Leontyne

by Richard Goodwin

  As we entered Linz, we heard the sound of two girls’ voices echoing off the sides of the valley. When we rounded a bend we saw the girls sitting by the edge of the Danube and yodelling their throats dry, practising for some competition they were entering. Fascinated, we asked the Captain to stop and we moored and went to quiz these Danubian Lorelei about what they were up to. They were an enterprising pair. Gertie worked in a butcher’s and Gaby was a secretary in an office; they had taken up yodelling as a way to earn a little extra. They concentrated their efforts on the hotel boats that came up and down the river and earned commissions from the boat companies to yodel a welcome to the passengers as they joined their ships in Linz. They told me that they were particularly popular with the Russian tourists. I do not suppose there is a great deal of yodelling in the Soviet Union.

  The next morning dawned grey and grim. The autumn was setting in and it was distinctly chilly when the Captain stepped aboard after spending a night at home with his wife. This time his plastic bag contained the ingredients for his special Matrosen Fleisch. We passed by the huge steel works, grim and threatening in the watery sun that was just managing to struggle through low polluted clouds. We had gone about an hour down river when I saw a sign pointing to Mauthausen Concentration Camp. We tied up on a pontoon and got out the bikes and pedalled up the long hill to that infamous place. I had never seen a concentration camp before and none of the films that I had seen had prepared me for the horror of seeing one of these places, so starkly preserved by the Soviets during the period that this part of Austria was under their occupation. I will not go into details of the pathetic cupboards of photographs that the Italian, Spanish and Russian families had fixed to the walls or describe the images that will be with me for the rest of my life. Man’s inhumanity to his fellow man has never before been so vividly demonstrated to me.

  The Captain had his meal prepared when we got back to the boat but he quite understood when Ray and I said that we did not have an appetite. Ray steered and I sat on the deck thinking about what I had seen. The Captain finished his meal and said simply that this was the kind of thing that happened if you allowed dictators to take over. It was very hard to tell what he was thinking as he gazed down the river, which was getting misty as the autumn evening drew in. That night we stopped in a district called the Wachau and I took Ray and the Captain out for a meal of the local fish called zander which is a kind of pike and particularly good. There was a need for a little cheer after our morning in that terrible place.

  After a couple of hours next morning we came to a village called Grein which was famous for being the place where passengers descending the Danube, before the blasting away of rocks that caused whirlpools, used to disembark with all their valuables from the boats in which they were travelling, leaving the experienced pilots to make their way through the boiling maelstrom whilst they rode horses along the bank. They would get on again in St Nikola about two kilometres downstream. The town hall in Grein is small and the old granary built on to it is the smallest working theatre in Austria with 163 seats. Mimi Kessler told me about these seats which one could buy at the beginning of the season with a key. You locked the seat up when you left and when you wanted to use the seat you had to unlock it and let the flap drop. She also told me that this had been the only theatre in Europe that had a lavatory actually in the auditorium. When the theatre was built everything was ready except the door to the loo, so they just put up a curtain. This proved to be a great success with the occupants because they were able to watch the show through the join in the curtain without curtailing their activities. Mimi was a witty charming woman who came from Grein and had spent the war as a cook for the landed gentry in Bathampton and Yorkshire. She spoke of her terror and confusion when she had first arrived as a refugee in 1938 and had been asked to cook pancakes which she did not have the slightest idea how to make. I am sure that she always had the wit to charm her way out of any such predicament.

  The next morning I made a stupid mistake by deciding to take the boat up the river a way to see how well we went into the current. Captain Non-stop had been held up and I thought that while we were waiting for him to reach us on the bus from Linz we would try this little experiment. All was well as I went upstream but as soon as I turned to come back the current got hold of the dinghy which was trailing astern and flipped it over. Luckily, this time, we had followed the first rule with outboard motors and had tied it on, but the oars and the life belt and anything that was loose in the dinghy fell out and either drifted off or sank. It took Ray and me some time to right the dinghy with the crane and when we reached the pontoon again, the Captain, who had arrived and seen what had happened, rightly summed up the incident with, ‘100 per cent Absolut Catastroph’.

  A pretty innkeeper’s daughter (they do exist) came up to the boat and talked to us about her childhood playing on the beaches they used to have on that stretch when the water level dropped in the summer before they built the dams and locks. Her family had been pilots for generations when it had been obligatory to take on a pilot to negotiate the Wirbel, or whirlpool. The girl, whose name was Maria, told hair-raising stories that her father and uncle had told her of the disasters they had seen and of how it had been impossible to reach the survivors on a stricken barge once it had struck a rock in the whirl. Her mother’s inn was full of pictures of these marine disasters and of the floods that they used to have which had reached the second floor of their pub.

  Maria told me that a very interesting man who had been a doctor in these parts lived nearby. All his life he had dreamed of owning a romantic castle overlooking the site of the whirlpool. I decided to bicycle there and so I told Ray and the Captain that I would meet them in St Nikola, where the pilots had been dropped in former times. I arrived at what appeared from the road to be the ruin of a small castle but, as I drew closer, I saw that it had been carefully restored. I rang the long rope bell-pull and waited for what seemed like an age until the door opened, letting a great shaft of sunlight through and giving the old man who appeared a white halo as the sun shone on his hair. The good doctor was well over ninety and seemed to be held together by an incredibly ancient and stiffened pair of long lederhosen. He was delighted to show me round his domain and proudly pointed out the plaques of the families that had lived there; these came to an abrupt halt in the 1400s – and then there was his. The castle had been a ruin from the time of the Crusades until this dauntless doctor had taken it on when he retired. He had turned it into a tranquil place and told me that the air from the pine trees was what had allowed him to live so long. At one stage in the nineteenth century an English aristocrat had bought the castle and hung a huge Union Jack from the remains of the tower – the old man showed me a watercolour of it. He also showed me a huge collection of pictures of the whirlpool and the various ways the ancients used to negotiate it. This apparently useless intelligence was to become extremely useful within the hour. I admired this dauntless old man’s garden, breathed the air deeply on his instructions, bade him farewell and shot off down the hill on my bike.

  The boat was in the appointed place but one look at the faces of the ship’s company made me realize that there had been a ‘100 per cent Absolut Catastroph’. I was greeted with, ‘The prop’s fallen off,’ and it was soon apparent that there was absolutely no way that we were going to be able to retrieve it in what must be the deepest part of the Danube; we were now in a fjord-like valley where the bottom must be at least two hundred feet below the surface. I heaved my bike on board and as I did so I had an idea. The print at the castle had shown how the ancient boatmen on the Danube had steered their craft with long oars called sweeps. I realized that we had the means to make something similar. I had bought a bit of ¾-inch chipboard which I had made into a table for eating on deck and I thought that if we cut that in half and bolted the bits on to the two long scaffold poles we carried, we could make two excellent sweeps.

  Even though we were in a remote place, a small group of incredulou
s spectators had gathered to watch our progress. We had no problems constructing our sweeps but we knew that if, before nightfall, we were to reach the shipyard about fifteen kilometres downstream where Captain Non-stop had his contacts, we had better be on our way. When Ray and the Captain had brought the barge into the shore without the aid of the engine, they had crash-landed, which meant that we were firmly stuck. It would have been easy to get off had the engine been working, but alas, with no propeller, it was useless, so we had to get everything absolutely ready, untie the barge and wait for another vessel to come past, creating sufficient swell to lift the barge for a split second while we pushed her off. The first ship that came by was a German barge that saw we were in difficulties and considerately slowed down to pass which was no good. We had to wait for a large Bulgarian lorry carrier to come past at full speed – this was enough to dislodge us. While we were waiting we had dried out the outboard after its morning dunking and got that going, so with Ray and me pushing as hard as we could to get the Leo out into the stream, the Captain revved up the outboard on the dinghy at the stern. In a few moments we were facing upstream in a seven-mile-an-hour current and slipping slowly backwards. We had to turn the boat as soon as possible, otherwise we would be pushed sideways into the bank and then we would be really stuck.

  The Captain had tied the dinghy on to the port side of the stern of the Leo and so we had to turn round to port in as tight a circle as we could, otherwise the current would catch us and push us down sideways. Ray and I stuck our oars in and pulled with all our strength, while the Captain opened the throttle on the outboard: we started, very slowly, to turn. I was quite sure that we would not get round but somehow our efforts succeeded and the bows just missed the bank on the far side. We were round and heading downstream. Our progress was fair when the current ran straight but when there were eddies and other unpredictable currents the outboard alone was not strong enough so we had to lean on our sweeps and pull as hard as we could. Fortunately, the Captain really knew his river and was able to give us warning when these places were coming up. It took us five hours to get to the shipyard at Ybbs and we arrived just as it was getting dark. We tied up with some difficulty and the Captain sprang ashore and went to talk to his friends in the shipyard to see whether they had a nut that would fit and a crane to lift us out of the water. While he did this, I called up London on the short-wave radio to see whether the office had been able to get a nut made which I had ordered after our last mishap a month before in Germany. They had ordered it but it had not been made, which was not cheering news, and I hoped that the Captain had had better luck.

  That night Ray and I were too tired to eat but I felt honour bound to cook something for the Captain who was a regular eater and so I cooked that reliable standby, spaghetti carbonara. As the Captain munched through his pasta and bacon, he told me that we had to be ready at seven in the morning when the foreman had promised to pull the Leo from the water on a trolley and then assess the problem. This yard was an official establishment and therefore was not really allowed to do outside jobs, but luckily they were not too busy and the Captain indicated that a small present to the workers’ canteen would open all doors.

  We were on the trolley, which was marked with a stick in the water, at seven sharp on the most perfect morning in probably the world’s most scenic shipyard. With no delay at all the Leo was slowly winched on to dry land and the foreman engineer came to measure the naked shaft so that he could look for a nut. He took one look at the problem, ran his thread gauge over the shaft and briskly said he would have to make a nut and it would take an hour, would that be all right? An older man, who was a deaf mute, asked, using sign language, for the spare propeller that Ray was holding and carried it off to the workshop. Just then a hooter went and everyone disappeared for breakfast while we were taken to the manager’s office by one of the men and offered a glass of chilled vodka. I felt it was churlish to refuse, but the effect of one vodka on an empty stomach, followed swiftly by another, is lethal and I found myself in a daze for most of the morning. Ray, rather wisely, had managed to avoid this toast; the Captain had not, but it appeared not to make the slightest difference to his progress.

  By ten o’clock a new nut had been made, a hole drilled through the shaft, and a pin placed through the nut and the shaft so that the propeller can now never come off again. The dents on the propeller had been removed and we had said our farewells to these amazingly kind people. I hope our tiny contribution went some way towards a jolly good party in their canteen: they deserved it. Within half an hour we were at the next lock where our papers were looked at very carefully because I had taken a photograph of the shipyard from the side of the lock. It turned out that there was a building at the end of the lock which housed a turbine for electrical power and I suppose the lock-keeper thought he was guarding the national security secrets of Austria.

  The weather in those early October days was beautiful and the leaves were turning in the proper fashion. Our next stop was the vast monastery at Melk which was a great resting place for travellers to Vienna. Built on a great bluff above the Danube it had been conveniently placed a day’s journey by carriage or boat from the city. Almost all the historical luminaries had been entertained there by the monks, ever since the thirteenth century. When one particular Pope had visited he had found himself unable to pay for the food for his vast retinue, so had donated instead the relics of some Christian who had died in Rome. I suppose you made sure you never left home without a relic or two that you could give away, just in case you got a bit short of cash. In this case, no one knew who the martyr had been, so they all came to the very practical decision of calling him Frederich. Napoleon had come uninvited, and Marie Antoinette had visited, to name but two who had stayed in the great state rooms. The library is very fine indeed and looks out over the Danube valley so that I am sure that scholars can very easily be distracted by the view. This part of the Danube is particularly imposing for the river traveller, and was one of the reasons that I had been drawn to make the journey, because I had read a nineteenth-century writer called Planché who had described its beauty when he made a trip on the Danube in the early 1840s.

  The blue church of Dürnstein was our next beacon. High above it was the fortress where Richard Coeur de Lion had been incarcerated and where as legend would have it he heard the minstrel Blondel singing his favourite hit. The local schoolmaster told me the Austrian version of this story which was not quite what I remember being told about our heroic adventurer king in the home classroom that Mrs Shuttleworth ran in Bombay. It appeared that the co-leader of the Crusade had been an Austrian duke, Leopold V, who had led the attack at the Battle of Acre and, having heroically stormed the fortress, had hoisted his national flag to the battlements. Richard, as official leader of the Crusade, had objected, and the two warriors had fallen out. The Austrian had returned to his homeland, muttering revenge, and Richard had returned to England. He had been shipwrecked and found himself travelling up the Danube in disguise. He must have had a predilection for young blond friends, or Blondels as they are known in that part of the world, because he had lent one of them his gloves to cut a dash when he went shopping. The boy’s gloves had been recognized and Richard incarcerated; in due course the Austrian had become thirty-five tons of silver richer. Looking up at the fortress, I realized that to hear anyone singing by the river from the castle required an embroidery of the possible.

  After the pretty town of Dürnstein the valley opens out into a plain stretching down to our goal, Vienna. We had one last stop to make at the boatyard where, after we had been to Vienna, I proposed to lay up the Leo for the winter. Captain Non-stop brought us to the shipyard at Korneuburg where some large ships were being built and some of the pre-war paddlewheelers were being repaired. One of the modern ships that was being finished was going out on its trials the next day and the Captain, who had a cousin who worked in the yard, got permission for us to look over the ship, which was being built for the Russians.
It was a 5000-ton refrigerator ship which had more massed technology on it than anything else I have ever seen. Everything had at least two, if not three, back-up systems and everything was automatic. The Russian captain was an extremely jolly man who merrily complained that it was ‘too much automatic’. I asked him if he was automatic himself, which made him laugh, and since it was his birthday we all went off to celebrate in his office. We postponed our triumphal entry into Vienna until the next day; I think he said it was his birthday!

  It is said that all great cities have their knees in the water, but Vienna merely dips an extended toe into the Danube. Like London in August, the city reminded me of an empire that had gone on vacation. Captain Non-stop brought us to a berth that belongs to the DDSG, situated just under the Sweden Bridge on the canal that runs parallel to the Danube itself. Unlike any of the other cities we had stopped in, the towpaths were not particularly popular with the inhabitants. For some reason the usual crowd of lovers and dog walkers were far fewer, so it was a surprise when I heard a voice with an authentic British nautical ring about it calling out ‘Ahoy, Leontyne.’ The owner and his companion came on board and they told me that their passion in life was a four-masted sailing schooner, of which they were part owners and which they kept on the north-east coast of England. They were an engaging couple, and, having heard a number of their nautical adventures, I asked them what they did for a living. To my great surprise, the gentleman told me that his name was Professor Müller, Principal of the famed Vienna Conservatory of Music and his friend, a pretty, slim girl, was the Professor of Guitar. They invited me to visit the Conservatory and we arranged to meet in a couple of days.