Leontyne Read online

  LEONTYNE

  By barge from London to Vienna

  RICHARD GOODWIN

  To my wife

  Contents

  Preface: Leontyne and I

  Chapter One: London to Calais

  Chapter Two: Calais to Bruges

  Chapter Three: Bruges to Agimont

  Chapter Four: Agimont to Rheims

  Chapter Five: Rheims to Paris

  Chapter Six: Paris

  Chapter Seven: Paris to Montbard

  Chapter Eight: Montbard to Mulhouse

  Chapter Nine: Mulhouse to Mannheim

  Chapter Ten: Mannheim to Frankfurt

  Chapter Eleven: Frankfurt to Nuremberg

  Chapter Twelve: Nuremberg to Passau

  Chapter Thirteen: Passau to Vienna

  Acknowledgements

  Plates Section

  Preface

  Leontyne and I

  I can’t remember when my dream turned into a plan, but I do remember when real things started to happen. I remember standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris one morning and watching the barges ploughing up and down. They were complete; families, children, even a car on board for some. Where they stopped for the night was home, wherever they were. It was then I decided that I wanted to sample the half-gypsy life that these people lead; stopping, making new friends here and there and, above all, greeting the bright morning light over the countryside, always changing, always new.

  I live by the river in London, so some years back I put out some inquiries amongst the river people I knew and, to my surprise, within days I was told they had just what I wanted, a converted launch tug. A bit too soon, I thought, but I went to have a look all the same. There she was, black and rusty and cruelly converted into a kind of cabin cruiser. The motor was far too small for such a heavy boat, the hull was thin in places and in many parts there was a layer of concrete to stop leaks. But there was something about her tenacious shape and lowness in the water that made me feel that she could carry me to wherever I wanted in perfect safety. Her vital statistics were 30 feet long, 9 feet wide and she drew just on 4 feet of water. She weighed over 14 tons and was so low in the water that she could pass under almost any bridge. A deal was struck, probably too much, but for £4000 she was mine.

  I had to register her name with the relevant authorities before I could go anywhere, in this case with the Board of Trade. This vessel of mine was known to all who worked on the Thames as the Leo. I liked the name but the Registry said that there were nine other Leos and if mine was to be the tenth, I would have to produce her birth certificate. This proved to be impossible. The best I could do was to find out that she had been built in 1926. By whom and where was very unclear. Some said Odell’s Yard at Brentford: some misty eyes remembered Odell bringing her over from Holland to use as a template for other similar tugs he was building. As I delved, I found out that the Leo had been owned by all sorts of river people, some of whom had passed bundles of notes to each other and were guarded about their ownership in any case: they certainly didn’t have any bits of paper. One of these likely lads, a gloomy ex-lighterman, volunteered that I would certainly perish in her, as he had nearly done going round to Harwich when a sudden storm blew up.

  Alarmed, I went down to the berth where she was lying and had a serious moment wondering whether this was a final madness. But I knew in my heart that I would never be happy if I didn’t get to France; so all possible risks were forgotten and the preparations began. I had registered the boat as the Leontyne but by all her friends she is still known as the Leo, strange hermaphroditic beast that she is. The wondrous sound of Leontyne Price’s voice (on my very first visit to the opera, I heard her sing Aida in Milan) could well also have had something to do with my choice of name.

  Before the great adventure described in this book, I took the Leo on several voyages, preparations, as it turned out, for the big one. Our first Channel crossing was uneventful until we were in the middle of the main shipping lane. We were using the proper procedure to cross at right angles so as to be in the danger zone for as little time as possible, when quite suddenly, one of the rigid fuel lines on the engine burst. Something like that happens very rarely. Fortunately we had a spare but fitting it as we rolled about in the wash of half a million tons of supertanker was alarming. At last, one of my friends from the river, Paul Wilson, finished the job and the engine turned over again. I wondered if we had made even the tiniest blob on anybody’s radar.

  I took my family through Paris and round the glorious canals in the centre of France and then decided that I should have to bring the Leo home and put a bigger engine in her. After two years of wandering through the summers I recrossed the Channel and had a new engine put in for the next expedition.

  This voyage was from London to Calais with one foot in the gutter, as it were, round to Cherbourg, and then down to St Malo. We only just made it before the weather broke, after five clear calm days in May. Then, on through the Brittany Canals, which are too narrow for today’s commercial traffic, to Redon and then to Nantes and out into the Bay of Biscay.

  We had to turn back almost at once, as the huge Atlantic swells got hold of the Leo and tossed her about like a plastic cup. Chastened, we ran for cover to St Nazaire. Happy to limp into harbour we spent the night in the old submarine pens, a night that will be long remembered by the ship’s company, my children, Sabine and Jason. Cold, uncomfortable and noisy; the fishing fleet tied up and unloaded their fish next to us just when we had nodded off. Still it was a great deal better than some watery grave off the Isle of Noirmoutier.

  The next year I continued through the Bay of Biscay in perfect weather and up the Gironde to Bordeaux. Then I set out through some of the most beautiful parts of France. I remember eating fritters made from the flowers of acacia that a lady lock-keeper, seeing I was alone, had kindly made for my supper. In these parts, the lock-keepers have sovereign rights, it seems, over the land fifty yards up- and downstream of their lock. I had asked to moor in the shade under the enormous acacia trees, and that was how I came to eat this delicious and recherché meal. I gave her a plastic bottle of Scotch whisky for her husband. As I left in the dawn the éclusière, rather shyly I thought, gave me half a dozen eggs. She said that she was very grateful for the Scotch and indicated that her husband had enjoyed it and her. I suppose May is rather a good time for that sort of thing.

  As the Leo and I ploughed our way through the peaceful canals lined with yellow wild irises, the water covered with the fluffy flowers of the acacia trees that lined the bank, it came to me that here was real exploration. Discovery of what life could be like if lived at a human pace. Just the odd contact every hour or so with a lock-keeper and time to think without fear of interruption. I began to think about where else I could go after I had completed my present trip, how it could be financed and whether I really wanted to do it. Perhaps I was seduced by the idyllic surroundings, but it was here I decided that I would make a real voyage, not just a holiday adventure, to some faraway place. If I could get it together, I would try to go down the Rhine, up the Main, over the European watershed (the watershed stretch would have to be by land as the new canal currently in construction would not be finished for some years) and then down the Danube to Vienna. Of course the Leo would not have enough accommodation for a lengthy trip but perhaps since she was a tug she could tow a barge or even, as was becoming more fashionable, push one.

  After my couple of trips abroad, I felt I was ready for the big voyage. The Leo and I had done our homework. I knew what she needed and knew where we were going. The only thing that remained was to finance the adventure. Now, I’ve worked in movies all my life, doing a bit of everything, and, if there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that if you really want to do anything, you have to make a
serious start yourself with whatever resources you have available. It seems that personal commitment and enthusiasm are the main ingredients for persuading financiers of the worth of a project. So I decided to convert over the next year the Mercat, a Thames lighter that at one time had been a high-security barge, which meant, amongst other things, that it had a galvanized hull. The first major work was to take out the ceiling of the barge (oddly named as it is in fact the floor). The boards had completely rotted and we had to replace them with a special mixture of fast-drying concrete up to the level of the steel frames of the hull – about nine inches of concrete were required. Quick-drying concrete has to be used because the mixture must dry while the vessel in on a flat bottom – if the tide comes in before the concrete is properly set it will dry at an angle, meaning your boat has a permanent list.

  Then the ordering began, and all that winter welders worked intermittently, installing all the big items, in the correct order. Holes were cut in the aft deck for the generator which was housed behind the aft bulkhead. Steel box bars were rolled to form the same curves as the combings, so that the hold of the barge was enclosed. Doors were cut in the bulkheads and tanks were installed for water and fuel.

  Once the welding was out of the way, the carpenters got cracking. I installed a formidable diesel cooker which I found in a chandler’s who had had it in his basement for eight years (meaning that I got it cheap). There were three sleeping cabins, one which I had designed for my daughter Sabine, a double one for guests, and my cabin, which was naturally slightly larger than the others with a desk in it, as I had visions of writing Captain Bligh-type logs far into the night. In the event I was nearly always too exhausted to do anything but jump into bed and fall asleep.

  The total area on the barge available for living was sixteen by thirty-three feet. Apart from the cabins, there were two bathrooms, both with electric lavatories which always blocked at the most inopportune moments. The forward bathroom had a minuscule bath which was hardly ever used on the voyage, not because we were particularly dirty people but because it was such a performance to have a bath and we frequently did not have enough water. We had to make other arrangements. The rest of the area was made up of the saloon, which was lined on the port side with the diesel cooker – this also coped with the central heating – a double sink and a freezer. In the middle, I had put a table from a monastery that I had bought years before in the New Forest. In the swinheads, the angled bits at the ends of the barge, I had fitted a generator in the aft section and in the larger forward section there was a 400-gallon fresh-water tank, a holding tank for the sewage, and a massive bank of batteries to give us a 24-volt DC supply plus a back-up bank in case they failed.

  Entrance to the barge was from the stern of the saloon down a stairway, under which was a hot water tank which was heated by both the central heating and the generator. This very nearly caused an accident on one occasion when we left the generator running with no water in the system: the effect was rather like the invention of the steam engine and caused a considerable explosion, splitting the sides of the copper canister as though it were a rotten peach. The interior of the barge was lit by ports in the deck above and by portholes in the sloping sides of the barge which reflected dancing light off the water in a most pleasing manner.

  All through the early summer months, I tried out the rig. The Leo was now pushing the barge which I had renamed the Leontine to make the lock-keepers believe that it was really the same vessel and thus reduce the paperwork – a ruse that I am happy to say worked very well. Because of the huge pressures on the deck equipment we had a number of breakages. Pins snapped off, steel wires broke and it became obvious that this was an area that I simply could not afford to try to save money on. So I had to exchange all the winches holding the two boats together for heavier gear. Up and down the Thames we went, raising eyebrows everywhere. Over and over again I was told that I couldn’t think of getting to Vienna in that.

  At the end of June I decided that I must try out the new towing post. Pushing the barge up river to Putney, the gearbox overheated and we had to stop to let it cool down. On the way back to Rotherhithe I decided to tow the barge, which I thought would be better for the gearbox and perhaps not give it quite so much work to do. As we went downstream the ebb tide got stronger and stronger and I began to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to stop very easily. As we raced under London Bridge and then Tower Bridge, the spring ebb tide was at its full force. I was alone on the tug, with the rest of the crew, which included Sabine, on the barge; there was no means of communication with them as they were below decks. I started to get really alarmed.

  To stop in these circumstances meant that I would have to chuck round, that is to say that I would have to bring the tug, with the barge following, round into the current at just the right moment or I would be swept past the mooring I wanted to go to; this, in turn, was drying out so fast as the tide went out that soon there would be no water for us to come alongside. I tried the manoeuvre. As the Leo came round to face the tide, the engine and gearbox failed to give me the punch I needed. The barge and the Leo jack-knifed, the towrope trapped me against the steering wheel and then I felt the whole weight of the barge, all forty-two tons, press against my abdomen. I was literally squashed, but the rope slackened for a moment, giving me just enough time to haul my semi-paralysed lower half up on to the barge. As I did so, the bow of the barge crashed through the wheelhouse of the Leo, a blow which would have done for me if I had been in the way. I lay on the deck not able to move or do much at all, except to admire Sabine’s courage as she leapt from the barge on to the tug, and tried to correct our course. Miraculously, a police launch happened to be passing, finding us careering helplessly down the Thames on a five-knot tide. They took some time, it seemed to me, to assess the situation; in the meantime Sabine managed to steer the tug in approximately the right direction, making to throw a line to the police boat. At this point I blacked out.

  Further events are somewhat hazy, except that I remember my dear wife leaning over me as I promised her I would sell the boats and live a calmer life.

  Chapter One

  London to Calais

  I was out of action for six weeks and as I lay in my hospital bed overlooking the Pool of London, I watched the hordes of office workers streaming to and fro over London Bridge. The new ‘London Bridge City’ is quite a sight at dawn, but, when the sun comes up, its concrete canyons are, alas, just the same as any other project which has been built for the continuing glory of its architects, rather than the poor souls who have to struggle round its windswept gulches. What are they all dreaming about – making their fortunes from the VDU screen? Or perhaps making their escape? What do people dream of today? Once the movies provided dreams of romance and luxury, but today everyone knows the plot. Violence, more violence and sex is all that is being provided, by and large. I dreamed of quiet places with calm water, bread, cheese and a bottle of wine, and above all I dreamed of being in control of my destiny for a time, amongst the rivers of Europe. Perhaps I would be able to persuade someone to back me in what would seem to many a dotty venture.

  It was obvious to me by now that I would need professional help in the adventure to improve the odds on completing the journey more or less unscathed. Ray Julian was one of the elite band of Thames watermen who had spent seven years as an apprentice before getting his papers as a licensed waterman. These years of learning are very important on the Thames, a savage and unpredictable river as I knew to my cost. Over the journey, I realized what an enormously resilient person he was. There was hardly ever a situation that he had not experienced when it came to handling boats and he had the true professional attitude to electrical and mechanical machinery which, if he did not understand how to mend, he would find someone who really did. He kept himself amazingly fit by going for long runs along the towpath at dawn every morning and eating masses of honey with everything. He had two grown-up sons and a very pretty daughter. I had run into him throu
gh my contacts on the river and had liked him as soon as I met him as he was clearly a gypsy at heart like me and we got on at once. By the end of the trip, I had the greatest respect for him and his appreciation of the natural beauty through which we travelled, which was far more intense than many an Oxbridge mind I have encountered. My journey would have been a lot more difficult and far less fun without his good humour and stamina.

  At the beginning of September 1987, I was well enough to start trials again and get the Leo’s rig correctly fixed. The biggest problem was the lack of sufficient power. The best and cheapest remedy seemed to be a bigger propeller, but a bigger propeller meant a stronger gearbox; this, in turn, meant a more powerful engine, and that I couldn’t possibly afford. In the end I decided not to waste any more time, but to concentrate instead on raising the finance for the voyage which would also have to cover the cost of the six-cylinder Gardner engine that I was planning to get, reconditioned, from a London bus.

  During the winter months, many little things were being finished off on the barge and I was slowly getting the boats into a condition which, if not exactly shipshape, might be described as working. The hydraulic steering on the boat had sprung a leak and we were at one time drifting without steering under Tower Bridge. Fundamental mechanical problems like this had dogged our progress, but that is often the way with dress rehearsals for a successful show.

  At last, after a winter of biting my fingernails, the money was raised from a British television company, Central Television, and now all that had to be done was to fix a date for our departure.

  Our first night on board, in April 1988, was not without mishap. Ray was not yet with me, and, until he could join me, I had taken the services of another waterman, Reggie, a man with a huge and apparently random knowledge of geographical place names. As he moored us up, at Fisher’s Wharf by London Bridge, and tied our warps round a pillar, he reeled off the names of the big towns on the Don and the Volga. ‘No problem,’ said he. ‘When the tide goes down, just check the ropes, and all will be well. I bet you can’t tell me what the Russian port at the mouth of the Danube is called.’