Moonlighting E-Book

Michael Brown

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 554

Beschreibung

In spring 1973, Michael Brown, a young freelance travel writer, took a phone call from a friend: 'Why don't you come down to Somerset and see these things called elvers - they migrate up river at night on the high tides and the local's fish for them. It's called elvering.' And so began a lifetime's career, full of ups and downs, as a self- employed eel fisherman: from the enchantment of catching them by moonlight, to driving them in battered vans across Europe, to smoking mature eels, to selling them - Michael and his long-suffering wife Utta have never looked back. A heart-warming tale of running a small business on a shoe-string; and a passion for eels which never faded.

Leseprobe

To Utta for sharing it all and for Emily and Oliver for coming along too

Contents

Title PageDedicationChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelvePostscriptAlso Published by Merlin Unwin BooksCopyright

Chapter One

It all began with a phone call in the spring of 1973. It was David Forrest, a good friend from university days whom I hadn’t seen in a while.

‘Why don’t you come down to Somerset and see these things called elvers – they migrate up river at night on the high tides and the locals fish for them – it’s called elvering. If you’ve got a bit of time, come and see.’

Time was something I had a great deal of. After university where I’d read languages, I had joined the marketing department of ICI in London. They were a good company to work for, though I never quite understood what marketing was all about, but this was the early Seventies: restless, exciting times, Carnaby Street, the Hippy Trail and mini everything. I was itching to get out. Below, through the windows of the Knightsbridge office, swirled exotic and colourful sights while inside everywhere I looked were men I could see myself becoming if I stayed: grey-suited family men whose daily lives travelling the same train, going home to wives and families, seemed honourable but monochrome; lives of quiet desperation. I wanted more, I wanted to be free and to travel, I wanted to be outside in the open air. Apart from that, I hadn’t the faintest clue what I wanted.

I left, pompously telling friends that I wanted to have a go at being a writer. This was as much to justify to my poor parents who had invested considerably in my education the lunacy of leaving a solid career with great prospects, as they saw it, as having anything to do with a talent to write. But I had learnt the importance of a label: it made things plausible, allowable. To say, ‘Mum and Dad, I’m off travelling’ didn’t go down as well as, ‘I want to travel and write.’ It gave it a greater sense of purpose and acceptability; it was easier for them to sell on to their friends.

I travelled overland roughly in the direction of Australia and very soon discovered that I was not a natural writer, I had very little to say, and I was excruciatingly slow: most of what I wrote I seemed to cross out. Filled with doubts and unsure of myself, thoughts and ideas seemed to dry up and wither on the page. It was not an auspicious start. However more by luck than anything else I managed to land a few articles with the travel section of the Sunday Telegraph whose editor was spending much time building a new life in another country and needed a bank of material from contributors he could feed weekly into his column. I was thus able to murmur impressively,

‘Well, I’m a freelance writer actually. I’m working on a travel piece.’

It was an impecunious living with its highs and lows but, unencumbered, it gave me a certain freedom to look for something I really wanted to do.

Following David’s phone call, I met him a few days later at Taunton station. He was driving a rattly old grocery van still with the shelves in the back.

‘This is what we use to take the elvers up to London airport,’ he explained as we ground up a hill on our way to the farm at Curry Rivel, ‘and down there is the moor, or the Levels, where we’ll be fishing tonight. There’s a tide on. I’ll drop you on the river, you can fish and I’ll pick you up later. We’re sending out a shipment tomorrow; I’ve got to get the boxes ready.’

There was something very invigorating about David’s whirlwind pace. It certainly beat staring at a blank piece of paper in my room in London.

David had studied agriculture and marketing at Wye College before coming on to Reading university where we had shared a house in my last year and where he was remembered for his culinary achievements: his tossed pancakes, which we had difficulty removing from the kitchen ceiling. A great networker, before the word was fashionable, with dozens of contacts everywhere in every field; he had enormous energy and was one of those people who fizzed with ideas, trailing in his wake a litter of abandoned plans. Already by this time he’d set up and sold several small businesses, and worked for a charity in one of the poorest areas of northern India. He liked to have several things on the go at once; very often you’d enquire about his latest project, only to find that he was onto a new one.

It was while he was working for a market research company in London that he had been asked by a client to find a source for things called elvers - baby eels, also known as glass eels - for the lucrative Japanese market where they were farmed and grown on to adult eels. David had happened to mention this to a friend who was doing his practical year as an agricultural student on a farm near Curry Rivel in Somerset.

‘You’re in luck,’ said the friend, ‘I think I can help; we have elvers down here; they fish for them on the local river, the Parrett, and the farmer I’m working for has special holding tanks for them; he buys them in from the fishermen. They are sold to dealers in Gloucester.’

Never one to waste time, it wasn’t long before David had left his market research and was shipping elvers live by air to Japan.

Later that night, I stood on the raised banks of the river Parrett and watched the rising water. Even there, miles inland, the tide was still pushing, the river swelling. The elver net I had been given was a hand-held dip net, deep bellied, about three feet long and half as wide and deep, like a pelican beak, covered in fine mesh. I’d been told to tuck it tight into the bank facing the direction of the sea from whence the elvers were supposed to come. Every now and then, feeling every bit the professional fishermen, I checked it, lifting it up for inspection by its long handle with a sweeping motion to hold the catch in the back of the net, as I’d been shown, but there was nothing. Not a sign of an elver.

Behind me the lights of a small pub, the Black Smock, cast soft light on the little road that wound beside the river. From a village across the moor came the sound of church bells. The river had stopped pushing now, the tide beginning to turn and run back. Gradually its cargo of flotsam, reeds and sticks slid past in reverse. Lifting the net again I peered into the bottom of it and there against the fine sieve mesh I saw my first elvers: a squiggle of tiny translucent creatures, about three inches long and as thin as a bootlace, unmistakeably eel shaped. They made a tiny rustling sound in the bottom of the net. Tipping them into my bucket I laid the net back in the river, tight into the bank, mouth facing downstream and waited a few minutes before lifting it again. This time there were more, a small ball of elvers, perhaps half a kilo and now the sound they made was louder, like fat frying. I looked at them as they swirled and writhed round the bottom of the bucket, forming a small puff of white foam in the centre – the slime secreted by their activity and locally known as vump.

From David, I had learned a little about their life cycle which began with a migration and ended with one, an outward and a return journey forming a circle – like the moon – but one that could take anything up to twenty years or more to complete. Those tiny fish in my net seemed so young and delicate, yet they were already hardened travellers. They had drifted nearly three thousand miles from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea, the other side of the Atlantic, where they had started life as larvae – leptocephalus – shaped like sycamore seeds, little sails that made the most of wind and tide and the Gulf Stream current to carry them across the ocean in countless millions.

After three years they reached the continental shelf where they metamorphosed into the recognisable shape of the elver, or glass eel. Only seven cms long, and weighing no more than a third of a gram, perfectly formed, beautiful as spun glass, they were driven by their migratory instinct to seek freshwater. They entered every European river, stream and freshwater outlet from southern Portugal to northern Europe, straining to reach upstream, inland where they could live and grow to adulthood. Years later when they reached maturity the adult eel would head back down river and back out to sea, re-crossing the Atlantic in months not years, to find again the dark Sargasso weed where they would spawn and die.

And they were now out of water, out of their natural environment, yet still swirling round the bottom of my bucket as if desperate still to continue their migration up-river. They had an urgency, a vigour. They were extraordinary creatures. As I peered at them, intrigued, in wonder, I had not the faintest idea then that they and their species would become so much part of my working life for the next thirty years.

*****

David and I were staying with the local farmer, Anthony Lang, his partner in the Japanese venture. Anthony provided the holding tanks from which to ship the live elvers that came up-river on each set of spring high tides. David would travel down from London for the week of the elver tide and stay at the farm. He had certainly landed on his feet.

Home Farm was a lovely old Somerset farmhouse, long, low, built of the local blue lias stone, with a walled garden and an orchard at the back. Jane Lang, Anthony’s wife, was an attractive lady in her early forties, mother of three, and a very good cook. The heart of the house was a large warm kitchen with a big table and an Aga, always full of noise, dogs, children, phones ringing, people calling in, and passers-by; a sort of unofficial meeting place with Jane at the centre of it. Bow windows with seats looked out over her immaculate walled garden and flowering borders. She had a keen eye for colour – the garden, she said, was her peace and sanity. Papers came with breakfast, the FT for Anthony, which David would borrow and read, stretched out like a lord, in the window seat. I was never quite sure how he had managed to reserve this extraordinary accommodation each time he came to fish the tides but I wasn’t complaining.

Anthony Lang, the farmer, was in his mid-forties with rugged good looks and breezy confidence, a natural leader, full of enthusiasm and a born salesman. He had grown up in the area and was steeped in the life of the land he farmed. He knew everyone in the vicinity, knew the moors like the back of his hand, had fished for elvers as a boy for fun and for a feed. ‘Wonderful with duck egg, the elvers just dipped in a bit of flour’.

Though he had inherited the farm from his uncle, it had come saddled with death duties. He could have sold land to settle them but he wanted to keep the farm intact so was steadily paying them off. With sheep and cattle and arable, he farmed well, had a good eye for stock and had built up a prize breeding flock of Dorset Down sheep. But he also had the entrepreneur’s eye for a business opportunity, ready to try any profitable sideline that might boost the farming income. Which was how he had come to elvers.

Some years before, in the late Sixties, he’d happened to read with interest an article in the business pages about a market for elvers and their commercial value. At that time there was no commercial fishing for them in Somerset – locals only caught them for a feed. Coincidentally, at around the same time, on his rounds of the farm, he’d seen a man studying the river and the old mill at the edge of his property and had fallen into conversation with him. The man’s name was Mike Hancock. Hancock was eyeing the river for eels – big eels –for which he had a ready market.

‘Well,’ had said Anthony, ‘I don’t know much about eels, but I do know about elvers. You’d better come up to the office for a chat.’ Hancock was also looking for somewhere to set up a holding site to store the eels he would buy and sell. He was a convincing character, very persuasive, also with an eye for an opportunity. It was agreed they would be partners in an eel venture: Anthony, as landlord and backer, would put in a borehole and tanks to hold live fish, while Hancock would run the operation. And so it was that over the following years, Hancock had established a huge network of elver fishermen around the local river Parrett, buying in elvers each spring by the tonne, selling them to the dealers in Gloucester, while in the summer and autumn he bought and sold adult eels from all over the south of England.

It had worked well for a number of years. Eventually they’d fallen out. Hancock was ambitious, felt he was doing all the work for none of the profit. Wanting to go it alone, he had found and built a perfect site near the town of Chard, some ten miles away, but – as Anthony saw it - in Anthony’s time and with Anthony’s materials. The split between the two had been sulphurous and left a mark of deep distrust. But the fact was Hancock was still lord of the river, with the allegiance of most of the elver fishermen whom he controlled with an iron fist. It was a virtual monopoly and what newcomers like David managed to buy off the river with a small team of catchers was only ever going to be the crumbs from under his table.

At breakfast each morning at Home Farm, after a night’s fishing, the talk was of the night before, of how the fishing had gone, and Anthony would want to know how we had done compared to Hancock and his men. There’d always be much growling. ‘He wasn’t straight. I could have put the blighter inside if I’d wanted to.’

In a way this was to be our legacy, this rivalry, but as I was to discover, it was not something that was in any way unique in the world of elvers: from Spain and France, to the Severn at Gloucester, rivalries and bad blood thrived in the hothouse elver world. There was skulduggery and there was also eel-duggery. And eel-duggery was just as murky.

Much of the equipment used in Hancock’s day had vanished or quietly mouldered away. David was therefore desperately short of kit: nets for catching the elvers, trays for storing them live on the riverbank before they reached the safety of the tanks. To recruit fishermen in those days, like soldiers, you needed to give them the means to catch. Each day, after a gargantuan breakfast, we moved to a beautiful timbered barn beside the house where we’d frantically make and repair nets for the night’s tide. In those days fabrication began with an ash pole handle about six feet long onto which was fixed, using willow canes, the actual dip net part, shaped like a cupped hand, deep and bowed. Onto this was glued and tacked the fine sieve mesh that allowed the water through but held the elvers back. In the old days the locals had used net curtain or mesh stocking, even granny’s knickers, anything as long as they caught elvers. I loved the net making. It was like being paid to make model boats or planes. After sitting so long at a table in London, wrestling with some travel piece, it felt so satisfying to be doing something practical, to be making something, even if it was only out of ash pole, withy and netting.

I wasn’t the only one to enjoy the net making sessions. Once when we were desperately trying to finish the nets in time for the evening tide, Jane Lang came out with sandwiches of fresh brown bread and beef for lunch. Beef off the farm with a sweet marbling of fat and a dab of horseradish in fresh, brown bread. Just finish the netting, I thought, and then I’d have a break, so I put the plate on a big splitting log behind me. The job finished, I turned in anticipation. The plate was there on the log but it was bare. Puzzled, I looked round, thinking someone else had taken them but the barn was empty. Except for Major. He was the Lang’s spaniel, a large, handsome fellow who liked company and would sit amongst the clutter of wood and netting on the floor of the barn. He was sitting to attention, looking away, just a little too nonchalantly I thought. When interrogated, he wagged his tail, denied it instantly but I could tell by the hopeful look in his eye that the beef had been very delicious and he was wondering if there were any more.

At the end of each tide or as soon as there were sufficient elvers for a shipment, the fish were packed in polystyrene boxes, driven to Heathrow and put on a plane to Japan. Each box held one kilo of elvers – some 3,000 baby eels – with a little ice and water and a vented lid for air. David had spent hours improving the design of the original boxes that came from France which were too shallow and prone to tip over. The new box was more robust, deeper and locked into the ones above and below to give greater stability.

I had nothing to do with this part of the operation – I was on net-making duties - but I could feel the tension, saw all the planning and preparation that went into a pack. It was a highly risky business. From the tanks in Somerset to the eel farm in Japan was a journey of 24 hours, sometimes more, and it put the elvers at the very limit of their endurance. Any delay, any hitch, spelled disaster. Kept moist and cool, the elvers could live out of water for limited time, taking oxygen out of the air, respiring through their skin. It was this remarkable ability that made their export to foreign lands possible at all. Even before the First World War, the Germans had collected elvers from Gloucester for restocking their rivers and lakes, transporting them on wooden trays laid with damp moss and stacked inside great wooden chests.

The day after each shipment David would pace up and down, taut as a bowstring, waiting for a phone call to learn whether they’d arrived safely. That anxious wait for news of success or failure was something I was to get to know well in the years to come.

That Spring I helped for three tides and then it was May and the season was over. But something had happened. I had enjoyed hugely the teamwork, the direct involvement, the buzz and excitement of the business. And though utterly different to my native Dartmoor in Devon, I had fallen in love with the Somerset Levels, the quiet intimacy of the moors, the willows, the water and the wide open skies. I told David that, if needed, I’d like to help again the following year.

*****

In the Spring of ’74, I arrived in Somerset to find them all reeling from the news that the Japanese market had closed overnight. A virus had been found in European stocks shipped from France and the doors had come down. No further exports. The market was gone. David was bitterly disappointed and embarrassed, the Langs were not happy, the venture was falling apart. Anthony drew on old contacts and managed to sell the fish that had already been purchased to a dealer in Gloucester. With the demise of Japan, David’s business associates melted away; they were busy with other things. But I had time: anything to get away from wrestling with that blank piece of paper. We returned to London and got on the phone. Speaking to government agencies, river authorities, any possible leads for a market for elvers, the same name kept coming up, that of Alex Behrendt of Two Lakes, Romsey.

Alex was German, his father had been a Fischmeister and he was born and brought up on fish farms in East Germany. During the war, he’d fought in the German army under Kesselring retreating up through Italy, before being taken prisoner and placed in a POW camp in the south of England. On his release, he’d met and married an English woman and had started a trout fishery, near Romsey in Hampshire, the first of its kind in the country. He’d gone on to develop it into a highly successful business. I got his number and phoned him up.

The voice was crisp, direct, heavily accented,

‘Ja, vot you vant?’ Alex was always forthright. But as soon as I got into conversation with him, I sensed this was the man, this was our breakthrough. He was so well informed. I described our catching efforts in Somerset and the ban on elvers to Japan.

‘Ja, I heard about that. Now look, I read German trade press, all fishing journals. And each week at this time of year, there is adverts for glassaale, that means elvers. Wiz a phone number beside. I give you some and you can ring them up.’

I thanked him profusely.

‘And Michael, I can call you Michael, right, you tell me how you get on.’

Over the next days I ran up huge bills phoning the numbers Alex had given me. Most were not interested, had already bought in their seasonal requirement and didn’t want more but this was already exciting, it showed me that there was another market beside the Far East and we could contact them in the future. And then I struck lucky. A very strong south German accent with a twang that I could only just understand said yes, he would take elvers, up to 200kgs on the next tide. His name was Alois Haas with a fish farm called Fischzuchtkoenigsee, right up against the Austrian border.

‘Ah ja, I know zis man,’ said Alex, delighted, when I told him of our progress, ‘he was also in the army with me in Italy.’

Returning to Somerset and the farm for the next elver tide, David and I managed, through buying in and from what we caught ourselves, to collect the elvers we needed over the course of the week. We then packed them in the poly boxes and put them on the plane at Heathrow. And waited for a phone call from Haas to inform us of their safe arrival. It was not to be. There had been a disaster. What elvers were left, said Haas, were good, but most of the boxes had been damaged and the fish had escaped. He had managed to salvage some two thirds of the load we’d sent him, for which he would pay us, but the rest must have been scattered somewhere between London and Munich.

David now revealed another side to his character, turning overnight into a kind of forensic loss adjustor and sleuth. Through chatting to staff at the cargo bay where we’d loaded at Heathrow and listening to conversations, he soon pieced together the real story: a fork lift operator had carelessly driven the stacks of boxes at such speed that they’d tipped over. They were all talking about it. The shipment was insured and eventually, after many months, compensation was paid.

This episode marked the end of another season, which had more than dented David’s enthusiasm and highlighted for him the unreliability of the business of elvering. Furthermore the timing and commitments of the elver season were beginning to clash with projects he had become involved in. Through international funding he had managed to secure a grant to carry out a study on eel populations worldwide, looking at their distribution, exploitation and cultivation. This was taking up more and more of his time. Moreover he had been commissioned by Fishing News publication to write a book on the subject. It was all happening for him. I could sense his interest in the Somerset venture beginning to wane.

One evening when we’d been fishing to make up the elvers for the Haas order, we talked over the possibility of my taking over from him – if the Langs were agreeable. He would then be free to get on with his new life. Later, alone with my net on the river, I went over our conversation and felt hugely excited as I realised in a rush of clarity that it would be the perfect solution to my quest. Elvering seemed to provide all the ingredients, the things I was looking for: to live and make a living in the country, to run a small business which was seasonal and which would give me time to travel and perhaps to write. Little did I know that the only thing I’d ever write would be cheques.

Meanwhile, as we set off over the summer in separate directions, we decided to remain working together in a loose partnership until plans were clearer. It was agreed that I would look for other elver rivers and attempt to secure a market for the following season.

Two things had recently happened which were indirectly linked but which were to have a big impact on future events. Listening to the radio one day, I had heard a programme about the way writers observed nature. They talked of Gilbert White, and of Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, but the piece that really caught my attention was when they turned to Gavin Maxwell and a passage of writing in the Ring of BrightWater where he describes the seasonal arrival of the elvers on the west coast of Scotland. I listened in astonishment. I had no idea elvers were found in any quantities other than in the West Country and Gloucester. Potentially here was another source of supply.

Around this time, too, I had read a book by John Ridgway, Journey to Ardmore. Ridgway was still very much a household name, having rowed with Chay Blyth across the Atlantic, an extraordinary feat of endurance. His book fascinated me with its autobiographical details, the great adventures and yet also the determined step-by-step making of a business, setting up his School of Adventure in the remote north of Scotland, just beneath Cape Wrath. As I was free-lancing at the Sunday Telegraph, I suggested to the travel editor that I might write about the place. Privately I thought while I was up there I could usefully look at elver rivers. I contacted Ridgway and it was arranged that I would attend the Businessmen’s courses for two weeks that June.

I took the overnight sleeper to Inverness, then the train to Lairg in Sutherland where an instructor met the party that now emerged from various parts of the two remaining carriages, like weevils from a biscuit. A single track road led north for miles beside the thin ribbon of loch Shin then through wild mountain scenery, past the mountains of Ben Stack, Arkle and Foinaven. They were a mixed, interesting bunch of individuals, mostly middle aged, from all walks of life, all a little over-hearty, nervous of what lay ahead. Beyond the Laxford river, we turned down to a sea loch and crossed by boat to the Ardmore peninsula to the Adventure School, tea and reception.

Foinavon ridge from Badna Bay

Ridgway was a big man with craggy features, very blue eyes and a broken nose. He had a big presence; meeting him face to face was a bit like coming up against a cliff. As we drank tea in the main hut overlooking the loch, he briefed us on the week ahead, starting with the six o’clock early morning run. The man beside me, a director of a large shipping line, turned grey, muttering ‘Oh, God, I can’t possibly do that.’ Suddenly, there was a noise from the kitchen next door where Marie-Christine, John’s wife was clearing away.

‘John, John, look, down there, look at the loch.’ We all piled over to the window.

Below us a titanic underwater battle was in progress: a cormorant had got hold of an enormous eel, which it was trying to swallow. Looking down through the gin-clear water of the loch, we could clearly see as the eel twisted, thrashing, broke free pursued by the bird which swam with its wings underwater, its beak snapping like giant shearing scissors. They would resurface locked in battle until eventually the cormorant managed to toss the eel back, swallowing it head first. There was a great baggy lump in the long black throat, a beating of wings and treading of water with mammoth swallowing; the eel was all gone, just the tip of the tail hung from the beak. Then it must have done something particularly painful for there was a convulsion and it shot from the bird’s throat like a spear and the whole chase began again. It was an extraordinary battle, raw drama. At last the cormorant took the eel again with a final gulp and then very slowly, with deliberate, painful effort, like the closing of an overstuffed suitcase, the beak cranked shut. For the rest of the day it sat on a rock offshore, wings outstretched as it digested its monstrous meal.

At the end of a week of sailing, climbing, canoeing and hill walking and before the arrival of another course, I took a day off to explore and was walking back in the afternoon over the Laxford bridge, when I saw gulls on the river below. They were perched on rocks and pecking at the water, eating something I couldn’t see. Could it be the elvers that Gavin Maxwell had described? I wondered. Through the trees beside the river I glimpsed the outline of a big house and following the drive down to it, heard voices from the lawn at the front. Two women were sitting having tea. One of them I recognised as the Ridgway’s secretary; it was her day off. Her hostess jumped up almost as if she’d been expecting me, and offered me a cup. I had the feeling that conversation had worn a little thin and she welcomed the interruption. She introduced herself as Sandee Mackintosh.

‘Yes, we do get elvers,’ she replied to my question, ‘but my husband is the one who knows all about it, he’s the factor for the estate. You’ll have to wait till he gets home from work. Have another piece of cake.’

I ended up staying for supper, a memorable meal that lasted for hours. Sinclair Mackintosh had already been factor to Anne, Duchess of Westminster and her estates in this corner of Sutherland for several years. He and his wife Sandee had married the year before and were installed in the beautiful soft timbered house that belonged to the estate, set on the wooded point that looked down the Laxford to the estuary. The evening sun reflected off the river, filling the house with light. It was an idyllic spot.

Sinclair was helpful and interested. Yes, they did get elvers, and that was what the gulls had been eating. And he felt the estate would certainly entertain the possibility of limited elver fishing if it brought in revenue and just so long as it didn’t in any way affect the salmon run. Permission would have to be sought from the Duchess, of course. She was not in the north at the moment; he would speak to her when he saw her and then it would be necessary for me to come up and meet her in person, probably in the autumn. Before the meal he took me down to the Laxford, to where it rushed over the rocks below the bridge, the water, soft, peaty and amber-coloured, falling several feet and forming the first natural barrier to migratory fish. This, we agreed, would be the best spot to fish the elvers.

It was after midnight when I left the Mackintoshes but there, in the far north in the middle of summer, it was still light enough to read a book, which made it easy to walk the five miles or so back to Ardmore. It was a beautiful night, not a single vehicle nor artificial light, just a silvery world of mountain, river and loch with a big moon in the sky; no sound as I took to the track that led to Ardmore; just the thump of my boots and the peep of an oystercatcher on the loch below.

On return, I found that my tent was being investigated by a small, fat highland pony, the much-loved pet of John’s wife, Marie Christine; he was the enfant terrible of the school, spoiled, stubborn and frequently belligerent. He had evidently decided that the tent was an enemy and anyway stood on the patch of grass he was wishing to nibble. I arrived just as he was extracting the tent pegs with his teeth and chucking them over his shoulder like a man pulling nails from a plank. Even when I shooed him away and replaced the pegs to the sagging tent, he later returned in the night to do battle and a strange scene ensued in which a naked man chased a small pony across a field brandishing a large metal peg and mouthing curses. It was a short night.

*****

A few weeks later I received a writing assignment in Germany. With my flight paid, it was an ideal opportunity once I had done the report to take to the road and look for new markets for elvers. David had given me some money from our communal kitty so I hired a car in northern Bavaria and drove to a succession of fish farms and fisheries I had contacted earlier in the year after Japan had closed its doors. They were mostly located in wonderful out-of-the-way places, far from the autobahn and I drove, enraptured, on little roads with no traffic, over hills, through forests and quiet villages of farms and wooden houses and onion dome church spires. I headed north and to the east of the industrial Ruhr, to the Edersee, one of the three dams breached in the Dam Buster bombing raid of 1943. Herr Seidlitz owned the fishing rights to the lake and stocked it annually with elvers, which matured into the eels that attracted the great numbers of fishermen who descended on it each year.

Eel fishing in Germany was the high point for a fisherman; landing an eel was like catching salmon or sea trout in Britain. Back home, attitudes couldn’t have been more different: anglers hated eels, they were a nuisance, they couldn’t get the hook out, they got caught up in the line, often it meant cutting the tackle and making a fresh start. In Germany the eel was prized, revered almost; you would keep the eel you had caught, perhaps smoke it later in your backyard, share it with friends. And tell them about the even bigger one that got away.

As I visited one contact after another and parted from each with good intentions of staying in touch for the following season, it was evident that they all bought their elvers from the same source - the Deutsche Fischerei Verband, a government-backed agency charged with the restocking of inland lakes and rivers in Germany. And it seemed to be run by one man whom they all referred to with varying degrees of respect: a Herr Rosengarten, who was based in Hamburg. The more I travelled, the more I felt I would have wasted my time if I hadn’t met him; he was undoubtedly the Mr Big of the German elver market. I looked at the map. Germany was huge: I was roughly in the middle and Hamburg miles away in the north. And I was fast running out of time. I parked the car and jumped on a train.

Rosengarten and I met at Hamburg station. He always remembered the plastic bag I was carrying – my unofficial briefcase – while I remember that he was wearing a suit and, curiously, as if he couldn’t find the shoes to go with it - sandals. He was squarely-built with a booming personality and large powerful handshake. My German learned at school but picked up mainly while hitching in the country as a student was conversationally good but rapidly overwhelmed by anything deeper, by the interminable sentences ending with cascades of complex verbs that always totally threw me. Rosengarten didn’t do verbs. Through years of dealing with French and Spanish lorry drivers and elver suppliers, he had developed a kind of simplified German that was easy to understand, speaking in phrases like bullet points that could be easily absorbed - that was, until he got carried away.

He’d been born and brought up in East Germany; his father, like Alex Behrendt’s, a Fischmeister running a large carp farm in the south east of the country. For all his bluff and bluster of manner, Rosengarten had the East German’s old fashioned, traditional values in his business dealings: he was tough in negotiation, firm but always fair, ‘immer korekt’ as he would have put it. And for over a quarter of a century of doing business with him, he never called me by my Christian name, using instead always Sie – the formal You – and always addressing me ‘Herr Brown’, until finally the year he retired, we met and he got out a bottle of champagne to celebrate the fact we could now call each other by our first names, and use the familiar Du form of address. ‘Ja, Herr Brown,’ he paused as if readying himself for the leap, ‘Michael, wir können uns jetzt duzen.’

The meeting at the railway station was a turning point. Years later, he would say that even though I had a plastic bag as a briefcase, the fact of going out to meet him in Hamburg showed him I was serious. It was agreed: he would buy from us. He had his main French suppliers but he would be interested in taking air freight deliveries from the UK, though he made it clear that I would have to accompany the first shipment so that we could both agree on the quality and any losses. It was arranged that I should contact him as soon as the season started the following spring.

In between these travels and work in London, I went home to Devon and caught up with my parents, filling them in on the chain of events. All along they were hugely supportive, excited as I was at developments and eager to know how things were going, although I sensed my father – who had spent all his working life in the teak forests of Burma - viewed the elvering with some suspicion, ‘a get rich quick scheme’ that would not last. They lived on the northern edge of Dartmoor looking across to the sweep of the moor. My father had retired at the age of fifty from the tropical heat of the jungles and with the need to keep earning, he grew Christmas trees in the fields around the house. Looking back on it, for all his inherent caution, this had been a bold and a risky step for him to take, returning from overseas to launch into a business about which he knew little. But it was a magical place in which to grow up. In the school holidays in summer, my brother and I would cycle onto the moors with a picnic and swim in the freezing cold, soft, peaty water of the moorland streams. We spent hours diving with masks and snorkels, fascinated by the small brown trout that hovered in dark places under boulder and waterfall. Occasionally there were much larger fish, a salmon once, and then, a long thin snake-like fish, coiling through the stones, terrifying to me – my first sight of an adult eel.

Later on, as I grew older, I’d drive down from London for the weekend after work, arriving late; all noise of traffic dropped away, and there was just the hush of wind in the pines that grew around the house. It was this experience of childhood in Devon that drew me to the idea of making a life not in town or city but in the country, and it was why the possibility of the business based on elvers was so attractive.

By the autumn, David Forrest confirmed that he wished to step back from the elvering to do a Business MBA and leave me to take it on. We had already set up a provisional partnership under Brown and Forrest; now that we were parting, I asked him if I could retain his name on the notepaper. Brown’s Elvers or Michael’s Eel – there was already a Mick’s Eels in London – sounded decidedly slippery whereas the two surnames had a certain balance, a resonance. Besides, David was now the author of Eel Capture, Culture and Marketing, an excellent study of the then-current trends in the industry. Retaining his name, I thought, might lend marked credibility - gravitas - to the fledgling business. To this, he readily agreed. He also promised for the forthcoming season the use of his VW camper van, which he’d acquired to carry out the research for his book. This was a friend indeed.

That October I received word from Sinclair Mackintosh that if I wished to come up, the Duchess could see me at her house in Sutherland to discuss permission to fish the Laxford for elvers. I travelled north by train to Inverness and north again, and was met at Lairg station by Hector Morrison, the Duchess’s chauffeur, 43 years on the estate. He wore a battered chauffeur’s uniform and peaked hat and drove an old Ford Zephyr with crates of stores in the back. His wife Peggy ran the post office in the estate village of Achfary. We headed north along Loch Shin, steely grey, the same road I’d followed to the Ridgway’s back in the summer. Hector spoke in that quiet, soft highland accent, almost Irish in its lilt. I told him I was nervous about meeting the Duchess, but he reassured me, saying she was ‘very nice, very friendly’ and when I asked him what I should call her, told me that the best way was simply to address her as ‘Your Grace’.

Lochmore Lodge was a gracious house of granite stone and grey roofs built under the hill and set amongst pines, with fine gardens sloping down to high rhododendron hedges and the loch below. I was met by Sinclair and ushered in to meet the Duchess who was standing with her back to the fire, feet planted well apart, a woman in her early sixties, comfortably dressed, with fine wide set eyes, a broad smile and commanding presence. She had the richest gravelly voice I’d ever heard.

She was Anne, Duchess of Westminster – I had been briefed by Sinclair – the fourth and last wife of Duke Bendor, Second Duke of Westminster who in 1924 had purchased the Reay Forest estates – a mere 48,000 hectares – as this part of Sutherland was called, land that his predecessors, the Grosvenor family had had a long association with, having leased it for years. The Duchess’s home was in Chester but her real spiritual home was there in Sutherland where she spent most of her summer and autumn salmon fishing and stalking – it was said she was an excellent shot.

We talked for a while then moved into lunch, with Sinclair and one other guest. I was placed next to the Duchess, and while conversation went back and forth with Sinclair mostly on general estate matters, I scrabbled in my mind for something to say, too preoccupied even to taste the flavour of the smoked salmon served as a first course. At a suitable moment, I leaned forward to enquire about her race horses, Arkle and Foinavon, which had both won Grand Nationals, (Arkle three times), and whether she had any other promising ones coming through.

‘And when they retire from racing, your Grace, I suppose they are much sought-after and you are able to put them out to stud?’

‘Ah, no, Mr Brown,’ she smiled a little condescendingly, ‘unfortunately, you see, as they are horses that go over the jumps, those huge fences, their equipment has to be removed in case they do themselves damage…’ and she flashed me a smile. I winced and nodded in vigorous understanding.

Up to that point no mention had been made of the elvers; then, as we served ourselves to a delicious shepherd’s pie from the sideboard, she turned to the subject. Her main concern, it was evident, was not how much the estate made out of the project, but any possible adverse effect that the taking of elvers might have on the salmon fishing and the river Laxford, which she proudly described as ‘the best salmon river in Britain.’ I assured her that there was no conflict, that the elvers came close to the bank and near the surface and that we fished with hand-held nets. Sinclair backed me, saying he had spoken to Billy Scobie, the head gillie, who agreed there could be no possible harm. She seemed reassured. She was also concerned that I should not lose any money invested, if after a trial year, the estate decided against the venture.

Later, I joined Sinclair in Achfary, the little estate village a mile down the road. On the crags of rock above the valley, the stags, heavy in rut, were roaring into the winter sky, deep bellied roars that seemed to come from their very depths. I was introduced to Billy Scobie, a big, gentle, quiet spoken man with greying hair, clad in a working tweed suit who said that from the first frosts of the year when the hinds came on heat, the stags would roar all night through September and October, keeping them all awake.

Together we looked at the river and Scobie identified the falls below Laxford bridge as the best spot to fish the elvers, which, from his annual records, came around the third week in May – this tied in with Gavin Maxwell’s observations. We then went on to the salmon hatchery, his pride and joy, ‘the most modern in Europe’ he proudly called it, where the estate had built up a lively restocking business sending eyed ova from their own wild fish to rivers overseas. They also hatched and raised salmon fry for release back into the Laxford river. The hatchery was a long low building set on a side stream above Achfary. Inside, it was dark and cool; down one side was a row of wooden box tanks fed by the burn, the water cascading down from one to another. This was where we would store the elvers we caught. It was a perfect holding site.

Sinclair wrote a short time later to confirm that the Duchess had given her permission to fish the Laxford. He looked forward to seeing us up there the following year. With Somerset and Scotland as two sources of supply, and having secured a market in Germany, things were coming together well. I now needed to find somewhere to live in Somerset near the Lang’s farm and the holding tanks. I felt if I was to make a real go of the elvering, it was absolutely necessary to live in the area. It was not a business that could be properly managed by weekly or fortnightly visits from afar. Besides, living in the country was its main attraction.

In December 1974, in the search for somewhere suitable to rent, I was fortunate to be able to stay with old friends of my parents in the village of Buckland St Mary up on the Blackdown Hills, about half an hour’s drive from the elver tanks. My first visit was to my future landlord, Anthony Lang, to finalise the terms of our agreement: I would run the elver business independently of him using the facilities already in place, the holding tanks and the storage barn, and for this I would pay him a percentage of the turnover. It was a figure that seemed high but I sensed that Anthony had had enough of elver dealers; if I could make it work, fine, if not, that was the end of it. That suited me well; it was just the freedom and independence I wanted.

Having settled the tenancy with Anthony, I then started to explore the surrounding country for somewhere to live. It needed to be as close as possible to the elvers, somewhere I could park a van, a place where I could come and go, often at night, without disturbing neighbours. As I explored, I came across beautiful stone villages with towered churches, and was excited by the thought that this was where I was coming to live. But for the money I could afford, there seemed nothing that was suitable; the best I found was a cramped, second floor flat with no parking in the middle of a small nearby town.

Each evening I went back to my hosts, David and Margaret Norton and reported on progress, or lack of it. They lived in a huge rambling Victorian manor house that they’d bought for a song just after the war. It was dark and shabby and gloriously comfortable, like an old well-worn coat. Over the years various bits of it had been closed off, like the ballroom to one side of the entrance, ‘one room less to heat’, where the smooth boards of the dance floor had begun to curl like autumn leaves. David was a big florid man who grew Christmas trees in the fields around the house and whose passion was tennis: he played twice weekly, to a high standard on a hard court in the grounds; this was followed always by a huge tea, magnificent fruit cakes you’d want to take on any expedition and tea that came in cups the size of buckets, all provided by his wife, Margaret who never joined the tea party. She had once been a ward matron and ran the household and her numerous family with strict efficiency and with the assistance of a large watch pinned permanently to her chest and a clipboard of lists under one arm.

She was a sweet shy person, always wore a slightly distrait air as if she was permanently running to catch up. At meals in the kitchen we sat amongst piles of books and papers, neatly stacked in ordered profusion, surrounded by more lists with reading glasses attached and baskets, several of them, all packed. Baskets of mending, baskets for shopping, baskets for the vegetable garden. Over all this ordered chaos, a kitchen clock ticked and a big dog creaked in its basket. On my last morning, over bacon and eggs, I was expressing frustration and despair over my house hunting, when David asked me if I would consider somewhere as far from the elvers as their village. Originally I had thought it far too long a journey, but the lack of anything suitable now shrunk the half hour drive, making it feel distinctly possible.

‘My daughter has a cottage here which she can’t sell. I could have a word with her; she might be prepared to let it, keep it warm until a buyer comes along. We’ll have a look at it after breakfast if you like.’

I fell in love with Skye Cottage as soon as I saw it. It was at the lower end of the village, at the top of a tiny lane that led down to an old mill. Settled into the side of the hill, it looked over the wooded valley to fields and hills; it had cob walls painted soft pink, and it sat in its own small garden with a lawn and apple tree, bounded by a wall with the field beyond. At the top of the garden, where there was room for a veg patch, stood a garage, which could be used as a workshop and storage for elver kit. Inside the cottage were three tiny upstairs bedrooms above a large living room and kitchen fired by an ancient rayburn that burned anything. A thin corridor tacked on to the back as an afterthought led down the side of the house to a bathroom. It was fitted with the smallest bath I’d ever seen, a tiny tub on splayed feet. The whole place was perfect.

A few days later I spoke to David Norton’s daughter and it was arranged that I could rent Skye Cottage for five pounds a month, starting from the beginning of January 1975 and until such time as a buyer was found. Even with my limited means it was well within the budget.

That Christmas I wrote the usual cards to family and friends, including one to a lady in Australia. Her name was Utta, she’d been born in Germany but her family had emigrated when she was small. She’d become a psychiatric nurse and I’d met her in London a few years before in 1971 when I’d still been with ICI and she had been travelling over in Europe, taking a break from her job back home. She had an infectious zest for life and she was the only person I’d ever met who, when eating an apple or a pear, ate the whole thing, core and all, leaving only the stalk. Very cheap to run, I thought. We had kept vaguely in touch - well enough to know her current address. Scribbling a bit of news, I told her about the elvering and the cottage with its tiny bath, and ended with the throwaway line, ‘Why not come and see it!’ And posted the card.

An old bridge on the Somerset moor

Chapter Two

As soon as I moved in to Skye Cottage on the Blackdown Hills of Somerset in early January 1975, I began preparations for the coming elver season that would start in the spring. With equipment to make, nets and the trays for the fishermen, tanks to repair, markets to contact, airfreight to arrange, there was a sense of purpose that I’d never felt before and though there was much to do, I revelled in slowly working my way through it; building the new business, steadily putting it together piece by piece. There was the challenge too of having to be inventive, having to make do because for income I had only some tiny savings and the odd payment, usually months late, from the writing. All the while I was free, entirely my own master, in a place of my own in country that was as beautiful and varied as any I’d seen. I felt I’d arrived.

Most days I drove over to the elver site, down off the Blackdown hills to the little village of Hambridge on the edge of West Moor and the Levels. The holding tanks were located in the courtyard of Bowdens Farm at the furthest end of the Lang’s property and about a mile from their main farmhouse outside Curry Rivel. The system depended on spring water drawn from a borehole some seventy feet down in a corner of the yard. This fed a small reservoir from which it was then pumped to the tanks. Over the years, the site had been neglected, briefly used during each season and then abandoned. Equipment lay around quietly decaying, the tanks leaked, nettles and brambles invaded the pump house. It all needed a little care and attention. Down one side of the courtyard stood a row of barns, which included a granary, tractor shed and a larger barn with a fine stone flag floor, once used to store cider apples. This was the one that would be my storage shed and workshop.

Across the courtyard was the farmhouse occupied by the farm shepherd, Ernie Woods, who was to become friend and support over the years on all things, including elvers and eels. Ernie looked after the secondary flock of sheep. Unlike the prize breeding Dorset Downs, kept ‘up top farm’, these were crossbreds reared for their lambs. Away from his boss and the main farm, he was largely left to his own devices, which suited his independent nature. There was nothing hurried about Ern. He walked with a slow, swinging stride as if covering long distances, always dressed in blue overalls and ‘wellitons’. The pitch of his voice was a low rumble and he spoke in a deep, burred Somerset accent. He had dark, watchful eyes and a broad, malleable mouth that would break into a great grin or laugh. For his work, he drove a battered little grey tractor, manoeuvring it expertly with a swagger, often one handed and standing up like a Scythian charioteer as he headed up the drive at speed to the shed where it was kept. There at the threshold, he’d squeal to a halt, just in time to disconnect the vertical exhaust pipe, which would otherwise have carried the roof away.

To Anthony Lang, his boss, he was a good, reliable shepherd, but with a difficult, truculent streak, and easily offended. The cause of trouble lay in the simmering rivalry between Ern and the main shepherd, Bill, or Shep, as he was called, a thin, wiry man of few words, dressed in gaiters and hobnail boots and an old army coat tied with string. Ern resented the way Anthony thought the world of Shep, whose word on the Dorsets was law. Shep had been a shepherd all his life, knew his flock like a family, poured his whole life into them, administering to every one of their needs. When you saw the Dorset Down rams clipped ready for a show, they had that smug groomed look of gentlemen off to their club. Under Shep, they won some of the top breeder prizes.

Ernie was a loyal man, with deep respect for his boss, but he found all the attention on the Dorsets hard to bear. He’d come into the barn where I was working, full of grumble and resentment after some particular incident,

‘Tid’n right, Mike,’ he’d grumble, ‘they got all of they there up top farm to do his bliddy job and alls there is down yere is oi. Boss said this morning, he sed, what a good job Shep done, back along at that there show – well, maybe he ave but he got all they to elp en. Tidn right.’ And I’d listen and nod sympathetically as he rumbled away.