A Never-Ending Golden Sun

Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (1996)

Early June in Britain has a definite smell. It’s not quite the sharp relief that you might associate with the first shoots of spring; a sliced crab apple that’s fallen straight off the tree, maybe, or a sudden rain shower on crisp grass, perhaps. But it isn’t anything like the sweaty oppression of a hot summer’s day either, which hovers somewhere between a damp gym sock and an overripe banana.

Early June is much more subtle than that. It’s a gradual sweetening of the air, an almost honey-like scent that creeps out across the land and rolls out a yellowing haze in its wake. It is experienced especially well at dawn by the side of a pond, when it can feel like the whole country is being gently dusted with a caramelized sugar crust simply for your pleasure, or that you’ve been viewing the land through a pair of ginger-coloured stockings that are pulled tight right across the balls of your eyes.

When early June is on form it brings the humans warily to their gardens, to cook meat and attempt some ice in their drinks, and also calls bees out of their hives to gather and discuss making a move. Don’t be fooled, though – early June brings a sense of threat too. It is not yet summer, and all that has built since winter could quite easily be swept aside in a solitary night of single-digit temperatures, or a week of sullen rain. It is a risk that only doubles if someone is foolish enough to remark: ‘What wonderful weather we’ve been having recently.’

For me, and anglers like me, early June exists as a hidden fifth season. It’s not always found in early June; it can actually be any time from May, or even as early as late April, if we have had an exceptionally warm spring. Throwing our increasingly irrelevant Gregorian calendar aside, it is more accurate to place this season somewhere between the point the bluebells pass their best, and the seven days of proper sun we call summer. It brings trout to the surface to feed voraciously on the first of the serious fly hatches, a time known as ‘duffer’s fortnight’, where even the most novice of anglers could seemingly catch a fish with a bent pin, but it is early morning on a certain type of water targeting a certain type of fish that defines the hidden season for some of us.

If you are lucky enough to catch this bridging spell at its climax then it is as close to climatic perfection as I think it is possible to experience as a fisherman. To achieve true flawlessness, though, is to time these rarefied atmospherics with your presence beside a lily-choked and tree-lined pool, at the exact point of sunrise. Obviously you will need a rod, loaded with light line and a bright float. Preferably there will also be a billowing steam peeling off the water’s surface, and, once you have made your first cast, great plumes of pinhead-sized bubbles will surround your patch of water in a fizzing carpet.

If there is an angling scene that better represents the quintessence of this unsung time of year then I am yet to see it, but the fish that leads the charge doesn’t just show itself to anyone. You have to be willing to search.

It was the start of the summer holidays from school, my first in secondary education, and Grandad was searching furiously at the back end of his living room. His arse had just nearly knocked the television over.

‘Yes! I’ve got it!’ he shouted in triumph. While lifting an old Polaroid cleanly from the labyrinth of VHS cassettes and family albums, he resembled an immense old walrus emerging from the water with a fresh fish in its teeth.

It was a black-and-white photo showing a solid-looking young man kicking a rugby ball. His shoulders are leaning back, his spine is straight, and the ball has just been thumped so hard it is leaving his toe as nothing more than an egg-shaped blur.

Grandad restored his breath. ‘There, Will.’ He presents me with the image while inhaling, this time for dramatic effect. ‘The perfect kick. You’ll never see it done better than that.’ He thumbs the photo to make his point. ‘That. Is how you do it, my boy.’

I grip it in my hands.

It’s him in the picture, isn’t it? Of course it’s him.

Things hadn’t gone too well at my new school. The endless evenings of fishing after lessons were over for a start – homework and a long journey to and from the gates had made sure of that – plus, after seven years of climbing the year groups at the local village primary school, I had found myself unceremoniously dumped back at the very bottom of the pecking order. It wasn’t like Wisbech Grammar was all that bad. I was bullied, but not terribly so; it was the brand of schoolboy cruelty that had you tying a coin into the knot of your tie, to stop it being pulled so tight it was impossible to undo, rather than the threat of actual bodily harm. But having any sort of fear of attending school was new to me, and I didn’t like it at all.

This was the start of adult life, though, where the first lesson you learn is that your free time will be leased back to you only once you’ve earned it, and that your future now depends on your ranking within an extremely narrow field of disciplines.

In lieu of stellar grades – I was no academic – I was to be judged by my ability to hit a cricket ball and take a full-contact rugby tackle. The problem was I was terrible at both rugby and cricket. We had played neither at my primary school, bar the very occasional game with a soft ball, or tag rugby, where the worst thing that could happen is that your mate grabs your shorts, and not your tag, and you end up exposing yourself to the class.

Unfortunately there really isn’t much room for fishing in the arena of competitive team sports, especially those played by adolescent boys. Sure, there is a match-angling scene, but mostly this still boils down to individuals performing against other individuals, and no one – I repeat, no one – has pictures of the latest match-angling stars plastered across their bedroom walls. Anglers just aren’t idols or icons for your normal teenager. My obsession with John Wilson suddenly seemed very childish and, to be frank, a bit embarrassing.

My recent progression as an angler was an irrelevance to my new classmates, of course. No one cared how good my casting was getting or that I had recently broken my perch personal best. Instead, my fishing became my escape route, the secret place I could vanish into to hide from my struggles at school. Later angling would actually offer me something of a pathway out of my problems, but that was all to come and in the first year of the new school I simply had no choice but to play the sports they instructed me to play.

I couldn’t even catch a cricket ball, let alone throw it. They were rock-hard and frightening, much like the teachers and older kids who pushed past me in the corridor, and, as such, I tried to avoid them, all of them, at any cost.

‘You’re a bit of a loner, aren’t you?’ remarked one of my peers, after yet another lunchtime of dodging the other pupils in the first year. I felt hot tears puddling in my eyes and quickly looked away. ‘No.’ You’re just all dickheads, I wish I could’ve said.

Dad and I were sat together in the Rose Tavern pub at the end of the school year. He was a massive real-ale nerd so going to pubs was hardly something new. Even as a twelve-year-old I had seen the inside of most of the decent pubs in our area, especially if they graced the hallowed pages of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide, but it was a rare occurrence to be alone with him and without the rest of the family. I was finally sat in the inner sanctum, the actual bar and not just the ‘Family Fun Zone’. In with the real men, who drank by the pint, smoked and swore, I thought for a moment that Dad might even buy me a beer, but really I knew the real reason why I was here. I had just experienced the sporting equivalent of being tarred, feathered and marched around the market square naked. It was time for a fatherly pep talk. He slid an orange juice across the table towards me. ‘It will get better, give it time, Will.’ I felt too sick to even drink it. He had to ‘give it time’ at his school, he explained, and it wasn’t easy for him either, at first.

‘It actually took me right till sixth form before I really started enjoying it,’ he attempted, jovially. Sixth form! Was Dad absolutely out of his mind? That was six years away! I looked at the orange juice in front of me and wished my whole life would go away.

My first rugby season had been a complete and utter disaster. It began with quite possibly the most anonymous performance in rugby union history, where the one touch of the ball I had was the moment it collided with my face, and split open my nose, and ended, even more dramatically, when one of the teachers used my limp form to demonstrate the dump tackle and shattered my collarbone in the process.

Sadly, my collarbone had re-fused just in time for the cricket season, but, unlike the X-Men, it had not mutated into anything that might have given me superpowers or even just a better throw. The year’s crowning glory, truly the fly on this absolute turd of a term, had occurred just an hour before Dad’s morale-boosting speech in the pub.

The Under-12 first-team cricketers were a man down, and as I had volunteered to do the scoring in the ludicrously misguided parental belief that ‘it’s all about taking part’, I was drafted in as the eleventh player.

I spent our opponents’ innings just trying to avoid the ball, a feat I achieved well by virtue of the fact my team wanted me nowhere near the ball either, but when it came to our turn to bat my luck ran clean out.

Wickets tumbled with regularity from almost the moment our batsmen began their run chase. They had a bowler with an arm like Hercules, who, quite remarkably, also appeared to have grown some facial hair. I could only assume this man-boy was part of some witness protection programme, sent to terrorize the Under-12 cricket scene in relative anonymity.

Stumps exploded into puffs of sawdust and all too soon I found I was strapping myself into every single piece of protective equipment the school owned. I was sure I was going to die at the crease, and, ten minutes later, I realized I had.

All I needed to do for our team to escape the debacle with a draw was to bat for three balls. Three balls. The first fizzed past my head. I didn’t even see it. Hercules glowered at me. ‘He isn’t moving,’ I heard an ignoramus shout from within my own team, who, I noted, had helpfully gathered in a ten-man semi-circle around the boundary rope, as if they were witnessing an execution by stoning.

The second ball swung away, just inches from shattering my fingers or, worse, my stumps. Everyone groaned. Hands were placed on heads on both sides. Just one more left, I thought to myself. I looked to my dad, off work for the game, but never really a sporting man either. He tried to give me an encouraging thumb’s-up look from behind his glasses and improbably thick hair, but his face betrayed his true feelings: I was in deep shit. With sad inevitability, the third and final ball crumpled my wicket.

You could’ve heard my teammates on Mars as I trudged off the pitch. ‘Fucking useless Millard, we should never have sent him out there.’ A darkness descended. I scooped up my bag and headed for Dad’s car and the Rose Tavern pub, without speaking a single word till I was wedged in the triple sanctuary of a Toby mug, a fruit machine and my dad.

‘They totally blamed me, Dad. You heard what they said. How can I show my face in school after that?’ I was ranting at my juice. ‘I hate this place. I hate this school. I hate everything about it. All of my primary school friends went to Downham, I just don’t understand why I’m here in this place with these blazers and rules and teachers and tests … and terrible sports … and not … not with all my friends.’ I started to cry, properly this time.

Dad put a hand on my shoulder. ‘If you still hate it at the end of next year we’ll move you out. I promise.’ I sniffed hard and plunged my wet face into his shirt. ‘Give it time,’ he said again. I could tell it was hurting him too, but I didn’t care.

‘But what about rugby season next year, Dad?’ I shouted. ‘They’ll kill me!’

He looked at me with glassy brown eyes, and said nothing.

The reason for Grandad’s sudden expedition to the land that time forgot was that he had spoken to my dad and believed the solution to all of my problems was behind his television set.

‘All you need to do is study this picture and you’ll be able to kick penalties from the centre spot.’ He slapped me so forcefully between the shoulder blades I felt the tremor in my stick-thin legs, like two albino chipolatas.

There was no way that this was what Dad had advised Grandad to do. He had come up with this solution all on his own.

‘You’ve got all summer before the start of the rugby season. Just give it some beef, boy!’

I looked up at him, hoping he could see through to the lost child within. There was a pause as he stooped to meet my gaze, understanding dawning perhaps?

‘You can even take it home and study it if you like?’ He gave me a chummy wink and another slap on the back.

I didn’t take it home. I had eight weeks before I had to be back at that school and I intended to spend it all forgetting the place ever existed. That meant two things: fishing, and really big carp.

By my final year of primary school the memory of the first pike had faded. I had a clutch of close friends from the village whom I fished with and, together with our bikes and the timetable of the Norfolk Green bus, we were pushing further than ever before. Bigger drains for bigger fish, stronger rods, thicker lines and the greater levels of patience required to sit through the shoals of roach and perch for something really special.

With them I caught my first zander, our first proper pike, my first ever chub, all by strapping rods to the crossbars of our bikes and pedalling as far as our legs could carry us in a single day. We were the kings of the Fens, bound only by the parental rule that we must be home by nightfall, and by the end of our time together in school our angling ambitions were inevitably extending beyond what we could feasibly catch from our home waters. We wanted more, and we weren’t alone.

From the late 1970s onwards anglers nationwide were draining from Britain’s rivers and canals and taking their tackle to well-stocked and exceptionally well-polished commercially motivated fisheries. Overwhelmingly, the explosive popularity of one single species had driven the change: the king carp. It had first been introduced from Asia as food for monks during the Middle Ages, and selective breeding had seen the proliferation of a heavier, hardier and highly varied cyprinid species that combined a readiness to feed with a heart-stoppingly powerful fight from even the smallest specimens. There was hardly a pond in the UK that they couldn’t be stocked in, and, with astronomic annual weight gain possible from a new wave of protein-rich baits, targeting the species passed from the specialist and into the hands of the everyman.

Images of these giant fish, with their magnificent scale patterns, implausibly broad guts and thick, rounded mouths, screamed from the front page of every fishing magazine and tackle shop in the country. Even John Wilson was far from immune to carp fever: he built a carp lake in his own back garden, and soon released a video titled Oliver’s First Carp, in which a boy exactly our age caught a single fish that weighed more than our entire annual catch from the Creek.

That was enough for us; and what remained of that summer was spent begging our parents to drive us out to our closest commercial carp lake.

I have hardly ever felt as ill-prepared as the day we eventually arrived on the banks at Wood Lakes in Stowbridge. This wasn’t fishing as we knew it: it was war. Row upon row of stiff, carbon-fibre rods sat on tripods backed onto hi-tech bite alarms, like a battery of anti-aircraft missiles, and behind each rig sat a grizzled-looking angler dressed head to toe in camouflage gear. Even the baits were unrecognizable: brightly coloured balls called boilies that looked more like sweets than an edible fish attractant, but, my God, these set-ups were effective. Every so often a bite alarm would scream off and one of the men would lift nonchalantly into the sort of fish that would have had us talking for months.

We stood in silence and watched the carnage. It was all we could do. Our rods, cobbled-together collection of tackle and Mum-made foil-wrapped sandwiches were pathetic in comparison.

When we eventually did attempt to fish we hid away in the far corner of the lake, and took to plundering our way through the shoal of tiny perch that lived there. It had to be tiny perch, didn’t it? Despite all the fish we had caught together in months past we were now thrown to the minnows of our adolescence. That one morning in the company of the kings of carp had proven we were still just little boys after all, and I wasn’t actually the king of anything. Things just got worse from that point. I would be even more aware of my shortcomings the following summer, thanks to cricket at my new school, but of even greater concern that year was the discovery that I was no longer surrounded by my friends. In big boys’ school I was just another fluff-faced squeaky-voiced competitor lining up in a bizarre, hormone-driven race without rules or a discernible finishing line. Quite quickly, catching a big carp became the embodiment of my teenage frustrations. It was my fantasy fish, the one creature capable of bridging the gap between my shortcomings as an angler and my teenage aspirations, and meant so much more than just ticking off another species in the Wilson Encyclopedia. For me, it was puberty.

If only I knew then what I know now I might not have been so eager to commit myself fully to commercial carp fishing at such a young age.

My friends and I were very late to the party. It was the early 1990s by the time we graced the banks of Wood Lakes, by which point the nature of commercial carp fishing had been refined to such an extent that it felt like the whole fishscape might well have spilled off the back of the same truck.

Identikit lakes, fish and fishermen spread out across the land, reducing the sport to catching as big, or as much, with as little effort as humanly possible. Well-maintained fishing platforms replaced wild holes in the reeds, flattened roads led direct to well-manicured banks, and, in many places, fishing swims were dragged entirely clean of debris, detritus or any other snags that could result in a lost carp, and a spoiled day.

For the most part, any native wildlife that could be seen to have any detrimental impact on carp growth in the carp pond was actively discouraged or ruthlessly controlled. At the fisheries that could afford them otter-proof fences were erected, cormorants – ‘the black death’ – were managed, or just shot, and so-called ‘nuisance’ fish species – bream, roach, rudd and tench – were netted en masse and removed altogether. The key to success is to ensure the customer’s hook baits always have the very best chance of working their way to the lips of a specimen carp, and specimen carp only.

Chris Yates, an angling legend and staunch traditionalist, who famously broke the British carp record in 1980 on an antique rod and single grain of corn, wrote a scathing attack on the direction of the sport in his brilliant 1997 book The Secret Carp: ‘this standardization has gone beyond a joke. Not only do the majority of carp anglers have to fish with at least three identical rods and reels, they must also have the complete product range of whoever happens to be the most fashionable tackle and bait manufacturers of the day. And of course they also require waters that can accommodate this multi-rodded, heavily equipped regimental approach. So the lakes have become standardized as well. Ultimately even the fish have become standardized with all specimens entered onto graphs which show growth ratios, condition factors, identification marks, colour variations, dietary habits, intelligence ratings, dress sense, musical appreciation and knowledge of world history.’

He’s being disingenuous of course, but only slightly. Carp fishing today has arguably gone even further down the standardization road. On one side are the big fish venues with lightly stocked, but named and well-known, carp giants that might grace the bank several times in a season, and on the other are fish-filled carp factories that provide constant rod-bending action all year round.

Thirty years ago a fishing catch totalling 100lb or more would have been big news, but this season a six-hour match was won by an angler who banked an astonishing 1,500lb of carp. His haul amounted to 350 fish at a catch rate of one carp a minute. With the top three competitors also catching in excess of 1,000lb of fish each as well, it amounted to over 1,900 carp out of that one lake in a single August afternoon.

Given the Environment Agency recommends that natural fisheries can only hold 200 pounds of fish per acre to remain healthy, it is clear something is very definitely, very seriously, wrong. No fisherman is that good. Fishing in this way places fish, and fish welfare, as firmly secondary to the demands of the angler. In the worst-case scenario, the fish in these oxygen-depleted and unnatural environments must eat the food we offer them just to survive. It’s little more than Battle Royale or The Hunger Games of carp, fishing reduced to a game of numbers based wholly on a single species.

It sounds awful, it really does, but for the past twenty years I’ve absolutely lapped it up. This is, in part, because not all commercial fisheries are quite that bad, but also because they can be an enormous amount of fun. I get the attraction, I really do. When you haven’t got much spare time to indulge in a hobby that has a tendency to be a slow burn on the best of days, sometimes you just want to catch, but this overpowering magnetism of the commercial lake has fundamentally altered fishing as we know it, and not for the better: for the majority of anglers today, there is simply no longer any alternative to the commercial.

I had learnt from the Canal & River Trust that many of our once great waterways have fallen into a state of neglect purely through a total lack of angling interest, but I also recalled John Ellis’s comment that all the youth seek these days are thrills from bigger and bigger carp; and this, I discovered, doesn’t necessarily keep them in our sport for life.

This season’s rod licence sales show there is a huge lack of young people coming to fishing; worse yet, junior licences are down a massive 50 per cent in just the last five years. The only growing branch of the sport today is among pensioners, the sorts of people who had grown up around massive canal matches and the understated pleasures to be had from dangling a worm in wild rivers and streams.

In building up to the carp lakes through the small perch, roach and pike of my local river, I had already received a gradual apprenticeship in the essential techniques I needed, but I also formed a critically important, and deeply intense, connection to my natural environment. It just isn’t the same if you jump straight into the sport and catch a big lump from a stocked pit at the very first time of asking. There’s no question that carp fishing is extremely exciting, but the buzz wears thin if that’s all you ever experience and catching something is guaranteed. It’s hard to imagine many young people sticking with fishing once that box has been ticked multiple times, and I can’t see them reverting to the subtle pleasures to be had from plundering small fry from a river either, especially once they’ve been hooked on the power of the carp.

You can’t blame the owners of the commercial fisheries. It’s just business after all, and many have since taken serious steps to set up in a manner that is better for the carp, but these waters shouldn’t be to the exclusion of all other fishing styles and species. It is down to us, as a fishing community, to take responsibility for protecting the integrity of our sport by choosing to be more diverse with our angling. After all, shouldn’t fishing represent the exception, the foil, the buffer, to a modern world already filled with uniformity, instant gratification, click-bait buzzes and shrinking attention spans? Angling, by its very nature, is a random, often chaotic, collection of environments, species, methods and possibilities that afford the fisherman the opportunity to get utterly lost for a lifetime or more. You can’t always win, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily lose.

‘Whatever next? Rods that reel the fish in for you, or devices that cast your bait into the perfect spot?’ I didn’t want to tell Grandad about the electronic bait boat I’d seen during my latest trip to Wood Lakes – it quite literally did cast that man’s bait into the perfect spot. ‘It’s taking the skill out of fishing,’ he droned on and on.

By the end of the summer after that fateful first year at secondary school my fishing friends from the village had drifted away. We had caught a handful of small carp between us, and had swapped our river tackle and maggots for our own series of identical rods and bags of boilies, but the polarizing demands of our new schools in different towns had come between us in the end. We were all on different paths now, and I missed them a great deal.

The biggest new challenge on my horizon was found within the new commercial carp fishery that had just opened, ironically, at the end of Grandad’s garden. I knew beyond doubt that I needed those carp more than ever now. Besides, it seemed more than just mere coincidence that big carp were available a stone’s throw from Grandad’s lobelias. This was my chance to fill the void left by friends and sporting failures, and it felt like it was being handed to me on a plate. I told Grandad we had to go. He just laughed. So I went on my own.

It took a couple of weeks down there before it happened. I was fishing a bunch of maggots tight to the back of a purpose-built island feature when my rod was, quite literally, ripped clean off its rests and into the lake.

I picked it up by its disappearing butt and began a fight like no other. The reel screamed and the rod hooped to breaking point as it tried in vain to cushion a thunderous opening run. It was far and away the biggest fish I had ever been connected to at the time, a fish I had long dreamt of and a fight I had spent long hours practising for and considering. But now it was all happening I felt a sense of near-paralysing fear, both at what the fish might do to my tackle and what it would do to my vulnerable emotional state if it managed to escape.

Eventually the great carp wallowed, hippo-like, directly under the rod tip. It was as if I was watching Wilson on a video of my childhood, laughing along and reaching for the net, but it wasn’t him, it was me. I leant forward, waist-high in the lake with water seeping down deep into the fibres of my Umbro tracksuit bottoms, and folded the fish deep into my memory for all time.

I had caught a mirror carp, so named after the set of shining reflective scales that adorn its flanks. It tipped my scales at a hefty 12lb, not massive by carp standards, but the restorative properties that fish had for my self-belief were worth a thousand centuries in cricket or a winning goal in the ninety-third minute. If I could emulate my fishing hero, then what else couldn’t I achieve? I was euphoric that night and, in a rush of blood to the head, asked Mum, our household’s cricketing impresario, if I could join the village cricket club.

From now on I would seek only bigger and bigger challenges, and I would take them head-on. The capture of the mirror carp had bolstered my sense of self-belief to such an extent that I could almost imagine its immaculate scales were to be worn as plates in my own suit of armour. No one was going to make me feel scared or hopeless ever again; and I was going to get better at sport, even if it did kill me.

In spring, I returned from a long period of filming in the jungles of New Guinea to find blissful sunshine bathing the nation. Finally, the horror rains of the endless winter had passed and the new season had brought some superb fishing weather.

I had wanted to catch crucians from the outset of this challenge. Mostly because I thought they were among the most beautiful fish swimming in our waters – I still do – but I also hoped it would be a really good way of exploring the unsung traditional still waters of the nation. The sorts of places you might see in the paintings of the English Romantics, very Constable-esque, I imagined, but I also felt, after the drubbing at the hands of both the pike and the perch, that this was a fish I actually had a fairly good chance with. I had caught a fair few crucians while out carp fishing, including one real beauty almost 3lb in weight, so surely with just a few tweaks to my tactics, and perhaps a bit of research, a whopper was well within my reach?

I, along with many others, believed that the crucian was native to Britain. Its pocket-sized and dignified appearance was surely more in keeping with these fair isles than the brutish king carp? However, I soon discovered that was not the case at all. The most recent DNA analysis of a sample in Norfolk can only place the crucian here in the medieval period, around the same time as all the other carp species. I forgave myself for my mistake – the analysis was only a couple of years old and was hardly official. Even Alwyne Wheeler, fish expert and former curator of the Natural History Museum’s fish department, had believed they were native, stating as much in his paper published in the year 2000, but there was still no way of getting round the cold, hard, present-day facts: this fish was introduced.

Its being so much smaller than the king carp has led to suggestions that the crucian might have been brought here from the east as something of an ornamental species, a splash of colour in the noble’s pond, but it is hard to find precise references to support the supposition. What we do know is that carp as a whole were a much sought-after food item in the Middle Ages: perhaps a multitude of carp species were actually ordered to create something of a smorgasbord for those with a piscatorial palate? Carp was no food for the peasantry though – maintained by monks and consumed by monarchs, carp were both luxury food items and status enhancers, favoured, in particular, by the House of Tudor. Who knows? Perhaps the rotund King Henry VIII was chewing down on his umpteenth crucian while considering executing another wife? He certainly had a partiality for the carp species, and practically every other freshwater fish in Britain. Susanne Groom, in her book At the King’s Table: Royal Dining through the Ages, describes a magnificent starter course served to Henry VIII that naturally included carp, but also herring, cod, lampreys, pike, salmon, whiting, haddock, plaice, bream, porpoise, seal, trout, crabs, lobsters, custard, tart, fritters and fruit, and that doesn’t even touch on the man’s penchant for whale meat, black pudding and swans. It was curious, I thought, how all the other fish species to grace the tables and plates of the palace were so well distinguished and explicitly referenced, yet when it came to the carp, everything from goldfish, to commons, to crucians, fell under the same generic ‘carp’ banner. I glossed over this detail at the time, but it was actually a sign of things to come.

I thumbed through the Wilson Encyclopedia to the crucian section. I noted his description of the unusual ‘upturned mouth (without barbels)’ and tendency to ‘shoal according to their size’; but it wasn’t until I came to cast my eye on the listed British record size that I stopped in my tracks. Something wasn’t right.

5lb 10.5oz.

There was no way that could possibly be accurate. I knew for a fact that there was no verified crucian catch in Britain in excess of 5lb as, after I caught my three-pounder, I had checked the record books and discovered that the record back then was only around 4.5lb, but I just couldn’t imagine Wilson making such an elementary mistake either. I was going to need some help.

Peter Rolfe runs a wonderful website dedicated wholly to the species (http://www.crucians.org) and after a friendly exchange of emails I tapped the digits of his number into the receiver and a gravelly, almost Shakespearean voice soon answered the phone.

‘The sooner we drop “carp” from “crucian carp” the better,’ he growled.

Peter Rolfe has been dedicated to the preservation of the crucian for the past forty years. He is a bona fide hero for the species (even receiving the Fred J. Taylor Award for Environmental Stewardship in acknowledgement of his work), but I doubt he’d ever wear such a title.

‘People think the fish is related to the king carp, when they hear that “carp” moniker, when of course it isn’t. It’s related to the goldfish.’ I scribbled furiously as he spoke. It was all news to me. ‘The bigger carp species out-compete crucians for territory and food, so that’s bad for one, but also they interbreed with them with tremendous ease, as does the very similar brown goldfish. As commercial fisheries and the stocking of king carp became popular everywhere, well, the humble crucian didn’t really stand much of a chance.’

In my twelve-year-old haste to pivot on the scaly backs of king carp and hop into the world of ‘real’ men, I didn’t once stop to consider what the consequences of such a wholesale stocking programme might be. By the end of the 1990s it had become abundantly clear that the crucian was actually in very real trouble indeed. ‘It hadn’t seemed so bad at first, I suppose it was just that they had become less popular,’ continued Peter, ‘but once we realized just how many fish that we thought were crucians were in fact cross-breeds with goldfish or common carp, well, we realized the situation was somewhat dire.’

Peter was putting it delicately. If the crucian wasn’t marching to the brink of extinction in this country, it was certainly gearing up for the walk. It was a paradox of sorts, our obsession with the king carp speeding the decline of a different species of carp, but it was pretty easy to see why things had gone so wrong for the crucian: it was small enough to be ignored. Little wonder it preferred the hidden season: as a fish of Britain it was once dangerously close to vanishing altogether.

The Wilson Encyclopedia puts a crucian mega-specimen at over 3lb: that is chump change for the king carp, really, a very average-sized fish; and with an angling population hooked on the bigger-is-better mantra the crucian was almost predestined for trouble. The odds were stacked further against the fish as their traditional habitat – small, rural pools – began to disappear nationwide through drought, pollution and shifting agricultural practices. The crucians might have stood something of a chance in an environment where a disappearing waterway would at least make local news – in small pools in our parks or urban ponds, for instance – but unfortunately the well-intentioned communities here have a tendency to unwittingly liberate their pet goldfish directly into the crucian gene pool. With that, it seemed, to Peter and his friends at least, the crucians’ fate was sealed.

Then came a quite unexpected turn in their fortunes.

In 1997 the British Record Fish Committee hit the ‘reset’ button on the whole crucian record list. Following the cross-breeding revelations it was felt the record as it stood was essentially redundant: no one could be sure if the leading fish were pure crucians or just cross-breed hybrids with goldfish and common carp. Clear rules were set out to help the layperson identify the fish – between thirty-two and thirty-four scales along the lateral line, a lack of barbels around the mouth, a large convex dorsal fin – and a new fishing challenge was laid down to an army of anglers apparently itching for something new.

One year later, the capture of a truly enormous 4lb 2oz pure crucian lit up the angling press, and the wider fishing public, surprisingly, switched on to this diminutive fish wholesale. Perhaps the king-carp-shaped blinkers were gradually being lifted as the new millennium approached, but, either way, as the tragic plight of the fish made the national press, the call to do much more to save the crucian reached an unprecedented level.

‘Things were quite suddenly much more optimistic for the crucian.’ Peter warmed at the thought. ‘The word has since spread and many more people are interested in fishing for them these days. Really, I’m chuffed it’s all happening.’

The Wilson Encyclopedia had hit the shelves, and my Grandad’s own Henry VIII-esque stomach, in 1995. Wilson, like the rest of us, simply didn’t realize these ‘carp’ were all separate species with a truly extraordinary ability to cross-breed.

‘There is a lot of misinformation out there about the fish still. Ponds and fisheries claiming to hold the crucian when really they don’t, and also fish breeders who think they are selling pure crucians when in fact they are goldfish or common-carp hybrids. You can see online, people still think they are catching near-record crucians when, in fact, they are all just cross-breeds. The problem is, as soon as you’ve unwittingly stocked these hybridized fish you stand no chance of maintaining a healthy pure-crucian population.’

I put down the receiver and immediately ordered a copy of Peter’s superb book Crock of Gold, which is, to date, the only book dedicated solely to the crucian carp, but I had an awful feeling. If the entire nation, and many of our top anglers, had been so easily duped with cross-bred fish, then what was to say every crucian I’d ever caught was not an imposter too?

Days later, with Peter’s book spread across my thighs, my fingers hovered nervously over several digital folders filled with photos of fish. Gradually, I began clicking my way through my catches past.

The princely brace from a recent visit to a farm pond were clearly just brown goldfish; they looked like crucians but the scale count was way over. I went back further. The surprise two-pounder from a Newport commercial in the depths of winter. Urgh. It was glaringly obvious now: the dorsal was the wrong shape and the – almost grossly – disproportionate fantail marked it out clearly as another goldfish cross. This was looking bad. Armed with the truth in Peter’s book I was starting to feel pretty foolish. I clicked through to the folder containing my personal-best crucian, the 3lb fish, a real beauty: a Wilson mega-specimen none the less. Staring proudly down the lens in the twilight, I’m holding what I knew now could only be a clear crucian–common-carp cross. I even sent the image to Peter Rolfe to be sure. His capitalization of the word ‘not’ before the words ‘a crucian’ was the final thumping nail in my specimen-crucian-carp coffin.

I continued, searching, almost desperately, for something to cling to, but as fish after fish failed to make the grade it slowly became clear that in all my years of carp fishing there was probably only one occasion when I caught a pure crucian. I was eleven years old, fishing a holiday pond somewhere in the rolling farmland of the south-west because I had been told by the owner that it held a mirror carp. The surprise crucian had taken a fancy to the piece of sunken bread flake I had freelined unwittingly into its path, but, back then, I couldn’t have been more underwhelmed.

I can remember it now, this little golden fish in my palm, all friendly curves and smoothened fins, that I decided couldn’t possibly be a proper carp. It was small and somehow fraudulent, more suited to a goldfish bowl than a fishing pond. Mutton dressed as mutton. I plopped it back in and re-cast, harder and further, hoping pure brute power would bring me closer to my own Shangri-La: my first king carp, just like the ones in all the magazines.

I hadn’t even bothered to photograph that fish, and here I was, over twenty years later, pleading the details of that distant memory to materialize into a barbel-less fish, with a convex dorsal fin, and thirty-two to thirty-four scales along its lateral line. It probably only weighed around 6oz, but that crucian, I realized now, was my new personal best.

In that moment my whole record-breaking challenge had been turned right on its head. It was like someone had fired a rocket into my front room. I slapped the laptop closed, more astonished than disappointed. This was absolutely extraordinary. All this time. All those carp. Not one of them actually a crucian. I laughed out loud and sent Lottie, my cat, charging out of the catflap in fright.

This was far bigger than me and some record chase. Not for one moment did I actually ever think I would end up chasing a species with the pure objective of simply catching one for potentially the very first time as an adult, let alone a fish that had survived such an epic threat to its very existence.

I fell in love with the thought.

As I type, the crucian record at 4lb 10oz is held jointly by two anglers: Stephen Frapwell and Michael James, who caught the same fish in early May 2015 from the crucian mecca, Johnson’s Lake in Surrey. I had been very kindly invited by Peter to fish the crucian ponds he had developed with his own hands, but they observed the close season until 16 June. I couldn’t wait till then. It wasn’t simply just aesthetically pleasing to be bankside at this time of year: all my research pointed to the fact that the bigger crucians came out then too. They were fit to burst with spawn by early June, preferring to deposit their loads before the king carp, and, according to Peter, just after the roach, perch and rudd. This year June had arrived with unseasonably high temperatures, and the king carp in my local lakes were already beginning to splash the shallows and deposit their loads; if I was going to smash my personal best I needed to act right now.

Utilizing the fisheries database on Peter’s crucian website I narrowed down the potential waters to those that had either recently broken records or had only just been pipped at the post, then I hit the phones. Back in May 2003, Little Moulsham Pit near Yateley had given up a 4lb 9oz fish to Martin Bowler. It was tricky to get a ticket and there were few details online. A call to the Yateley angling centre revealed it was now a syndicate carp lake owned by a man named Alan Cooper, who ran a groundbait company. Eventually I got through to Alan, but the news was bad. ‘They’ve all been eaten by cormorants, mate,’ came his flat reply, ‘it’s too expensive to restock them and it’ll take twenty years before a crucian ever gets to that size again. That’s twenty years of running the gauntlet with the cormorants and even at record size they can still be eaten. Big carp are a much better bet for me, everyone is a carp fisherman these days. I’m afraid it’s where the sensible money is.’ Over in Pembrokeshire, I was very excited to learn that Holgan’s Farm claimed to house potential record-breaking crucians, in a bespoke crucian lake, but a phone call there brought another rebuff. They had opted to stock brown goldfish and the resultant ‘crucians’ today were almost certainly hybrids. Realistically that only left me with two other places: one a real wild card, the Leather Lake, on the Verulam Angling Club ticket, which had produced a – at the time – record-equalling fish of 4lb 9oz five years previously; and the other the home of the current record, Johnson’s Lake, which is looked after by Godalming Angling Society.

I was in a very tight spot. Membership to both those clubs would set me back over £200. Perhaps if I lived closer it might be worth considering at a real stretch, but just for a day’s fishing out of my home in South Wales it was, quite simply, an insane amount to spend. I’d learnt my lesson the hard way that winter on Chew and my funds just weren’t going to stretch.

I emailed both clubs and explained my case. A week later the wonderful people at Verulam got in touch to grant me permission to fish the Leather Lake, asking only that I let the bailiff know when I intended to fish, but sadly I didn’t hear anything back from Godalming. Life at the top of the crucian tree is probably tough – you can’t be granting permission to every Tom, Dick and Harry with a hard-luck story. There was some very good news though. Johnson’s Lake was actually closed till 16 June anyway, to give the fish a deserved break, but right next door was Harris Lake, which was available to the public on a day ticket and stocked with the same group of crucians as Johnson’s (which I later discovered, to my immense surprise, were all originally taken from the monsters past of Little Moulsham, an afterlife of sorts for this exceptionally strong strain of fish). A call to the on-site tackle shop revealed the lake had emerged, perhaps unsurprisingly, as the odds-on favourite to best the fish in Johnson’s, and with favourable conditions and a larger stamp of crucians coming out earlier in the week I needed to get down there sharpish. I cancelled all my work plans for the next day and set the alarm for 2 a.m.

I had a chance.

Just before 5 a.m. the sun was rising on the most beautiful lake I have ever had the fortune to visit. Found the other side of a glistening trout stream seemingly fit to burst with Canada geese and their young, the Leather Lake unfolded from a thicket like something out of a dream.

It looked almost like the water had been poured into a divot in a fantasy forest, such was the density of the trees and greenery pressing into the water and spilling out of the sides of the small, shrub-tufted islands. It felt to me that if you simply were to pull the plug and drain the lake water, the rest of that forest would still be there underneath, just waiting to heave up from the lakebed.

The dawn added to the whimsy. Reflected in the gin-clear water it cast something of a week-old-bruise purplish haze across the place, and one inviting-looking corner was so choked with lily-pads that it wouldn’t have felt out of place in a Beatrix Potter book. Indeed, I could very well imagine the hapless frog, Jeremy Fisher, punting his way through the whole scene in search of his next minnow.

But it was the noise of the birdlife that set this place apart from anything else I’d ever experienced. There was a riotous, cacophonous clamour coming from all sides of this avian amphitheatre. I don’t think it was simply that I was up at a ridiculous hour – I have been fishing at silly-o’clock many times in the past, but I have never ever heard birdsong quite like this in Britain. For at least an hour it was absolutely astonishing and caused the whole lake to crackle with the sort of electricity usually reserved for major sporting events. This was a gathering of feathered souls participating in a massive collective experience, and I felt utterly privileged to witness it. This was their performance though – I was merely an uninvited audience member, and shuffled round the junglified banks with my head down in deferential silence.

I settled myself into a spot hemmed in by a weeping willow and a semi-submerged tree branch. I had seen a few bubbles, not a mass of action by any means, but certainly better than nothing. Plumbing the depth revealed it was significantly deep at the margins, a healthy five foot or so, but also that the entire swim was chock full of weed. A long tendril of green blanket snared on my line as I retrieved, like the clasping arm of a mighty kraken or sea serpent. On inspection, the tendril was erupting with tiny bloodworm that leapt from the fresh air and back into their lake water home as I tried to free it. It was a wonderful sign of the health of the place, but not so good for my chances of catching. These were naturally fed fish that didn’t need the carpet of synthetic bait I was proffering. Here the ethos seems to be to stock light and let nature do the rest. There was no question it had worked, as, alongside the record crucian, the lake had once housed a legendary leather carp, a variant on the mirror that has hardly any scales, which had risen to be among the largest leathers in the UK.

I put down a couple of doormat-sized patches of freebies to try and tempt the crucians in for breakfast – a few halibut pellets, some sweetcorn, maggot and casters – and float-fished over the top with the lightest kit I dared. Crucians are renowned for being delicate feeders, taking small baits and giving only the slightest indications of their presence – a murmur on the float and tiny plumes of bubbles, so I had heard – but my presumptive experiences with the crucian had taken such a battering recently I had elected to start from the standpoint that I effectively knew nothing.

Great spirals of buzzers and nymphs drifted like wood smoke across the lake. As the night gave over its hold and allowed day to break, a regal-looking pair of great-crested grebes hunted in the depths beyond my float. Their wonderful russet-coloured plumage fanned water droplets from the upper reaches of their slender white necks every time they emerged from the drink, resembling snowflakes cascading from a furry bordering around the hood of a winter jacket. Clearly, they were having significantly more success with the fish than me.

The birdcalls faded as the dog walkers arrived. All too soon I could hear the M25 droning in the background and all the magic that had briefly held the lake in suspense had gone. It was midnight and Cinderella was back to being a maid with a pumpkin and I was back in the world of man. Nature was supposed to take its rightful place on the seats at the back of the theatre.

It was weird. Like the compression of our natural and wild spaces in this phenomenally over-cultivated and over-populated island had caused the most intensely compacted expression of the resident wildlife in the space of that single hour. I began to pack up my gear.

When I was a child, my favourite joke was:

‘Knock-knock.’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Cook.’

‘Cook who?’

‘That’s the first one I’ve heard this year.’

If I’m blessed with children, the amount of explanation required to describe why that joke is funny will be as tragic as it is pointless. I remember reading recently that one in five birds in Britain are now on the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Red List. Just in my lifetime the majority of those have had their natural habitat reduced by half.

By mid-day I had successfully negotiated my way around the massive single-storey, three-lane car park that is the M25 at rush hour, and arrived at a very different place entirely.

Images of crucians adorned the sign to the Marsh Farm complex that housed the Harris Lake, as if I were in any doubt that in the small world of crucian fishing this place was the celebrity venue.

At first glance, it felt every inch the comfortable commercial: cut grass, a huge on-site tackle shop, neat gravel paths, and clean toilet blocks with hot water and hand towels, but down at water level there was more than a nod to wildlife. Thick flag iris and reeds smothered the banks between fishing pegs, lending the place an air of seclusion once you had settled into your spot lakeside. Numerous mallards cruised the water alongside diving tufted ducks, and, most wonderfully of all, a breeding pair of Arctic terns had taken up residence for the summer. With their long, brilliant-white starburst tail feathers, black caps and bright-red bills, they danced like sprites over the water all day long, remarkably fresh from their recent migration from the Arctic.

All the other anglers had stationed themselves in the deeper water that ran along the opposite bank next to a trainline. The tackle shop had advised that these were very much the hot swims, but, as I’d turned up late, I was going to have to look elsewhere.

I wandered around the lake perimeter before eventually settling into an overgrown corner fed by a stiff breeze. I was feeling confident despite the slim pickings. I quite liked the look of my corner. In truth, I probably would have picked it regardless – it put more space between me and the other anglers on the complex, which I always liked – and within seconds of placing my bag a large fish rolled right at my feet. If that wasn’t a good omen, then I didn’t know what was.

I had some fairly hi-tech gear with me – flavoured fish pellets and syrupy liquid attractants – but I decided to leave them all in the bag. Instead I mixed up a bucket of blended breadcrumbs, which I balled into the deeper water about three rod lengths out, and fixed up a simple float rod with half a worm as hook bait. This was fishing just as Grandad had taught me: traditional and simple.

I had been forewarned that though the king carp might rock up to your bait and sucker-punch you like a heavyweight champion, the crucian tends to dance around it like a featherweight, throwing the occasional jab, that might just quiver your line, without actually taking the hook. That means you need to be prepared to spend time sat on your hands with your heart in your mouth: waiting for a positive indication that something has happened down there.

Half an hour in, my float tip wobbled. It was so gentle, like a divination rod in the presence of a spirit. The crucians had arrived and were transmitting their presence. Gently, oh so gently. The float tip lifted.

The fight of the crucian isn’t anything like the smash-and-grab of the king carp; nor is it jagged like the perch or a sustained pressure like a tench. In the words of the Supremes: it’s a game of give and take; a tug of war where your opponent gets randomly weaker and stronger, leaving the hook free to be pulled out at any time.

Gradually I stole line from the fish till I had it in the net.

It was breathtaking. I wrapped my hand around its golden form. The crucian was exactly 2lb, a phenomenal start, and everything about it – scale counts, fin shape, mouth – matched up precisely, but I just couldn’t believe the size. It was well above the average for this fish. I had crushed my personal best with my first fish. I looked up to see an even larger crucian roll on the surface above my groundbait. The plan, unbelievably, was working.

I slipped the 2lb fish right back and re-cast feverishly. This place was extraordinary; by rights these are fish that should be the sole preserve of the dedicated specimen fishermen, yet here I was fluking one out after an absence of over twenty years. I felt as cheeky as if I’d borrowed the rod of a proper crucian carper, caught his fish, and then nicked his wallet.

Almost immediately I hooked and landed a second fish. Slightly smaller this time at 1lb 8oz. These crucians are deep-bodied, high-backed fish. They had a totally different feel to the so-called crucians I had caught before. Of course, that is understandable, given what I now know, but holding that first brace of fish, with their wonderfully curved underbellies that so elegantly filled the palm of my hand, it felt as rarefied an experience as cradling a newborn baby. In fact, the Harris crucians were so utterly distinct in feel (and, I realize now, I did need to ‘feel’ the fish, as photographs simply don’t cut it) that it is hard to believe I could ever have mistaken those hybrids of my past for the real thing. The crucian is one of those very few fish that doesn’t seem to lose its sheen after capture. If anything, the shape and golden hue are so satisfying, you could fool yourself into thinking the crucian was crafted purely to be held in the human hand.

Other anglers approached. No one else on the lake was catching anything. My late coming had put me right on the fish. Another huge crucian flopped over my carpet of breadcrumbs. ‘They are really taking the piss,’ laughed an elderly angler, albeit through gritted teeth.

As the afternoon wore on into evening I felt I was going crazy. Not only was my swim fizzing like a jacuzzi, but also massive crucians just kept rolling, one after the other, right next to my float. If that wasn’t enough, one specific fish kept swimming forward, projecting its body clean out of the water, and tail walking like a dolphin in repeated nail-straight assaults on my float. To be perfectly honest, it made me feel so self-conscious I started to look over my shoulder to check no one could see what was going on. (Later I read a chapter in Peter’s book by a very experienced crucian angler called Peter Wheat. He too had witnessed the performance, and attributes it to one individual fish, commenting: ‘I have never known another crucian to activate itself in this way.’ I was just glad I hadn’t completely lost my marbles.)

My float bobbed and weaved like a crochet needle. The bites were near imperceptible and almost impossible to hit. I was missing twenty indications for every hook-up, and lost several crucians to hook pulls in the fight. It was frustrating, and not purely down to having had just three hours’ sleep the previous night. These fish were living up to their reputation of being extremely cute feeders. I took a risk and upscaled the size of my hook and immediately snared another brace of fish, breaking my personal best for the second time that day.

As the evening came on, the intense exhaustion I was feeling, combined with the insane levels of concentration it took to just watch a flickering float in windy conditions, started to puddle my mind. Everything was exacerbated by the total lack of activity elsewhere on the lake, and the constant heady presence of those giant acrobatic crucians, every one a fish of a lifetime, crammed en masse into my corner. It began to have me wondering whether really I was just asleep at my seat and dreaming it all: giant golden hubcaps bouncing around the lake like fluffy sheep over a gate. I would have started counting the fish if I hadn’t been sure I’d end up falling in, but, then, was it possible to fall asleep while still in a dream? A mallard croaked to the right of me. I considered striking up a conversation, but then my float started to tremble.

Grandad, truly, would have loved this place. Perhaps I had honoured him in some small way by fishing the lake in the same style I knew he would have adopted had he been here in my stead, but I also knew that, in spite of all the advances in fishing techniques, tackle and bait, I had caught today because I had simply been in the right place at the right time. Sometimes that is all it takes.

The big one dropped at 2lb 5oz. It was like holding on to the moon.

After a not inconsiderable amount of sleep the next day, I rationalized my crucian was no record shaker. It wasn’t even a Wilson mega-specimen and, in reality, the British record is exactly double the size of the fish I caught. All sobering food for thought, but, quite honestly, I didn’t care. It was still a very good fish and one to be proud of. Besides, how often do you break your personal best three times in a day?

At last light the biggest crucian of the lot had rolled over my float. It was as deep as a breezeblock, dark and ancient-looking, like it had been cut out of a piece of pure teak. It looked to be well in excess of 4lb, perhaps even a five-pounder at a push, but I couldn’t be sure. Moments later, the great fish rolled again, this time right next to a particularly nervous-looking tufted duck. It really was huge. I peered on from behind the reeds with an intense longing, a neurotic dog trapped behind a window as a cat plays freely in the front garden. Some fish are just not meant to be caught.

Mum took me to almost every match and training session throughout the first summer of carp. In the company of men I grew up fast and their patience allowed me to learn the game properly and in my own time. By the end of the next summer I had banked numerous double-figure carp and had developed a competitive, aggressive streak that saw me take over as captain of the school cricket team the year after my humiliation.

I hated losing, but I hated cowardice in myself even more, and would absolutely insist I faced the first ball of our innings when the opposition bowlers were at their freshest and the ball was at its hardest.

Grandad came to my match in Upwell one summer’s evening. I was annoyed because, being only thirteen years old and playing in a team filled with men, I had been put down at the end of the batting order.

When it was my time to bat, I remember the bowler being told to come off a shorter run and bowl slower. ‘Not a chance,’ he spat, ‘if he wants to play in a men’s league he’d better be ready to take it like a man.’ Good, I thought. I took my guard, and chinned his first delivery straight back over his head for four runs.

‘You little twat.’ The bowler strode right into the middle of the wicket with his hands on his hips. I stepped forward too and stared right back at him. Over his shoulder, back on the boundary, I could see Grandad stood up, and the rest of my team going ballistic. I knew that the next ball was going to be short and aimed at my throat, so when it came I made sure I was well on my back foot and hooked him right into the cow field down at deep fine leg.

The only time I have ever seen steam come out of a man’s ears is in cartoons and that evening. The next ball was full, straight and right on middle stump. I should have defended it but the adrenaline was coursing through my veins and I knew I was better than him, so I swung at it with everything I had.

The ball hit the meat of my bat and just kept going and going. It bounced only once before it hit the pavilion filled with my teammates, who were, it is fair to say, absolutely losing the plot. I was out caught on the boundary in the very next over, but they all gave me a standing ovation as I walked off.

‘They were banging on the windows, son,’ said Grandad, his face still bright red with pride. It was an hour later and we were all crammed into the Red Lion pub down the road. The team were spread out across the bar, hammering the fruities and swearing, but Grandad and I were sat alone and quiet at a corner table.

Grandad slid a frothing pint of beer my way. He didn’t need to know that it was the capture of that big carp, and not the picture of him kicking the perfect rugby penalty, that had turned things around for me. In fact, nothing more needed to be said. In his eyes, I had made it.

‘The fish in this pond all came from just seventeen crucians I purchased from a fish farm over in Essex. They sat them down on the platform at Gillingham station and called me up: “Mr Rolfe, we have your fish.”’

Finally, I was putting a face to the gravelly voice of crucian authority. It was late summer by the time I had picked my way to Peter’s ponds. I rolled the van through Dorset, over the chalk beds of the River Frome and Nadder, and on into the leafy borders of Wiltshire. There is something of the fairytale about this whole part of the country. The map reveals charmingly titled hamlets – Milkwell, Birdbush, Hammoon, Bugley – and by the time I made it to my eventual destination at Donhead, it felt infinitely more plausible that it would be twinned with Hobbiton of Middle Earth, than in any way conjoined to the same land mass that belches the Regent’s Canal out at King’s Cross. I should have been arriving on horseback with a staff, not in a van with rods, but none the less I can’t tell you the precise location of these ponds. Even if Peter had sworn me to secrecy, which he hadn’t, after a couple of blissful hours floating through this landscape I was wonderfully lost.

Peter runs a large tanned hand over a clear plastic box filled with floats. Here was a man who spent most of his summer days outside. Methodically, he tackled up his rod and traditional centre-pin reel; you could tell he had done it so many times before that he didn’t really need to think about it any more, so we chatted about his past instead.

He had always fitted his work as an English teacher around his fishing, and had thus been able to spend his spare time visiting a vast roll call of big fish rivers across the south. ‘After the big-roach fishing in the Stour turned sour I decided to look into wild-pond fishing, but really there was virtually none to choose from back then.’ Peter slid his float to the appropriate depth. The country was being swept by a commercial-fishery fever by the late seventies; the sea-change had been so great that by the time I was wetting a line, the thought that there was once an alternative to the commercial lake hadn’t ever really occurred to me. Peter, faced with the same issue but armed with memories of catching crucians from secluded sand pits in Essex in the 1950s, took matters into his own hands. ‘I spread out an Ordnance Survey map and saw all of these wonderful blue specks. Forgotten ponds, hidden away on farmland and in remote woods, some of them really ancient too. After that it was just a case of going from farm to farm and asking for permission to stock a few fish.’

I was quite surprised. Throughout my youth I had feared farmers and the way they aggressively defended their rights to their territory. All of my friends had stories of being chased from fields by the shotgun-wielding ‘geroff-my-feckin-landers’, so the thought of door knocking with a request to fish seemed suicidal. Mind you, I was a BMX-wielding oik, and not a Cambridge University-educated grammar school teacher.

‘How do you convince a farmer then, Peter?’

‘Light pressure, Will,’ he replied, his eyes twinkling. ‘Most farmers are conservation-minded at heart. The idea of saving a species has a lot of appeal, and besides …’ He paused for a moment as he fixed his hook. ‘… I always explained that there was a market for the crucian, if they multiply.’

Peter was almost ready to fish whereas I was still sat on my chair scribbling notes with my pencil. I had instantly recognized him at his door from the warm and wide smile he shared with the man on the jacket of his book, but I had been expecting a schoolmasterly presence, a fiercely intense man who might dole out fifty licks across the back of a chair for a wayward cast. In reality Peter exuded a benevolent brand of charisma, a gentle soul armed with the infinite patience you need to be a really good fisherman, and, I suspect, a thoughtful and caring teacher. With trousers tucked into socks, flat cap and long, playful white hair flowing out the back, there was more than a sense of a man refusing to slow down in his senior years. Peter was clearly exceptionally fit; we couldn’t travel together in his car as he had a large, double-handed scythe and a pair of anvil loppers filling the boot, ‘just in case we need to do some work on the banks later on’. It was, in fact, while he was swinging his heavy scythe into a rampant mass of brambles that he revealed he was eighty-two years old. I was gobsmacked, and felt guilty for leaning on a fence post prattling on while this octogenarian beat out the earth in front of me. Clearly crucian rearing is something of an elixir of youth, and my goodness was it worth the sweat and blood. Peter’s ponds were stunning.

The waterways in the south-west bleed with a life you rarely see elsewhere in Britain, but there was a palpable intensification of nature around Peter’s ponds. Tucked away in a patch of trees on a dairy farm, these twin ponds acted like a pair of lungs, heaving their influence from the water and into the trees and fields that framed their banks. Kingfishers, ducks, clusters of lilies, sedges, iris, even an otter were all drawn to the restored water, and it was occasionally hard to focus just on the fishing.

Peter tapped his float, loaded with a chunk of breadflake for bait, a rod’s length out and near a fringing bush. ‘I limit it to only about fifteen anglers on these ponds, but most of the time you’ve pretty much got it to yourself.’ He flicked a few tiny fish pellets around his float to draw the crucians in. ‘Once I feel we have a surplus of crucians in these ponds, I try to sell them off for around £5 or £6 a pound. It’s less than the going rate, but I just want to get the crucians out there.’

I finally got my own rod in, carefully shot down so the float was merely an ultra-sensitive pinprick, and plumbed the depth to perfection to ensure my bait just about kissed the sediment on the pond’s bottom. My float immediately dipped and I turned out a tiny thumb-sized perch. I laughed. I was ten years old and back at Wood Lakes again. The next cast brought another, and then another. ‘Try some of my bread, Will, it’ll keep those pesky perch away.’ Peter leant over to reach for a fluffy white roll and his float dipped purposefully, proving conclusively my long-held belief that certain fish will only ever bite when you are distracted.

‘Oh! Huh oh!’ A youthful delight creased Peter’s face as his rod tip danced to the fish’s tune. ‘I’ve got one!’

A short fight delivered a perfect little crucian, like a small gold medallion. ‘What a lovely little fella,’ said Peter, admiring his work before underarming me the bread roll. His float dipped again before I could re-bait. ‘I can’t believe it!’ he laughed as I reached once more for the landing net. ‘I promise I put you in the better swim!’

I managed to get my own piece of bread out in the water in front of me and, incredibly, caught a perch on bread. This was something I had previously considered to be impossible, but there was little time for contemplation: Peter was bent into his third and, all too soon, his fourth crucian.

‘I really don’t understand.’ I could sense a tinge of embarrassment in his voice. ‘I usually fish your swim. I promise I gave you the more favourable area.’ I slipped the net under his fifth. I really didn’t mind; in fact, this moment in time meant far more to me than simply a few hours studying this crucian-whisperer.

I was far too shy to say so at the time, but I was right back with Grandad, decades earlier, stood at the Creek, devouring every movement of skilled operation, trying to learn, not simply catch. The student with the master. ‘Right,’ announced Peter, snapping me out of it, ‘you must come here and use my rod.’ I settled into his cushioned seat, desperate not to make a mistake or miss my chance, but moments later I was up netting his sixth fish, this time on my rod, in the swim I had only just that moment vacated. ‘Oh, I’m so so sorry about this, Will.’ Peter’s voice trembled with something approaching remorse as I near shook with laughter. His metamorphosis into my grandfather was truly complete. It was destiny, of course. Just as there was never an evening, no matter how shot Grandad’s eyesight or reactions became, when he didn’t catch more than me, there was never a family cricket match where my dad, who really couldn’t play cricket, failed to clean bowl me while I was batting. Some men are simply meant to always be your better, and it is much easier to take their lessons squarely on the chin than ever try to fight it.

The fish were all quite small and Peter was keen to place them in the other pond to improve the stock. Together we carried a white, plastic-handled bucket through a small thicket and over a stile towards the dammed end of the second pond. ‘I liked the line in your book, Peter,’ I began, hitching up the bucket as Peter gently waded into the shallows, ‘that read: “The only unsuccessful fisherman is the one who is not enjoying what he’s doing.”’

‘Ha! Oh yes! I think I may have been making a comment about those that obsess over the weight of their catch, the commercial carp fishers’ mentality.’ He began to gently hand-place each crucian into the new pond. ‘Fishing is a ridiculous pastime anyway of course: “A worm at one end and a fool at the other”, as the great essayist Samuel Johnson once wrote, but there has to be so much more interest to it if your enjoyment is going to last through the decades. It’s being in beautiful places, like this, and probing the mystery of the depths not for what is, but what might be. If you already know what’s in there the catching can simply become a bit, well, stale.’ Peter’s bucket was empty of fish now, so he upended the remains into the pond with a ‘splosh’. ‘… But each to their own.’

That afternoon I spotted a water vole scurrying along the banksides. It was the first I’d seen in over twenty years. It took me a while to place the location of the last one, but on the drive home I nailed down the memory. I was eleven years old, fishing a farm pond near identical to Peter’s, also somewhere in the rolling farmland of the south-west. It was when I had caught my very first crucian. Sometimes in fishing, the stars can align in quite curious ways.

‘I’m a crucian carp madman.’ It was impossible not to like the crucian scientist Dr Carl Sayer. He possessed a wonderful Norfolk twang to his accent, placing him as more combine harvester than petri dish, and spoke of the halcyon days of his youth, rods across the handlebars, with a melancholic nostalgia I could instantly relate to. If fifty-odd miles of dykes and drains hadn’t separated us, I’m sure we would have been good friends when we were tearing around Norfolk in the 1980s.

Dr Sayer and his colleagues have been busy reintroducing crucians and restoring ponds in remote farmlands across Norfolk from their Norwich headquarters. He has kept his work largely secret, in part to keep the landowners onside – ‘in case they think we’re planning on starting a fishery’ – but also because their success in breeding the crucian means theirs are now worth a small fortune. There are some 23,000 ponds on Norfolk farmlands, but the vast majority of them have grown over, dried up, or been smeared into new fields for crops. ‘“Ghost ponds” is what we call them,’ chirped Carl, ‘we’ve actually found beer cans on some of the old sites that date from the 1960s and ’70s, clearly the last time there was anyone actually sat there fishing!’ The seeds of waterside plants can actually exist in a dormant state for centuries, which means, even if several feet of soil and corn crop have been layered on top of an old pond, a bit of an uncovering job, fresh water and fresh fish can see a ‘ghost pond’ brimming with wild plant and animal life once more. Isn’t nature brilliant when it’s given a chance?

‘But why should we care about saving the crucian in Britain if it was never a native species?’ I asked, somewhat pointedly.

‘Who is to say it isn’t native, Will?’ shot back Carl, bluntly. I stammered something about the DNA analysis that had placed them here somewhere in the Middle Ages. ‘True, it did, but that work was based on just one tiny sample of fish.’ Carl pressed. ‘Since then we’ve found so many more ponds with crucian populations. We should be pushing for a much wider study of all these newly discovered populations. You can’t tell me you can take one study, from one population, and just say: “Well, that’s it, the crucian isn’t native then.”’

He certainly had a point. Carl went on to describe a remarkable theory that hinged on how ancient waterway management during the Roman era, which saw many ancient ponds and oxbow lakes drained to irrigate lands for agriculture, could easily have wiped out the crucian, only for them to be reintroduced at a much later date. ‘But that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ he concluded. ‘You can’t prove absence, can you? You can only prove presence, and it is impossible to get grants to fund these sorts of studies.’

I could see where he was coming from. All that DNA results can really confirm is that that particular sample set were introduced during the Middle Ages, but there was nothing to say that other populations from other ponds might have been here much earlier than that. Dr Sayer’s theory jogged my memory of the extraordinary story of the British pool frog. Right through until the 1990s it was generally accepted that the pool frog was native only to mainland Europe (in fact, until the 1970s it was incorrectly classified as merely a subspecies of the edible frog, when in actuality it transpired that it was the edible that was a hybrid of the pool and marsh frog); then, in the Norfolk town of Thetford, a colony of pool frogs was discovered that would electrify amphibian science.

Found in a ‘pingo’, an ancient pool formed by the melting of subterranean swellings of ice at the end of the last Ice Age, the small colony appeared darker and browner than the classic livid greens sported by the pool frogs of France. That couldn’t be, though; the accepted wisdom read that our climate was far too cold for the pool frog to establish itself here naturally. Bone analysis of the Thetford frogs was conducted and, sensationally, it was discovered that these frogs had in fact been here since before the last Ice Age, making their own way from Europe before the close of everyone’s favourite freshwater species superhighway: the Doggerland land bridge, which delivered us the pike all those centuries ago. The pool frog was hastily reclassified and, almost overnight, we gained a second native frog species to call our own.

For the crucian, though, until the ‘smoking gun’ of some conclusive DNA evidence can be unearthed, its plight in Britain remains precarious. ‘Why should we care?’ might seem a narrow-minded question, but a lot rests on the indigenous status of our wildlife. The classification of what is and what isn’t a native may seem ambiguous to say the least. As Richard Kerridge states in his superb book on reptiles and amphibians, Cold Blood, qualification only hinges on proving whether a species ‘established itself in a country independent of any human activity, no matter how long ago the arrival occurred’, but without it, it is virtually impossible to gain access to government funding and practical protective legislation for a species.

For the pool frog it all came too late. In 1999, the year before the startling results of the bone analysis were published, the last of the Thetford population died in captivity; an avoidable tragedy caused by our somewhat over-zealous ranking of wildlife based on arbitrary status and public popularity.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we inflate the importance of certain species over others all the time. The face has to fit. It has to penetrate the public consciousness and pull at the heartstrings for virtually anything to be done. Take the otter, for example. I love otters, and unlike most fishermen would dearly love to see one in the wild, but their celebrity status and cute looks have seen them garner a massively disproportionate amount of public sympathy and a hugely successful reintroduction, whereas other, less desirable, freshwater species have slid to virtual, or even actual, extinction with little or no protest whatsoever. The pool frog is one example, but what of the orache moth or the large copper butterfly? The slimy burbot fish? The Davall’s sedge plant? Or my water vole, with its yellow teeth and Wind in the Willows fame, whose numbers have plummeted by 90 per cent in the last twenty years?

I could go on, but my point is that we quite clearly have much bigger environmental issues to worry about than simply whether a species is definitely native. As I write, one in ten of the UK’s wildlife species are threatened with extinction and the numbers of our most endangered animals have crashed by two thirds since 1970. I don’t mean to unduly anger those specialists who work tirelessly to curb the catastrophic damage caused by invasive species (see the grey squirrel, signal crayfish, American mink and oak processionary moth for further details), but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the presence of crucians affects our freshwater environment negatively in any way. According to Dr Sayer and Peter Rolfe, they cause no harm, and coexist with other species in just about the most high-quality environment you can imagine, so can we just get on with protecting them properly, please?

We can be in no doubt today that our crucian populations are absolutely vital to the survival of the wider European crucian species. Over in Europe the aggressive-feeding and exceptionally well-travelled gibel carp, an interloper from Asia, has spread its seed into virtually every major watercourse on the Continent, even making it to the remote eastern reaches of the Baltic Sea. Of course, the gibel can cross-breed with the extraordinarily licentious crucian, and, with that, the purity of the entire continental species is now seriously under threat. However, we have no gibel here and, thanks to the unheralded (as well as unfunded) dedication of Marsh Farm, Peter Rolfe, Dr Sayer and all their friends, the British crucian has a fighting chance once more, and for that, I believe, we should all be very grateful.

The years passed. I got the knack for carp fishing and fished almost exclusively in commercials until I left school at eighteen. Largely, I fished alone. I was pushing the envelope, fishing for hours and hours in conditions that a man in his late seventies just couldn’t take, but even when some of my friends showed an interest in joining me, I largely shunned them. I fully accepted I was obsessed, and that they would just hold me back from my ultimate ambition to catch bigger and, in my eyes, better carp. I would fish on through anything: terrible weather, hunger, tiredness, it just didn’t matter to me; there was almost nothing I wouldn’t put myself through to get in front of a fish.

Dad had ultimately been right to persuade me to stick with school that afternoon in the pub. I made friends for life there and received grades that I just wouldn’t have managed anywhere else. Academically, I realized I needed to be sat on and chained to a desk to achieve, and my ability at sport had improved exponentially. I was extremely fortunate to be in a place where if you showed potential you had all the facilities you needed to improve, and, more than anything, to have loving parents who would do anything they could to nurture an interest in any of their children.

Looking back, though, I just wish the by-product of all of it hadn’t been the development of a competitive, win-at-all-costs impudence that bordered on over-confidence. I realize now it wasn’t in fact the winning or the competition I had enjoyed at all, it was the feeling that I belonged somewhere, but in defining success purely through the rigid prism of personal triumph I had totally lost touch with any of the pleasures to be had just from being part of something. The same had become true of my fishing, and as I got older it was inevitable my interest began to wane. After I left school I never played a competitive game of cricket or rugby again.

Perhaps, in its own way that is what crucian fishing is all about. The fish is small and challenging in its own way, but it is the subtle pleasures to be found in the sort of environments it inhabits that bring such a unique joy to this style of fishing. I am indebted to the fish for my having found the traditional British pond before it fully faded from my consciousness. It feels like the blinkers have been lifted from my eyes, but with so many fish records to chase I’m not entirely sure what to do with the rest of my year. Am I really saying that the thought of continuing for something really big is now a pointless endeavour? Of course I’m not, but the spirit of crucian fishing can only influence me to look for more than just a big fish as I continue this quest. Like my grandad before me, I’m a fisherman for life now, and have learnt those who pursue size, and size alone, can never expect their interest in this pastime to see them all the way to the grave.

Early June came and went with no record-shaking fish. Then, utterly against the grain, the biggest crucian of the year was landed from a secret pond hidden away somewhere in leafy Shropshire in the middle of August. It weighed almost 4lb and was accompanied by another brace of fish of over 3lb. Ed Matthews, a hooded chap with a broad smile, had hand-stocked and reared the fish just seven years earlier. ‘I was overwhelmed,’ he gushed in the pages of the Angling Times, ‘I stocked these crucians when they were around one inch long and cared for them for so many years, just hoping one day that they’d weigh over 3lbs … now it’s got me wondering just how big they could go.’ Perhaps the hidden season is no longer the time to target the record shakers, or perhaps it is just that the hidden season means much more. I’ll leave it to you to find out.