‘If you want to get off and walk or run along the towpath, we’ll meet you at the fourth lock,’ the skipper had told us after breakfast.
Breakfast was a croissant and two cups of tachycardia-inducing coffee. The towpath was a six-foot-wide strip of smooth asphalt between two grass verges. It was drizzling. The coffee buzz, the level smoothness of the towpath and the overcast sky were ideal conditions for running a mile or two. I stepped off the gangplank and hit the towpath running.
The scenery was French. Burgundian. Sleek and contented Charolais cattle were up to their knees in pasture in every other field. A buzzard circled the vines on the hillside. Six magpies were pecking in a field of long stubble. Even the barbed wire seemed somehow more stylish than ours.
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy. What did five and six mean? I couldn’t remember. Now there were brown slugs crossing the path, hundreds of them, all at full stretch, horns out, going hell for leather. Anxious about standing out against the asphalt and being picked off by birds, I supposed. I hopscotched over and around them. Nature seems more abundant over here. On this stretch of the canal the only thing not in abundance was people.
I passed an empty lock and lock-keeper’s cottage. Was this the first lock or the second? Had the skipper included the one at the start in his calculation? Who cares? I was full of running, that was the main thing. And I was remembering, too, to keep the stride short and fast and avoid that old-school, labour-intensive heel-to-toe type running that makes my knees ache.
Another lock. That was quick. So was this lock two or three? This lock was interesting for the fact that here was my first encounter of the week with a Frenchman — for he was unmistakably that. This representative of our sweet enemy was a large, elderly man in a blue boiler suit and flat cap. He had dismounted from his bicycle and was standing perilously on top of the closed lock gates. As I ran by he looked up.
I don’t know what it is about the French in their own country, but they always give me an inferiority complex. My ‘Bonjour, monsieur!’ was timid. It was returned, however, in a most friendly, and surprisingly high-pitched, tone of voice, and he added something which seemed to be in the form of a question.
I jogged in a tight half circle, hopped up on to the lock gate on my side of the canal. He and his bicycle were in a precarious position. The lock gates weren’t meant to be used as a bridge. Apart from the 20-foot drop on one side and the cold deep stillness on the other, the lock gates bristled with mechanical obstacles.
I put my palm to my ear, indicating that I hadn’t caught what he was saying. ‘Nous en avons pour toute la journée?’ More by luck than judgment I understood that he was asking me if I thought this rain was in for the day. Moreover he asked it as though he gave weight to my opinion. I studied the sky like a seer. (Now I remembered: five for silver, six for gold.) I said I thought it might clear up later on and I offered to give him and his bicycle a helping hand. He said thank you but he’d rather stay where he was for a bit longer. I wished him good day and jogged on.
I can vividly remember the first time I communicated with a Frenchman in his own language. I was about ten and I said to a French boy of about the same age: ‘Parlez-vous Anglais?’ ‘Non,’ he said. I felt the same elation now as I did then at expressing myself in such a pleasant language and being understood.
Not knowing whether the next lock was number three or four, I ran on for several lockless miles before concluding that it must have been number four, and ran all the way back again, and then I continued on back to the lock where the old man had asked me about the weather. He’d gone. Perhaps he’d fallen in and drowned. Now there were four children, aged between about five and 12, selecting herbs from the tall grasses beside the canal. Each of them greeted me courteously as I passed.
Around the next bend I saw the barge coming slowly. The table on deck was laid with white linen and heavily populated with big wine glasses. Lunch already. The skipper, standing at the wheel, raised an arm in salutation.
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