The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  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 o
ut 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.