Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  To our astonishment a smart white Mercedes drew up and a man stepped out dressed in a German huntsman costume complete with hat and feather. It was our scrap merchant friend who was off to his domain, since it was Saturday afternoon, to try his hand at a bit of sport, which I suppose meant shooting anything that was in season. The lock where we had lost the propeller was on his way and he wanted to have a word with the diving club to be sure that everything was in order. The frogmen were ready, Ray told them where he thought the propeller would be, and the lock was emptied so the divers would not have to dive so deep. The constant flow of shipping was diverted through the parallel lock. Almost at once the first diver flipped over backwards into the murky water and after about two minutes came up with our propeller. We could not believe our luck and gave the divers a suitable present for their club.

  We hired a cab back to the harbour and the boat, and, as soon as we arrived, a very cross gentleman turned up asking who had given us permission to have our boat there as it was against all the rules for a private boat to be repaired in the grounds of a state-controlled enterprise. Fortunately there are sensible people in every country, so I pointed to the very tough-looking foreman on the other side of the dock who was directing the movement of a large granite block and told my inquisitor that he was the one to quiz. As if by magic the man’s temper cooled and he became extremely civil and wished us luck on our journey. I suppose the burden of those German rules had suddenly been lifted from his shoulders now that he knew someone else was responsible.

  We made a new key for the shaft, put the propeller back and jammed on the nut. I would have liked to have drilled through the shaft and put a pin through it and the nut so the nut could not work its way off again, but we had no electrical supply to run our drill. Ray painted below the waterline with a special anti-rust paint we had brought from London and the Leo was ready to be lifted back into the water at seven the next morning.

  After the slag heaps of the harbour at Aschaffenburg the countryside was extremely beautiful. We pushed on along the Main valley through Würzburg where I had decided we should not stop as we were getting very behind schedule. I greatly regretted the decision because the town looked extremely interesting. On the outskirts there were a number of tented camps for holidaymakers which were clearly very popular but it was concentrated camping of a type that only the Germans seem to enjoy. I remember once having witnessed a startling example of this concentrated camping, when I had been staying the night on a recce for a film I was producing in Egypt, called Death on the Nile, at Abu Simbel, in a dilapidated rest house. Most of the tourists who go there fly in for the day and are flown out again after they have seen the amazing statues which were moved up the mountain when the Russians flooded the Nubian Valley to create the Aswan Dam. To my surprise a strange-looking bus had arrived full of Germans who had travelled across a great deal of desert from Tripoli in this vehicle, called a Rotel, in which up to twenty people sleep in what can only be described as filing-cabinet drawers. They seemed to love their journey though, and built a campfire in the grounds of the rest house and sang German camping songs far into the clear desert night under a canopy of stars.

  That night we stopped in a remote village, with a pretty church, called Lohr, situated on the banks of the Main. The evening was remarkable as it seemed to be the night when a certain larva hatched and a host of insects sprang from the river for a night of violent love only to die the next morning. It was dark by half past eight and an hour later the barge was covered in an inch of white-winged insects with yellow bodies. There were so many that I had to sweep them off the deck and into the river in huge piles. I suppose it was the lights on the boat that attracted them to the Leo but I must say I was awed by this natural manifestation of energy and waste. I can still hear the frantic whirring of their wings as they feverishly copulated for the first and last time.

  The next day started uneventfully enough. There was a green and white helicopter patrolling up and down the river and we waved cheerfully back at it as it passed overhead – but we were in for an unpleasant shock. Soon after three in the afternoon, a large, fast, mean-looking patrol launch came briskly alongside. A tall German river policeman with filmstar good looks and a heavy gun on his hip stepped on board and demanded to see our papers. We produced the papers, which were in order, and Ray presented not only his Waterman’s Licence for the Thames but also his apprenticeship indentures. The apprenticeship system is still operated on the Thames: when a boy is taken on by a master the apprenticeship document is ceremoniously cut in half. When the boy has served his time he gets his master’s half back. Sadly none of these proofs of experience – as if any were needed after travelling so far – were of any interest to the river policeman. He insisted that we stop at the next lock and consider that we were under barge arrest till we had cleared our position and taken on a pilot.

  As he left, he told us that we could eat rather well in a little pub in the neighbouring village. The events of the day had done nothing to cheer me up so I decided that we should leave the boat, tied up as she was at Wipfeld lock, and have a hot meal and some beer. We walked through the fields and came upon this very unpromising little village that had no signs whatsoever to make the traveller welcome. Eventually we found an open door and went inside to a small bar where we sat down. Two enormous people came out of the little kitchen and asked us almost in unison what we should like to eat. I said we did not mind. They went away and within ten minutes the wife started to lay out the most sumptuous spread before us. Local beer, so dark that you could not see through it when you held it up to the light, red cabbage, bits of meat, herring, cream – within half an hour our situation with the police did not seem so bad and soon it became quite funny. If we had to be arrested, then it was good news that we were near this hostelry. More and more delicious things were put before us and I began to wonder whether a pretty innkeeper’s daughter would suddenly appear, but I suspect that my hosts had probably been too busy cooking and eating for much to have sprung from their loins.

  At eight the next morning, a round-faced, jolly man arrived and made us understand that he was to be our pilot. ‘What about the Polizei?’ I inquired, and he made it plain that all would be well and all was fixed. I arranged a rate with him and we set sail through the lock that had barred our way the night before. I wondered what had happened with the police but all seemed to be well and all the barges we passed seemed to know our pilot, who was called Gerhard. It turned out that he was the local icebreaker captain and he was usually free in the summer for pilotage up and down the Main. He told us that only certain sections of the Main froze because of the huge amount of warm water that was pumped into the river from the outputs of the nuclear plants. I found it unnerving to think that so much hot water was pumped into the river and I wondered what else was – and yet the Germans are renowned for being extremely good at keeping their rivers clean. After a couple of hours the police boat arrived again and the young officer explained that he had gone to a lot of trouble to ring the authorities in Bonn and had got them to admit that the papers we had left some doubt about whether or not we should have had a pilot on the Main. He had been able to persuade them that we should not be fined, which in the normal way we would have been; at the same time he managed to indicate how much his helmsman loved Scotch whisky. We said goodbye and as they sped off I threw a plastic bottle of Scotch into the cabin to see how quick their reactions would be, and was amused to see they failed to catch it. They waved their thanks when they found the bottle had not broken.

  Gerhard had been around a bit and he had some amusing stories to tell about the life he led, which was very similar to that of watermen everywhere. He told us how one of the best contracts on the river was bringing American coal which was shipped from the States to Rotterdam and then brought all the way up the Rhine and then the Main to the American service bases round Bamberg. What it must cost the Americans to do this is unthinkable, but it kept American miners in work and the bar
ges running. The only problem in this little scheme, in which somebody somewhere must surely be making money for themselves, was that the coal was of a kind that the Green Party in Germany said was polluting their atmosphere.

  Gerhard knew that there was a four-day beer festival in Bamberg which was starting that night, so he got off at the next lock and phoned his friend Fritz to find us somewhere to moor the boat in the centre of Bamberg, a mooring which could only be reached by a private lock which only Fritz, who ran the local pleasure boats, could open. We arrived at the lock, which was only just large enough for us to get through, where Fritz and his wife and sons were all waiting for us. They were all licensed pleasure-boat skippers and they completely controlled all the boats in Bamberg and were doing very well on it. Fritz took over the wheel for the last tricky kilometre into Bamberg.

  The town was dressed over all, as it were, for its festival. The gaily striped marquees and the coloured lights were very pretty against the old houses lining the river. Fritz brought us into a mooring close to his boats and next to the public lavatories which, as the lady who ran them wistfully remarked, were at their busiest during beer festivals. As we tied up, a huge tray of glasses, each with over two inches of brandy, was produced to welcome us. A reporter from Radio Bamberg leapt on board and said how happy they all were that a British boat had come all the way from London to be there for their festival. It seemed churlish to contradict him. It was one of the most curious things about our trip, that people were most interested to find out why we had come to a place, not where we had been or where we were going. But it’s a bit like that with holiday snaps. Nobody cares where you’ve been unless they’ve been there themselves.

  We stayed in this beautiful old city for a couple of days. The festival was mostly populated with out-of-towners who had come to drink gallons of beer and feast off the hundreds of ducks that were turning on spits outside most of the restaurants. Bands played German marches, people sang and swayed to the music. I could almost smell the heartiness amongst the sauerkraut and roasting ducks. A team of Italians was making pizzas in a booth and proudly told me that they had composed a song specially for the occasion. The problem with their masterpiece was that its lyric consisted of only one word, ‘Pizza’, repeated over and over again.

  Later, I talked to a monk who ran weekends up at his monastery on the top of the hill for people in need of silence. He was an amusing man and I am sure that his courses must have been spiritually very refreshing. His order, founded in the twelfth century, was not allowed to possess any animal larger than an ass and as we walked past the monastery’s garage, he said that their order had rationalized this to owning nothing bigger than a Volkswagen. Mercedes were out.

  Bamberg was where the old Ludwig Canal ended with lock number 100. Charlemagne had dreamed of a canal linking the Main to the Danube, thus linking the North Sea to the Black Sea. He had tried to join the two rivers but had failed just before the project had reached the Danube. Ludwig had succeeded and the canal had remained in use up to the middle of the Second World War when the Allies had bombed it because they had had information that submarine parts were being moved along it. Virtually all the canal has now disappeared, except for the last lock which has been preserved in Bamberg, and which has a beautiful lock-keeper’s house. These houses were standard all along the canal, apparently, and had been designed by Ludwig’s personal architect. The ancient gentleman who was the present incumbent was quite small but extremely enthusiastic. He nearly came to grief when he demonstrated to me how the footbridge mechanism worked by winding a handle: it caught him unawares and the weight of the gate caused him to be lifted helplessly into the air on the end of the handle.

  The festival was still going on when we made a rather perilous descent of the River Regnitz with the tide under us. The river flows fast and there was not room for us to turn, which meant that when we approached Fritz’s lock on the way out we had to throw a line to one of Fritz’s sons who quickly put the eye over a bollard so that we could check our far too rapid descent – going full astern was no use at all.

  From Bamberg, we joined the uncompleted Rhine-Main-Donau Canal as far as Nuremberg, a hard day’s run through a huge canal with very little traffic on it. We reached the end of the canal at sunset with an unreasonable sense of disappointment that, after all these hundreds of waterborne miles, the two vessels would have the indignity of being loaded on a lorry and driven down a motorway to the Danube. Of course, we’d known all along that the canal wouldn’t be open officially, but sometimes you find routes open before the officially designated day.

  I had, of course, anticipated that we would need some pretty heavy lifting gear to get the barge out of the water and had spoken to a few crane-hire firms before making a final choice. Almost as soon as we arrived at the dockside a tall melancholy man from the crane firm appeared and quickly summed up the situation which for him was a mere bagatelle, he said. There was something about his melancholy that made me believe that he probably knew what he was talking about and I trusted him at once. He had made arrangements with the port authorities in Nuremberg to lift our craft out on to their special reinforced dock in three days’ time. He planned to use two cranes, each with a capacity of 150 tons. Cranes are rated for lifting weights straight up: as soon as the crane arm jibs out, the amount that they can lift is rapidly reduced and since these cranes were going to have to lean out, as it were, to pick up the barge, it was necessary to have a considerable over-capacity. The only problem that he foresaw was the police who would not let us travel during the day down the motorway, which made me think in Wagnerian terms of our huge barge careering through the night towards Regensburg and the Danube.

  Nuremberg, once described as the ‘jewel of the Third Reich’, is a very Bavarian town. There are a great number of American servicemen in camps round the city, I suppose because of its proximity to Czechoslovakia. I wandered round the town, not finding it very sympathetic, and became annoyed by the brass ring in the marketplace, which, according to legend, had been miraculously placed by some brilliant apprentice round a cast-iron upright, part of the decorative fence surrounding the cross in the marketplace: apparently he had achieved this without a join in the ring. The tourists love it of course and fondle the seamless brass ring in the hope that it will bring them luck. If they were to run their fingers, as I did, up the back of the cast iron that held the ring, they would find the cast iron had been joined together after the ring had been put on.

  I strolled round to the harbour master’s office and was invited to visit the works at the end of the canal where they were putting the finishing touches to one of the vast locks. I climbed down into the lock which was completely empty and found myself one hundred feet below the top. At one end of the lock were a number of small furry bodies spreadeagled on the floor. They were voles which had probably been making their journey along their accustomed routes and had fallen into this vast hole by mistake and perished.

  This vast project, linking the North Sea to the Black Sea, through linking the Rhine to the Danube, has been under construction for many years and is now due to open in 1992. The political problems that made the Germans fear that the Eastern Bloc countries would dominate the freight rates of Europe if they let them pass through the canal and their country have largely disappeared, and the opposition of the Green parties has been to some extent silenced, so perhaps this time a project might open when the authorities say it will. The canal requires a vast amount of high-level water to replenish it when the huge locks are opened and shut and so two immense artificial lakes have been created on an arid plateau nearby. This source of water is sufficent to generate enough electrical power not only to pay for the running of the canal but over the years it will also pay for a large part of the construction cost of the canal. Each time the locks are opened only 40 per cent of the water is lost to the next level: the remaining 60 per cent is pumped into huge holding tanks ready for the next ship to pass through.

  I was please
d to learn from the people showing me round that the Green Party had forced them to make some concessions for having driven this vast scar through one of the most beautiful parts of Europe. They showed me some ponds beside the canal which they said were resting places for ducks. To my untrained eye they looked just like lay-bys on main roads. I suppose that in fifty years’ time, when the countryside has healed up a bit, this method of moving huge quantities of heavy merchandise will be a great deal better for the environment than moving it by road or rail, but at the moment it is a matter of faith to be able to visualize the finished product.

  All the earth-moving equipment used in the construction work is enormous, and on the sector they were excavating when I was there they had built a substantial hill about half a mile from the canal: so substantial that the day after my visit, there was a heavy rainfall and thirty million cubic metres of mud and stones slipped like a vast lake of custard into the valley below. The sides of the canal were made with stones and nuggets of concrete over which was sprayed liquid concrete. On top of that were placed wire netting and more liquid concrete. The final stage was large aggregate and asphalt placed on the sloping sides. Imagine how it annoyed the construction company to have to stop and make a dent in this orderly progress to construct a lay-by for ducks.

  The day came for the lift and we took the boats from where we had moored to their appointed place – only to find it occupied by a German barge which had to load a cargo of nuclear-reactor parts which had been brought by heavy lorry from Austria, and were to be shipped to Rotterdam by barge and then to who knew where. The skipper explained that there was a problem: one of the bridges under construction that we had passed under near Würzburg had collapsed, killing a number of workmen, and the river was closed to all traffic until further notice. No one knew how long that might be. His contract was only for delivery of the goods so if he could not get through he would lose the work, which had naturally made him rather glum. The cranes and the heavy lorries were assembling and very soon there was a large group of people trying to sort things out. The drivers of the heavy lorries from Austria wanted to go home but could not because they could not unload their crates. The two lorries that had come to carry the boats off could not be loaded because the German barge was in the place where the cranes had been set up. Finally a small red car arrived full of fairly disreputable men who appeared to be the agents for the nuclear parts and told the barge to move while we were loaded.