by Will Millard
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-feck
in-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 wh
at 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.
