Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

by Paul Torday

  ‘Good evening, Dr Alfred,’ said the sheikh as I rose from my seat to greet him. ‘You are early. You must be hungry. Good.’ He sat in the chair the maître d’hotel had drawn out for him and ordered a whisky and soda for himself and a glass of champagne for me. I remember the sheikh turned to me and told me how good the food was there. I said I felt sure it was, and the sheikh nodded and said, ‘I know it is. The chef who now works here in the hotel used to work for me at my houses in London and Glen Tulloch, but I think he became bored with just cooking for me, and of course many weeks he was on his own when I was in the Yemen or elsewhere. So I understood when he accepted the offer of a job here, and of course I can still come and sample his cooking. I often do.’

  The drinks arrived and, with them, Harriet. I had not seen her for weeks. She had gone back to work at Fitzharris & Price but then had experienced something that I think must have been close to a nervous breakdown. Now she spent most of her time living at home with her parents, working from a laptop in her father’s study. My first impression was how pale and thin she was. Then she smiled at us, and her smile brought a lump to my throat. She still looked very pretty, despite her worn out air. I felt a great wave of pity mixed with desire sweep across me. I remember thinking, Desire? I am fifteen years her senior, for God’s sake.

  ‘You are off to a good start,’ she said, looking at my glass. ‘Yes, please, the same for me, if it is what I think it is.’

  ‘The Krug ‘85,’ murmured the wine waiter who had handed us our drinks and was waiting for further orders. ‘His Excellency orders no other champagne.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was any other kind,’ said the sheikh. He smiled at us, and then there was the business of menus being handed round. Once this was done and orders had been taken, the sheikh raised his glass and said, ‘A toast!

  To my friends, Dr Alfred and Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, who have worked without pause, who have set aside every difficulty both small and great-some difficulties, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, have been very great for you, very great indeed-and have succeeded against all odds in bringing my project to this point.’

  He raised his glass and drank to us. I saw the people at the next table gazing at the unusual, but in that place perhaps not unknown, spectacle of a sheikh drinking from a large tumbler of whisky and soda. He may have been aware of such glances, but they meant nothing to him.

  I, in turn, raised my glass and said, ‘To the project, Sheikh Muhammad, to its successful launch and its great future, and to the vision that inspired it!’

  Harriet and I drank to the sheikh and he inclined his head in acknowledgement and smiled again. ‘To the project!’ he repeated.

  This was our celebration dinner. The sheikh had suggested it a few days ago, after a project review meeting at Harriet’s office. Everything was now ready. I had been out on a final tour of inspection in June. The holding tanks had been built, as had the channels that led from them into the Wadi Aleyn. Water had been pumped from the aquifer into the holding tanks, and they had been leak tested. The sluice gates had been tested. The oxygenation equipment, which would keep the salmon alive when the temperature rose, also worked. The heat exchangers, designed to cool the water in the holding basins when the sunlight reached them, were fine. All the equipment had been checked and rechecked. We had run, and rerun, our computer models a hundred times. Nothing had been left to chance, except the great chance of the project itself.

  And the wadi had been re-engineered too. There were ramps for the fish to swim up where before large boulders might have obstructed their passage. There was a graded track running alongside the wadi to allow safe access for spectators and anglers, when it was full. Concrete casting platforms had been built at fifty-yard intervals, to allow fishermen who did not want to wade the ability to cover the river with their flies.

  Cases of equipment had been flown out to al-Shisr. Stacked in a room at the sheikh’s palace were dozens of fishing rods: fifteen-foot rods, twelve-foot rods, nine-foot rods. There were reels of floating line, sinking line; sink tips and leaders of all types. There were boxes and boxes of flies, of every different mixture of colour, size and shape. The selection had been made from flies which were known to catch fish on every imaginable salmon river, from the Spey to the Vistula, from the Oykel to the Ponoi, because no one really knew what fly a salmon in the Yemen would take, and what fly it would not take. The sheikh, I know, was looking forward to hours of experimentation.

  The sheikh’s honour guard, who had received training in the arts of fly fishing from Colin McPherson, were all back in the Yemen, and would be kitted out with rods and tackle, and encouraged to keep their hand in until the great day. They had been ordered to find a flat bit of desert, and practise Spey casting for an hour every day. The guard to a man were competing to become the first man to catch a salmon in the Wadi Aleyn (and indeed in the whole Islamic world) and the sheikh had already made it known that the first man to catch a fish would receive privileges and riches beyond his dreams, sufficient for the rest of his days, and all the days of his children, and all the days of his children’s children.

  The previous week we had received a final sign-off from the project engineering team that we were ‘good to go’. Now I was counting the days off on the calendar until the great moment came. I was flying back out to the Yemen two days after this dinner, to make the final, final checks and await the arrival of the sheikh and, after him, the prime minister and his party.

  Interrogator:

  Tell us about the involvement of the prime minister?

  Alfred Jones:

  I’ve told you before how my memory operates. Let me tell it as it happened. I’m trying to cooperate. If you did not keep interrupting, it would make it easier for both of us.

  Pause while the witness refused to talk for a few minutes. Then he resumed.

  §

  I was no longer in any doubt about the success of this project. I believed it would work. I believed it would be a transforming moment in the history of fisheries science, in the history of the species Salmo salar, and in the history of the Yemen. But above all I believed it would be a transforming moment in my own life.

  Already I was a quite different person to the Alfred Jones who had started work on this project over a year ago. That man had counted his greatest achievement an article he had written on caddis fly larvae which he had hoped would be published in Trout & Salmon. So far, it had not been. That man had lived trapped in a loveless marriage, for so I now realised it had been, accepting his fate meekly and without question. Then, I had not known the nature of love. Now I knew that I might not know much more about love, but at least I understood I had never known what it was before.

  And other things were changing in me.

  The first course arrived, and as we ate I asked the sheikh how he had come to learn about fishing in the first place. For some reason there had never been a moment to ask him this question before.

  ‘Many years ago,’ he said, ‘I was asked by my friend Sheikh Makhtoum, the ruler of Dubai, to go and shoot with him in the north of England. He has a very big estate there, with very many grouse, and I have shot sand grouse at home in the Yemen. I may say, I am a very good shot, or at least I thought I was. But when I got there I found that instead of walking after the grouse or pursuing them from vehicles, one was expected to stand still and wait for them to come to the guns. It was very different. We waited and we waited, and then, just as I had given up hope of ever seeing a grouse, clouds of them started flying past us. And the little brown birds, they flew so fast that I could not hit them for a long time. And I was very ashamed, for in the Yemen I am accounted a good shot.

  ‘Then Makhtoun said to me, ‘If you think that is so difficult, then you must try salmon fishing, and then you will have tried all these strange British sports, and you will agree with me that they are wonderful!’ So the next day, when we were not shooting, I went with a man to a river not far away, and he showed me where the salmon lay in the
water, and he taught me a little bit how to cast, and then I fished. I did not catch anything that day, but by the end of the day, when I was tired and wet and cold, I knew that there was no other sport for me any more. This was what I wanted to do, with every spare minute that God granted me.

  ‘When I left at the end of my visit, that man came with me. I offered him much money to come, but in the end he came because he could see my love for the fish was as great as his. And the name of that man was Colin McPherson.

  ‘I have not been asked back to shoot grouse by my friend Makhtoum, but I hope he has forgiven me for taking his man.’

  Harriet and I laughed. The plates were cleared away and wine was poured for Harriet and me. The sheikh, as usual, drank water with his food.

  ‘Now you must return the compliment,’ he said, ‘and tell me, Dr Alfred, where you first learned to fish and who was your teacher. In my pride I also now think I am a good fisherman, may God forgive me, but when I see you cast, I think I see a better fisherman than I am.’

  I blushed and muttered a denial.

  ‘No, no, do not be embarrassed,’ said the sheikh. ‘We are both of us true salmon fishermen and all comparisons apart from that are unimportant. But tell me, and Harriet Chetwode-Talbot shall learn as well, how it was you became a fisherman.’

  So I told him about my father, who was a schoolmaster in the Midlands. There was not a salmon within a hundred miles of us, at least not in those days, and he used to take me to Scotland every summer. My mother died when I was young, and my father was too busy to spend much time with me during term time. My aunt took care of me most of the time. But in the summer holidays we would go up and fish on little spate rivers in the north of Scotland, in the Flow Country or on the west coast. In those days it did not cost too much to buy a bit of fishing for a couple of rods for a week. Sometimes we went onto the estuaries of larger rivers where you could buy a ticket and fish for the day. And we used to rent a little bothy and sleep in that, and my father and I would gather up wood and light a campfire, and if we caught a fish he’d show me how to gut it and cook it, and the whole experience just got into my blood. I remember those long summer evenings in the far north, when there was just enough wind to keep the midges away, as the happiest moments of my life.

  I stopped for a moment, feeling I was talking too much, but both the sheikh and Harriet were looking at me raptly. I could tell that they too could see what was in my mind’s eye, as nearly as one person can ever see what is in the mind of another. A small boy of twelve or thirteen, standing on the shingle of a wide stream turning silver and gold in the evening light, the bothy behind him, where smoke curls up from a wood fire. He takes his rod up to the vertical and the line flies back over his head. A pause, then a snap of the wrist and the rod whips the line back out, so that it lands light as a feather on shadowed water under the far bank. I remembered the low hills in the distance and the cries of curlews and oystercatchers which had flown in from the nearby estuary, and I remembered the stillness and fulfilment in my heart as I saw the fly come round perfectly, and saw the swirl of the fish following it.

  The next course arrived and broke the spell.

  ‘And your father taught you?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘He had fished for sea trout in Wales, as a boy. He knew all about it. He was a true expert, a better fisherman than I will ever be. And he taught me the ‘Fisherman’s Rhyme’.’

  ‘What is the ‘Fisherman’s Rhyme’?’ asked the sheikh. ‘I have never heard of this.’

  ‘It,’ I explained, ‘is the rhyme that every fisherman chants to himself before he leaves the house, to make quite sure he does not forget anything essential. Do you want to hear it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the sheikh. ‘I insist we hear it.’

  I glanced apologetically at Harriet and then said, ‘Rod, reel,⁄Flask, creel,⁄Net, fly book⁄And lunch.’

  They both laughed out loud, and the sheikh had to have the rhyme repeated to him. Then Harriet said, ‘What happened at your meeting with the odious Peter Maxwell? You haven’t said. Sorry, Sheikh, but he is odious even though I know you are too polite ever to admit it.’

  Interrogator:

  Please tell us now about your meeting with Peter Maxwell.

  Alfed Jones:

  As I told you before, it was earlier the same day. Some time at the beginning of July but I can’t remember the date. I went to Downing Street and was shown into his office after only the briefest of waits, which was unusual with him. To my surprise, instead of the usual dark blue suit he was wearing a safari jacket, an open-necked shirt, chinos and desert boots. He stood up, shook my hand and greeted me like an old friend.

  ‘This is my desert outfit,’ he told me, indicating the safari jacket. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Perfect,’ I assured him.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Peter Maxwell, as he showed me to my seat, ‘there are four million anglers in this country? Four million!’

  ‘No,’ I said, sitting down and accepting the cup of coffee he handed me, ‘I didn’t know, but the number doesn’t particularly surprise me. It sounds about right.’

  ‘Do you know how many paid-up members there are of our party in the country?’ He held up his hand to forestall my guess. I’m not political anyway; I wouldn’t have known. ‘Less than half a million,’ he informed me. ‘More than ten anglers out there for every committed party member. I mean, it puts a whole new spin on the project, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? ’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I’m a bit slow at grasping these political ideas.’

  Maxwell seemed very excited. ‘You’ve been slow? Not you. I’ve been slow. You, Fred, have been doing a great job. No one would have given odds on the Yemen salmon project succeeding a few months ago. Thanks to you, I don’t think many people would bet against it now. That is why I am so excited by what is happening. You know, if you don’t get a knighthood at the end of this, then I’d like to know what the honours system is all about. And the chairman of the Patronage Committee is an old, old friend of mine. No, the only person who hasn’t been doing his job as well as he should have is me. Me, Peter Maxwell, who was supposed to see every political angle in every story. How could I have missed this until now? How could I?’ And he struck his brow, rather dramatically, with the heel of his hand.

  ‘Thank God, it’s not too late,’ he said. ‘There I was thinking that the real spin-off for the project was all those guys out there who don’t agree with our various military interventions. You’ve seen the placards on demonstrations: ‘Troops out of Iraq ’, ‘Troops out of Saudi Arabia ’, ‘Troops out of Kazakhstan ’. I mean, it’s becoming like a bad geography lesson. The original idea was we were going to provide a distraction to all these protest groups by doing something a bit different in the Yemen -fish, not guns. You understood that, didn’t you, Fred?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I got the general idea. I’m afraid I’ve been concentrating on the technical side of the project and haven’t given enough thought to the other aspects, but yes, I think I had grasped the basis of your interest. Is that no longer the case?’

  ‘Oh, it is still the case. Very much the case. We still want the media coverage and the ‘fish, not war’ story. We still want to go ahead with the PM’s visit, and we still want the goodwill we think we will bank from that. But there’s so much more. Don’t you see?’

  ‘I’m still not sure I do,’ I said, feeling stupid and slow.

  Maxwell stood up again and began pacing up and down the carpet in front of three vast, silent, flickering TV screens. ‘Well, here’s the maths,’ he said. ‘We think there might still be a hard core of half a million people out there who are troubled by our various Middle Eastern wars, especially the ones in Iraq. Half of them are probably our natural voters but now they might not vote for us at the next election. So, when we launch the project, we win some of them back. Maybe half of them, so that’s-are you following me-just over one hundred thousand
votes which could swing our way. Plus a lot of advantages if we could get the media off our case for a few days.

  ‘Now, let’s look at the angling community. There are four million of them, and we don’t have the research that tells us how they vote. It’s not in our database. Isn’t that incredible! We analyse our voters by socio-economic class, by geography, by whether they own their own home or not, by whether they had a university education or not, by age, by income group, by whether they drink wine or beer, by what their skin colour and sexual preference is, and by what their religion is. They’re so analysed it isn’t true. But we don’t know whether they fish or not. The biggest popular sport in the country, and we don’t know how many of them are, or could be, our voters.’

  I was beginning to see the point.

  ‘But I tell you this, Fred,’ said Maxwell, stopping in mid-pace, wheeling round and pointing a finger at me, ‘by the time I’m finished we’ll know everything we need to know about them. They’ll be the best-analysed voter group of the lot. And I’ll tell you the other thing about them: they will see and read stories, starting with this project, of just what a keen angler the PM is. He said so last year in the House. We’ll build on that statement. We’ll repeat it in all the papers and on TV. And then we’ll show the people that we are the government for anglers. There’ll be more money for fisheries. There’ll be angling academies. There’ll be a fishing rod for every child over the age of ten. I haven’t worked it all out yet, Fred, but by God if less than three million of those anglers don’t vote for us at the next election, then I will have lost my touch.’

  I nodded my head and said, ‘Well, we will do the best we can with our part of it.’

  Peter Maxwell sat down behind his desk again. ‘I know you will, Fred; I have great faith that you will deliver on the project. But, just one thing’-here the finger pointed at me again-‘the boss has got to catch a fish. And our schedule still says he has only twenty minutes to do it in. But it is crucial that we have that photo opportunity. Fred, you, and you alone, have to guarantee he gets that salmon. Can you do it?’