cross the bridge above the boat for a look at the Film Museum on the other side of the river. As I had been sitting on the deck of the barge, thinking about this and that, I had spotted an odd-looking pipe sticking out at right angles from the museum building. I found that on the first floor the museum had constructed a display about the origins of photography, and the pipe that was sticking out was holding the lens for a mock camera obscura, through which I was delighted to be able to see the Leo moored on the other side of the Main. The museum cinema was showing their copy of The Blue Angel and I spent what my mother would have called a thoroughly sinful morning, watching that marvellous, moving film. I suspect that one of the main reasons that I came into the film business was the sheer bliss of being able to see films in the morning. Now, of course, anyone can see whatever they wish on the television whenever they want, but in my day the idea of even being in a cinema or watching a rehearsal in a theatre before noon sent a tingle of excitement down my spine.

  After the film, I had a chat with the librarian of the archive, who told me that there were only two films in their library from the National Socialist era that were still banned. One was virulently anti-Semitic, called, in English, ‘Jew Suss’ (Jesus), which was blocked for obvious reasons, and the other was a film that the British had banned at the end of the war, about the Boers in South Africa who had found themselves in a British concentration camp at the beginning of the century. My librarian friend felt that the ban should remain, not for political reasons of any sort, but because the film makers had copied the scene from Battleship Potemkin where the sailors find weevils in their food. He said that anyone could see these banned films if they wanted to. He was a Berliner and carefully explained to me how only Berlin could have produced Lubitsch and Wilder – probably two of the greatest comedy directors the cinema will ever have. I had to tear myself away from this engaging, witty man, as I could see that Ray had returned and was standing on the deck of the barge on the other side of the river, unable to get in. I had taken the secret key that we kept hidden under the box where the hydraulic controls were kept, as I was afraid that someone had seen me put it away one day.

  It was hot and sticky in Frankfurt that August afternoon and Ray was as keen as I was to shake off the smell of the city and press on up the Main to Bamberg and beyond. The Gardner engine on the Leo started up with its familiar throaty chug, and we left the last metropolitan city we would pass through till we reached Vienna, which seemed as far away as it did when we had started out, four months before. Ray’s weekend at home had only heightened his resolve to see the famed Danube: his stories of our descent of the Rhine had clearly impressed his waterman friends.

  Chapter Eleven

  Frankfurt to Nuremberg

  Our first few miles out of Frankfurt were uneventful. The River Main wound through carefully controlled green landscapes until we were about ten miles from Aschaffenburg. I had learnt by now that when things were going smoothly with all the Leo’s various systems, it was time for caution. I was proved right, for suddenly, in one of the huge locks they have on the Main, Ray shouted to me that there was something wrong. He told me that the engine was running beautifully but that the unimaginable had happened: the propeller had fallen off. This is something that never happens, or at least it should not. We had to get out of the lock as quickly as possible because we were holding up vast Euro-ships waiting to come in.

  There were two ways to get the boat out of the lock: one, to drag it manually, the other to take the dinghy off the deck, clamp on the outboard, and push the whole rig from the stern. There was not time for the latter course. Already they were calling in German for us to get out of the lock. So Ray and I got a rope and pulled the wounded Leo slowly out of the enormously long lock with all the people in the control tower laughing and pointing at the old-fashioned British way of moving boats on canals. Later, when I explained the very unusual situation in which we found ourselves, they were much more helpful and rang the local diving club who promised to come and dive for the propeller.

  We discovered that there was a big harbour at Aschaffenburg, still another two hours away at the speed we were able to push the Leo and the barge using the dinghy strapped on the stern. Ray and I took it in turns to steer the dinghy and the Leo, and we finally reached the harbour to find to our delight that there was an enormous crane of the most modern variety, used to load blocks of granite from barges on to railway wagons. It was by now late on Friday evening and I did not think there was any chance whatever of getting the Leo lifted out of the water before Monday when the office staff of the harbour would be back. On Saturday morning I walked round the harbour and found a huge scrap yard and went into the office and explained my predicament with the aid of drawing and fractured German to the owner, an extremely pleasant man whose daughter lived in England. He told us that he would fix the foreman and get the tug lifted out of the water that morning and put back again on Sunday morning. This was something that would never have happened in England, or indeed anywhere else that I had been to. He also said that he had been cutting up some old British machine tools and we might be in luck and find the 1¾-inch British Standard Fine nut we would require to secure our propeller – if we could find the propeller, that is. We did have a spare propeller but it was one of the ones that I had experimented with earlier and had decided was not big enough.

  While the scrapdealer rang the local diving club, who very obligingly arranged with the lock-keepers to dive for our
propeller that afternoon, Ray and I pulled out the immensely heavy yellow webbing strops that I had made in London. The crane had the Leo out in no time and we soon saw what the trouble was. We had not only lost the propeller and the nut but the key as well. The key is an oblong piece of metal that fits into a slot in the propeller shaft and the propeller itself and stops the propeller twisting off. Now that we knew what we needed, we set out to comb the scrap heaps to try to find a nut that would fit. Eventually we found a heap of old guillotine machines, called ‘The Victoria’, that had been used to cut up paper. After we located a suitably sized nut the problem was how to get it off. I fetched our blowlamp from the boat and a huge Stillson grip (that is the kind of tool that plumbers are always forgetting). Ray found a long pipe and, while I heated up the rust-and-paint-covered nut with the blowlamp, he put the pipe on the handle of the Stillson and with a huge effort the nut moved free. We hurried back to the boat and tried it on: it fitted – not quite as well as an engineer would have liked, but it fitted. Now we had to get the propeller back.