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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Tom Fort, former angling correspondent for the Financial Times, is one of the most incisive and funny fishing writers in Britain today. This sparkling collection of his writings finds Tom at Ceausescu's bear-hunting lodge in Romania, at a fishing auction in the Home Counties, being thwarted by a bunch of hard-mouthed Brazilian dourado, on a press freebie in Scotland and in a terrible state on the Kennet - not to mention conducting a fantasy celebrity interview with Isaak Walton himself. Whether fishing in some exotic far-flung location, or simply leaning over the parapet of an English bridge gazing at the stream below, Tom Fort always manages in his stylish and witty way to pinpoint something important with which all anglers can identify.
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i
THE FAR FROM COMPLEAT ANGLER
Tom Fort
Foreword by Jeremy Paxman Illustrations by Charles Jardine
To My Brothers
CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY JEREMY PAXMAN
I first met Tom Fort when he emerged from the Brazilian jungle wearing It Ain’t Alf Hot Mum shorts and a straw hat which looked as if it had once belonged to Vita Sackville-West. ‘What about these Dorado, then?’ The voice was simultaneously quizzical and bossy.
The Dorado, dubbed the ‘Golden Salmon’ by Major Hills in the 1920s, was what had brought us both seven thousand miles. Within an hour of his arrival, having seen the arsenal of ironmongery in his luggage, local people had dubbed Tom ‘El Professor’. Professor of fishing. The impression of effortless angling superiority was somewhat undermined by the way they fell about laughing at the extraordinary collection of flies, spoons, rappallas and devons which fell out of his Financial Times carrier bag.
But the Professor isn’t an entirely unfair name for Tom. All fishermen are full of preposterous talk. Tom is no more full of it than the rest of us. But he has a persistence and dedication which sometimes means that he knows what he’s talking about.
Most anglers are one thing or the other – flyfishermen, seaanglers, monster carp chasers. Doubtless there are even whitebait specialists. But Tom Fort is an enthusiast for all forms of fishing. Although he now spends as much time trout fishing as his employers and his bank manager allow, he has never lost his early joy in chasing tench, priming barbel swims or dead-baiting for pike. My most recent fishing expeditions with him have been, in order, a day on a vchalkstream, an afternoon barbel-hunting, a morning’s pike-fishing, a couple of days’ early-season salmon spinning and an afternoon nymphing for trout in the Cotswolds.
In The Far From Compleat Angler you will read of fishing exploits from the Scottish Highlands to the Danubian Plain. It is tempting to see such feats as examples of flyfishing brilliance. Do not be deceived. As readers of his column in the FT know, he’s as likely to get his fly caught in an overhanging willow as the rest of us. But what he has in abundance is that essential prerequisite for any fishing success, boundless enthusiasm. Fishing with Tom – either on the riverbank or in these pages – is fun.
In Brazil, we soon gave up our naive ideas about spinning or flyfishing and took up the local custom of chucking livebait upstream and waiting for a passing set of jaws to clamp themselves around it. In one hundred degree heat and ninety percent humidity it was not the sort of technique which made undue demands on the dry fly purist. Our boatman, who had a bullet stuck in his head from a bungled bank-job and a set of false teeth he’d been sent through the post from Sao Paolo, grimaced in benign astonishment. The river, twice the width of the Danube, rolled beneath in muddy indifference.
After three or four days of this brain-addling torment, we had advanced the time of the first beer of the day from 12.30 to 8am. I had more-or-less abandoned hope. But Tom battled on until, finally, he found a way of hooking the Dorado on a spinner. In the space of half an hour he hit four of them. That was the fruit of persistence and competence and it put those of us who preferred a cold tinny to shame.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
One morning in early spring seven years ago, my brother Matthew, who was then writing about foodyish matters in the Financial Times weekend section, telephoned me to say that the paper’s respected angling correspondent, John Cherrington, had died. He suggested to me that I should apply to be Mr Cherrington’s successor. ‘You’re always banging on about fishing,’ he said. ‘Here’s a chance to get paid for it.’
In fear and trembling, I rang the man then running the Weekend FT, the redoubtable J.D.F. Jones. ‘I know nothing about fishing,’ he boomed at me. ‘But it’s amazing how many people on this paper have been into my office to tell me that they do, and that they should be writing about it. So what do you think you have to offer?’ I gulped, searching for an answer. ‘Well,’ he continued briskly, ‘send me something and I’ll look at it.’ So I sent him a piece about some curious characters I had observed at an auction of old fishing tackle, and that was the start of it.
Occasionally, I return to the question JDF asked me, and I still have no wholly convincing answer to it. I can, however, put my finger on one or two aspects of fishing about which I have almost nothing of value to say. This may be useful in saving potential readers from the pain of disappointment.
Anyone who reads anything I have to say in the hope that it will assist him or her to catch more fish, bigger fish or better fish viiis barking along the wrong river bank. I should like nothing better than to be one of those visionary thinkers - a Skues, a Halford, a Goddard, a Dick Walker - who, by the power of observation and intelligence, unlock one or more of the mysteries which make the sport so endlessly absorbing. But it is not so. My mediocre level of competence has been acquired slowly, clumsily and painfully through experience, and through an indifferent application of the bright ideas of others. I cannot claim to have made a single original observation of a technical nature.
Nor do I have stories to tell of the great fish I have caught; at least, not true ones. As a hungry reader of writing about fishing, I love that sort of stuff, if it is well done. There are a few technical treatises which I regard as having been of real worth to me: Walker’s Still Water Angling, Falkus and Buller’s Freshwater Fishing, J.R. Harris’ An Angler’s Entomology, Goddard’s Waterside Guide among them. But I like better those stirring accounts of monsters lost and conquered: of Bishop Browne’s Tay salmon, of the vast seatrout of the Em, of Zane Grey’s swordfish and Walker’s record carp, Mitchell Hedges’ sinew-stretching battles with shark and sawfish, and a host of others.
My own record in the big fish department is not so much scanty, as non-existent. I have caught but one 20-pound salmon, and that by a method (harling) which denies the angler any credit whatever. My biggest pike is a respectable but un-newsworthy 23 pounds. I have caught decent chub and barbel, but nothing which would rate a paragraph in the Angling Times. My best trout is a measly 4¼ pounds (though I have lost two leviathans, either of which would have been worth having stuffed - if I could have landed them). I once caught an eel of over 4 pounds, which is as close as I have come to a true specimen fish.
None of this has brought us any nearer to answering that nagging question. If pressed, I suppose I could explain why I write about fishing (apart from the money, of course, a sordid consideration which I do not propose to investigate further). The clue is contained in my school reports, those faded records of the academic endeavour of thirty years ago. viii
It was an article of faith among us that those who taught us - those aged, absurd figures in tweed jackets and twills - knew nothing of us. They hardly seemed to belong to the same species, so ancient and unreal were they. Yet there is a common thread through their comments about me which suggests that they may have been more perceptive than I imagined. The judgement is constant, though its expression varies: ‘Fond of the sound of his own voice… fluent in writing and speech, perhaps excessively so… if only he would think before opening his mouth… to him there is no music sweeter than the sound of his own…’ and so on.
Here, I fear, is the nub of it. That affection for my own tones persists into middle age; and will doubtless become a tedious adoration as the years roll on. And the great joy of writing about something - as opposed to shouting about it in the pub or around the dinner table - is that NO ONE CAN SHUT YOU UP. Just think of it. It is the dream of the expert, the self-proclaimed authority, the intolerable bore: to be able to go on and on, without fear of interruption. What a drug, what an addiction, that is.
So that is why I do it. Why anyone should wish to read it is quite another matter; and one with which, if you don’t mind, I’d rather not grapple.
1. INTHE BEGINNING
‘When I became a man,’ St Paul says in that high-minded way of his, ‘I put away childish things.’ I did not; not all of them, anyway. You need a few to stay sane in this grown-up world. And my favourite childish thing is fishing. By ‘childish’, I do not mean infantile or ill-becoming an adult, as the dictionary has it. In my view it becomes an adult very well. Once I know someone is a fisherman - whether it be Hemingway, Neville Chamberlain or Ranjitsingh - I know I have identified one redeeming feature in him. I suppose what I mean by childish is that it is an enthusiasm most easily acquired in childhood.
The urge to fish springs from the instinctive fascination which water exercises on boys. I would go so far as to say that there is something wrong with the boy who can pass a pond without wanting to dip a net in it, inspect its margins for tadpoles, or - at the very least - chuck a stone into it. But there is a great divide between that general urge to muck about, and the particular longing to pull fish out of the water. My own elder son is a case in point. He will go fishing, 2can catch fish, and will be happy doing so for an hour or so - but would rather play football. The truth is that, in his heart, he is not a fisherman; not yet anyway. This matters not a jot to him or me. For - while you can teach your child or anyone else’s to fish - you cannot persuade them to want to fish. The spark, the magic of the passion, is a gift from somewhere.
If the bug does bite in childhood, it usually does so deep, and the fever is fierce. My father was no fisherman, but by the time I was eight or nine I had become aware that two of my elder brothers were thoroughly infected. They had been given elementary instruction by my grandmother, afloat on Windermere. They had learned the nasty but necessary techniques of sticking a hook through a worm and subduing the perch which grabbed it. This knowledge they took to the banks of our local river, and there developed it. And eventually I was allowed to go too.
We were blessed in our river, the Loddon, which flows into the Thames at Wargrave in Berkshire. We had friends who lived in a large house beside it, and we had the run of the water. There was the Loddon itself, and what we called the Second Stream, which was once gloriously overgrown and fish-filled until the old Thames Conservancy blighted it with a typically barbarous act of dredging and bank clearance. But the main river was untouched and, summer, autumn and winter it was our playground.
It is many years since I fished it, and I would not care to do so now, for there is too much of a tangle of memory attached to it. Then, thirty years and more ago, it ran clear and was rich in weed and fish. Chub thronged the quicker water, with barbel as well; while the quieter holes held perch and roach and the odd pike.
I was passionate about fishing at once, and it is a sign of the depth and power of the passion that it endured at all, for it was two years before I caught anything more significant than suicidal bleak and bristly ruffe. The first great event took place, not on the Loddon, but at the mill on the Thames at Sonning. Its great grinding wheels have been silent for many years. It is now a pretty theatre, and the millpool is silted and lifeless. But then the water surged and roared, and shoals of chub and barbel gathered to feed on the tasty waste from the milling. 3
It was a tricky place to fish. You had to stand on the road bridge, with the morning traffic at your back, and cast with a heavy weight towards the white water foaming out from beneath the mill. The bottom was strewn with snags, and many a week’s pocket money was swallowed up on the hooks and leads we left there. The best time was early morning, and we would bicycle over from our home along the murky lanes with rods and bags precariously arranged, and the aluminium worm bucket clanking on the handlebars.
There were big fish at Sonning. One morning we arrived to find a gnarled Thames fisherman poised on his stool on the far bank, with a sack at his feet which was stuffed with barbel, at least one of them over eight pounds. But my first proper fish was not of this order. It was a chub, and it took my worm near the willow on the right side of the mill pool. It may have weighed a pound-and-a half; big enough to put a bend in my cane rod and to require one of my brothers to scramble down onto the bridge support to net it. I felt that I had joined the big boys.
Not long after I caught a bigger chub on the Loddon. It came up and seized a piece of floating breadcrust, dived into several weedbeds, and reduced me to an utter lather before giving itself up. By then the fire was well and truly lit. Waking and sleeping I dreamed of toothy pike, fat-lipped chub, round-mouthed carp. I pored over books of instruction, buried my head in the Angling Times, learned to revere Richard Walker above all other men, longed in vain to become a proficient catcher of big fish. I remained as incompetent as I was obsessed.
Painful adolescence brought a temporary remission in the disease. This is common, and many youthful victims find themselves wholly cured, and able to progress to golf, gardening, DIY or some other more mature pastime. My eldest brother, for instance, gave up fishing altogether, preferring village cricket and service on the committees of worthy local bodies. But I, having emerged from the waking sleep of university and the catharsis of having to earn a living, began to fish again in earnest. And around that time I entered a new world, inhabited by trout and decorated by flies.
As a boy, I used occasionally to wonder why people made such a fuss about trout. I knew nothing of fly fishing. I dug worms, tore 4loaves of bread into bite-sized pieces, moulded balls of cheese paste, and kept live bait in buckets. The notion that you could catch anything worthwhile on a confection of feather, fur and tinsel would have struck me - had I ever considered it - as most improbable. Little by little I became aware of trout, as a species which might be caught on a worm, and eaten. The first was almost black, with a few faded crimson spots near his grey little belly. He lived in the shadows beneath a stone Lakeland farmhouse, where the tumbling beck had long ago turned some wheel or other. He dashed at the worm as soon as I flicked into his cavern, and kicked and wriggled mightily as I swung him into unfamiliar daylight.
For many years the trout was a holiday fish, always pursued with a worm. There was a beck high above Windermere which required a tremendous scramble to reach the best pools, in one of which I once caught a trout close on three-quarters of a pound. There was another stream - a burn, this time - which cut its way through a tangle of forest to a lonely shore of a Scottish sea loch. Here the pools were bigger, but the trout just as small and famished as their Westmorland cousins; although, in a spate, the silver sea trout would run, and give us prodigious excitement.
I cannot remember the first fish I caught on a fly. It was certainly on the Eamont or Eden near Penrith, where indulgent friends let us roam at will over many miles of glorious water; and certainly on a wet fly, fished downstream. I was captivated by these fish, the violence of whose struggles made my beloved chub seem tame. And I was enraged and dismayed by my clumsiness as a caster, and by the knots, snapped casts and lost fish which tormented me. Slowly and painfully, I acquired necessary wisdom and a mediocre degree of efficiency. I graduated from the downstream wet fly, to the upstream dry fly, and was entranced by the new discipline.
Thus I have arrived at this time of life - a little way beyond forty, a time for self-examination. Although I no longer have the fanatical dedication of extreme youth, I find I love the sport as much as ever. But the passion is mitigated by the restraints typically imposed by middle age. I do not like fishing in the rain - it is uncomfortable. I do not like fishing all day - it is boring. I do not like sitting in boats 5for hours - it makes my bottom hurt. I prefer dry fly to wet, summer to winter, fair days to foul, wild brown trout to rainbows. Give me a river rather than a lake, for I like the feel, look, sound, rhythm of moving water.
What I like most of all in fishing is success. You meet anglers, mainly in books, who expatiate on the birds, the insects, the flowers and trees, the bounty of nature. These are all very well, and they help to fill books. But they do not make up for absence of fish. They may console, but they do not compensate. The essence of the business is catching fish. Non-anglers sometimes ask: what do you think about when you’re fishing? The answer, most of the time, is: fishing. If you are kneeling beside a stream when the rise is on and the trout are on the feed, and your mind is on the cost of borrowing or whither New Labour, you’re most unlikely to able to put your fly accurately over that fat fellow guzzling by the weeds, or to be able to hook him when he takes you.
At that moment, you must want to catch him more than anything in the world. Indeed, there is no other reality then. After he has risen and broken you, scaring every other fish in the pool and signifying the end of sport for the day, by all means relax by chewing over a few eternal philosophical truths. But the moment at which the contest between you and the trout is decided is simple and pure.
Behind that simplicity, nourishing it, is the wonderful, immense complexity of the science of angling. No other sport has inspired such expenditure of high-grade brainpower. There is theory and practice enough to sustain a university faculty. Great men have pondered the mysteries of fishing, and offered their solutions and theories. Yet mysteries they remain.
I have, in my time, dreamed of being a good fisherman. Now, I know this will not be. Good fishermen are born, not made. I have advanced, but only within the category of the moderate, and I know I will never get any higher. And that is fine by me. I do not want to be too good. Speaking analytically, I value disaster as highly as triumph. I want those heady moments of conquest to be earned, painfully. I do not care for the idea of being an expert, and am consoled by the knowledge that I am in no danger of it. 6
It is good for each of us to be fervent about something which does not, in universal terms, matter; and further, that it should be something incapable of being mastered. Gardeners need to be beaten by blight or black fly. Every now and then a sculptor should chip off a nose or ear. Sailors must fall in, horsemen fall off, crack shots miss, batsmen get ducks, golfers go mad in bunkers, fishermen break rods and lose monsters. It is not failure we must fear, but perfection.
2. ON BEING COARSE
By the time I reached thirty-five I was, in my own estimation of myself, a trout fisherman. I no longer day-dreamed of chub and barbel. June 16th, the opening of the coarse fishing season and at one time a date of overwhelming and mystical importance, had become nothing more than mid-June, prime time on the chalkstreams. If pressed on the subject, I would probably have said something faintly pompous about growing out of coarse fishing, or the higher art of the dry fly, or some such humbug.
My only concession to the past was the three or four days pike fishing I had each winter on a most beautiful lake in the grounds of a startling neo-Gothic pile not far from Reading. But although there was pleasure to be had in those short, grey days, in the march around the reedy shore, spinning rod in hand, in the slap of the wavelets against the sides of the grimy fibreglass boat, in the bob and dive of the float and the jagged tug as the sprat was seized, in the cry of triumph as my old Polish friend, Adam, dragged another olive-backed victim to the net, reaching as he did so for the cosh to beat it over the 8head - although there was a pleasure, it was a little melancholy and pallid, a touch lacking in red blood. In my heart, I suspect, I yearned for moving water, rather than the still breadths of the lake.
Thus, in the main, did my old rods - the Mark Four, the Kennet Perfection, the Fred J. Taylor roach rod - hang untroubled in their bags on their nails, gathering cobwebs; and the Mitchell fixed spool reel, which had so thrilled me when I had bought it twenty years before, lay neglected in the wicker tackle box. Then I had some rare good fortune. I stumbled upon a fishing paradise; and having had that good fortune, applied myself to securing it. A man I then knew hardly at all, but who has since become a friend indeed, had bought a house on the lower Kennet, with the river running beneath it out into the most perfect millpool imaginable. I had a casual invitation to come over one November afternoon, caught a pike from almost every hole into which I lobbed a sprat, and made myself as pleasant to my host as I knew how. He - generous and saintly man that he is - told me I could fish whenever I liked. I don’t know whether in the subsequent years, he has ever repented the invitation, for I have never asked him. I trust that he has not, nor ever will.
On the map it doesn’t amount to much, this bit of river, for it is no more than quarter of a mile from the point at which it leaves the canal to the bridge which marks the bottom boundary. But within that short stretch is an amazing richness and variety of water. One stream runs under the house, through the millpool, down to the bridge. Another breaks off above the house, bursts over a weir into a wide racing pool, before narrowing and curving through the gardens to rejoin its companion. A third, man-made and miniature, snakes back and forth through the wood, tumbling over a succession of tiny falls, until it, too, rejoins its fellows. When I first knew it, the place had not been fished seriously for twenty years and more; apart from by the gardener, that is. Mr Hughes was a stringy, wiry old man, with a voice and a face ravaged by the effects of a lifetime of unbroken cigarette smoking. Before he died, we got to know each other pretty well, for - once he had realised how I fallen for the water - it cheered him to break off from his labours to tell me where lurked the big pike, where were the gravel runs beloved by barbel, below which chestnut tree was to be found the most fruitful roach swim. 9
Very soon the old affections were rekindled, as it dawned on me that I had done my former friends, the so-called ‘coarse’ fishes, an injustice. Of course, I like to think of myself as a refined and sensitive soul; and therefore I should either dispute the fairness of attaching the adjective ‘coarse’ to species other than salmon, trout and grayling, or I should have nothing to do with the business of trying to catch them. But I scorn these empty dilemmas. I actually do think there is a coarseness about the bullying pike, the thick-scaled chub, the cunning, placid carp and the golden-green tench; and a coarseness about the fishing for them. And further, I would confess that it is a coarseness which I like.
It lies as much in the fishing as the fish. In dry fly fishing, it suffices to carry a little rod and reel, a net, and a shoulder bag for flies and accessories. But he who has serious intent towards, say, carp or tench will have a twelve foot rod with a big, fixed-spool reel. There will be buckets of ground bait, electric bite alarms, chests containing floats, weights, rigs and the rest of it. There will be a keepnet and a long-handled landing net, rod rests, a basket with provisions for a lengthy stay. There will be a chair, quite possibly a tent and a bed. The dry fly man approaches his task like a scout, the coarse fisher as if he were preparing to lay siege.
There is, too, a certain absence of refinement in the eating habits of these fish. Not for them the delicate wisp of feather and fur. They want something solid and meaty - balls of high-protein paste, cubes of luncheon meat or cheese, garden worms, bunches of maggots. Greasy luncheon meat I regard as an unappetising necessity, but I have a soft spot for lobworms; and as for maggots, they may smell rather nasty, but when sport is slack, you can organise a diverting race between a pair of them on the palm of your hand.
The rebirth of this long dormant enthusiasm has given me such intense pleasure that, on occasional summer evenings, I have found myself neglecting my expensive trout fishing in favour of sitting beside the foaming outflow into the millpool, still and expectant, awaiting the snatch at my bait and the battle with the bull-like barbel. But the best of it has been in the banishment of that doleful hibernation which the end of the trout fishing season used to impose. Now, from October to March, I continue to be a riverbank haunter, impaling 10worms and maggots and sweaty lumps of meat, and catching these useless, inedible fish in order to admire them and put them back. In short, I do as I did when I was a boy.
A Boxing Day morning should have a keen, healing quality, capable of repairing swiftly the damage sustained by the system the day before. The reeds and hedgerows should be white with frost, the sky pale blue, the air still. Your breath should hang in clouds, your cheeks should glow, and there should be much stamping of feet and vigorous rubbing of hands. But sadly this species of Christmas weather seems to have followed other traditional aspects of the festive season into extinction. And there was nothing in the character of the Boxing Day just gone to drive away the dreadful sensations of biliousness and self-disgust which afflicted me as a result of frenzied feasting. It was warm and grey and meteorologically mediocre.
It could, however, have been worse. I could, instead of going fishing, have been preparing for another bout of gluttony. And this soft mildness seems to suit the pike, keeping their appetites constantly keen; whereas extreme cold brings on torpor and indifference to the angler’s artifices. I had arrived bearing the Christmas dinner of which the pike’s dreams must be made. As food for humans, I cannot say much for the rank and oily sprat. But as pike bait it is first-rate - cheap, easy to procure, easy to fish with, and deadly.
I met Stevie at the waterside. He was accompanied by a nephew of his, an engaging but impudent boy who had not fished for pike before. When I confided to him that I had left the scissors at home, he recommended that in future I make a list, to avoid such errors. I repressed a desire to stake him in the weirpool, as ground bait, and instead directed him and his uncle to the second-best spot, a turbulent eddy at the side of the pool. I myself went a little way on to the best spot, a hole formed where the sidestream prepares to meet the main current. One afternoon Mr Hughes had taken five fish from it, weighing between fifteen and twenty-seven pounds. Its green, slow-moving water was pregnant with promise. 11
A juicy, stinking sprat was soon dangling beneath a cheerful, tubby float, and the ensemble lobbed into the middle of the hole. This float-fishing for pike can be a gripping affair when the fish are in the mood. In my youth I would use livebait, which is a barbarous business. The dead bait is just as effective, and indeed, hardly had my float hit the water than it shot away towards the roots of the willow, and my rod bent in answer to the strike. I turned to shout for Stevie’s help, only to see him in a similar fix. But the nephew scurried about with the net to good effect, and both fish were soon thrashing around in a large keepnet immersed in a quiet corner.
By the time I had landed a second fish from the same hole, I was aware that my inner being was on the mend. Nausea had fled, and I felt almost human again. My brother - he at whose table I had gorged myself so grossly the day before - arrived bearing dark, potent Calabrian wine and legs of turkey. An hour or two before, I would have dismissed with a shudder the suggestion that I could ever again have a meaningful relationship with a turkey. Now I fed and drank, and agreed with my comrades that this was how Boxing Day was meant to be spent.
I spent an hour or two of the early afternoon trying to catch a chub. I cast my luncheon meat into the smooth water below the ash tree where, a fortnight before, I had caught three fat fellows up to four pounds. This time, though, there was no jerk at the rod tip, no pluck at the bait. Perhaps the chub had been overdoing the Yuletide feasting, too. But there was just time, before the gloom gathered into darkness, to return to the hole and dispatch another sprat therein. Again my float went away and again my reel made its protesting music.
We had ten for the day, the best just over eight pounds. Although the big ones stayed aloof, we had enjoyed almost ceaseless action of one sort or another. And they fight respectably, these river pike, and with their predatory lines and muted colours, make a pleasing sight together on the grass. The impudent boy caught his first one and was heard to ask if it was always so easy. He was sternly admonished - but try explaining to a ten-year-old that it would stop being fun if it happened every time.
12The epic account of the epic battle is a staple of fishing literature. These descriptions are almost always variations on a standard theme: ‘The rod bucked like a wild horse in my hands… the reel shrieked/screamed/howled/whined… the fish leaped skyward, lit by the sun, like a bar of silver… the huge tail lashed the water into foam… a final, desperate bid for freedom…’
This kind of thing becomes wearisome. The trouble is that, while the outcome and the incidentals vary, one struggle with a big fish is pretty much like another. The fish pulls. The angler pulls. The fish dashes around. The angler dashes after it. One side or the other comes out on top. If it is not the angler, he swears. It is all rather predictable.
I would not deny that the fighting of the fish is an integral, thrilling part of the sport. It stirs deep responses, and is the necessary prelude to the glow of triumph or the bleakness of despair. But the purest, most intense excitement precedes the fight. It comes while the angler is still, while he is waiting and watching. It is the moment of the take. And I would further suggest that, in its highest form, it must engage the visual rather than just the tactile sense. This is not to disparage the heart-stopping moment at which a salmon or trout grabs a sunken fly. But, more often than not, this is felt, not seen. It may be that, when it happens, you are concentrating hard on your fishing. But you may equally well be ruminating on the excesses of the gutter press or the wisdom of privatising the railways.
Contrast this with the responsibilities of the dry fly man addressing a trout which is on the feed. He must be aware of where the fish is, cast in the right place, spot his fly, chart its progress towards his quarry, and then - as the surface is broken and it vanishes - be ready. Should his mind wander, he will be lost, and so will the fish. It is a sure bet that the moment he starts pondering the issue of the female priesthood or the expansion of the European Union, the trout will rise and he will miss it.
However I sometimes feel that fishing with the humble float offers an even purer joy. Pleasing in appearance, even more pleasing in disappearance is how H.T. Sheringham put it with 13exquisite pungency. The glory lies as much in the variations in the manner of that disappearance, as in the fact itself. The float may tremble awhile, then move off with steady purpose before slanting into the depths. It may do no more than dip. It may stir almost imperceptibly, then glide away. It may bob for minutes before being pulled under. Or it may, almost as it meets the water, be jerked from sight. All the fisherman can do is watch, shaking under the strain of powerful emotions.
These reflections came to me as I watched my favourite crimson-topped pike float circle that dark green hole beside the weirpool. It was a glorious day to be out, with a clean breeze blowing through the bare trees. The river, as if tired of its trick in turning most of the surrounding countryside into a lake for the previous two months, had retreated within its banks for the time being. But it was still running high, and the little backwater was the only place quiet enough for my float. It, and the sprat beneath, had travelled no more than a couple of yards down from a tangled willow, when the crimson top stopped, vibrated for a second as if conducting an electric current, and went under. I could see it beneath the surface, whizzing towards the roots of the willow, and I struck.
The rod bucked, the old centrepin reel whined, the great tail….. no, after what I said earlier, I’d better leave that bit out. Suffice it to say that after a stern contest, I netted a magnificent, small-headed, fat-bodied, female pike; gawped at it; thrust it into the keepnet; and ran off to the house to find witnesses. Plastered in mud, dripping with pike slime, reeking of sprats, I hurtled upstairs in search of the infinitely indulgent couple who let me have the run of the place. ‘I’ve caught a monster,’ I bawled. ‘You’ve got to come and look at it.’ Michael followed me, dressed for a smart lunch in suit and natty Italian shoes, and hopped about in the mud, whooping with excitement, when he saw the creature.
I slipped it back into the weirpool, and watched as - with a flick of its tail - it went off to resume its life’s work of terrorising lesser species. One does not fish on after such a triumph, so I went home, singing. The pike weighed twenty-three pounds and was, by half a pound, the biggest fish I have ever caught. 14
One of the attractions of this Kennet fishery, for a non-specialist non-specimen hunter such as myself, lies in the diversity of species. I no longer have the stamina or the inclination to spend hours in one spot waiting on the whim of a single quarry. I like to roam and vary methods. If the pike are sullen, the chub may well be feeding. If the perch are not tempted by a float-fished worm, a little spinner with a tuft of red wool at the tail sometimes rouses them. A biteless hour poised over the legering rod is enough for me, and my thoughts wander to the roach reputed to inhabit the deep swims upstream.
There was a November day, deep autumn verging on winter. The river ran clear, rid at last of the rubbish swept down by floods and gales. We were a party of four: myself; the proprietor, who was distracted by turmoil in the business world, although he did emerge briefly to drag a fifteen pound pike from the millpool; Stevie, who immediately after he arrived from London announced that he had to return there to ingratiate himself with a client; and my brother Matthew, who devoted himself to tiddler-snatching. As befits a serious angling correspondent, I angled seriously, beginning with a pike of seven pounds or so from the weirpool. Lunch was excessively protracted, and the sun was already beginning to sink when I caught a four pound chub from the millpool, and - a little further down - a bristly-spined, black-banded perch of close on two pounds.
By now the light was fading fast. But there was still half an hour left to try for a barbel in the run beside a Portuguese laurel above the house. A lump of luncheon meat was sent on its way, and I had hardly made myself comfortable when there was a violent wrench at the rod tip and the fish was on. I knew at once it was a barbel, for there is a fierce, muscular determination to its fight which is unmistakeable. Head down, great tail driving, it bored this way and that, seeking weedbeds and tangled roots. By this time Stevie had returned, and at last, bug-eyed with envy, he netted it for me: a glorious, golden battler of eight pounds, by far the biggest I had ever caught.
Such days of multifarious success are suitably rare. On the other hand, I know of no piece of water which offers a better chance of catching something. This applies whatever the conditions, barring roaring flood, and whatever the season. As a result the river has become a constant presence in my mind, forever trespassing across 15the line between the subconscious and the conscious, its rhythms elbowing aside mundane considerations. Thus, one March morning, I was toiling at my desk - or, more probably, staring into mid-air with the end of my pen in my mouth - when a thought struck me. At once it sabotaged whatever tedious task it was on which I was engaged, for it demanded immediate attention.
It was that if I didn’t go fishing there and then, I would have no further opportunity to do so before the coarse fishing season ended in a few days’ time. Outside the sun was shining, the birds were chirruping, the daffodils were about to bloom, and the river was calling me in insistent, irresistible tones. The internal debate between duty and inclination was brief, and within the hour I was beside the water. I had decided that, since it was my last chance, I needed to pack a lot in. I would therefore begin by catching a perch or two, spinning; move on to the elusive roach, which I would lure with bread; and bring proceedings to a resplendent coda with a barbel, undone by a helping of Sainsbury’s breakfast slice, which a friend had assured me was the barbel bait of the moment.
At five o’clock - with an hour of daylight left - I had caught neither perch, nor roach, nor barbel, nor anything else. In catching nothing, I had also suffered a series of misfortunes, each in itself trifling, but cumulatively demoralising in the extreme. The fact that they were self-inflicted offered no comfort. Of course I should have remembered to bring a stool, and not relied on the ground - for a damp backside in chill March is no laughing matter. And, yes, I know I should have bought a new pair of gumboots - although it seems a bit much that the leak in the right one which I knew about should have been matched by a new and unsuspected gash in the left one which looked like the work of a maniac with a butcher’s knife. All right, I should have been alert enough to prevent Bertie the spaniel stealing most of the packet of breakfast slice; and I should not have been so careless as to cast most of what was left into the upper branches of the alder opposite.
I could have risen above all these irritants, if only I could have caught something. This is what most aggrieved me - the obstinate, unreasoning, ungrateful refusal of the fish to bite. As the evening drew in, so my scowl grew darker. Then I had an idea. I should be 16after fish which were always hungry. That meant chub. Only the chub could save me.
I hastened to the millpool. And there, on the fragments of meat which the blasted Bertie had left me, I caught five fine, fat chub. The bites were bold, the fights in the foaming water strong and satisfying. I avoided any more absurd blunders, applied myself intently, and was rewarded. All the love for the chub which I had had as a boy - as a fish which could be depended on - returned. The last was the best, a good four pounds. As I slid the net beneath its gleaming flanks, I murmured my thanks for the inspiration which had taken me from my desk that morning, and for a day redeemed from disaster.
3. ANCIENT AND NOT-SO-MODERN
Auctions
Anglers are, on the whole, comparatively decent and virtuous souls. They love children and other living things. They can make dutiful spouses, are respectful to their parents, and are good workers. Their sins tend to be the minor ones of omission: a box of maggots left in the fridge or a tin of worms in the pocket, a dinner engagement overlooked in the excitement of the evening rise. They are characterised by humour, modesty and intelligence. In short, there has never been a greater calumny than Doctor Johnson’s celebrated jibe about ‘a worm at one end and a fool at the other’ - if indeed the Doctor ever said anything so foolish, which I doubt.
If fishermen do have a collective fault, it is perhaps that of acquisitiveness. However adequate their store of equipment for the efficient pursuit of their sport, they long for more. They sigh for the bewitching melody in the swish of the latest graphite fly rod, and the soft click of the newest Hardy reel. This urge to accumulate 18clobber now extends as much to the treasures of the past as to the technological advances of the present. There is an undiscriminating fever for old fishing tackle, and curious and quaint memorabilia associated with the sport.
For these days it is not sufficient for image-conscious sportsmen simply to practise their sport. You must be a collector as well. The cricket lover should have a shelf or two of Wisdens, a brace of Spy cartoons, and a bat autographed by the 1934 Australians. The golf man should have acquired a set of Bernard Darwin first editions and Bobby Jones’s hat. I’m not sure what would be appropriate for the tennis enthusiast - perhaps a broken string from a racket used by Helen Wills Moody, or a sweatband discarded by Fred Perry.
No sport has spawned more baggage than fishing. There is the tackle itself, made by craftsmen to last; the thousands of books, each written in the hope of containing an eternal truth; and the stuffed fish, the prints and the paintings, evidence of the endearing desire for a permanent memorial of that catch of a lifetime. My own chief hunger is for books, of which I have an absurd number. Next to them, I love stuffed fish, even though I possess no more than one example, and that a rather small, anonymous, weary-looking roach.
When we were boys we used to buy our maggots at Messrs Perry and Cox, a dim and dusty cavern of a shop in Reading. On the wall was an amazing and beautiful sight, a display of rare golden tench, five of them, exquisitely mounted in a broad, bow-fronted case by the great taxidermists, Cooper and Sons. I would stand before it, staring at these gleaming creatures suspended timelessly among the waving weed. And I would see them in their element, gliding through their own mysterious domain. So faithful was the detail that this took no effort of the imagination, even though I had never seen a golden tench alive, nor have I since.
I recall another glass case, in which resided - and still resides, I trust - a mighty trophy known as the Parrot Pike. I first saw it at the top of the stairs at Bonhams in Chelsea, and was so staggered by it that I nearly tumbled down the way I had come. This beast, 12 inches deep, a foot thick, 42 inches long, and weighing almost forty pounds, was caught by a London silk merchant named Parrot on the Dorset Stour in March 1909. Someone who saw it on a fishmonger’s slab 19before it was stuffed described it as immense and perfect, which it is. It was bought early in the 1950s by a member of the Finchley Anglers for two pounds. At Bonhams it fetched £4000.
I would love to have been kept company by the Parrot pike and a few of his comrades. But I concede that there might be a problem with the displaying of them. Such a fish, glaring from the wall with its teeth glinting in the lamplight, might well be inimical to social intercourse. I was told once that the owner of the stuffed remains of Richard Walker’s record carp, Clarissa, was facing a similar difficulty. His wife, oppressed by Clarissa’s overbearing presence, had told him that either her rival went, or she did. The last I heard, he was still thinking about it.
