With Scotia and its necessary accessories, happy cast-offs this time of my father’s (reel and line and fly-box etc), arrived new boots, my black ‘oilskin’, my sou’wester, gear fit and unfit for the worst of wilderness weather. With it too, at last, came my deliverance from Sundays at home with my mother and sister. Goats from sheep, I entered the world of men and legend, a slip of a boy, hardly weighing five stone. From now on I would feed my own wide-eyed reservoir of dreams and future stories.
I had lived for this moment, longed for it consciously and no doubt subconsciously. I’d even wept for it in the small hours, hearing my father on the landing and the stair, as he tried not to make a noise, closing the back door, and making good his escape down the side of the house, into the dark murk of the bottle-green morning and away. To what? From what? What mystery at heart? Escaping to and escaping from being inextricably coupled motives and motifs. I would find it all out for myself in good time.
So, as you see, passing the eleven plus meant the world to me, but not for the usual reasons. It meant escape, escape from home. What if I’d failed? It doesn’t bear thinking about. Would Scotia have been my consolation prize? I can’t think so. But I didn’t fail and now no longer did I have to endure the day, waiting for my father to come home. No more did I have to play shop with my sister in the little cupboard in the alcove, or some such nonsense. She knew my heart wasn’t in it. She it was I once when quite a lot smaller rebuked as a ‘blooded fool’, meaning bloody fool, over some incident in that shop of hers. She it was who otherwise called me ‘the witness’, she of the village Band of Hope, if not the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
What did I witness on the home front? Nothing special, as you know. Those ordinary goings on, family life, differences, squabbles, arguments, violent outbursts of rage.... My sister’s line was that I didn’t participate, didn’t do my share, didn’t keep my end up, didn’t protest at parental injustice. It was hardly the thing in those days anyway. I kept my distance, later at least, I’m sure. And I saw the heart of melancholy itself, I believe, of longing for what I couldn’t have, of inarticulate loss thereby, from the start.
But whatever my sister’s view I used also to chatter-chatter-chatter, and I was called a jabberwocky. My father would thump the table angrily to shut me up as he tried to listen to the news on the wireless. Undaunted I would continue whispering loudly to complete what I wanted to say. So I was any number of things, at that age, just as I am now. Except then I longed to be a man and go fishing for trout at the Black Lake. Which none of you did, I think. Or I feel I would have met you.
I bore witness to the brown trout and the wilderness, in life and death, and grew quieter and more withdrawn, as if spell-bound. Whatever my earlier flights round the tower of Babel, I made up for them in silence soon enough. It wasn’t so much that I held my tongue, or kept my counsel. I just grew more inward, a receptor, not exactly pensive. I think therefore I am should here read I think therefore I was. Beyond home, among my peers, this withdrawal became especially marked, but at home too, until I was never quite at home. If I’d known what a cogito is mine would have been: I don’t think, therefore I am, lost in the depths of things.
Sometimes my father would exclaim aloud at the sadness he saw in my look. He’d see me absent, and distracted, both when I was a boy and later, in first manhood. It pained him. But I think I was very happy in my melancholy, if now today no longer free from deeper sorrow. I was cast that way at birth. But man’s inhumanity to man lends bias too. My father was a fine one to talk, anyway, in all the gloom that held him fast from day to day, so rarely lifting, so rarely light of heart, never it seemed at ease.
Now no more was it my sole compensation to gut and clean the fish he caught. This I had done in the high sink, under the cold tap, beginning when I was about eight. My brother was born when I was eight, and I did some sudden growing up, on being displaced, driven farther aside and farther into my self, a middle child now, and most fortunate in that, slipping from attention, pioneering no parental anxieties, inspiring no new cares, not needing nursing. How I loved my brother, and we all spoiled him: he was like a special gift. And I was doubly lucky he came along: for his arrival set me free; he served my solitude and independence and sharpened my sub-conscious focus.
I loved the work of gutting fish too, especially if the fish were big, though they were almost never more than three-quarters of a pound. Fish fascinated me. I loved them. I prized them. Every time I picked one up it was as if for the first time. Fish and fishing filled my head, made my head swim.
The characteristic Dulyn fish was dark-backed, as if dyed by the black water, sometimes with a golden underside – sometimes paler, depending much on the time of year – and strongly speckled with red. The Welsh word for trout is brithyll. One meaning of brith is speckled. The characteristic black peppering of speckles common to all trout was less clear to see on the Black Lake fish, especially above the lateral line. Often too the Black Lake brithyll was short and stocky. I believe a close Welsh equivalent of brithyll would be ‘common speckled fish’. So acquainted with them did I become that I could tell from the common speckled fish my father brought home, whether he’d fished at the Black Lake or a different water. In time, like a wine taster pinning a vintage to a year, to a village or a vineyard, I might just tell you which different water, the fish being, like an accent, precise to their place of origin. Sometimes the Dulyn fish had pale pink flesh and then it was said they were especially toothsome.
How I would look forward to my father’s return and the ritual gutting and cleaning in the half-light of Sunday evening, the water seeming to get colder and colder, as it splattered out of the tap, all the way from the lake properly called Caw Lwyd but known to us then as Cowlyd, or when we moved to the Wooded Hill, all the way from the Black Lake itself. Then I cleaned the fish in their native water.
The world came round for those fish and for me. And the world was Welsh, as only much later would I see. In time I learned to inspect their gizzards, to find what insect life the fish had been feeding on. It meant everything to me, to see the fish, to wonder at them and to rejoice, to ask my father how he had enticed the bigger ones to rise, with what fly. So insistent was I and persistent in wanting to share in his expeditions and be close to him in that way.
So much did I love the brown trout, but not to eat until later in life. I loved it even when the bright-eyed shine had gone from it and matt rigor mortis set in, supplanting slithery slippery-eel suppleness.
It seemed my father always caught fish, whether anyone else did or not, brown trout from the Black Lake, or once in a way another place, Caw Lwyd, or Llyn-y-Foel high up under Moel Siabod, or Llugwy, or.... Names of such weight and depth to me, I drowned in them, as I said them to myself, a Sunday litany, a catechism, of longing. Places I could smell in my father’s clothes and gear, in the bits of moss and other vegetation that got bagged with the fish, wet outdoor scents mingled with oilskin, when he came home. It was an intoxication to take to bed and sleep on, on the too-short journey to tomorrow. School in the morning to fend from my mind.
My father in his day fished every such North Welsh water known to man and some unknown, and others metaphysically, that he never found all day, out on the wilder moors and mountainsides, where anecdotal accounts of how to get there proved unreliable and maps stubborn to read, landmarks elusive to mark, ways hard to find. There were more than sixty lakes in our world, the world of Eryri, or Snowdonia. I would fish only a handful of them. Having explored far and wide, my father found the Black Lake best of all, as a challenge, both to get to, deterring others, and to fish. He loved it as no other water on earth, unless it was the smithy burn at Malzie, of founding memory, where as a boy he hooked his first trout and was hooked in turn, forever. It was his devotion to the art taught me the nature of faith and meaning. Some things have to be believed to be seen. Some fish must be imagined to be caught. The proof of life is passionate and unswerving devotion to dreams. As Yeats said – anothe
r fly-fisherman too – that’s where reality begins.
Of course there must have been blank days I overlook here, when all my father came home with was an empty creel, too tired to be gloomy at failure, and the day up there itself more than compensation.
* * *
Now with Scotia at the ready, I was of the company, a boy-man among men (Ifor and Trefor) as they were men among themselves, or my father’s sole companion for the day. I loved it especially when we went on our own. We delayed more. There was no one else to consider. We fished Afon Dulyn, the little stream that ran from the lake, especially if the water was up and danced around the boulders, foaming, purring, pouring, into black pooling holes, on a bend, such an enthralling sound-warp there. Such an inscape was there instressed in that rollrock highroad burn. Then the morning rise at the lake might be sacrificed to my instruction in casting, to the purism of fishing a small fly upstream.
My father would not fish, but crouching behind me, he’d coach me, correcting my action, and delighting in me when fingerling trout haloed overhead on my line, lured by the Welsh Coch-y-bonddu, the ignoble Bloody Butcher, the noble Mallard and Claret.... or the little black fly he designed himself, the bottle-brush fly that floated dry along the sheer surface of the narrows and rolled and bobbed in the turbulence of the pool, upstream, in those sharp acid-rain waters. There the small trout rose with roses on their silver flanks, to initiate me and be returned, instinctively, tenderly by first nature, to the dashing stream.
Then it was the same on the way home. But now we fished downstream, across stream, and in the dying evening when more fish chose to feed, in the thinning light, the cold air rapidly descending. Sometimes I’d hook one just big enough to eat.
When night began to close on us, my father might decide to trek away up the hill, on a vertical, knowing that to hit the track speedily would in the end make the final leg of our journey easier, no matter present suffering. Doing that one evening we stumbled on a rain gauge, a copper bucket in a hole, marked up in inches and fractions of inches. It had scarcely a drop in it, that high summer. So my father looked at me, and the next thing I knew we were bounding down to the stream to fill it, and then to struggle back a quarter of a mile or so and drop it all but full to the brim in its hole.
I could always depend on my father for lessons in delinquency. When I was ten, he was forty. We were ever divided by thirty years, as my son is from me, the true span of a generation, but sometimes it seemed scarcely more than half an hour. (The gauge we discovered was tended by the shepherd, who one day, with a knowing look, told of the time he’d found it full.)
So began my captivity in the wilderness, to things wild and wet. So I lay awake one fateful June morning in 1957, at 5.00am, pretending to be asleep, listening out for my father, as if fearful he’d forget me. At last he came into the bedroom and shook my foot through the blanket and whispered ‘Lad, lad...’ at which I pretended to wake suddenly. The day had come, the day of days. The eleven-plus was a watershed. (This is all a story about watersheds literal, littoral, and other, till the end of time for me.)
Normally the first day would be at the start of the season, which ran from 1 March to 30 September. It would not be in the month of June or May or April, unless March proved especially bitter and locked the lake with ice. It would follow the close season, as early in spring as could be. Mine had been a ten-year close season. Even before I could stand on a stool and turn the cold tap on above the old sink, trout fishing surfaced in my life. The close season – close and dark, a snug wintry tunnel with autumn at the entrance and spring at its exit – drew everything in.
How I remember those wintry nights, with the wireless on, or with my father hammering the typewriter writing about fishing, as often as not, or else sitting at his bureau under the crane of an anglepoise lamp, tying pretty imitations of the natural fly or nymph or larva. Winter might roar and rock about the house and the trees in the Glen or up on the allt crash and run like a sea in storm and flurry in the chimney, but we were snug indoors, in a pool of lamplight, absorbed at this miniature, delicate work, as if at the eye of a storm, the still centre, the eye of the hook.
As to tying flies, my father was like an old biddy with knitting patterns in her head: knit one, pearl one, knit two together.... He didn’t need recourse to patterns. All the patterns were in his head, and next in his hands, which were unusually big hands, unlikely hands for such delicate manoeuvres. Then there were adaptations and inventions, theories to put into practice, as to what a trout actually sees.
My father had books on the subject, classic books. Their appeal to me lay in their pretty illustrations of the numerous varieties of imitations they discussed, and the feathers they identified. These books also had other guidance, as to key flies to use month on month: Iron Blue Dun for March and April, when it is cold, for example, a small fly on a number 16 hook. But that was not the heart of my interest. My pleasure was more simply sensual. I’d draw my chair up and watch my father’s every move. His hands were so big that for significant passages you couldn’t see what he was doing. It was as if abracadabra he conjured the bright pretty flies into being.
About him on the opened bureau lid would be all the materials needed for whichever design he was intent on: Lillputian tins and boxes, scissors, tweezers, little spring-loaded clamps for gripping and winding the silk thread, and other miniature gadgets, and reels of thread: black, olive being the shades most in use but all the colours of the rainbow to be had in one or other giant cigar box (probably supplied by a Ratcliffe boss); and bigger reels of narrow lurex ribbon: gold and silver, and red; and gold wire; and wool, and quills, and hackles in ‘capes’ from the breasts of poultry: pointed cock hackles and rounded hen hackles, black hackles and brown and ginger ones: hackles of every kind and shade, some dyed ones of bright green or orange; horse hair; deer hair; dark hair from the hare’s ear; mole fur; water-vole fur; tinsel; wax; pheasant tails and tippets and wings; peacock herl and ostrich plumes; blackbird wings and tails, and song-thrush wings and tails; blue feathers from the wings of jays; starling hackles and wings; coot and moorhen feathers; heron feathers; teal, mallard, widgeon, partridge, grouse, woodcock, tawny owl feathers.... Every feather that ever took wing, it seemed.
Such an evening would smell of moth balls and nail polish and other potions, and it resounded with a jew’s-harp ring, created as the little hooks, gripped tight in the vice, received their first whipping of silk along their length, from bend to eye. I loved that noise. I loved on those occasions especially the scent of nail varnish, a beadlet on the point of a needle of transparent nail varnish being ideal for sealing the last hitch round the neck of the fly, once the thread is finally cut.
I loved the way the cock hackles would spill into a whirr of insect legs when wound round the shank, just behind the eye of the hook. And all manner of other effects delighted me, as the different materials were applied and the imitations completed: sedge fly, stone fly, caddis, nymph, beetle, spider, daddy long-legs, May fly etc, etc. You could not have enough flies. And as each one was made and set down on the desk, the mind could not help leap to ponder the trout it would take, to reflect on the lake, to imagine spring. Just so I would summon the lake to mind sometimes, when my mother filled the kettle.
You needed a great store of flies. Few survived the mauling they got when a trout rose and took the hook. Many besides were snagged and lost in the back-cast, or had their barbs ripped off by rocks, or got waterlogged and lost their glory. Veterans of successful days battered beyond further use would be hooked into jacket lapel or hat. My father wore successful flies in his hat, until it was so festooned with them you could barely make out the hat itself, for the besieging swarm of insects that forever buzzed about his head.
So the close season, when no fishing was done, had both a practical and a metaphysical role to play. Fishing went on. Fish were caught in the mind’s eye. By the age of twelve I was tying my own flies, and there was a pride in it that made you prefer only to
use those you’d tied yourself. Anyone might catch a hungry trout on a worm, but on an imitation fly, and one you’d made yourself? That was the heart of it.
And in another part of the dark wood of those days and times, outside with my airgun Diana .177 – goddess of hunting – I would go to shoot a blackbird or a thrush or some other innocent creature, and be rewarded with a sixpence or a shilling for a good pair of wings. And away my father would go shooting wildfowl and game and every kind of edible bird or creature for the pot, and in the process furnish an abundance of materials for the close season task of tying flies. Nature red in tooth and claw was first nature to me to know.
We didn’t drive to pick up Ifor at his house on this first trip, nor did we ever, but waited parked in the dim first of morning outside Ratcliffe’s. Ifor lived on Fairmount and would now be coming down the hill to Wellington Road, which Ratcliffe’s factory faced. (I was born on Fairmount at St Andrews Nursing Home.) There was Ifor in his wellingtons on Wellington Road, it used to amuse me to think. He was the only one who endured the rigours of the day in wellingtons and he never seemed to suffer from blisters. His oilskin was black and heavy. It was a bigger version of mine. But he also had matching water-proof leggings, whereas mine were light blue and very stiff and I didn’t really like them.
Nor did he travel light otherwise, but with a soldier’s knapsack with webbing straps (just as my father had) and brass clasps, and his creel over his shoulder or stuffed in his bag, and his rod, his snack in his bag, his newspaper twist of black tea-leaves and sugar, his can and little bottle of milk, his matches, newspaper and tinder, or on some days in the warmer weather, just his Thermos flask and squashed cheese and ham sandwiches, to comfort him in the valley of the shadow of the Black Lake.
Once Page 7
