The lure of rivers
One lucky afternoon I chanced upon an interview between Robert Macfarlane and Mark Wormald about his book, The Catch – Fishing for Ted Hughes. Mark Wormald described Hughes’s struggle to capture in poetry the slippery physicality of his relationship with rivers and the fish he encountered there. This idea struck me, particularly as both Wormald and Hughes are professional wordsmiths and also fishermen. I took the bait and bought the book, which is a marvellously sinuous confluence of memory and literature and a hymn to the love story between humans and rivers. Reading it gave rise to memories of my Dad and his lifelong affair with fishing.
‘A hymn to the love story between humans and rivers.’
Sunset on the River Teme at Ludlow
We lived in Edinburgh, but every summer we went to the Hebrides in search of trout. My father signed us all up to this quest. If my mum resented spending her summer entertaining three children in a series of draughty bothies she never said. Much later I remember her sympathising with her sister whose family were dragged to Royal Dornoch every year, saying of my father, ‘at least he doesn’t play golf’. In its favour fishing offered dramatic scenery, variety and the promise of something to eat at the end of the day. She always packed a sharp knife for the filleting. Dad left early every morning strung about with trout rods and an old army knapsack containing fishing flies, reels, a flask of Heinz tomato soup and two cheese and ham rolls. He returned at dusk, sometimes with fish, often without and we fell asleep to the whirr of reels as he sat at the kitchen table, whisky at his elbow, drying his lines.
Sometimes I was allowed to join him. Insouciant sheep would watch from the roadside as I squelched up the hillside behind Dad in my too big wellies the tackle bag banging awkwardly at my hip. What seemed from below to be the summit hid a peaty lochan where a single rowing boat waited to spirit us over the dark choppy waters. I was tasked with rowing the boat but did it so badly that I was swiftly returned to the shore with a bottle of midge repellent and the instruction to ‘stay right there and don’t move.’ I ate my sandwiches at 11 o’clock and spent the rest of the day crouched in the heather, reading my dogeared copy of Prince Caspian, with half an eye open for the monstrous blood-sucking ticks that were certainly hiding in the long grass preparing to snack on my exposed knees.
Once my rowing had improved sufficiently, I was trusted to transport Dad and a tweedy medical colleague out into the picture postcard that is Lake of Mentieth. Oars shipped I was banished to the damp green boat cushion in the stern while fishing flies whizzed and flicked over my head. Dad wore a tweed deerstalker with spare flies hooked into the band, an ancient, waxed jacket that smelt of pipe smoke and an air of intense concentration. Talking was not allowed. My role was to hand them the tackle box when a change of fly was required and be ready with the aluminium framed landing net in the event of a fish being hooked. If the catch were large enough, I was to despatch it with a smart blow to the head as I had been taught, the instrument of execution being, I later realised, a medical knee hammer.
In the Easter holidays we decamped to Boat of Garten so Dad could fish the Spey. One day he gamely took all three of us with him. He spent the entire morning galumphing up and down the stony bank in his waders releasing our lines from overhanging branches, unknotting the inevitable fankles and trying to stop my youngest sister from skimming stones into the salmon pools. Sometimes we even caught fish – always small brownies, and he taught us how to gently disengage the hook from the jaws and hold them in the current until they could swim away. Occasionally we took a couple of the larger ones home, strung through the gills with bullrushes, for Mum to gut, fillet, dip in oatmeal and fry in butter. I doubt we would have made it as hunter gatherers.
I don’t think I realised until very recently, that catching fish was never the point. My father was not an emotional man, nor a particularly communicative one, and I don’t think he could have articulated what fishing meant to him. He spent winter evenings tying flies at a green baize card table conjuring fantastically gaudy insects from a motley collection of feathers, wire and sparkly thread. In the early 1980s he made us each a pair of fishing fly earrings – with the barbs carefully removed. I wish I’d had the maturity to ask him about it, to understand why he kept so many, to me, identical rods in ancient canvas bags stacked in the garage and why he would spend long summer afternoons dry casting in the garden. Dad was a GP like his father and an elder of the kirk, a careful man who took very few risks. Only now when I walk beside the Tweed in spate and feel the power of that wide brown force, I see him in heavy rubber waders up to his hips in cold, raging water and recognise him as reckless.
I discovered recently these pictures of my father as a young man, and as a much older one, with two of the few salmon he ever caught. The delight on his face is the same in both photographs, although they were taken 50 years apart and this tells me more about why he fished than any conversation.
My father only ever fished in Scotland, where the water tends to icy peatiness. Ted Hughes and Mark Wormald, have fished all over but are both natives of the English chalk streams that provide a uniquely rich habitat for so much aquatic life and whose existence is under threat from multiple directions. Mark has waded deep into the campaign to prioritise and protect these waters, and recently helped organise a conference in Cambridge bringing together, scientists, fishermen, conservationists and writers to share ideas and raise awareness of the danger the chalk streams face.
We cannot all be poets, and I for one will never be a fisherwoman, but our bodies are composed 60% of water, rivers flow in our blood and we cannot let these precious places slip out of our lives.
