I must say that I was extremely anxious when the barge was lifted out of the water because the stitching of the yellow strops began to pop in an alarming manner, but the melancholy crane manager and his calm, gum-chewing crane-drivers took no notice. With infinite care they lifted the old girl out of the water and jibbed their cranes round in perfect unison until they had the barge directly over the waiting lorry. Once the barge had been correctly positioned on the lorry and the amount of overhang had been carefully measured, the vehicle was moved out of the way to make room for the other one which would carry the Leo. When both vehicles were loaded, the mournful man explained that we had a problem because we were above the regulation height for the police permissions that he had obtained. I never got to the bottom of why this had happened but in any case it meant that we had to take down the entire crane arm on the barge, and cut down our blue flag board as well as a number of other bits such as the handrail between the two boats. The lorry drivers were most sympathetic, realizing that we were in the grip of a bureaucratic muddle, and soon cut off the offending bits that could not be dismantled.
My main preoccupation once the problem of the height had been solved was unblocking the outside of the sewagetank drain which had got firmly blocked by earth, and other more unpleasant substances, when we ran aground from time to time. Now the Leo was out of the water I had an opportunity to tackle the problem. Through fatigue or sheer stupidity I was of course standing under the drain when it finally disgorged itself, much to the amusement of the drivers.
As I paid the mournful man the £4500 this lift was costing, he told me a story which perhaps accounted for his perpetual gloom. He told me that he had only once been to London, to sell a very large nineteenth-century French painting owned by his family, at one of the leading London auction rooms. When he had arrived, he took the painting to the auction rooms to be told by the expert for that type of painting, a certain Anthony Blunt, that it was a fake. Blunt added that he had just sold the original to a client in America. A few days later, after having seen the sights of London, the mournful man went back to the auctioneers to collect the painting, but it had mysteriously disappeared. The auctioneers were eager to pay out the insurance money, which was only a fraction of what the painting was worth, he said, for he had no doubt that his was the original. He left in a fury and later accepted the insurance money feeling the British had done him down.
The police, for whom we were waiting to inspect the load, arrived just as the sun was setting. The bargeman who had been held up by the collapsed bridge had, by now, loaded his huge boxes of nuclear spares and was waiting for news of the repairs to the bridge. Suddenly all the measurements were done and the convoy set sail, as it were, down the motorway with Ray driving the 2CV while I drove a hired car with a huge flashing sign, fixed by magnets to the roof, to warn people that a very heavy convoy was on the move.
Chapter Twelve
Nuremberg to Passau
It took us about five hours to cover the hundred or so kilometres to Regensburg, the furthest point north on the Danube. When we woke in the morning we found ourselves on the side of a dock full of barges from the Eastern Bloc countries. The East had really begun. I watched a Rumanian bargeman feeding his chickens that he kept in a hutch on the deck. The Germans said they kept livestock on board because they could not afford the price of German food but it may have been because they liked fresh eggs. The Germans seem to resent the way the Rumanian government has put a price of £12,000 on anyone of German origin who wishes to leave Rumania. So, if you had a German mother-in-law in Rumania, you’d have to decide whether £12,000 was worth it!
The lorry drivers were very keen to put the old Leo back together again in just the state they found her and managed to persuade the dock engineers to lend us their welding gear. By breakfast time all was back as it should have been and a fresh coat of paint had been brushed over the black weld marks. We then went round to the works canteen in the docks, a splendid place with jolly waitresses, whom the lorry drivers chatted up and who produced an extremely filling goulash soup with frankfurters, a dish which seemed to span the ethnic frontiers. Once the gang had breakfasted, the unloading began and the operation went with typical German efficiency: suddenly we were actually floating on the Danube.
The first person from the world of Regensburg to visit us was a Hungarian: Hungarians are nearly always first when someone new and potentially interesting turns up in town. The young man who arrived had been educated at Harrow and consequently spoke perfect English. He had been sent by his boss, Captain Ott, who arrived soon afterwards with instructions on how to complete our papers to proceed down the Danube. He told me that Regensburg had been one of the centres of the salt route when salt was brought from the Far East; the caravans crossed the bridge that had stood in Regensburg for centuries.
Captain Ott was one of the many men that I was to meet who had worked on the Danube all his life, and was a true romantic. He had literally run away to sea when his father, also a Danube captain, had forbade him to. He had become the youngest captain in service anywhere on the Danube and had many a story to tell of a certain Captain Frolich with whom he had worked as mate and who was later to be our pilot. He told of derring-do, of manoeuvring a vast bridge into position with a series of barges and tugs, and the delights of his favourite haunts which I suspect only the Danube sailors know of. Captain Ott had been offered a job in the front office of the shipping company he worked for because of his expertise in knowing just how far a barge could be loaded at any season. This required a very expert knowledge of the water levels up and down the Danube and the length of the voyage. If the barge was overloaded and he knew that two days before it had rained heavily in the mountains he could gauge whether there was a chance that the cargo would get through with the draught it had or whether it would have to be unloaded into smaller craft.
The trade on the Danube was very much controlled by the Soviets, who manned their craft with service personnel so there was no question of having to make a profit in commercial terms. The Soviets were the main suppliers of coal and coke to the great Austrian steel works at Linz. If the Austrians ever fell out with their big Russian brothers they would have a thin time of it indeed. Most of the barges that came up the Danube from the east were without motors and therefore had to be towed by huge tugs that varied enormously in age, but, however old, were still capable of making considerable headway over an eighteen-kilometre current with a string of 3000-ton barges behind them. Because of the length of the tows it was necessary for the barges to be manned and to be steered all the time they were under way, so that the tow could negotiate corners successfully.
It was a bit like the boyhood of Raleigh as Ray and I sat and listened to Captain Ott talking about his life on the Danube. He told us of how, when he had decided on the advice of his wife to take the job in the office, he had hidden his car behind a tree to watch his beloved ship steam off down the Danube for the first time without him in charge, and had shed a tear or two. I do not believe that any modern woman can ever understand the romance that a boat has for a man. How can they? Men do not understand it themselves, but there is something there which most women fear and distrust; they fear the seductress over whom they have no control who gently rocks their men to sleep at night and leads them into distant temptations and out from under their thumbs.
In order for us to leave the harbour, Captain Ott had arranged for an enormous man, the skipper of a barge from the company that Ott worked for, to pilot us the ten kilometres to the centre of Regensburg, which I thought was hardly necessary. I was wrong, for the current was extremely strong and we made very little headway: it took us a full two hours to get up to a berth next to a Rumanian tug that was waiting for its barges to be unloaded before taking them back to that sad benighted country.
We tied up and Ray went back to the harbour to collect our little car so that we could load it on board the next day before the pilot arrived. It was clear to me that the journey to Vi
enna was going to be very swift indeed and there would be no sense in leaving the car behind and coming back to collect it later. I went to chat to the crew on the Rumanian tug, taking them a pack of cigarettes which I swapped for some eggs from their marine hencoop. Later, the captain, an incredibly thin man in a well-worn suit which he had clearly just taken from storage, came on board the Leo with a bottle of Rumanian-type champagne. He welcomed us very charmingly to the Danube, expressing the hope that we would have many wonderful memories, and then began to tell us of his life on the boats. Rumanians who are permitted to travel outside their country are rare indeed and these boat people are among the privileged few. We did not speak of politics at all, but, after he left, having told us where his favourite mooring places were, I noticed that when he got back to his tug he was grilled by one of the crew. I wondered which one of them was the secret service man. I am afraid I am naive enough not to care and tend to take people as I find them.
Ray had parked our car next to a fine fifteenth-century salt storehouse, about fifty yards from where we had moored. After all the excitement of our first day on the Danube, I, at least, was dead to the world but woke at dawn to find that the Leo seemed to be in the midst of a crowd. I pulled on an anorak and went up on deck to find the most astonishing scene of devastation. The salt storehouse, after surviving five hundred years of war, plague and pestilence, had burned down during the night, leaving vast smouldering timbers pointing like great black fingers to the sky. People stood around in the cold morning light looking stunned, while the fire brigade and the police cordoned everything off. I woke Ray, who had also managed to sleep through the whole event, and asked him exactly where he had left the car.
He pointed, somewhat mournfully, at a huge heap of smoking debris that a bulldozer was pushing together. I went to inquire where our car might be and found a policeman who said that they had towed away a couple of wrecks to the police pound at the back of the police station. When I went round there, I found that the car was a complete wreck, and quite happily signed the papers for its official burial by the appropriate department.
Regensburg was a town that I found myself really at home in. Down on the quayside by the rushing Danube stream, there was a sausage kitchen, run by a lady who had been cooking her sausages there since the last year of World War One. This meant she had been turning over bangers on her griddle for seventy years and remarkably fine she looked on it. I soon discovered there was a kind of sausage dynasty in Regensburg, for her niece – and incidentally her heir – had married an ex-heavy-lorry salesman who had brilliantly expanded the sausage empire into a chain of shops and regular restaurants. The delicious sausages that had become so famous were made, apparently, solely from shin of pork, and for true perfection should be eaten with some of the eighty tons of sauerkraut the enterprise produced every year. One night when the sausage czar was in his cups, he hinted that there had been rumours that the fire which had burnt down the salt house had been started deliberately. After five hundred years of standing in the same place and burning down on the night we arrived, I think he probably had a point.
In the town hall, the guidebook told me that they had the last original torture chamber in Germany here in this odd and enduring town. They had called it a ‘questioning room’ when it had been in full swing some centuries before. If you were accused you were questioned with the help of a number of devilish devices for stretching your arms or cracking your spine. If, under pressure, you confessed, you were dragged before a people’s court where you had a chance to deny the charges, but the catch was that if you did that, the whole process started all over again. This happened three times in all and if you were still alive at the end of it and still denied the charges, you were allowed to go free.
The town is rich because it has a number of high-tech industries that have moved to the area, such as Siemens and BMW – the latter has one of the most modern car plants in Europe. Ray was an enthusiast for BMWs so we went out to have a guided tour of the plant kindly arranged by the sausage czar. The guide who showed us round this glistening plant kept saying that only two years before the meadows where this factory had been built had been full of sheep. I felt the sheep probably had hornrimmed glasses and read the Financial Times in the German edition. The plant is run on the modern system whereby everything that it does not produce itself comes in from local factories at the very last minute – and these factories’ output is controlled by the computer at the main plant. I was curious to know what would happen if there was a strike in one of the subsidiary plants and I was assured that there were no strikes in Germany, at least not here.
We walked from one huge shed to the next and watched fascinated as these symbols of modern life were rapidly assembled in a myriad shapes and colours. It is possible to order one of about three hundred different types of wing mirror, or so it seemed. When I mischievously tried to put one of the robots off its singular course by walking very closely in front of its guidance sensors as it transported a fully finished car to the inspection bay, I was briskly told not to provoke it as if it were a sleeping dog! As I walked out of the last stage of this dream factory, it occurred to me that these people were making the dreams that the old studios in Hollywood used to supply with the great films of the thirties and forties.
Far away, on the hills on the other side of the Danube from the factory, stood glistening in the sun the Temple of Valhalla, Ludwig’s tribute to the minds of the great men that had made Germany famous a century before. This great Grecian classical structure stood on the top of a small hill overlooking the river. The Germans have resisted spoiling its natural outline by refusing to place railings round the gigantic stone stages, in spite of the protests from the relatives of the Japanese tourists, who, while taking snaps of the magnificent columns, had taken that one step further back than they should have done and plunged thirty feet to the next level of unpardoning granite.
As I walked back to the boat that evening, I mused on the Germany I was discovering. The technical pursuit of perfection was obvious at every turn. The BMW plant made what everyone has come to believe is a very superior car, but will it be remembered in five hundred years’ time? The Temple of Valhalla with its marble busts of Beethoven and Schiller seemed to me to reflect virtues more durable than any technical achievement. As I walked past the docks, I saw the shaded red lights of the Palais d’Amour which was clearly part of the same chain as the ones in Frankfurt, with its neat window boxes full of red geraniums, and a discreet pornographic video flickering half-hidden in the doorway to welcome the punter as he mounts the steps for his ration of heaven or, in this case, Himmel. I remembered at the tender age of thirteen lying in bed at my boarding school listening to my dormitory prefect reading a chapter from Smollett which ended, ‘And so, dear reader, I shall not burden you with the mystery of hymen.’ I burned to be burdened and when I was, finally, I found out it was a great deal more mysterious than I had ever imagined.
Ray and I took the Leo for a day out up the Danube without the barge, travelling as far as the gorges at Kelheim and past the place where the new Rhine-Main-Donau Canal will join the Danube. The gorges are very impressive and I watched a climber scale the vertical cliffs above the raging river as we plugged away to reach the top of the gorge. We picnicked and chatted about our adventures so far and fell to wondering what our new pilot, Captain Frolich, was going to be like. Because of the great distances that we would inevitably travel due to the speed of the river, the new pilot would have to come prepared to stay on board at night because there was very little chance of him being in a position where he could take the train home at night. So it was with some trepidation that we returned down the rushing Danube to Regensburg. It was on that trip that I calculated that the Leo travelled faster than she had ever done before (if you do not count the motorway), at the dizzying speed of 22 kilometres per hour.
I had decided that as we were now going off into the real distance we should have a short-wave radio so that we could call Lo
ndon, or rather, Portishead Radio, direct. While it had been possible to get to a telephone without too much difficulty thus far on our journey, the great distances between towns and the remoteness of some of the reaches of the Danube made a short-wave radio advisable. The two young men who came to fix it were extremely efficient and did the job quickly without any fuss. The curious thing about it was that although they were able to do all the tests and get it functioning, they did not know how to call anyone up because a licence was needed for that. I had a licence but I had to spend some hours reading the instructions in German before I heard the welcoming voice at the other end at Portishead Radio asking my ship’s name (Lima-Echo-Oscar-November-Tango-Yankee-November-Echo) with a pronounced West Country burr.
Regensburg has been a crossroads for travellers for centuries because the bridge used to be the only one across the Danube for miles on either side. Tucked away in a little back street was a Czech bookseller who, on hearing my British accent, told me his life story, which should have been on the shelves with the fiction. He had been in the diplomatic service at the beginning of the war and then had joined the British special forces and had been dropped into France, where he seems to have spent the war. He was returned to England and soon after decided to go back to Czechoslovakia to see his family. At Calais he was kidnapped by the Czech secret service and returned home under arrest where he was sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour in a quarry. After two years of this he escaped and returned to Germany where he lived in a refugee camp for ten years. During this time he worked at the library in Munich which gave him a great knowledge of books. The British authorities were due to pay him a pension but it took a decade and a half for him to establish his identity and claim his money. Now he is rich and one of the leading experts, or so he claims, on German-language books in Turkey. I realized that, now that we were over the European watershed which lies between Nuremberg and Regensburg, I should be hearing a lot of tales embroidered with oriental splendour like this. But then perhaps it was the truth.
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