Long before I’d pledged my troth before the Reverend Mervyn Pettitt my imagination had been frequently occupied by golden, sun-filled images of father and spellbound son sitting thigh to short-trousered thigh, fishing for tiddlers in some idyllic farm pond.
The thought had always appealed even as a young teenager – not through any premature yearning to become a parent, more a passion to paint the excellence and magic of fishing on the impressionable canvas of a young mind; so besotted, so steeped was I in all that formed the wonderful world in which I walked, sat and fished that even then I possessed a subliminal need to preserve and perpetuate that world.
As much as I love my fishing today, there was a period of ten years or so when a genetic investigation would surely have revealed in me a trace of Cyprinus Carpio…every sunrise, every sunset, every push of moonlit water, every cloop and every scrape of silver-paper on gravel impregnated my soul to the point of distraction – and to the detriment of my education.
On the first evening of the 1968 summer-break, my bed and I parted company and wouldn’t be reacquainted until September 4th, the day before school resumed. I lie, I think. I have a vague recollection of a blissful one night stand some time toward the end of August when, I believe, Mum persuaded me to ‘Have a nice bath and a proper night’s sleep’.
It would have spoilt a good record, but then thirty-nine nights wildie-hunting out of forty might be considered enough for any young man. But I simply couldn’t get enough. I still have the pencilled account of being awake and fishing from mid-day on a Saturday to 2pm Wednesday at which time the hallucinations became a tad too realistic: three or four times I saw the land heave, crumble and creep, lava-like, into the lake along with my rods and after as many panicky, pointless rescue attempts I decided that even a morn as beautiful as this would have to be forsaken in the interests of my health and sanity. I simply hadn’t been able to bear the thought of missing a moment of the preceding dawns and dusks, the warm nights and the sunlit ripples of the day.
I awoke exactly twenty-four hours later, curiously refreshed, and believing it to be Wednesday afternoon still.
It is difficult for me to believe that there existed on Earth at that time another angler with a greater or even similar passion for fishing, and it was that complete, euphoric fulfilment that started me subconsciously contemplating at an early age the prospect of schooling a future sprog in the Utopia of fishing and water lore. I suspect my conscious thoughts on the matter occupied no more of my time than those of any other angler; I did, however, determine that any child of mine would benefit from the humblest of initiations to the Gentle Art – possibly by way of the bamboo cane and bent-pin but probably with the use of a seven foot spinner and cheap fixed-spool reel. Regardless of the tackle, the apprenticeship would involve certain vital ingredients: maggots, worms, floats, mud (the black, smelly, peaty stuff) tea, sandwiches and a keep-net. Rising at 3am would be another essential element for, at six or seven years of age, you are unaware that there is such an hour. You are familiar with the right-angled clock-hands, the ‘L’ shape of 3 o’clock, but it’s dark and it’s quiet and that’s weird. But it’s so exciting! Stepping out into the silence of the darkened street you imagine that you and Dad are the only people awake on Earth. Talk is muted and to the point. The latch on the garden-gate is quietly opened and closed before turning to wave to Mum – a pale blur at the bedroom window – and clomping off in your wellies to the pick-up point. Club-outings, too, are fundamental to a youngster’s upbringing.
I knew all this and I KNOW all this, but when the time came I blew it.
It wasn’t all my fault. The World had changed for a start, and, at the tender age of five, Christopher was quite accustomed to early morning dashes for the Dover Ferry and Stansted Airport: 3am held no special enchantment for him. He’d entered a world where the night sky was grey, orange on the horizon, and host to a small handful of only the brightest stars. He knew he’d soon be belted-in and zooming down the tarmac with Eddy Stobart and his pal, Norbert Dentressangle. He most likely knew what ‘Prestons’ do and where ‘Potto’ is as well.
But I am partly to blame. Well, largely to blame. O.k, it’s all my fault! I was at that awkward stage in life when one’s commitments and responsibilities in family life clash head-on with the natural urge to fish. I’d developed since becoming a dad a mental picture of what I saw as a ‘fairness balance’- a vague approximation to the Scales of Justice – tilting this way and that according to the time spent fishing or the amount of effort expended on, say, decorating or pushing swings down at the local rec’. The scales had for a squirmingly long time been in my favour, so my coming trip to the North Cambridge Fens had been painfully and resoundingly dropped into the conversation after tea on Friday. Fearful of her response I quickly added the masterstroke, that Chris would be coming and that the air would do him good and that he’d have a lovely day and that we could drop in on Grandma and that……..
So, Sunday saw us on Moretons Leam, an intimate little drain almost as deep as it is wide; no bamboo canes, no bent pins…together we lobbed out a half-herring, leaving five year old Chris to hold the glass Dawsons Challenger and Mitchell 300. One glance over the shoulder as I threaded my line brought home to me the folly of my judgement: sat there on a square of polythene, Chris’s beautiful but pale little face blinked and unpretentiously grimaced with every gust of the November North-Wind. The three feet of cork and glass that stuck out from under his arm told me that, indeed, ten feet of fishing rod is too much for a small boy; he’d naturally informed me that six or seven is about right. Chris’s blue watery eyes were fixed on the float as per my instruction but clearly no spell had been cast and no excited anticipation showed in them.
I lifted the hood of his anorak and adjusted his scarf. I kissed his forehead and rubbed a little warmth into his cheeks, attempting a few words of encouragement to assuage my feelings of guilt. Turning back to my tackle, the full significance of the morning hit me hard – you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression…where were the forest-filtered sunbeams, the decaying logs, the foul but irresistible pong of pond-mud, the buttery lilies, the Tizer? No ‘Fisherman’s Ruler’ lay in the grass beside him, no bread-paste, no solar-powered maggots on a journey to nowhere, no muddy knees….
His assurance that he was happy cheered me little, not inside. I knew that seven or eight hours of winter sky, land and water was no recipe for a lifetime love of fishing and that, yes, I’d blown it; he’d never beg me to take him down to the pond, never rush home from school and be away again within five minutes, rod tied to his crossbar. I’d never emulate Mr Crabtree in a favourite fireside chair, smiling and nodding approval of my boys’ bank-side exploits. And I was right.
Chris’s float duly bobbed and fought its way upwind for four or five yards – potentially more explosive than the darting of a sixpenny quill but nowhere near as exciting for a nipper. Nonetheless, it was good to have some action and having turned the tension-cap to a safe setting I instructed my lovely boy to wait until the fish pulled, then to strike.
After much reel-screaming and shutter-clicking, a fish as long as Chris himself was netted and soon turning the needle to just over 12lbs.
 |
|
Chris – with the tench I’d pursued for twenty years |
Good? I don’t think so. At best, the occasion was bitter-sweet, a hole in one on your first-ever round, a childhood holiday in the Seychelles, paying to lose your cherry……Chris must have thought ALL fish were that big and that easy to catch. He didn’t fish with me again until he’d reached the age of ten when I tried to repair the damage with a quill and maggots-only visit to an Essex reservoir noted for its trout, pike and roach. Dad saw to himself first: matching 12ft rods coupled with fast-retrieve Japanese reels filled with low-stretch 4lb line. Meticulously seated on inch-perfectly spaced precision-made telescopic rod-rests, the Specialist Legers each fished two grains of corn on a size 10 at about 40 yards. Inwardly smug with my set-up and confident of showing my son a specimen roach or two, I set him up with ‘boy’s tackle’ terminating in a single maggot suspended by a chipped quill I’d bought in Pownalls of Great Yarmouth in 1963. Even after three botched attempts at casting, Chris insisted on putting the float out himself and succeeded at his next attempt, pleased to see it cock upright, dip once and sail away! After turning out the drawers of his memory-bank Chris gave a half-hearted strike and promptly petrified as the culprit made for the valve-tower a quarter of a mile away. It had to be a trout, eh?
Ten minutes later, my little boy nonchalantly netted the fish I’d pursued for twenty years. It was a tench. And it weighed 6lb 12oz. Easy, innit?
Sure enough, Chris eventually found his spiritual home sitting on a desk in his bedroom and went on to achieve an honours degree in Computer Science. I marvel at his knowledge and skill, his intimacy with ‘bus-lanes’ and super-conductors, his keyboard dexterity and logical thought processes….but I wish I’d taken him to that pond in the summer of ’87.
Cliff Hatton.
