Coming Home
For all our time together in the Fens the thick-lipped and fat-chested chub was very much Grandad’s fish. He talked about catching them from the running water around Bedfordshire with relish: ‘Large lumps of bread crust or a plump slug, that’s all you need for a whackin’ great chub, my boy.’ I caught my first one on a metal spinner and wisely elected not to tell him anything about it; my second came twenty years later and told me with certainty that he was finally on his way out.
Dad took him out fishing just one more time. It was to a local pond in the centre of a town park, and, despite a cancer beneath his right eye and floating blobs that cruelly obscured his vision, he still managed to winkle out a tiny perch or two: the tiny perch, the fisherman’s escort in and out of the sport. On the front cover of the order of service at his funeral was a picture of him holding the monster perch caught from our favourite swim at Popham’s Eau. I felt my chest heave and eyes fill with tears as I looked at it. He had been on his way for a long time, so there was no sense of robbery at his loss, but time did little to dull the impact of actually losing him for good.
The gathering of friends and family brought out many of the old stories. Some were familiar, such as the time his friend was so thoroughly depressed at being out-fished by him they swapped rods, only for Grandad to continue to catch more; other stories were new even to me, including one outrageous tale involving Grandad’s knowledge of the Russian word for ‘ice cream’ and an interrogation at the hands of the KGB. I made a small speech about what he meant to us grandchildren, but I struggled to talk about his relationship with his son. It felt uncomfortable, as if all the awkwardness of his alpha-male posturing and the resultant shunning of real emotions had been transferred directly onto me for the day. Grandad was very different to Dad, but he was none the less extraordinarily proud of his son and loved him deeply. He just couldn’t bring himself to publicly show it. If I had my time again I would say what he once told me on the riverbank. The banks always were his confessional box. ‘Just aim to be like your dad, Will,’ he said. ‘Aim to be like your dad.’
I wanted to end this journey back where it began. I wanted to come home. I wanted to see the Creek again and fish Popham’s Eau. I needed to see the Fens. I hadn’t been back since his funeral over two years ago, and I hadn’t fished Popham’s Eau since I carried Grandad off the banks on our last fishing trip together. Almost every fish I’ve tried to catch from when this challenge began has been influenced by what he tried to teach me there. I need to go back now to really see what else I have learnt. Going full circle, right back to where in effect it all began, is the only way I will know if I’ve really changed at all.
It was the week before Christmas when I began the long drive cross-country from South Wales to fenland. I had returned from a honeymoon in Zambia and headed straight back out to New Guinea for more filming with BBC Two, so I really wasn’t ready for the cold on my return, and nor was the van. Strong cross-winds and exposure made it a bit like steering a sail between the great concrete pillars that hold up the M4 bridge into Wales, fittingly rising up like giant rugby posts in this rugby-mad nation. I love crossing the River Severn in bad weather, though, just so I can see the bleak savagery of the wind-whipped tidal currents, the coal-black exposed rock at low tide. The fish are probably impossible to catch in conditions like this. I gaze into the turbid waters and imagine the advancing squadrons of bass as the tide changes, the flatfish and the elver eels on their way up on the ride. I’ve rarely seen it worse than this down there but the fish are just fine; humans, though, would stand no chance. Stripped down and bare, without technology or clothing, the far bank would hang tantalizingly in view but your body would slide away on the savage current long before you froze to death. I sail over the bridge and on into England.
There is great value to keeping an eye out for wildlife, even on motorways as barren in feel as the M4. There are always red kites to be spotted, cutting through the sky and seeking roadkill, and a great many deer species hang on the fringes of the woodland set aside at the road’s edge, staring forward with their twitching ears and glassy, doll-like eyes. Everything drops away as the sun fades. Three hours in and the earth is flattening around me, an indication I am entering the far east of the country.
By the time I finally reach the outskirts of the Fens it is already pitch black. Fen black. It should be its own colour. The density of the darkness on the long roads between communities here is something you can only fully experience on a clear winter’s night like this. It feels like I’ve been ejected into deep space, ploughing my van on through some infinite void. Wispy, frozen mist envelops me as I head out onto the fields; but I am calm. I learnt to drive in these conditions and am far more fearful of driving in big cities than I ever will be driving out here.
A buzzard rests near the royal-purple sign that welcomes me back into fenland proper. I catch its feathers in the headlight beam of my car. Its wings are angled down and flattened by the moisture in the air. It looks like the large, leathery hood of an axe-wielding executioner from the Middle Ages when it hangs in the trees like that. The bird is waiting until first light to hunt. We both are.
This darkness, especially nightfall, had a big role to play during my childhood. It was the time all activity, fishing and war games must come to an end. No matter how far from home we were, we all knew the consequences of arriving back through the front door in the Fen black. My life was one without mobile phones, or even clocks, we ate when we were hungry and used the passage of the sun across the sky to dictate what we would do next. Everything else could be pushed to the limits, but there was no justification for a post-dusk homecoming; besides, we respected our parents and valued our liberty far too much to ever push our luck too far.
It was only when I left this area and met people from outside that I began to realize how different my childhood had been to most. As long as we were home before dark, and didn’t speak to strangers, my friends and I pretty much did as we pleased. We looked after each other and stuck together. As long as we kept to the basic rules, we had the chance to be free. Really free.
Although the draining of the Fens began in 1630 it would take right through till the 1850s for the fertile farmland to be effectively free of water. The introduction of Victorian engineering and the first steam-powered pumps saw the land increase in value some four times over; the Fens would become the vegetable basket of Britain, and people flocked to help with the massive harvests on the exposed blackened peat.
Soon the sense of familiarity is so intense I feel I can almost close my eyes and drive the rest of the way home: Ring’s End, Guyhirn, Wisbech St Mary, Leverington, Wisbech and the spectral glow of the old factory site I used to work on; all so well-known yet so distant, as if they were locations cast off from another life I had once led.
The A47 leads me on down to the roundabout by the Elm Hall Hotel. This is the place where I turn towards my village, but I always knew it for the little roadside fishing pond stocked for the workers in the local canning factory. My friends fished it once and spoke of catching dozens of little common carp on sweetcorn. I was much older when I eventually made it there to fish, but it was already long barren of its anglers and carp. At one end the wind was corralling hundreds of super-strength cans of Polish beer on the water’s surface. When change came here, it came quickly.
The modern-day mechanization of farming practices after the Second World War both dramatically reduced the number of labourers needed and boosted the land’s productivity to stratospheric proportions. By the late 1980s the Fens were accounting for more than one third of the national output of vegetables, and the supermarkets’ use of new computer technology meant orders could be placed the moment a product had been purchased. With the scan of a barcode and click of a mouse, the supply chain was essentially streamlined and retrofitted around the exact buying habits of the consumer. Massive orders of fruit and vegetables were now capable of doubling or halving overnight, so farms and their factories took to calling in their workers to pick, pack and process at the shortest notice possible, but supermarket competition and customer expectation demanded the product price was still kept as low as possible. There was no real rise in wages for the legions of workers who had survived when the machines replaced people, but the uncertain shifts, unpredictable hours and now the crap wages on top meant many locals finally felt that enough was enough. There were still many jobs that needed the human hand, though; the farmers and factory owners were going to have to look elsewhere.
I was sheltered from these monumental changes as a child, particularly as I was still able to find local work fruit picking as a teenager well into the 1990s, but in the time it took me to leave school and finish my degree I went from being able to walk onto a factory line anywhere to finding it virtually impossible to get a job at all.
Many of my friends in the fields and factories blamed the migrant workers for ‘coming over here and taking all the work’, but this was as far from the mark as those that pointed fingers at the ‘lazy benefit-scrounging’ local population who were ‘all just racist’.
When the locals had started to refuse to meet the new demands, farms and factories simply turned to foreign gangmasters and agencies to pick up the shortfall. Eastern European workers from the poorest parts of the former Soviet bloc, Poland at first, but latterly Latvians, Lithuanians and Russians, flooded to the area on the false promise of good wages and regular jobs, but when they arrived they discovered that the meagre wages they were to be paid were largely siphoned into the hands of criminal gangmasters under the guise of being ‘back payments’ on transportation costs, or taken as outlandish rental rates for the overcrowded houses they were placed in. Away from the houses, I began to notice tents cropping up, concealed deep within hedges and patches of trees. Out on the banks, fyke nets and long lines turned up for the first time in my lifetime. People were desperate. Desperate enough to spend winter in a tent, desperate enough to risk a criminal record for poaching fish; accruing debts with terrible people and sinking into a worse state of poverty than the one they had left behind.
The rate of new migrants coming into the area was higher than anywhere else in the UK – it had to be, no one else would tolerate that sort of treatment longer than they had to. Soon, some of the worst examples of poverty in the country were to be seen right on my doorstep, but that should hardly be surprising, should it? When we demand our food is available at bargain prices, around the clock and throughout the seasons, there was always going to be someone paying the cost somewhere.
There were times I felt like we were still all cast adrift in flooded Fens. I grew up in a Bermuda Triangle of land where the county borders of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire all meet. We had one train line a half an hour’s drive away, a scattering of main roads and definitely no motorways, and our nearest McDonald’s took two bus journeys and a change at Wisbech. In the Norfolk Broads or on the north Norfolk coast it is all part of the charm, but visitors rarely came to my neighbourhood through choice, and yet I still love it here. There is a sense of the truly mystical to the big skies and open fields, and the greatest sunsets and starry nights I will ever see have always been here. A comic once said if you stand on a milk crate you can see the curvature of the earth. As a child I would sneak out the back of the house in the depths of winter and climb the last apple tree in the orchard. From my vantage point I could see across the earthen sugar beet fields, stripped bare of their crop and frozen solid like the sea. I used to imagine it was the point where the world was stitched together, an elongated patch atop the earth’s surface sewn in the same way my school trousers were when I holed the kneecap.
Fenland people are mocked, of course. We are the uneducated, slack-jawed inbreds. ‘NFN’ – ‘Normal for Norfolk’ – the outsiders like to joke. Folk-of-the-flat interned in a land where people go mad because of the lack of hills. Later the madness was actually attributed to malaria from the swamps, but we never shed the rest of the character stains, and everywhere I go people like to poke fun about where I’m from. It doesn’t bother me, though. I liked the people I grew up with here, and I actually felt sorry for people that took the piss out of us, as I knew they had missed out. Most of all, I liked the adult contentment of feeling small in a vast, unbroken landscape. I am grateful to this land: for the respect and interest in water it has given me, the lack of fear and sense of control I have in the wild. I now realize that it is something special, and not something simply innate in everyone.
Perhaps I am indulging my nostalgia now I no longer live here. I couldn’t wait to leave this place when I did. I felt a sense of suffocation as I grew older, that the whole place was getting perversely smaller and more inward-looking with each year of my life that passed. New Year’s Eve and when Glastonbury was on as a teenager were always the worst. Watching mass celebrations on the television I would feel frustrated and jealous of everyone else. Worse still I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were the sorts of people that would never be invited to the party. However, a decade after all of my friends and I had been released from the Fens and headed to jobs in the big cities of Britain, I realized that it was now that we were actually trapped for real and that what we had as kids would never be ours again. I never really felt at home in cities, and thought that any day soon someone in a suit would tap me on the shoulder and remind me where I was from, that I was wearing the emperor’s new clothes, that it was time to go home now and that my performance was over. It took another ten years before I realized everyone else working in the city feels exactly the same.
According to the Wilson Encyclopedia, the ‘Roach is the most commonly caught British freshwater shoal fish.’ It was the footsoldier of the Creek, the fish that made up the bulk of my keepnet as a child, but, as a result of their sheer volume and small size, I feel they never really received the respect they deserve. Coming home, it had to be the roach I went for.
The eyes are a virulent, violent red in colour, but there is something of the underdog spirit in the way the rest of its curved and downward-facing mouth appears. Its neat head fronts a classically fish-shaped body, and with white-silver sides and orange-red fins it is, unfortunately, the prime target for live-baiting for pike. A Finnish friend of mine even uses their eyeballs to catch perch: ‘But they shimmer with an animation you just can’t get from any bait,’ he said, in response to my disgust at his practice. As I said, the roach deserves more respect.
Before the opening day of the coarse season on 16 June I would walk the Creek and look under the bridges at Popham’s Eau. Thousands of roach in great shoals were to be seen basking in the sunshine together and the day couldn’t come quick enough when we could try and catch them. The greatest catch I ever made came in that opening week. I was on the River Delph at Welney with Grandad, Dad and my friend Lee. We had happened upon a truly vast shoal of roach that would not stop biting. We baited with maggots and threw in breadcrumbs by the handful till we had precipitated a feeding frenzy so great that even when we ran out of free-feed they still just kept on coming. They continued to bite through pike attacks, they even continued to bite when I fell in. It was simply an incredible day’s fishing, and when it came to tip our keepnets up and return the roach to the river I can still remember that feeling of amazement that such a great quantity of fish could be living in such a small patch of river.
Numbers, though, are one thing. There were other days when the roach came on strong for a time, but, out of the thousands and thousands that came to my hook, the biggest I ever landed was well under the 2lb mark. Jack Hargreaves writes: ‘It took me thirty years to catch a two-pound roach, even fishing in the best southern roach-waters.’ The current record roach, standing at 4lb 4oz, was caught from a lake in Northern Ireland, and the only river to feature any fish in the current top ten record roach list is the Stour in Dorset. Truly, the Fens were never likely to trouble the roach record books then, but some very fine roach have been landed here, many fish over 2lb, and I even once heard of a fish in excess of 3lb coming from the Great Ouse near Ely. In angling, there is always a chance, but, really, how much did I actually care by this stage?
I approached the outskirts of my village a little before dawn. My entire childhood world had just been compressed into a little under an hour in the car, but fifteen years after I had left it was heartening to discover my village had hardly changed.
I chose to drive the long way to Popham’s Eau so I could pass both houses we had lived in. The first, a beautiful Georgian doctor’s house in the middle of the village, had electronic Christmas candles in the window; the second, on the outskirts, had a new shed on one side, and that seemed to be the sum of the modifications. I drove beside the Creek, noting the nonsensical new sign that declared it the ‘Nene–Ouse Navigation Link’, then on past the butcher’s, the hairdresser’s, the corner shop and Navrady’s, which still sells the best fish and chips in Britain. Out towards the end of the village I closed in on Grandad’s place but flicked the indicator to signal right, just before I made it to his bungalow. Following the nail-straight road towards the Sixteen Foot Bank I headed instead towards his spiritual home, travelling just a few hundred metres before pulling into a small lay-by beside a field.
You wouldn’t know the river was here in light or dark. The pancake-flat landscape creates an optical illusion that hides Popham’s Eau perfectly in its dip, but I knew it was there. I opened the boot and lifted out a large bucket filled with groundbait and a couple of tubs of maggots and casters. It was cold but not as cold as it used to be at this time of year. When I was a child the winters here could be savage, days of sub-zero temperatures would freeze the fields solid and turn the flooded Welney Washes into a giant ice rink that produced many a champion speed skater, but the walk along the edge of the field towards our spot was still just as long as I remember.
The fen drains intimidate some anglers. They appear as a blank canvas, miles of unrelenting uniformity in both directions with very few obvious fish-holding features to cast at. When Grandad came here he would walk from his bungalow, across the road and alongside a small orchard between the field and the river. He followed a fence line to a concrete post at its end. Here he would tie off a length of rope for safety and, effectively, abseil his way down the bank to the water’s edge. That was where I needed to be and I did eventually find the post, still standing proud; but it would take till the sun was fully up for me to realize the fence and the entire orchard were all long gone. One solitary old apple tree remained, surrounded by long grass.
I grip the cold concrete post and feel an overwhelming sense of belonging. I used to sit right here when I was old enough to come to the Eau on my own. I would wait for him, his heavy steps along the bank, his ‘all right, my beaut’ greeting. It would never come again now, but I can still feel his presence here, far more than I could at his funeral service, or by holding his rods or reading his books. This is where we both once belonged. Wet mist soaks the banks. I had been nervous walking here, warning myself repeatedly to take my time and watch my step, that one slip in the darkness could see me plummet from height and into the drain, but the post makes me feel secure and the banks are nothing like as steep as I found them as a child. I move down easily and quickly towards the water’s side.
I doubt many people have been here since I last fished this spot with Grandad all those years ago. The bed of common reeds on this bank stand some eight foot high, forming a caramel-yellow fence between me and the water, but there is still a gap just big enough for me to squeeze into my seat and cast my roach tackle. I begin rolling apple-sized balls of groundbait laced with maggots and casters. The sluice gates are open downstream at Denver so the water is pushing through at a real clip, plus there is twelve foot of deep water in front of me: if I want to guarantee the balls make it to the bottom of the river I will have to squeeze them really tight. This is where I want the roach shoals to find them, and then, once the shoals are here and feeding confidently, I’ll flick out a hook. I must remember to keep the bait going in, though – it won’t last long in this flow and I’ll want to hold the fish here for as long as I possibly can. ‘It’s not little and often, it’s a lot and often, Will’, that’s what Grandad would have said had he been next to me now; then he would have told his old story about the fishing match he once lost because he only brought ten kilos of groundbait with him. ‘Don’t be afraid to keep it going in, as once the roach are gone you’ll never get them back.’ I throw the bait in as accurately as I can and return to the car for the rods.
Two hours slide by and the sun gently rises without bringing much warmth. The river elects to retain its misty coat and small jenny wrens buzz around in the reeds like hummingbirds. On the far bank a pair of swans dance neck to neck out across the water, but mostly it is very quiet. I didn’t realize how much I miss the silence. The real fenlands personify a rare brand of solitude. Many can’t hack it. I can understand that and I’ve always felt for the occupants of the remote farmhouses out here, miles from people and each other. Clumps of rotting water lily leaves float past on the flow. The living plant that formed them is firmly on the retreat now, back towards the silty riverbed where it will safely wait until the weather warms once more. In the spring the lily beds are dense and sometimes many metres thick. I used to love fishing off these lilies. It produced some of our finest fish, but a monster lived in there too, a fish that contained unstoppable power. It was our Moby-Dick. I hooked it just once; Grandad managed it several times, of course, but neither of us ever saw that beast – it simply tore the line from our reels and straightened our hooks right out. Looking back, we never once scaled our gear up to actually attempt to land the creature; we simply tolerated its occasional intrusion, probably in much the same way as it tolerated us. Many years later a young lad from the neighbouring village of Three Holes landed a carp well in excess of 20lb from this very stretch of water; perhaps that was all the legend had ever amounted to, but we never liked to think so.
I have set up for the roach exactly as Grandad taught me, with one of his handsome handmade floats, thick and well weighted, set at twelve feet in depth with the bulk of my shot strung out close to a small hook. I want to get the bait right down in the river, but if I don’t get a bite down on the river bed that doesn’t mean the roach are definitely not present. I’ll just have to adjust the float and bring my bait off the bottom a little, an inch or two every ten minutes or so, just to check that they aren’t shoaling a little higher up and intercepting all my groundbait as it sinks through the water column. Even with the heavy float and weights, I still have to steady the tackle in the flow, mending the line almost as if I were float-fishing the River Taff. I keep the bait trickling in with one hand and fix my eye firmly on the bright-red tip of the float for any possible indication of arriving roach.
Roach can be extraordinarily cute when they take the bait and sometimes a gentle bite might only register as a tickle on the float tip. In his prime Grandad could seemingly catch roach without any indication whatsoever, though: he would give a sudden crack of his wrist and there the roach would be, writhing on his hook as if spirited there by some unseen force. When the poet Ted Hughes wrote of float-fishing in 1967 he commented that ‘your whole being rests lightly on the float’. That’s the state you must look to achieve to be a truly successful float-fisher like Grandad, a condition of such intense concentration that there is nothing more in life than you and your float; when a pulse, a flick, a tremble on that tip will register in your body as if an earthquake has struck under your tackle box. It sounds tense – it really isn’t, and, even if you fall short of such a lofty goal, float-fishing still offers its junior practitioners a shot at pure escapism. Staring at a float erodes stress at a far greater rate than any trip to the gym, pub or psychiatrist’s couch ever will. It alleviates anxiety and leaves the angler fixed within a world where there are no bills to pay, no pieces of work to deliver and no problems at home. Time both slows down and speeds up. You can spot micro-details like how a cloud of nymphs expands and contracts on a river’s surface, or how a kingfisher dramatically throws its neck forward as it strikes the water, but while observing the translucence on the wing of some damsel, or watching a toad crawl in animated slow motion, you suddenly realize it is getting dark and that you didn’t even touch your lunchtime sandwiches.
I always feel better after a day’s float-fishing, even when I miss all my bites, and if I were allowed to fish only one method for the rest of my life then the float would be it.
I tried to settle into the rhythm of my float that morning but it was impossible to get over the piece of my personal history I was sat in. Why did Grandad fish here almost exclusively for the last twenty years of his life? I had always put it down to the Eau’s close proximity to his bungalow, but he really could have lived just about anywhere in the village. I blew some hot air and life back into my fingers. Popham’s Eau didn’t have the obvious aesthetics of the Creek even; you had to look hard for both the beauty and the fish down here. Maybe that was part of it, the idea that it was a bigger challenge. The fish here were definitely bigger if you did find them but I knew there was more at play here too.
I flicked a lily pad off the float. I never want to return to fishing just one set of venues for just one fish, but the immense enjoyment to be had at seeing a river change its shape and character from just one vantage point seemed pretty clear. Only by returning to the same place over and over can you see that no one day is ever the same as the next. Watching a river change its character through the seasons somehow ballasts us as anglers and people. It reminds us of our own mortality in the face of natural forces that are out of our control. It should not be an intimidating or frightening prospect. There is great comfort to be found in the discovery of something larger than your life. I can very well imagine that bearing witness to the changes in your grandchildren has a similar effect. Eventually we all get left behind, of course, but at least we can take steps to make sure that when we do go the things we love continue to grow without us around. Grandad kept his grandchildren, and this place, close. I know he was proud of us all, and now, against all odds, I’ve found my way right back here to check all is well on his behalf. I bet he always knew I would as well, the silly old sod.
Jiang Taigong was a statesman and strategist who lived in ancient China in the second millennium before Christ. According to legend, he had served the tyrannical Zhouwang, the last king of the Shang Dynasty. Zhouwang was a debauched slave owner who took enormous pleasure in torturing, then executing, anyone who objected to his rule. Jiang Taigong hated him with every inch of his being and was desperate to overthrow the despot. However, despite being an expert in military strategy, Jiang Taigong was old and had no army to call on.
Jiang Taigong left his position with the king, but knew that one day his special talents would be needed to defeat him. He took to fishing and lived in seclusion for many years. As time slipped by it became clear to those who lived around the riverbank where he fished that Jiang Taigong never actually seemed to catch anything; in fact, on closer inspection, they discovered he wasn’t actually fishing with a hook at all. Jiang Taigong believed that the fish, when they were ready, would come to him of their own volition. And so it was that King Wen of the powerful Zhou state found Jiang Taigong, at the ripe old age of eighty, fishing without his hook and, through pure curiosity alone, engaged this peculiar man in conversation. The king soon realized that Jiang Taigong was a uniquely gifted person, as well as a military expert, and hired him as his mentor. Together they would go on to overthrow Zhouwang and eventually establish the legendary Zhou dynasty throughout China, the longest dynasty in Chinese history.
Jiang Taigong gave out the image of a man fishing, when in fact he was waiting for an army to overthrow King Zhou. It was a cunning piece of sleight of hand: he had a hidden purpose that was heavily masked by an obvious one, but it took him time. The morals of the story: good things come to those who wait, and things aren’t always as they seem.
My bite alarm has just gone off.
Gently, I place my roach rod down on its rests, leaving my seat behind as the bleeps start to sing out in a string. Forgive me, readers, for slightly pulling the wool over your eyes with the roach-fishing lark, and forgive me, Grandad, for the blatant use of technology in your treasured spot, but hidden at the end of the reed bed a heavy rod baited with a single smelt has been lying in wait this entire time.
I scoop that rod off its rests. Its feels like gripping the trunk of a tree in comparison to the roach rod but this is no time for clever comparisons: the line is pulling alarmingly taut, signalling that it is high time to strike, and strike hard I do.
At first I feel solid resistance and the line grinds horribly. It is locked up against something but I sense instinctively that now is not the time to ease off on the pressure. Suddenly the line pings free and I can tell from the opening, steaming, pile-driving run which follows that this is going to be the biggest fish of my journey by an absolute fucking mile.
Despite the mammoth run I feel strangely in control. Don’t let the fish bully you. I pile on strain when I feel it is trying to rest and give it line and space to run when it decides to assert itself. After ten minutes I get my first glimpse of the fish and it is, as expected, a very big pike. It shakes its head angrily at me, like a bullock caught in an electric fence, and, to my absolute horror, I notice that there is only a single, barbless, hookpoint left in the fish’s mouth, sat right between its bony teeth like an after-dinner toothpick. It is, as they say, brown-trouser time.
The pike steamrollers towards the dead lilies and reeds on my side of the bank so I apply as much side-strain as I dare; if it goes in there I know I’m done for. Mercifully, she turns her head at the last moment and drives back into open water. It’s definitely a female pike: the solid belly, shoulders and head are unmistakable. The reel whines and my hands and knees begin to rattle with adrenaline. I know now that this is not just the biggest fish of the journey, it is the biggest fish I have ever seen in Popham’s Eau. It is the beast.
In front of me, in a flash of a second, I swear blind that a giant shoal of roach rolls on the surface of the river, momentarily rippling the place with a life I haven’t seen in a hundred winter visits here. In the middle of them all is my great fish, wallowing like a hippo just out of reach of the net. I hold the rod up to its maximum extent and slowly win back the line, gently heaving the magnificent animal back towards me. The weight of the fish leaves my rod the moment it hits the base of my net; at the same time another, unseen, weight slides right off my shoulders. I stare up to the sky and feel my eyes heave with tears.
Thank you, Grandad. Thank you for teaching me how to fish and thank you for everything else. Thank you for just being there.
I didn’t break any angling records during this journey and, in reality, I was always quite some considerable distance off the mark. That greater sand eel is still as close as I’ve been to a submission to the hallowed British Record Fish Committee and its list, but, still, I had a lot of fun and did break several personal bests. In my own way, I did at least avenge the memory of that greater sand eel.
The fact is, you just can’t drop into any old swim and hope to catch a record on wild water. Yes, the chances are significantly narrowed when you know there is a record fish trapped within a lake, or even behind a lock gate, but you still need to learn that creature’s habits and harmonize yourself to the natural rhythm of a place. That all takes more time than I had, and yet I still wouldn’t have changed how I approached this challenge one bit.
I realized ultimately that I’d had infinitely more pleasure catching fish from ridiculously unlikely spots, meeting new people and discovering new places to try, than I ever did from actually chasing a record fish. The sand eel was beautiful not because it was a record on some other man’s list but because it was a total surprise and the first I had ever caught. What is fishing without the element of surprise?
There have been many failures in this book and plenty of days when I caught absolutely nothing at all. In the past this would have been a major problem, rectified quickly with a trip to my nearest carp stew pond to confirm I hadn’t lost the magic. In fact, this very act confirmed I had already lost the magic. Fishing is our way of tapping back into something we have lost in our comfortable and cosseted lives, a throwback to a time when we did need to catch to survive; it should not ever be reduced to purely a competition to catch the biggest fish. The baited line is our link to the secret underwater world and it reconnects us with nature in an immensely powerful way that few other pastimes ever could. We are a part of a much wider, wilder system, and not simply above it. Failure to catch demonstrates we do not have full dominion over nature all of the time and plugs us back into the notion that we, as humans, should only ever be participating in a mutual and fair exchange with the natural world, one where we can’t always guarantee a win.
At the end of it all I have discovered that I am still at my most relaxed when I am by water, but I am also at my happiest when I’m fishing a river. My river fishing, like my family, has always been there for me, and I’ve been at my lowest when I’ve abandoned them both. I now realize that it is the fishing, and not actually the fish, that has provided the levelling presence throughout my life. Even when I’ve neglected it, river fishing has waited for me. I promise I’ll never leave the rivers again.
My hero, John Wilson, made 160 television programmes in a career spanning over twenty-five years. In 2009 he justifiably received an MBE for services to angling and eventually retired to Thailand, where he runs a fishing lake with his brother, Dave. I spent a wonderful evening drinking beers in the bath while watching episodes of Go Fishing back to back for hours on end, drunkenly raising a glass to the man who inspired a legion of young fishermen just like me. Thanks, John.
My grandad was not a second father. I already had one of those and never needed another, so what was he to me? He was my older best friend. He would do anything for me (as long as it didn’t cost too much money!) and I would do anything for him. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell him, and no judgement he would ever pass. He was a superficially hard and competitive man to his death, but his core held an utter softness. He brimmed with absolute and unwavering love for his son, his family, his grandchildren, and for me.
Grandad and I kept the secrets we shared with each other on the banks, but there was one of his musings that I knew I would eventually have to tell Dad about when the time came. I was ten years old and we were fishing Popham’s Eau side by side. He was sat there with his floppy white hat on, watching his float while absent-mindedly moulding breadcrumb groundbait all around the cork handle of his rod. It was a fairly typical summer afternoon. Then he leant towards me and said: ‘When I go don’t put me in the ground with the rest of the silly buggers. Put me in the river, back where I was a boy, my boy.’
Dad found the exact spot he spoke of in words Grandad had written in Bedford, My Bedford, and one crisp spring afternoon my dad, my brother and I carried him back home: up the River Great Ouse above Bedford, below a bridge, across a field, and into a break in the eight-foot-high common reeds.
Grandad finished his journey where his passion began. Gently we eased his ashes between our fingers and let him slip into his infinite water.