Leontyne (19 page)

The Pastor told me how to reach the house which I had seen from the canal. I went and talked to the family there, who told me that their modern home, with its balcony overlooking the canal, had been an old garage which they had converted. The father's trade was very high-quality lithographic printing, and he took me out to see his works on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Strasbourg. Artists and painters came and worked with him to manufacture prints of their work. This was what he specialized in, though he had to earn the rent by printing advertisements for the usual inanities. I found his large facsimile of the original design for Strasbourg Cathedral quite fascinating. The detail that the
draughtsman of four hundred years or so ago had put into the plan was quite extraordinary. Strasbourg Cathedral, as the design showed, should have had two spires, but when they came to build the southern spire the foundations began to sink. The front of the cathedral is so ornate that one rarely looks up to see that there is a missing spire. Where the spire should have been, two hundred feet above the street, someone has built a postcard kiosk, which looks quite grotesque perched high over the town like that, though perhaps its earnings keep the roof in good repair.

Once a year Strasbourg has a market in the heart of the city, which is completely closed to traffic for the day. Thousands of people come from all over the area. Gypsies, Algerians, Turks from across the Rhine in Germany, and representatives of every other nationality under the sun. The crowded medieval city had the feeling of how I imagine the famous fairs of the middle ages to have been, with throngs of wide-eyed people genuinely amazed by what they were seeing. It is very sad to see so little wonder in people's eyes these days, but I suppose it's because everyone thinks they have seen everything there is to see on the television. Voyaging slowly on the
Leo
, one felt every nuance of the change in the countryside, every tiny influence of the changing population and their habits. Outside in the open, the weather, too, had a very strong bearing on how one felt about a place. This physical involvement, the air round the people and places, is the essence of travelling and something that cannot be substituted.

Monday morning again. We were still waiting for the Rhine inspector to return with the papers, and, worse still, the name of a suitable pilot for our descent of the
Rhin sauvage
once, two or three locks downstream, it was flowing freely, uncorseted by canalization. The papers finally arrived in the afternoon and we had a clean bill of health from the Commission, whoever they were. There is a British representative on this commission, which is considered a sinecure by
the French as there is precious little British involvement in shipping on the Rhine. Our inspector had put on a gaily coloured shirt and I suppose, like all prisoners and their captors, we had grown quite fond of this meticulous man with his rules and calculations. He had the grace to admit that these had been mistaken by 25 per cent in regard to the size of the anchor. Ray and I looked at each other, thinking that this mistake might have been made because that was the only anchor that Jacob had had in stock at the time, but that was an ungallant thought. There was nothing to do but grin and bear it, and hope that we would never have to drop the anchor in anger, because if we did there was a very good chance that the poor old
Leo
would be pulled in half like some saint in Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
.

Our pilot followed close on the heels of the departing inspector. He was a small French
batelier
who spoke German and lived in Strasbourg Harbour on his barge, which was too small to make much money with. He supplemented his income by piloting French barges, and the odd voyager like ourselves, up and down the Rhine. He came to us through an agent, so he must have been quite well known. His fee was fifty pounds a day plus travelling expenses, and we arranged to start from the harbour at six thirty the following morning. Ray was, by this time, quite rightly feeling that the pilot's arrival was an unnecessary expense, and had taken a dislike to the man. I could see that I was going to have to dance about a bit to keep tempers from fraying. Luckily my younger daughter Sabine and her boyfriend Robert, returning from a youth orchestra concert in the South of France where they had both been playing the violin, were due to arrive that evening. I hoped that this would cause a distraction for Ray, and take his mind off the vagaries of the EEC bureaucracy.

The following morning we were all up at 0.600 hours. Shipshape and Bristol fashion – as much as we ever could be – we left the centre of Strasbourg for the harbour, to pick up
the pilot and to tackle the much vaunted
Rhin sauvage
. He was there waiting for us, carrying a small holdall, which seems to be the sign of all boat people everywhere. We discovered later that he lived on little packets of soup that were dissolved in boiling water. He never ate or drank anything else, except water. I found Ray trying to explain that when you put the
Leo
astern, she always cut to port. The pilot was not listening: he was one of those men who knew how to do everything better than anyone else.

For the first couple of hours all went well, as we were still on the canalized section of the Rhine. In the penultimate lock I took a ride with a family of three – a Dutchman, his wife and their small son who was just home from school for the summer holidays. They owned what seemed like a vast barge, though by Rhine standards it was small, being a mere 1300 tons. They managed this monster on their own, and were planning to be in Holland in a couple of days, even though they had chipped their propeller and were getting a certain amount of vibration as they pushed along with their load of gravel for Rotterdam. I was proudly shown over their spotless barge, which was called the
Janna
. They had a large saloon with washing and drying machines, a bridge you could have got lost in, a television and a video machine, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. It was their home and they had to work very hard to keep it going. They had a radio telephone which kept them in touch with their freight bureau all the time, so they were able to accept cargoes from wherever they were. The system on the Rhine for making phone calls over the ship's VHF system is very efficient. The Dutch couple said that they did not make a fortune, but were able to keep going. They were very proud of their skill; the wife had all the same permits to drive this great ship as her husband did, so they could go for days and nights without stopping if they had to. They told me that they could have made a lot more money if they had had a bigger barge, but that would have necessitated employing crew, which would have meant all
sorts of extra problems, so they were happy to stay as they were. The amount of time that they had to wait between voyages was considerably less than their colleagues in the rest of Europe – with the exception of the Germans and the Swiss.

The
Janna
had been much swifter than the
Leo
and I had to wait for a while on the last lock before the real Rhine. I found myself wondering how Ray and the pilot were getting on, and could imagine Ray watching and waiting for the poor man to make a mistake. While I was there a Swiss tow of 15,000 tons inched its way into the lock, with no more than six inches to spare on either side of the barges. A huge pusher unit was manoeuvring them gradually into the lock from behind. The size of these tows may not come near to the size of the ones on the Mississippi – but they were enormous compared with what we had been used to.

The
Leo
turned up and I had a briefing from Sabine, a veteran of many voyages on the
Leo
, about Ray and the pilot. She said that Ray was not at all happy and thought it very unfair that his command had been taken away from him. I could only agree, but we were entering the Rhine proper after this lock and if the pilot was to be of any use it would be now. For the first few miles the river was indistinguishable from the canalized river that we had been on. Then it became much narrower and we found ourselves putting up our blue board to pass a convoy of upstream barges starboard to starboard. This was not particularly exciting in itself, but the pilot and Ray now had something to do together which reduced the hostile atmosphere. I looked up to see the German customs post go flashing past, and frantically signalled to the pilot that we had to stop there. As I did so there was a great blast of
‘achtungs'
from the loudspeaker on the customs pontoon telling us to stop at once. This was not so easy because as we turned round we were swept further downstream and it took us about half an hour to turn and push our way back up to the customs house. As we did so a smart
green customs launch, which had been radioed to come and make sure we did not do a runner, arrived alongside and asked for our papers. The procedure was simple and efficient but it was the first time that I had been confronted with Germans who spoke only German, and as mine was woefully rusty, I began to realize that it was going to be much harder to make myself understood in future. Up went our courtesy flag and we were into Germany.

The first thing we noticed was the very large number of mobile bridge craft. I think that the NATO forces were about to make one of their periodic exercises to cross the Rhine, for there were American and German soldiers everywhere, whizzing about in inflatable boats and getting their huge lorries stuck in the marshy areas on the banks. We had our first taste of what we later called the German stare. The soldiers, or whatever they were, circled the
Leo
in their speedboats and gazed implacably at us with dead fish eyes, but the strong current had us whizzing along and we were soon in Speyer where I had said we would stop to buy some provisions.

As the pilot made to chuck round to come head up into the stream so that we could land at Speyer, he swung right out towards the far bank to make his turn. The river had created some new sandbanks which he was not expecting, and I could see Ray brighten visibly as the bows of the barge went firmly aground. The pilot then went astern and drove the stern of the
Leo
straight on to another sandbank. Ray and I had been in the same fix a number of times, and we knew that the only way out of it was to detach the
Leo
from the barge, free her from the sand and then lay off a hundred yards or so in deeper water and haul the barge off the bank backwards.

The sheer bliss of
Schadenfreude
had Ray beaming and I went astern to tell the pilot what he should do. He ignored me at first as he drove the poor old
Leo
forwards and back embedding her further at each attempt. Finally I got annoyed
and told him that Ray and I were going to drop the anchor on the barge whether he liked it or not and then detach the
Leo
. I don't think he believed that we would be so insubordinate but soon realized we meant what we said. I went forward again and dropped the anchor while Ray released the
Leo
from the barge. The pilot was going astern at the time and shot backwards as the tug was released and got firmly stuck in the sandbank. He realized at this moment that we were in charge. Gradually he got himself off, we threw him a rope from the barge and the rest of the operation went smoothly. The barge was anchored in deep water while we reattached the
Leo
, and off we went again without getting our provisions. It seemed that the pilot had another ship to take up the river that evening and they were waiting for him at Mannheim.

Within the hour we were approaching this industrial city. What city in Germany is not industrial in some way? The pilot wanted to be dropped off for his next job. Ray took over the tiller, happy to be back in charge of the boat once more. With incredible skill he turned the rig in the strong current and brought us up to within two feet of the barges our pilot was to take up river that evening. The pilot stepped aboard, and after a hurried conversation shouted out that the barges had broken down and he was going to have to mend them himself. By this time Ray had turned round again and we were way out of earshot. We would be seeing him in a few days after we had gone up to Heidelberg, and planned to meet him in Mannheim when we came through again.

Ray and I, plus Sabine and Robert, were suddenly free and covered the last few miles rapidly, through Mannheim where we turned right into the Neckar. We tied up on a pleasure-boat pier that was clearly not in use and walked up the bank into the town. The main tram depot greeted us when we got to the top and because we were tired we decided to go to the closest restaurant which turned out to be a Chinese. It was
not quite what I had planned for Sabine's first night in Germany, but, as ever, hunger is the best cook and I remember eating well before we turned in.

It only took about two hours to make our way from Mannheim to Heidelberg. It is hard for me to think of Heidelberg without thinking of
The Student Prince
, of which I have very special memories. When I lived in the smart part of London, in Belgravia, we had a very small cinema theatre in our basement where we could run 16mm films. I had a friend who was a great fan of Ramon Novarro and he had been approached by the secretary of the Ramon Novarro fan club – whose membership had dwindled to five ladies and a gentleman – to run the film of
The Student Prince
in which Novarro had starred. In those days it was extremely hard to get prints of old films and we had to ask a famous film historian to lend us his bootleg copy. When the fan club left after the showing of the film, there were a number of tear-soaked tissues under the seats. They probably thought it was the last time they would ever see their hero. They must have all been teenagers when they had joined the club, and the secretary had been the secretary when Novarro was alive. The idea of a member of royalty slumming it with the plebs and falling in love with a commoner has always been appealing to the masses and is, in fact, what keeps most of the British and French tabloids going today. Heidelberg University has, for the most part, been moved out of town, and all that is left now is a building that purports to be the
Gasthaus
where the student prince spent those heady and formative days.