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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
H.T. Sheringham ranks among the finest fishing writers of the twentieth century. Here is a collection of the very best of his angling experiences, taken mainly from his six fishing books and from The Field, for which he was Angling Editor. No fish escaped his interest, even if it did sometimes escape his creel – carp, tench, chub, pike, roach, salmon and trout – all were pursued with equal gusto. He takes the reader on a journey without frontiers, from the reservoirs (Blagdon in its opening years) to the finest chalkstreams in England, from overgrown canals to Welsh salmon rivers. No snob, he knew only the joy of the sport. He is funny, he is moving and – most rare – he is modest about his all-round skills with rod and line. If you are new to Sheringham, An Angler for all Seasons will surely convert you into one of his many admirers. The essays in this anthology have been chosen and introduced by Tom Fort, former Angling Correspondent of the Financial Times.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
The essays by H. T. Sheringham which are reproduced in this anthology have previously appeared in the following publications:
An Open Creel, first published by Methuen in 1910An Angler For All Seasons chapters: 1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18
Trout Fishing Memories and Morals, first published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1920An Angler For All Seasons chapters: 6, 8, 16
An Anglers Hours, first published by MacMillan in 1905An Angler For All Seasons chapters: 7, 12, 19, 20, 23
Coarse Fishing, first published by A&C Black in 1912An Angler For All Seasons chapter 13
The Field magazine, January 1921, February 1921, July 1921, November 1919An Angler For All Seasons chapters: 2, 3, 11, 21, 22
Journal of the Flyfishers’ Club, summer 1916An Angler For All Seasons chapter 24
The publishers wish to express their particular thanks to The Field and The Flyfishers’ Club for their co-operation, and to Tom Fort, journalist for the Financial Times, for his help in putting together this anthology.
Introduction
BY TOM FORT
It was a little over a quarter of a century ago that my eyes were first opened to the possibility that there might be more to fishing than catching - or, more commonly in my own distressing case, failing to catch - fish. One of my elder brothers and I, browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Reading, came upon a case of books on angling. We were passionate fishermen, but of a severely non-spiritual kind and this was reflected in the few books we then possessed. I remember a volume called Coarse Fishing With The Experts and a series of little manuals on catching perch and roach and the like.
Among the books we bought that day was one bound in faded red cloth. Its spine was decorated with two crossed fishing rods, between which were a net and a fat basket with lid raised to display something resembling a chub or carp. It cost two and sixpence and was called An Open Creel. The author’s name, H. T. Sheringham, was as it happened, faintly familiar to us. For, in addition to our handful of practical treatises, we did have another book - BB’s Confessions of a Carpfisher, which includes an immortal account of a battle royal with a big carp at Cheshunt Reservoir written by this selfsame Sheringham.
I read An Open Creel straight through, with a swiftly swelling sense of wonder and delight. Even now, I can recall the condition of hilarity to which I was reduced by the chapter entitled ‘A Day of Tribulation’, in which Sheringham describes a succession of calamities which overtook him during a day’s wet fly fishing, presumably on the Exe near Dulverton.
I was, at that time, making my own first, cack-handed attempts to educate myself in the use of a fly rod. It was a great viiisolace to find the despair, which unfailingly overwhelmed me as I sought to deliver my flies in the teeth of gales, mirrored in this light-footed but deeply felt prose. Just as I had railed against a cruelly indifferent Providence, so Sheringham - having left his cast in a bush over deep water - sat down to contrast his misfortunes with those of Job. A little while later came the loss of the big fish on which his heart was set, ‘leaving me to my thoughts of Job and his exaggerated griefs.’
In his introduction to An Open Creel, Sheringham refers in characteristic fashion to its predecessor, An Angler’s Hours, which had been published five years earlier in 1905. ‘There was about that volume,’ he writes, ‘a certain smugness; in nearly all its chapters fish were slain and weighed and reckoned up and made the object of fat complacency.’ He declares his intention to offer a more balanced picture of the sport, to lift the veil on the angler’s sorrows in order to tell a little of those days which end with the creel lamentably empty. For myself, I had no creel. But if I had had one, its customary condition would, indeed, have been one of lamentable emptiness, for I was a most incompetent fisherman. At once, I felt that this man was talking to me.
I should complete the story of my discovery of H. T. Sheringham. Having devoured An Open Creel, my brothers and I (for a third also became a devotee) rushed back to the shop in Reading and snapped up Elements of Angling (first published in 1908) and Coarse Fishing (1912). These are both works of instruction and much of the content is, inevitably, dated. But each is beautifully written, awash with humour and good sense and well worth the effort of tracking down. They also illustrate a central - and for me most endearing - aspect of Sheringham’s angling philosophy: his passion for the so-called coarse fishes. I shall return to this subject later.
There were no more Sheringhams in the Reading book shop. But by now the fire of our enthusiasm was lit and we wasted no time in obtaining Trout Fishing: Memories and Morals from ixa dealer (alas, at a dealer’s price). An Angler’s Hours took a little more hunting down, but with that the Sheringham oeuvre was almost complete (I exclude his Fishing: Its Cause, Treatment and Cure, a slight and overtly humorous book which he published in the 1920s; and also a handful of novels, among them Syllabub Farm). This burst of buying laid the foundations of our collection of fishing books, and sowed the seeds of an acquisitive appetite still unsatisfied today.
I now have custody of most of the books, almost six hundred of them. I cherish them all, even the ones I have never got round to reading. And there are writers to whom I return again and again: J. W. Hills, Zane Grey, Roderick Haig-Brown, BB, G. D. Luard, Frank Barker, F. A. Mitchell-Hedges, Richard Walker, Chris Yates, Negley Farson, Stephen Johnson, Arthur Ransome, Harry Plunket Greene. All of them I regard as friends, and all of them I admire for the way they have brought the sport to life. Yet, for all the hundreds of fishing books I have read since those distant days of enlightenment, I have never had occasion to change the opinion I must have formed then: that Hugh Tempest Sheringham was the finest of them all.
The Sheringhams were a family of strong clerical leanings. Hugh Sheringham was brought up in Tewkesbury, where his father was Vicar. His grandfather had been Archdeacon of Gloucester. Sheringham himself rebelled against this affinity for the Church. His son John (to whom I am grateful for much biographical and personal detail) remembers him as a convinced atheist, although - as a consequence of his great love of singing - he remained a devoted member of the church choir in the Oxfordshire village of Eynsham, where he made his home for the last ten years of his life.
The flavour of his childhood and the dawning of the passion for rivers, are exquisitely captured in the opening chapter of An Open Creel, ‘Waters of Youth’. The affection for the chub - whether caught on worm or cheese or, best of all, fly - was born on the Severn and Avon and their tributaries and was never to leave xhim. While his grandfather, the stern Archdeacon, endeavoured to bend him to the discipline of Latin verse, the boy’s imagination ran on water meadows, the play of sunlight on moving water, the tantalising mysteries of the depths beneath the hanging branches of willows. But the young Sheringham was a gifted scholar and that strict classical education - apart from leaving him with a sometimes excessive affection for Latin tags - was to stand him in good stead when it came to developing his graceful, easy style of writing.
He won a scholarship to Westminster and took a classical tripos at Cambridge. This was followed by a year in Germany, where he mixed study with amusement and enjoyed, on an unnamed river, what was numerically the greatest catch of his life - seventy-two trout. ‘It was a great day, certainly,’ he recalled later. ‘But it did not seem like fishing. It was more like gathering in the harvest.’
The Sheringhams were undoubtedly of the gentry, but neither moneyed nor landed. After the carefree student days, circumstances dictated that Hugh Sheringham should earn a living. The meeting which was to seal his fate occurred beside that most lovely Berkshire chalkstream, the Lambourn. In his fishing diary - kindly lent to me by Justin Knowles, the founder of the Flyfisher’s Classic Library - Sheringham recorded the event tersely:
‘September 1903. Spent three weeks at Newbury, principally on the Lambourn. Caught many trout, but only about three brace of grayling the whole time. Met W.S. there, and so appointed to The Field.’
W. S. was William Senior, then editor of The Field and well known as the author of a number of fishing books published under the pseudonym Red Spinner. Sheringham was then just short of his 27th birthday and he was to remain Angling Editor of The Field until his death, 27 years later. As enthusiasts for fishing literature, I suppose we should be grateful for the fact that he made journalism his career. Had he gone into the Church, or the diplomatic service, or to the British Museum - which was apparently his ambition - he ximight well have joined the great throng of us whose immortal masterpieces remain firmly locked inside our heads.
As it was, by subjecting himself to the constant, nagging demands of journalism, he produced a mass of writing which made him among the most cherished and respected authorities on fishing of his day. What is more, in his role as an editor, he encouraged, cajoled, flattered and browbeat a host of friends, acquaintances and complete strangers into putting pen to paper. Harry Plunket Greene’s Where the Bright Waters Meet is merely the most celebrated of the books to which Sheringham acted as midwife.
Yet there was, I suspect, a sadness in this working life. John Sheringham believes that his father regarded himself as a partial failure; that he reproached himself for not having made better use of his talents. Though he must have enjoyed the writing of many of those inimitable articles and the experiences on which they were based, there must also have been much that was oppressive drudgery - in particular, in the immense annual labour of producing the guide, Where to Fish.
There were disappointments, too. One was being passed over for the editorship of The Field. Another - according to Sheringham’s brother-in-law, H. D. Turing - was the comparatively poor sales achieved by Trout Fishing: Memories And Morals. This was published in 1920 and was regarded by Sheringham as embodying much of his angling creed. But in the depressed post-war years, it did nothing like as well as the earlier books.
From this point onwards, Sheringham’s energy and appetite for writing declined. His essays in The Field became few and far between as the 1920s progressed, until they ceased almost completely. Nor - apart from Fishing: Its Cause, Treatment and Cure - were there to be any more fishing books. In addition, he was dogged by worries about money and, increasingly, by ill-health. His son recalls an atmosphere of chronic indigence prevailing at the family home in Eynsham. It was a condition not assisted by Sheringham’s notorious unworldliness, reflected in xiithe fact that, at a time of particular penury, no less than three men were being employed to tend the garden. There is a poignant entry in the diary for 1923, recording Sheringham’s resignation from the local club which had the fishing on the Windrush, on the grounds of expense.
During the war, Sheringham was head of the editorial department at the Ministry of Information and seems to have suffered some sort of breakdown as a result of overwork. Several of the tributes to him on his death refer to the change in him which his friends observed when he returned to The Field in 1918. He began to suffer attacks, apparently of epilepsy, which caused giddiness, severe headaches and loss of memory. There are several entries in the diary which refer to these attacks, more than one of which occurred when he was fishing the Houghton Club water on the Test. Although 1930 seemed to bring an improvement in his health, it was temporary and he died of cancer in December 1930 - ‘peacefully,’ wrote H. D. Turing, ‘at the first hint of dawn.’
As well as being an atheist, H. T. Sheringham was a socialist. It was a combination which, at that time, was a little more unusual among members of his class than it was later to become. One of the few distinct memories that his son John has of his father is of an opera staged in the garden at Eynsham, with proceeds going to the Labour Party (another is of being beaten by HTS for kicking a cat). It may sound far-fetched to argue that Sheringham applied socialism to fishing, but it seems to have been the case. His friend John Moore - with whom he collaborated on editing the The Book Of The Fly Rod - wrote: ‘It was chiefly the humbler angler that he loved and by whom he was loved in return. He always preferred that a river should be bought by a large angling club than by a single millionaire or a syndicate of plutocrats.’
Although Sheringham clearly relished his days on preserved stretches of the Itchen, Test or Kennet, he always fished them as a guest and was never to be counted a member of a syndicate of plutocrats. The kind of fishing club he liked was the xiiione he celebrated in ‘A Suburban Fishery’, in An Angler’s Hours, where a man might stalk a trout or two, then cast a fly for chub and finish his day watching his float circle a shaded eddy in the hope that the perch or roach might bite.
It was in his passion for coarse fishing that what one might term Sheringham’s democratic instincts are most apparent. He wrote in his introduction to Coarse Fishing: ‘Salmon-fishing is good; trout fishing is good; but to the complete angler neither is intrinsically better than the pursuit of roach, or tench, or perch, or pike.’ Put like that, it sounds so reasonable.
Yet, coming from a man of Sheringam’s social background, this creed was almost heretical. Men like Halford did not demean themselves by considering the ways of chub. Only the salmon in his Scottish torrent and the noble trout of the chalkstream, were considered worthy of a gentleman’s time and study. Sheringham’s partiality for floats and spinners, worms and cheese, an 18-foot rod and a Nottingham-style centrepin reel, made him an object of curiosity among his friends. Plunket Greene, for instance, portrays him as ‘diggling for sticklebacks,’ and ‘sitting in a punt watching a float for hours at a time on the chance of flicking a two-inch pinkeen over his shoulder.’
As a trout fisherman, he was clearly no mean performer and he was as thrilled as the next man by a great hatch of blue-winged olives on the Test, or the spectacle of mighty Kennet trout gorging themselves on the mayfly. But he seems to have been happier still battling his way up some inconsequential and overgrown brook or weed-choked carrier, employing every conceivable minor tactic to winkle out a brace or two of wild, wary trout.
He loved rivers like the lower Kennet, the Colne and the Evenlode, where democracy reigned and the fish which rose to his fly was as likely to be a chub or a dace as a trout. As for salmon, he caught his share, mainly from the Welsh Dee and the Coquet in Northumberland. But he maintained an air of lofty indifference to the celebrated, exclusive rivers of Scotland and appears to have xivbelieved that those who fished them and nowhere else, were not truly to be counted of the brotherhood.
He was, by all accounts, a gentle and most lovable man. His friends prized him for the humour of his conversation, his scholarship, his immense knowledge of angling’s traditions and literature; for his insistence on being supplied with afternoon tea; for his ability to conjure a brace from an improbable spot on an impossible day. Above all, he inspired through his writing respect and affection from friends and unknown subscribers alike. In his heyday, before the Great War, there was only one question to be asked on the day The Field came out; ‘Has HTS anything in this week?’
H. D. Turing deftly identified the nature of Sheringham’s originality as a writer on fishing. Before him there were, broadly speaking, two mainstream styles in angling writing. One - exemplified by Halford - was that of the teacher addressing his pupils, a colossus condescending to instruct mere mortals. The other - with a deplorable tendency towards the sentimental, contrived and verbose - sustained the fiction that the capture of a fish was of no consequence at all, compared with the ecstasy derived from a communion with nature as found on the river bank.
Sheringham’s voice came as a fresh breeze, dispersing the tired old conventions. He spoke of fishing as other fishermen found it, of rare triumphs and frequent reverses, of the joy of escape which is at the heart of the sport’s attraction. He subscribed whole heartedly to the axiom that it is better to catch fish than not to do so - but knew well enough that, for ordinary folk, success in fishing as in other matters could never easily be won. He defined the angler’s season thus: ‘Of the total number of his days, probably two-thirds will give him no results worth mentioning. Three-quarters of the rest will be of the type conveniently labelled “fair to middling”. And there may be two or three days of really fine sport, days about which he at once writes articles. An article or two may be written about days of the second class, but about those of the first there is a grim silence.’ xv
He broke that grim silence and also left an incomparable record of those days of the second class. He did not preach from some mountain top, compelling an envious awe for his fishcatching expertise; but spoke to his fellows as an equal. And he did so in a manner at once wise, humorous, unaffected, fresh and elegant.
The curious thing is that I feel I have known him for a long time - almost, that I have fished with him. He lived for several years in a house not more than a couple of miles from my own. From his diary I have learned that he fished the same Kennet millpool, which is now my favourite haunt when the mood is on me for a couple of hours, after chub or barbel. Ever since I first read the books, I have enjoyed his company - as Eric Parker described him ‘an angler gay and wise, an eager comrade, humorous scholar, truthful and loyal friend.’ My hope in presenting this anthology is that more of the brotherhood may make and enjoy, his acquaintance.
Tom Fort, Burghfield Common, April 1992.
CHAPTER ONE
Waters of Youth
The other day, while turning out some old papers by way of making the new year less crowded than its predecessor, I came upon a faded old photograph of a group of young people seated and standing in the constrained fashion of those who are being sacrificed to the amateur camera. One peculiarly villainous countenance purports to be my own, and I should not be too zealous to acknowledge the impeachment were it not for a certain far-away look in the eyes which has reminded me of something. I remember now that I was looking through the leafless trees at a glint of water, and wondering whether the three roach would live or die. In moments of crisis, such as are caused by the dentist’s chair or the uncovered lens, one has these flashes of disconnected thought.
The three roach, as a matter of fact, were in the water, a small pond between the garden and the stable-yard, and I had put them there that morning just before luncheon. They came from a little river about half a mile away, and were the trophies of my angle, brought home in a landing-net to convince certain scoffers (the photograph punishes them enough) who said that no man could catch fish in the little river during the winter, because when earth is bound in frost-chains fishes burrow into the mud, and are no more seen. In those days my mind was by no means clear upon this point, but disagreement seemed to be expected of me, and I disagreed. More than that, I borrowed a primitive sort of rod and line from the principal scoffer, dug myself some worms, and went down the hill to the river after breakfast. The banks were hard with frost, and the edges of the stream were lined with ice, but, not a little to my surprise, I had some bites, and in a short time caught the 2three roach. Then I returned, cold but satisfied, to find the fish were still alive when I got back to the house. So they were turned into the pond before a company of respectful onlookers. Maybe their descendants are there yet if the pond still exists.
The discovery of the old photograph and the memory of the incident of that day have set old strings in vibration, and thoughts of other ponds belonging to a further past come up unbidden. Among them are the ponds of Arden, the fair country in which I was privileged, with a small number of other boys, to imbibe the rudiments of education. We were a lucky set of youngsters in many ways. Too few in most years to make up an eleven at cricket or football, we were allowed a great deal of liberty for other country pursuits, and we used to cover miles every afternoon in search of birds’ eggs, butterflies, and other treasures, or in following the hounds, which came within reach several times every season. One thing only was not regarded with favour by the authorities, and that was fishing. I never quite understood why it was discouraged, but it was; only about once a term were we allowed to go out with the sanction of authority and angle in the little stream that ran through the village.
We always made a festival of this solemn occasion, and we nearly always caught something worth having, for we were easily satisfied. Minnows were not despised, gudgeon were greeted with rapture, and the occasional triumph of a roach, with gorgeous red eyes, was a thing beyond words. Once one of us caught a golden minnow, a very beautiful little fish such as I have never seen since, though I have heard of a specimen now and again. Most of our captures were kept alive and put into ‘the pond’, a funny little piece of water in the stable yard, flanked on two sides by the kitchen-garden wall, and on the third by two small willow trees. Round in shape, about twenty feet in diameter, and filled debris in the shape of old tins, sunken fragments of toy boats, bottles, and other remnants, it was by no means the place into which fish ought to have been put, for their speedy demise was practically certain. The 3odd thing was, however, that our fish thrived in the uncongenial puddle. They would even take a worm at times, and, in default of better occupation, we used to angle for them with withy twigs, cotton lines, and bent pins. The gudgeon adapted themselves to the pond best, but bull-heads also lived there pretty well, and also stone-loach, when we could get them home alive, which was rather difficult. One afternoon a great surprise came to us in the shape of a little carp, which must have been in the pond all the time, for none of us had put him there. He remains a mystery unsolved to this day.
There were other ponds in Arden - the stickleback pond which was within the school grounds, the newt pond in the copse where the bluebells grew, and others further afield which held genuine fish. To angle in these we had to be very subtle, and to escape the notice of the authorities in our exits and entrances. Even a telescopic Japanese rod does not look like a very convincing walking-stick, and an ordinary rod concealed partly by trousers and partly by coat must give its owner a curious gait. Perhaps the authorities winked at our ruses innocents, perhaps we were never discovered. At any rate, I remember no dire penalties incurred on that count, though for other offences we were rightly chastised now and then. One of the distant ponds held a species of merry little fish of a reddish-bronze colour, which we never could catch. They would come and suck at the Russian lily-leaves close by our very feet in the most impudent manner, but they would not take any kind of paste or grub or worm, at any rate with a hook in it. What they were I still do not know, but I think they may have been crucian carp.
Another pond, which was really a kind of backwater of the river, was a very thrilling place. Here we angled concealed amongst the bushes at its edge in great fear and trembling, for not only was the place forbidden by the general law of piscary, but the school authorities used often to walk this way; moreover, there was a fierce notice-board upon a neighbouring tree, and the landowner was an object of much awe to us, being an intimate friend of the 4authorities, and therefore, presumably, in league with them, as well as anxious to conserve his own property. These tremors gave an added zest to the occasional captures that used to reward our visits. The fish were for the most part roach, with one or two small chub. I never remember catching more than two at any one time. I grieve to say that Sunday afternoon was our favourite occasion for the foray. We presumed on the law of orthodox English nature which ordains that the forenoon of the day shall be spent in church, and the afternoon in quiet meditation on the sermon which has been preached. A least, that is my interpretation of Sunday proceedings now; in those innocent days we held that the authorities slept.
Some miles away from our school there was a lake which never ceased to rouse our curiosity and cupidity, and to the end of my life I shall remember the night when we first had ocular demonstration of its possibilities. There was a very aged person (he seemed so to us, being about eighteen) who came to read with the authorities, and to while away the time before some examination. Being so old, he was highly privileged, and to us he seemed a perfect Nimrod, for he had a gun and a real fly-rod, actually caught a trout in the little river, and even soared so high as to obtain permission to fish in the enchanted lake. And so one evening he returned with no less than eight roach which he had captured alone and unaided. They must have weighed about six ounces apiece, and spread out on rushes on a dish they made an imposing spectacle. Envy but mildly expresses my own feelings on that occasion. Not long afterwards another visit to the water had even more wonderful results, and the hero came back with two fish bigger than seemed possible. They were bream, he said, and they weighed about two and a half pounds apiece. He was good enough to reward our open-mouthed admiration with some instructions on the art of catching these leviathans. I can still remember his telling us that you had to have two rods, bait with lobworms on the bottom, and sit afar off, maintaining absolute silence until a bite came. I have a shrewd suspicion that he had learnt these facts himself for the first time that 5very day (from the keeper), but I may be wrong; perhaps jealousy still lingers. In those better days, though I envied, I thought no guile. The opportunity of fishing that lake never came to me at that time, but in after-years I visited it more than once. It is sad that the visits only led to a conviction that ‘we are not such as we were,’ and that it is unwise to seek interpretation of a happy dream.
One more pond is still vividly pictured before my eyes, and yet I only saw it twice. The authorities rode now and then to visit a clerical friend a good many miles away, and twice, on early summer afternoons, another boy and I went also on the ponies which were hired two or three times a week for our instruction in the art of riding. We thoroughly enjoyed these excursions, for the rector’s cakes were of very noble quality and profusion. I was in a mood of great spiritual exaltion, after partaking thereof, when I first saw the pond, so my first impressions may have been transcendental. But undoubtedly the pond was a very lovely place. It lay at some distance from the house, and one had to jump down a ha-ha from the lawn, then crossing a park-like meadow. The water was rectangular in shape, and probably not more than fifty yards long, though to me it seemed immense. But the most noticeable thing about it, even to a small boy thinking of fish, was the magnificent display of rhododendrons, whose great green leaves and glowing petals formed almost a wall round the banks. In the gaps grew long meadow grass, and the whole scene was vivid with life, for butterflies and lesser insects were everywhere. The water was of a greenish quality and looked deep, and I remember thinking that such a big pond, with such big flowers round it, must hold very big fish. But on that occasion I saw nothing, though the reverend lord of the soil, whom, despite a cynical smile from the authorities, I ventured to question on the subject, said that there were fish there, and that I might catch them next time if I liked. I was never able to try, alas! for my horsemanship did not warrant my carrying a rod as well as a crop, but on the second visit I saw a fish. It was unlike any fish that I see nowadays, being long and 6green, and moving like a ghost. I have been wondering ever since what it was.
Besides these ponds, there were two brooks, feeders of the small river. One contained loaches of noble size, but very difficult to catch, because the water was rather deep. To take these agile fish in Nature’s way - which was our way - one ought to be able to stand in the bed of the stream, and, stooping, to make a trap of one’s two hands, into which a fish would dart when judiciously stirred from under its stone. We had not read ‘Lorna Doone’ in those days, so the idea of a loach-spear never occurred to us.
For the bull-heads in the other brook we used not only to grope, but also to angle. Sometimes we would do it in the most barefaced manner. Raising a likely stone, we discovered our quarry lurking beneath. If the stone was then very gently replaced, the fish apparently took no alarm, and after an interval a little red worm on a small hook placed at the edge of his haunt would have the desired effect. But there was one deep pool in which we had to use a float, and from this I - no, I am not sure that it was I - we caught on a never-to-be-forgotten day a fish, a great fish, a miraculous fish, a fish with red spots. It was the first trout, and it weighed belike two ounces. We went home, ‘striking the stars with our august heads.’ One more trout we had out of the same brook lower down, where it was bigger, but I will not dwell on the incident. It was at the period when we collected butterflies and were never abroad without butterfly-nets.
Contemporary with the schooldays in Arden are memories of fishing in the summer holidays, all detached and fragmentary. They amount to little more than a series of mental pictures, with myself more or less heroic in the foreground - more, as when, at about the age of ten, I saw the huge perch cruising about under the camp-sheeting, seized by main force the rod of a protesting but smaller playmate, and, again by main force, hauled the fish to dry land and fell upon it. I believe it weighed one and a half pounds. The rod, a telescopic Japanese thing, was broken in the crisis, and 7I seem to remember that there ensued what are popularly known as ‘words’. I also remember the worm which brought about that victory, a peculiarly yellow bilious-looking object. Less heroic do I appear in the picture where, eager to be after the gudgeons in the backwater, I jump incautiously into the boat alongside the landing-stage, and fall out of it on the other side. The presence of grown-up spectators, who regarded me as a heaven-sent opportunity for mirth, made the experience a bitter one. Besides, I was sent home to change, and so wasted a whole glorious hour of life.
Other pictures of early days include a bridge over a canal, under which I used to sit, heart in mouth, gazing down into the clear water at very small perch in session about my bait; and a weir-pool on the Yorkshire Derwent, where I caught gudgeon and watched an impressive figure standing on a stone near the further shore fly-fishing for, I was told, grayling. I did not know what grayling were, but I saw the flash of silver when he used his landing net, and assumed them to be a specially desirable kind of roach. One holiday was spent at Berwick-on-Tweed, and there I made the acquaintance of the ‘poddler’. That sporting fellow - the young of the coalfish - became promptly the centre of existence for me. Waking or sleeping, I thought of nothing put poddlers, and was to be found at all hours of the day walking up and down the long stone pier, holding a long rod and trailing in the water the traditional tackle - three white flies, a pipe-lead, and a baby spinner - or sitting with my feet dangling over the edge, and offering pieces of herring for the consideration of any fish that cared for them.
Once I caught a large red mullet, which made me very proud. Once, too, I assisted, as spectator, in a great draught of salmon, seventy or eighty of them in the net all at once. I approved of the proceedings when the fishermen leaped into the shallow water and began to lay about them with their clubs; but otherwise I was not much interested in salmon. Poddlers were my fancy. They caused me to refuse to go to Edinburgh, Melrose, and other objects of family pilgrimage; they made me think and speak 8slightingly of the Whitadder, whither I was lured one day by false promises of trout; they filled me with a hatred for a certain person which I have hardly got over yet. He was about my own age, and he carried two immense ones on a string. And he refused for them three-halfpence, and a pocket-knife, and a hook! Poddlers, in fact, were the important part of Berwick-on-Tweed. They were Berwick-on-Tweed.
Some matters are there which it were well to touch on but lightly - my first catch of jack, for instance, made with a Devon minnow in April! A severe reproof by a stranger as I walked home displaying them in triumph gave me my first idea of what the close season meant. Other memories, however, are legitimate enough and very delightful. I fear I should not now find fair a certain small stream, branch of an important river, which of old gave me much thrilling sport, but in those days it was a river of Eden. Somewhere in the background of recollection is a consciousness that its bottom was principally composed of tin cans, bottles, and other contributions from a neighbouring small town; some faint echo of a whisper seems to remind me that the same town trusted largely to Providence and the flowing water for a sewage system; but in effect I do not remember these drawbacks. What I do remember is the ancient willow leaning out over the stream, and the eddy below it caused by the release of water narrowed by the willow roots. There was a blissful day when I caught four dozen roach out of that eddy and at the edge of the stream. The fish came on to feed about midday, and they would only take little red worms - rather an odd thing in summer. I was, of course, late for lunch and duly reprimanded, but I had such a basket of roach as no other boy took out of the stream those holidays. That the fish scarcely averaged three ounces apiece does not even now dim the glory of that achievement.
There were other triumphs connected with that mile of water. Many small chub were captured there with a red palmer. They always lay close under the opposite bank, and the fly had to fall within an inch of the clay or weeds. Sometimes a fish would 9rise immediately like a trout, but more often it would follow the fly for some distance, making quite a decent wave. Then the tightening line would announce the time to strike, and the half-pounder would be hooked and played. Very fair sport he would give, too, for I used to fish with a tiny greenheart rod, about eight feet six inches long, whose weight must have satisfied the most zealous light-rod man. It was the right rod for a boy, and it was also the right rod for getting the greatest amount of fun out of small chub.
Three large chub are prominent in early memories. The capture of one is described in early memories. One of them was a Wye fish, for whose better undoing I had to ascend a tree. Seated in the fork, which overhung a deep, still pool, I perceived my friend and others of lesser calibre basking on the surface. A lump of cheese paste was carefully lowered, allowed to hang in the water just before his nose, and taken. The rest is confusion, and I have no clear memory of what happened, except that it was all very exciting, and that the tree, and my rod, and the chub, and I, got much mixed up. But the fish came out at last, and weighed - I know not what. I used to call him three pounds. The other monster came later than either of the two mentioned, from the Teme, and I remember it chiefly as being the reward of patience. I fished for it persistently for two days, and at last got it on an alder. It weighed three and a half pounds on the scales, and was a great triumph.
Chub played, on the whole, the most important part in my early fishing, and they were my earliest instructors in fly-fishing. The Thames was the scene of the first exploits, two joints of a relative’s salmon rod the first fly-rod, and a one-ounce chub the first fish caught with fly. I visited the same reach again not long ago, and the glory of it is departed. Even the one-ounce chub is no longer to be caught - by me, at any rate - and the whole scene is woefully altered. It does not do to ‘revisit Yarrow’. Still, one has one’s memories, and I shall always think with awe of the three great perch below the footbridge that came up out of the depths after my worm, looked at me, and went down again. On the 10strength of those perch I laid out three-halfpence in Abingdon on the purchase of a ‘hook to gimp’ - silver gimp, I remember, and very pleasing to the eye. The investment was not remunerative. That same week, however, I received a gift which was. By the backwater I came upon a grown-up angler who had a roach nearly as big as himself. He told me that it was two and a half pounds, and that he had caught it with red lead. He gave me of this miraculous bait, and that same evening I caught a roach of three quarters of a pound, myself on a piece of it, thereby breaking my record utterly. I have never tried the bait since, but no doubt it makes a good colouring matter for paste.
It must have been about three years later when I made my first decent bag of perch, an occasion never to be forgotten. It was on Shakespeare’s Avon, a mile or two above Stratford. The August day was what an August day should be, and a blazing sun had driven me into the shade of some willows which lined the stream. The basket was empty, which was not surprising, the water being clear as glass and the heat intense; even the little fish of seven or eight inches, which at that time satisfied my modest aspirations, had declined to nibble at the proffered worm.
It was, perhaps, the tempting coolness of the deep water under the trees which made me peer round one of them and look down into the stream; it was certainly a lucky accident which made me aware of vague forms moving in and out, to and fro, below the tangle of roots and red fibres. I gazed fascinated for a time, and at last, as eyes grew accustomed to the play of light through the branches above, made out the identity of the forms; they were perch, and such a shoal of them as I had never seen before. This ascertained, of course, the question arose how they were to be caught. The branches and twigs came down so low, and the trees were so close together, that plying the rod was impossible. After much deliberation I cut a withy shoot about four feet long, and tied the gut cast to it after taking off the float. Then I had an apparatus which was manageable, and with which I could get the thrilling 11joy of seeing the perch actually take the worm as it sank down among them, or, more often, as it was being drawn up. I do not now remember how many I caught or what they weighed, but my small creel was quite full by the time I had finished, and I think some of the captives must have been over a pound. I learnt more about perch and their ways on that single afternoon than I should have from years of orthodox float fishing. Even now the lesson that perch like a bait which moves slowly up and down still serves me in good stead sometimes. But I fear I shall never again know quite so fine a rapture as came to me at its first learning.
At about the same period I first made acquaintance with the old Priory Pond, a marvellous piece of water in an otherwise fishless part of Gloucestershire; the most desirable spot on earth, it seemed to me, when I had discovered its secrets. It was rectangular in shape, about half an acre in size, and the monks made it; so, at least, local history averred. A kind of ancient culvert connected the pond with a short creek which joined the brook, and twice every day the water ebbed and flowed under the little bridge which spanned the neck between pool and creek. Why there should be an inland tide of this sort was always something of a mystery in those days. Subsequent meditation has suggested that when the mill situate in the ancient Priory 12
