Narrow Dog to Carcassonne (30 page)

You know I just can’t understand you, said Lucy. I was talking to Clifford about it and we really don’t think it’s good enough. I mean Cliff and I and Georgia gave you the best years of our lives. Whenever you needed us we were there. When you wanted advice we gave it, when your friends let you down we would comfort you. If you had bad luck in business or sport we would remind you what mattered was your own integrity, that bit of you inside that you know is good and no one can take away. We didn’t ask for anything in return, only your love. And now we are getting old you leave us, you go off and do things against our advice. You don’t care what we think any more. People ask Where are you, they have heard you are in trouble, and we say, We don’t know, they probably are, they usually are. Grandmothers have evolved over millions of years so they can be backup mothers, and grandfathers so they can put up shelves and build barbecues and give people money. Other grandparents babysit and tile their daughters’ bathrooms but all you do is wander around and risk your lives and lavish your affection on a wretched dog that looks like a skeleton and steals things. You sit up drinking with people we don’t know, dropouts and expats and bums, and your little grandchildren say Where are Granny and Grandad Why can’t they come to the pictures with us or take us to Chester Zoo and we say Last we heard they were being swept away down the bloody Rhône in a boat that was made for two feet of water with a dog that should be under the table in the Star or running around on the common chasing rabbits.

It was Lucy, I said, wishing us luck with the Bollène lock.

THE RIVER WAS SMOOTH, AND WE THRASHED between chalk and green hills, under bridges, and down the lock cut, the Train à Grande Vitesse overtaking us every half an hour at just under the speed of sound. I’ve got him, said Monica, waving the VHF, I’ve got the lock-keeper. I can understand what he is saying. He knows we are coming down the Rhône—he says he is expecting us—
Le narrowboat anglais
Phyllis May
avec ses géraniums
. Isn’t that nice?—look, the gates are open, there’s no one else, go in.

What is the drop in this lock? I shouted to Monica. Twenty-three metres, she said. Listen, I said, tell him on that VHF thing what Mad Mozza said—click click, let the water out click by click, what’s the hurry, and all that. Go on, tell him—click click.

The water began to move down the walls. Down and down we went, bollards groaning, alone, into a void six hundred feet long and thirty-six feet wide and seventy-five feet deep: Gloucester Cathedral, with green and black and yellow walls, mud and weed, armoured gates, water falling down. Two hundred million gallons. It took only ten minutes.

Did you tell him what Mad Mozza said? I shouted—click click? Watch out, shouted Monica, the gate is going up, the light is green—let’s get out of here—let’s boogie.

SAINT ETIENNE-DES-SORTS IS ONE OF THE VILLAGES where the Côtes du Rhône Villages wine comes from. It is old and narrow and built along a quay and the Rhône is so wide that you think you are by the sea. All the men wore swimming trunks. As we left Saint Etienne the church rang like Debussy’s underwater cathedral.

The August wind was hard against us and you could smell the Sahara. When we entered a lock it was a blessing to fall down the wall into the shade. Out on to the stream again we were chopping through the white horses and the swell and the Rhône was getting broader and broader.

Then we were in a bay kilometres wide and far away a wall where there should be mooring rings. A smudge turned into a big Dutch barge but we saw room behind it and came in against the current, as you should. But the wind and the swell were behind us and it took half an hour to rope up. We lay down, our clothes dark with sweat, Jim panting and pressing hard to the floor, and went to sleep.

Look, said Monica, the wind has changed. The clouds were still moving from the south but now the wind was from the north. The swell was still running upstream but the ripples were running downstream. It started to rain and the Dutchman from the barge came on deck and so did I and we danced around and waved our arms and shouted. It rained hard for ten minutes and there was hail and the air was cooler.

On the towpath fourteen chaps with Fartblasters ranted down and back again, and a chap with a Jet Ski came alongside so that we would know he had a girl on the back, and would be sure to enjoy a night of love, so furious was his exhaust. Two heads floated by—the Dutchman and his wife, who had thrown themselves into the water. An ancient castle on the other bank, far away when we had arrived, was now half a kilometre nearer. By my troth, quoth Lancelot, this is a funny place.

Sur le pont d’Avignon

Lonnie Donegan, Lonnie Donegan

Sur le pont d’Avignon

Lonnie Donegan still plays on.

What rubbish is that? asked Monica. I just made it up, I said. But he’s not playing on really—the Rock Island Line came and took him away. We’re all waiting at the station, you know.

We won’t have to wait very long the way you are steering, said Monica. You’ve got to get across the path of that barge before it runs us down and go hard left up the Avignon branch and all the signs are reversed because you are going upstream, but you don’t understand the signs anyway so it doesn’t matter.

Going into Avignon I was pushing against the Rhône for the first time and on our right in the sunlight over the hill a gold Virgin. Half an old bridge and people on it taking pictures. Don’t go through the arch, said Monica, there’s no depth. See all those big poles?—that was the marina. The French invented aluminium so they made the marina at Avignon out of aluminium. It’s not there any more, the Rhône got it. A chap on the stone quay waved and showed us to a space.

We were outside the city walls and to get inside we had to cross a main road and go up Death Alley. To go up Death Alley you hold hands and keep the dog’s lead short and do some stretching and some deep breathing and then you rush down the middle of the street, which is five feet wide with three-inch pavements, before the little cars realize you are there and come after you. If they catch you up you have one chance—there is a doorway and you can press into it. They have the same arrangement in train tunnels—I know, I was caught in one as a boy, but it was not as bad as Death Alley. As the cars brushed by they gave us a wave—one sportsman to another.

Steps up to the viewpoint by the cathedral and a gate and a notice—
No dogs
. Jim will wait outside a shop but he is not good at waiting on steps and we could hear him howl as we looked over Avignon, east to the mountains and down at the
Phyllis May
an inch long, holding her parasol like a white postage stamp over the front deck.

On Saturday evening the sun hit the cream walls of the Pope’s Palace and shone in our eyes and the square dissolved into black and shadow. Cooler under the trees—the crowds, the tables and chairs, the roundabout horses, the whippet. He’s called Nelson,
madame
, said the stallholder. He went grey when he was four. I mean he went white round the muzzle—he’s grey anyway. There are not many whippets in France, said Monica. Oh yes, said the stallholder, there are many whippets. We have seen two of them, said Monica. Nelson wagged his tail and Jim looked at him as if he was mad.

When we awoke we were tired and nervous. The Rhône was terrible but at least you knew where it was going. Now we were turning right—across the bottom of south-west France, into Languedoc-Roussillon, leaving Provence on our left. It was the Petit Rhône for a while then a canal that seemed to go straight across the middle of lakes and then an inland sea and then the Canal du Midi. It would be all corners and decisions and hire-boaters and locks and Superdick had said the Canal du Midi was shut so we might have to walk. And there was a mistral for the next few days, said the chap on the next boat. The wind whined and whispered and shook the boat.

The weather had changed—it was twenty-two degrees and we shuddered with cold. I put on my life jacket and a woolly scarf and steered around the old bridge and the
Phyllis May
headed south for Vallabrègues.

HELLO—DUBOIS? THIS IS YOUR PRESIDENT. THE president of the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône, you fool. Who were you expecting, the President of the Republic?

Look, have you got rid of that damn toy barge yet? Didn’t I make it clear? If all the private narrowboats came over from England we would have to find another hundred kilometres of wharf. Getting in the way of our gas barges, wearing out our locks, ruining our economy.

The water—did you let the water out in Vienne as I suggested? All four million tons? And they were still there in the morning? God, they must have steel hawsers. What about the poison gas—he sailed through it? Some sort of English robot with rubber lungs if you ask me. The gas barge? She headed for the bank? Those damn narrowboats only draw two feet and if they head for the bank they get away—it’s happened before.

What about the lock-keepers? Always been my favourite—whoosh, whoosh, it’s all over. Crane up what’s left of the boat, send the divers down, mail home the bits in a plastic bag. What do you mean the lock-keepers say they like the boat, and she speaks French, and there is a dog? A dog? They said they would go on strike? For a woman in a hat, and a bloody dog? When we tamed the Rhône we had real men. All we get these days is pansies and pederasts.

Did you say Superdick? Ah nice one Dubois—I thought he had been put away. Superdick has never failed—the destroyer of worlds. What?—he failed? And he showed them the photos? He must have lost his edge after the electrical treatment. Dubois, if you sent in Superdick no man could do more.

Look, go home to your wife, lovely girl, leave it to me. Give her my regards, by the way. Tell her Hoochie Coochie Prezzie Boots was thinking about her—you’re a lucky man, Dubois. And not a word about this business, or I’ll make sure she hears about the lady in the flowered dress.

Once they get out on to the Rhône to Sète Canal it’s outside my
territory. The lads on the Rhône to Sète will help out, of course, but I owe them one already.

Dubois, we have very little time. I know, I’ll ring the Air Ministry. I hear that fat oaf Darlington has been disrespectful in bars about our jet pilots. After what I tell them the air force will want to nuke the buggers.

Very soon afterwards four airplanes, fighter-bomber-size, came down the Rhône straight towards the
Phyllis May
on its pontoon at Vallabrègues, in a line, at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, six inches above the water.

Thirteen

THE WINE-DARK SEA

Languedoc-Roussillon

B
lue flowers like bells, and yellow stars, between the towpath and the canal. A hot wet wind from the south. No one about. Monica on the tiller and Jim on the towpath with me. The Rhône to Sète Canal is straight like the Gloucester to Sharpness Canal, and broad enough for the transport barges that come through now and then. Fish splashing and twisting near the banks, red and silver. In Paris it’s the dancing dead, I thought, and here it’s the dancing fish. Monica brought the boat into the bank—Your turn—and joined Jim on the towpath. After five weeks trembling on the rivers, Jim was free. We were at sea level, and would be on brackish water until we entered the Canal du Midi, a hundred kilometres away.

Over the bank a jingling and two curved horns, then the heads of half a dozen black bulls. Now a man’s head at twenty miles an hour and there he was on a horse. Then in a gap a herd of white horses. One or two had egrets on their backs. We have had no egrets, I said to Monica. Egrets, she said, I’ve had a few.

We could see the Tower of Constance a long way ahead. This is a lighthouse standing on top of a castle keep, like a fag end on a tin of beans. It is on the corner of the walled city of Aigues Mortes, which means Dead Waters. Aigues Mortes is a castle but they lost the plans and it ran away and finished up half a kilometre square. They began to fill it with restaurants and gift shops in the thirteenth century and are making good progress. We reached it before lunch and went for a walk inside the walls.

Why is the local wine called sand wine,
madame
? Because it is grown on sand,
monsieur
. We have no
appellations contrôlées
wines, but these are wines of the area. No,
monsieur
, this weather is not normal. We have hot weather here, but not heavy like this with no sun. I tasted the wine—it was thin from the sand and strong from the sun.

WHILE MONICA IS IN THE FOOD SHOP I STAND in the wet wind in the square holding a case of wine and a carton of wine and some shopping bags and Jim and my haversack and I am trying to pull my arm up to eat my ice cream and Jim is pulling it down and crowds of people are pushing by covered in sweat and sand and my T-shirt is soaked and the mosquito bites on my legs and wrists are itching and Jim decides to squat in the square and I put everything down in the road and get out a plastic bag and clear up and then I give him the end of my ice cream and two other dogs come along to try to steal it and the dog lead wraps round my legs and the bags wrap round my arms and the sweat runs into my eyes and I wish I was in Stone and it was freezing and raining and Jim was pulling me into Langtry’s and they were serving Timothy Taylor’s Landlord’s Bitter and Clifford was coming in for a pint and I wish I had never thought of this voyage and I want to go home.

DRINKS ON THE
PHYLLIS MAY
WITH A COUPLE we had met in Namur in Belgium. We wintered here in Aigues Mortes, they said. The weather is nice, windy now and then, but usually warm. There were five English boats—many Dutch, Germans, Swiss; and sixty people would come to a barbecue.

How did you cope with the Rhône? they asked. They threw the lot at us, I said—gas barges, floods, dicks, gales, poison gas—in the end we were attacked by fighter-bombers. We were on the outside pontoon and four of them came at us roaring. They stayed six inches above the water and got nearer and nearer and bigger and bigger and louder and louder. We thought we were done for. Piston-engine planes, looked a bit like lorries—they had square wings. Three of them were yellow and one of them was brown. They were almost on us and we were standing on the pontoon frozen like rabbits. Then one of them touched the river. Then the others did too and there was a lot of spray and a lot of noise and a wake that chucked the pontoon into the air. Then they swept away with a great racket, missing us by six feet.

We realized they were picking up water. We heard later there have been fires round Avignon and the planes dump the water on the flames. We thought they had come for us—you can get like that on the Rhône.

IT WAS TWENTY-FIVE DEGREES AS WE LEFT Aigues Mortes, and I shivered. Overhead a flamingo, its breast condensing the dawn, its legs trailing, its head forward like a swan, not back like a heron, its neck interminable.

The banks of the Rhône to Sète Canal were sandy, with desert scrub down to the water. We were sailing across the middle of blue lakes. Sometimes the canal was defined by banks and dunes, sometimes by rows of stones. Often currents poured through gaps to the southern waters on our left and down to the Mediterranean. There was a lightness in the air and a smell of salt.

Over the lakes the cream towers of a city—the island-valley of Avillion—

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns

And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea

Further the blue mountains, and the sky, and the clouds more pink than the flamingo. We came on Floridas you won’t believe.

Smoke across the cut far ahead and a helicopter the size of a wasp and here come the fighter-bombers to drop their silver blankets and the fire went out and the planes went away with a noise rising in pitch—There you are, there you are, there you are.

AN ENGLISH HACK NARROWBOATER DOES NOT expect rivers to flow straight across canals without an aqueduct or proper written notification, and he is not used to winds that knock you down. When I turned left off the Rhône to Sète Canal towards the seaside town of Palavas-les-Flots the wind and current gripped me under the elbows and hustled me towards the Mediterranean, a kilometre away.

Turn, turn, shouted the captain on the quay as I swept by and I turned across the current so now I was heading for the sea sideways. I rammed the throttle forward and back to avoid the boats on either bank, and tried to turn right round, but each time a boat would come downriver at ten knots and block me. There was a lot of noise and smoke and spray, and crowds of gongoozlers. One chap was selling tickets. My hope was to get the bow caught in one of the wooden quays—if I failed I would finish up in Morocco. This one,
monsieur
, yelled the captain. All right, this one; oh well, this one.

I caught the last quay with the rope fender on the bow and the boat swung round and I beat back to a mooring. The captain, a young chap, shook my hand. I think it was the shared jeopardy.

Palavas-les-Flots is going to be like Blackpool, I said to Monica that evening. Down both sides of the river where I had roared crabwise into town were restaurants and gift shops and lots of people. One side of the river in hot shadow, one in the smouldering sun. We walked along and Jim looked for dropped sandwiches and Monica looked for a restaurant and I looked for a hat with
Kiss Me Again on the Backside
in French but there was none of that and no Palavas rock. There were no drunks. There was a good dinner and a bottle of local wine which was awful but Palavas-les-Flots on the Mediterranean made me think of Blackpool and I loved it.

Next night a wild mooring. Jim and I walked down the sandy path between the canal and the lake. Half the sky was dawn. A flock of flamingos was standing in the lake, all facing the same way. Their breasts were moulded like a globe and were as the wild rose. Some had blood-red on their wings. Most were asleep on one leg with their heads tucked underneath their arms and the rest were foraging under the water.

We walked on and here was a flock with heads, set on waving necks, having a chat—
Wricky wricky wroo, wricky wricky wroo
. Two of them dipped their beaks and raised them in perfect time. Jim followed me down the bank, close behind so the birds could not see him. The flamingos moved further into the lake,
Wricky wricky wroo, wricky wricky wroo
.

PAUL VALÉRY IS BURIED IN SÈTE, SAID MONICA. I didn’t realize, I said. I understand his poetry better now—the heat, the light. But he does go on so. It’s all life and death and the universe and exclamation marks. I’d rather Théophile Gautier and his white swans or Apollinaire and his crayfish any day. The best thing Valéry did was ‘The Cemetery by the Sea’—

There is a coolness breathed out by the sea

A salty power gives back my soul to me!

Let’s run down to the main, leap out alive!

And while we are on the topic, I said. No, said Monica, we are not going out on to the Mediterranean in the
Phyllis May
, and that’s final. The French have got different rules about going to sea, and we don’t know anything about the access, and we haven’t done any planning. We planned the Channel for years. We’ll finish up in gaol or sunk and never get to Carcassonne. Why do you want to go out on the Med? Just another notch on the bedpost? We never said we were going out on to the Med. We are going to Carcassonne. We get so near and then you throw it all away because you want to boast to your drinking cronies. And you are frightened of the Etang de Thau. You are trying to prove to yourself you are brave and if we are put in gaol or they take the boat off us or we sink you will not have to cross the Etang de Thau. I can read you like a book.

We are on salt water already, I said. And people will say Did you go to Carcassonne and we’ll say Yes and they will ask Did you go on the Med and I don’t want to say Yes well we did in a way. I want to say Yes next question. But I’ll leave it to you, I promise. I would never do anything to upset my Mon.

Before Sète there is a bridge, and it would not open until nine o’clock so we had an hour to wait. To the left, to the south, a broad channel, with a notice saying
No Pleasure Boats.
Monica came along the gunwale. I suppose that’s the Med, she said. I turned left. No, she said, you mustn’t. Just under the first bridge, I said. Just a look-see, just a reconnoitre—trust me.

It was calm and there was no wind. No craft around, every twenty yards a fisherman, looking at the
Phyllis May
as if he had slipped down a time warp or the Ricard had got him at last.

Under the first bridge the estuary widened, but the water was still calm and I went on. Stop you fool, said Monica, there’s a notice—
No Houseboats
. The French call us a houseboat. Just a recce, I said. Monica went down to have a cry with Jim and prepare to abandon ship and I sailed on.

Now we could see the exit to the sea, between a little lighthouse and a breakwater. Through it a freighter. My heart beat faster—My God, a narrowboat on the Med. Will I, can I actually make it? If the coastguards come out they might take away the
Phyllis May
. Oh dear, what’s that? A black boat heading for us fast, and I got that feeling you get when you see the lights of the police car in the mirror.

The boat went by about its business and we sailed on, past the lighthouse and the breakwater and on to Homer’s wine-dark sea. It wasn’t wine-dark, though, it was silver and smooth with a swell, and the early sun in his glory.

The freighter was heading west. There were fishing boats in the mist over towards the edge of the world. I couldn’t see any other narrowboats. I turned and went back past the lighthouse and after a couple of days things were fine with Monica again.

THE ETANG DE THAU IS AN INLAND SEA SEVENTEEN miles long and five miles wide. To get to the Canal du Midi and to Carcassonne you have to sail the length of the Etang, and the idea was scaring me stiff.

First we had to leave the Rhône to Sète Canal and cover a mile to Sète harbour across the corner of the Etang. The sea was fairly calm and very blue. As we came near the harbour entrance two girdered bridges reared up together like mantises. Nice of them, I thought, we could have passed underneath, no problem.

There was a Sunday afternoon crowd in Sète and the streets along the river were furnished with stands and two white boats were rowing towards each other to the scream and thump of a bugle band. The crew were in white and at the back of each boat on a tower ten feet high a chap was holding a bargepole and looking determined. The boats passed and the jousters pushed each other with their poles. One fell spreadeagled, pausing before he hit the water.