We
weren’t
very badly stung, but it was a
pity there was no one standing by with a stopwatch.
pity there was no one standing by with a stopwatch.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
I was sitting
on the grass bank with the rod in my hands, with the flies buzzing round, and the smell of
wild peppermint fit to knock you down, watching the red float on the green water, and I
was happy as a tinker although the tear- marks mixed up with dirt were still all over my
face.
Lord knows how long we sat there. The morning stretched out and out, and the sun got
higher and higher, and nobody had a bite. It was a hot still day, too clear for fishing. The
floats lay on the water with never a quiver. You could see deep down into the water as
though you were looking into a kind of dark green glass. Out in the middle of the pool
you could see the fish lying just under the surface, sunning themselves, and sometimes in
the weeds near the side a newt would come gliding upwards and rest there with his
fingers on the weeds and his nose just out of the water. But the fish weren’t biting. The
others kept shouting that they’d got a nibble, but it was always a lie. And the time
stretched out and out and it got hotter and hotter, and the flies ate you alive, and the wild
peppermint under the bank smelt like Mother Wheeler’s sweet-shop. I was getting
hungrier and hungrier, all the more because I didn’t know for certain where my dinner
was coming from. But I sat as still as a mouse and never took my eyes off the float. The
others had given me a lump of bait about the size of a marble, telling me that would have
to do for me, but for a long time I didn’t even dare to re-bait my hook, because every
time I pulled my line up they swore I was making enough noise to frighten every fish
within five miles.
I suppose we must have been there about two hours when suddenly my float gave a
quiver. I knew it was a fish. It must have been a fish that was just passing accidentally
and saw my bait. There’s no mistaking the movement your float gives when it’s a real
bite. It’s quite different from the way it moves when you twitch your line accidentally.
The next moment it gave a sharp bob and almost went under. I couldn’t hold myself in
any longer. I yelled to the others:
‘I’ve got a bite! ’
‘Rats! ’ yelled Sid Lovegrove instantly.
But the next moment there wasn’t any doubt about it. The float dived straight down, I
could still see it under the water, kind of dim red, and I felt the rod tighten in my hand.
Christ, that feeling! The line jerking and straining and a fish on the other end of it! The
others saw my rod bending, and the next moment they’d all flung their rods down and
rushed round to me. I gave a terrific haul and the fish — a great huge silvery fish — came
flying up through the air. The same moment all of us gave a yell of agony. The fish had
slipped off the hook and fallen into the wild peppennint under the bank. But he’d fallen
into shallow water where he couldn’t turn over, and for perhaps a second he lay there on
his side helpless. Joe flung himself into the water, splashing us all over, and grabbed him
in both hands. ‘I got ‘im! ’ he yelled. The next moment he’d flung the fish on to the grass
and we were all kneeling round it. How we gloated! The poor dying brute flapped up and
down and his scales glistened all the colours of the rainbow. It was a huge carp, seven
inches long at least, and must have weighed a quarter of a pound. How we shouted to see
him! But the next moment it was as though a shadow had fallen across us. We looked up,
and there was old Brewer standing over us, with his tall billycock hat — one of those hats
they used to wear that were a cross between a top hat and a bowler — and his cowhide
gaiters and a thick hazel stick in his hand.
We suddenly cowered like partridges when there’s a hawk overhead. He looked from one
to other of us. He had a wicked old mouth with no teeth in it, and since he’d shaved his
beard off his chin looked like a nutcracker.
‘What are you boys doing here? ’ he said.
There wasn’t much doubt about what we were doing. Nobody answered.
‘I’ll learn ‘ee come fishing in my pool! ’ he suddenly roared, and the next moment he was
on us, whacking out in all directions.
The Black Hand broke and fled. We left all the rods behind and also the fish. Old Brewer
chased us half across the meadow. His legs were stiff and he couldn’t move fast, but he
got in some good swipes before we were out of his reach. We left him in the middle of
the field, yelling after us that he knew all our names and was going to tell our fathers. I’d
been at the back and most of the wallops had landed on me. I had some nasty red weals
on the calves of my legs when we got to the other side of the hedge.
I spent the rest of the day with the gang. They hadn’t made up their mind whether I was
really a member yet, but for the time being they tolerated me. The errand boy, who’d had
the morning off on some lying pretext or other, had to go back to the brewery. The rest of
us went for a long, meandering, scrounging kind of walk, the sort of walk that boys go for
when they’re away from home all day, and especially when they’re away without
pennission. It was the first real boy’s walk I’d had, quite different from the walks we
used to go with Katie Simmons. We had our dinner in a dry ditch on the edge of the
town, full of rusty cans and wild fennel. The others gave me bits of their dinner, and Sid
Lovegrove had a penny, so someone fetched a Penny Monster which we had between us.
It was very hot, and the fennel smelt very strong, and the gas of the Penny Monster made
us belch. Afterwards we wandered up the dusty white road to Upper Binfield, the first
time I’d been that way, I believe, and into the beech woods with the carpets of dead
leaves and the great smooth tru nk s that soar up into the sky so that the birds in the upper
branches look like dots. You could go wherever you liked in the woods in those days.
Binfield House, was shut up, they didn’t preserve the pheasants any longer, and at the
worst you’d only meet a carter with a load of wood. There was a tree that had been sawn
down, and the rings of the trunk looked like a target, and we had shots at it with stones.
Then the others had shots at birds with their catapults, and Sid Lovegrove swore he’d hit
a chaffinch and it had stuck in a fork in the tree. Joe said he was lying, and they argued
and almost fought. Then we went down into a chalk hollow full of beds of dead leaves
and shouted to hear the echo. Someone shouted a dirty word, and then we said over all
the dirty words we knew, and the others jeered at me because I only knew three. Sid
Lovegrove said he knew how babies were bom and it was just the same as rabbits except
that the baby came out of the woman’s navel. Harry Barnes started to carve the word —
— on a beech tree, but got fed up with it after the first two letters. Then we went round
by the lodge of Binfield House. There was a rumour that somewhere in the grounds there
was a pond with enonnous fish in it, but no one ever dared go inside because old Hodges,
the lodge-keeper who acted as a kind of caretaker, was ‘down’ on boys. He was digging
in his vegetable garden by the lodge when we passed. We cheeked him over the fence
until he chased us off, and then we went down to the Walton Road and cheeked the
carters, keeping on the other side of the hedge so that they couldn’t reach us with their
whips. Beside the Walton Road there was a place that had been a quarry and then a
rubbish dump, and finally had got overgrown with blackberry bushes. There were great
mounds of rusty old tin cans and bicycle frames and saucepans with holes in them and
broken bottles with weeds growing all over them, and we spent nearly an hour and got
ourselves filthy from head to foot routing out iron fence posts, because Harry Bames
swore that the blacksmith in Lower Binfield would pay sixpence a hundredweight for old
iron. Then Joe found a late thrush’s nest with half-fledged chicks in it in a blackberry
bush. After a lot of argument about what to do with them we took the chicks out, had
shots at them with stones, and finally stamped on them. There were four of them, and we
each had one to stamp on. It was getting on towards tea-time now. We knew that old
Brewer would be as good as his word and there was a hiding ahead of us, but we were
getting too hungry to stay out much longer. Finally we trailed home, with one more row
on the way, because when we were passing the allotments we saw a rat and chased it with
sticks, and old Bennet the station-master, who worked at his allotment every night and
was very proud of it, came after us in a tearing rage because we’d trampled on his onion-
bed.
I’d walked ten miles and I wasn’t tired. All day I’d trailed after the gang and tried to do
everything they did, and they’d called me ‘the kid’ and snubbed me as much as they
could, but I’d more or less kept my end up. I had a wonderful feeling inside me, a feeling
you can’t know about unless you’ve had it — but if you’re a man you’ll have had it some
time. I knew that I wasn’t a kid any longer, I was a boy at last. And it’s a wonderful thing
to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can’t catch you, and to chase rats and kill
birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It’s a kind of strong, rank
feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it’s all bound up with
breaking rules and killing things. The white dusty roads, the hot sweaty feeling of one’s
clothes, the smell of fennel and wild peppennint, the dirty words, the sour stink of the
rubbish dump, the taste of fizzy lemonade and the gas that made one belch, the stamping
on the young birds, the feel of the fish straining on the line — it was all part of it. Thank
God I’m a man, because no woman ever has that feeling.
Sure enough, old Brewer had sent round and told everybody. Father looked very glum,
fetched a strap out of the shop, and said he was going to ‘thrash the life out of Joe. But
Joe struggled and yelled and kicked, and in the end Father didn’t get in more than a
couple of whacks at him. However, he got a caning from the headmaster of the Grammar
School next day. I tried to struggle too, but I was small enough for Mother to get me
across her knee, and she gave me what-for with the strap. So I’d had three hidings that
day, one from Joe, one from old Brewer, and one from Mother. Next day the gang
decided that I wasn’t really a member yet and that I’d got to go through the ‘ordeal’ (a
word they’d got out of the Red Indian stories) after all. They were very strict in insisting
that you had to bite the wonn before you swallowed it. Moreover, because I was the
youngest and they were jealous of me for being the only one to catch anything, they all
made out afterwards that the fish I’d caught wasn’t really a big one. In a general way the
tendency of fish, when people talk about them, is to get bigger and bigger, but this one
got smaller and smaller, until to hear the others talk you’d have thought it was no bigger
than a minnow.
But it didn’t matter. I’d been fishing. I’d seen the float dive under the water and felt the
fish tugging at the line, and however many lies they told they couldn’t take that away
from me.
4
For the next seven years, from when I was eight to when I was fifteen, what I chiefly
remember is fishing.
Don’t think that I did nothing else. It’s only that when you look back over a long period
of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else. I left
Mother Howlett’s and went to the Grammar School, with a leather satchel and a black
cap with yellow stripes, and got my first bicycle and a long time afterwards my first long
trousers. My first bike was a fixed- wheel — free-wheel bikes were very expensive then.
When you went downhill you put your feet up on the front rests and let the pedals go
whizzing round. That was one of the characteristic sights of the early nineteen-
hundreds — a boy sailing downhill with his head back and his feet up in the air. I went to
the Grammar School in fear and trembling, because of the frightful tales Joe had told me
about old Whiskers (his name was Wicksey) the headmaster, who was certainly a
dreadful-looking little man, with a face just like a wolf, and at the end of the big
schoolroom he had a glass case with canes in it, which he’d sometimes take out and
swish through the air in a terrifying manner. But to my surprise I did rather well at
school. It had never occurred to me that I might be cleverer than Joe, who was two years
older than me and had bullied me ever since he could walk. Actually Joe was an utter
dunce, got the cane about once a week, and stayed somewhere near the bottom of the
school till he was sixteen. My second term I took a prize in arithmetic and another in
some queer stuff that was mostly concerned with pressed flowers and went by the name
of Science, and by the time I was fourteen Whiskers was talking about scholarships and
Reading University. Father, who had ambitions for Joe and me in those days, was very
anxious that I should go to ‘college’. There was an idea floating round that I was to be a
schoolteacher and Joe was to be an auctioneer.
But I haven’t many memories connected with school. When I’ve mixed with chaps from
the upper classes, as I did during the war, I’ve been struck by the fact that they never
really get over that frightful drilling they go through at public schools. Either it flattens
them out into half-wits or they spend the rest of their lives kicking against it. It wasn’t so
with boys of our class, the sons of shopkeepers and farmers. You went to the Grammar
School and you stayed there till you were sixteen, just to show that you weren’t a prole,
but school was chiefly a place that you wanted to get away from. You’d no sentiment of
loyalty, no goofy feeling about the old grey stones (and they WERE old, right enough,
the school had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey), and there was no Old Boy’s tie and
not even a school song. You had your half-holidays to yourself, because games weren’t
compulsory and as often as not you cut them. We played football in braces, and though it
was considered proper to play cricket in a belt, you wore your ordinary shirt and trousers.
The only game I really cared about was the stump cricket we used to play in the gravel
yard during the break, with a bat made out of a bit of packing case and a compo ball.
But I remember the smell of the big schoolroom, a smell of ink and dust and boots, and
the stone in the yard that had been a mounting block and was used for sharpening knives
on, and the little baker’s shop opposite where they sold a kind of Chelsea bun, twice the
size of the Chelsea buns you get nowadays, which were called Lardy Busters and cost a
halfpenny. I did all the things you do at school. I carved my name on a desk and got the
cane for it — you were always caned for it if you were caught, but it was the etiquette that
you had to carve your name. And I got inky lingers and bit my nails and made darts out
of penholders and played conkers and passed round dirty stories and learned to
masturbate and cheeked old Blowers, the English master, and bullied the life out of little
Willy Simeon, the undertaker’s son, who was half- witted and believed everything you
told him. Our favourite trick was to send him to shops to buy things that didn’t exist. All
the old gags — the ha’porth of penny stamps, the rubber hammer, the left-handed
screwdriver, the pot of striped paint — poor Willy fell for all of them. We had grand sport
one afternoon, putting him in a tub and telling him to lift himself up by the handles. He
ended up in an asylum, poor Willy. But it was in the holidays that one really lived.
There were good things to do in those days. In winter we used to borrow a couple of
ferrets — Mother would never let Joe and me keep them at home, ‘nasty smelly things’
she called them — and go round the farms and ask leave to do a bit of ratting. Sometimes
they let us, sometimes they told us to hook it and said we were more trouble than the rats.
Later in winter we’d follow the threshing machine and help kill the rats when they
threshed the stacks. One winter, 1908 it must have been, the Thames flooded and then
froze and there was skating for weeks on end, and Harry Bames broke his collar- bone on
the ice. In early spring we went after squirrels with squailers, and later on we went
birdnesting. We had a theory that birds can’t count and it’s all right if you leave one egg,
but we were cruel little beasts and sometimes we’d just knock the nest down and trample
on the eggs or chicks. There was another game we had when the toads were spawning.
We used to catch toads, ram the nozzle of a bicycle pump up their backsides, and blow
them up till they burst. That’s what boys are like, I don’t know why. In summer we used
to bike over the Burford Weir and bathe. Wally Lovegrove, Sid’s young cousin, was
drowned in 1906. He got tangled in the weeds at the bottom, and when the drag-hooks
brought his body to the surface his face was jet black.
But fishing was the real thing. We went many a time to old Brewer’s pool, and took tiny
carp and tench out of it, and once a whopping eel, and there were other cow-ponds that
had fish in them and were within walking distance on Saturday afternoons. But after we
got bicycles we started fishing in the Thames below Burford Weir. It seemed more
grown-up than fishing in cow-ponds. There were no farmers chasing you away, and there
are thumping fish in the Thames — though, so far as I know, nobody’s ever been known to
catch one.
It’s queer, the feeling I had for fishing — and still have, really. I can’t call myself a
fisherman. I’ve never in my life caught a fish two feet long, and it’s thirty years now
since I’ve had a rod in my hands. And yet when I look back the whole of my boyhood
from eight to fifteen seems to have revolved round the days when we went fishing. Every
detail has stuck clear in my memory. I can remember individual days and individual fish,
there isn’t a cow- pond or a backwater that I can’t see a picture of if I shut my eyes and
think. I could write a book on the technique of fishing. When we were kids we didn’t
have much in the way of tackle, it cost too much and most of our threepence a week
(which was the usual pocket- money in those days) went on sweets and Lardy Busters.
Very small kids generally fish with a bent pin, which is too blunt to be much use, but you
can make a pretty good hook (though of course it’s got no barb) by bending a needle in a
candle flame with a pair of pliers. The farm lads knew how to plait horsehair so that it
was almost as good as gut, and you can take a small fish on a single horsehair. Later we
got to having two-shilling fishing-rods and even reels of sorts. God, what hours I’ve spent
gazing into Wallace’s window! Even the . 410 guns and saloon pistols didn’t thrill me so
much as the fishing tackle. And the copy of Gamage’s catalogue that I picked up
somewhere, on a rubbish dump I think, and studied as though it had been the Bible! Even
now I could give you all the details about gut-substitute and gimp and Limerick hooks
and priests and disgorgers and Nottingham reels and God knows how many other
technicalities.
Then there were the kinds of bait we used to use. In our shop there were always plenty of
mealworms, which were good but not very good. Gentles were better. You had to beg
them off old Gravitt, the butcher, and the gang used to draw lots or do enamena-mina-mo
to decide who should go and ask, because Gravitt wasn’t usually too pleasant about it. He
was a big, rough-faced old devil with a voice like a mastiff, and when he barked, as he
generally did when speaking to boys, all the knives and steels on his blue apron would
give a jingle. You’d go in with an empty treacle-tin in your hand, hang round till any
customers had disappeared and then say very humbly:
‘Please, Mr Gravitt, y’got any gentles today? ’
Generally he’d roar out: ‘What! Gentles! Gentles in my shop! Ain’t seen such a thing in
years. Think I got blow-flies in my shop? ’
He had, of course. They were everywhere. He used to deal with them with a strip of
leather on the end of a stick, with which he could reach out to enonnous distances and
smack a fly into paste. Sometimes you had to go away without any gentles, but as a rule
he’d shout after you just as you were going:
“Ere! Go round the backyard an’ ‘ave a look. P’raps you might find one or two if you
looked careful. ’
You used to find them in little clusters everywhere. Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a
battlefield. Butchers didn’t have refrigerators in those days. Gentles live longer if you
keep them in sawdust.
Wasp grubs are good, though it’s hard to make them stick on the hook, unless you bake
them first. When someone found a wasps’ nest we’d go out at night and pour turpentine
down it and plug up the hole with mud. Next day the wasps would all be dead and you
could dig out the nest and take the grubs. Once something went wrong, the turps missed
the hole or something, and when we took the plug out the wasps, which had been shut up
all night, came out all together with a zoom.
We weren’t very badly stung, but it was a
pity there was no one standing by with a stopwatch. Grasshoppers are about the best bait
there is, especially for chub. You stick them on the hook without any shot and just flick
them to and fro on the surface — ‘dapping’, they call it. But you can never get more than
two or three grasshoppers at a time. Greenbottle flies, which are also damned difficult to
catch, are the best bait for dace, especially on clear days. You want to put them on the
hook alive, so that they wriggle. A chub will even take a wasp, but it’s a ticklish job to
put a live wasp on the hook.
God knows how many other baits there were. Bread paste you make by squeezing water
through white bread in a rag. Then there are cheese paste and honey paste and paste with
aniseed in it. Boiled wheat isn’t bad for roach. Redworms are good for gudgeon. You find
them in very old manure heaps. And you also find another kind of worm called a
brandling, which is striped and smells like an earwig, and which is very good bait for
perch. Ordinary earthworms are good for perch. You have to put them in moss to keep
them fresh and lively. If you try to keep them in earth they die. Those brown flies you
find on cowdung are pretty good for roach. You can take a chub on a cherry, so they say,
and I’ve seen a roach taken with a currant out of a bun.
In those days, from the sixteenth of June (when the coarse-fishing season starts) till
midwinter I wasn’t often without a tin of worms or gentles in my pocket. I had some
fights with Mother about it, but in the end she gave in, fishing came off the list of
forbidden things and Father even gave me a two-shilling fishing-rod for Christmas in
1903. Joe was barely fifteen when he started going after girls, and from then on he
seldom came out fishing, which he said was a kid’s game. But there were about half a
dozen others who were as mad on fishing as I was. Christ, those fishing days! The hot
sticky afternoons in the schoolroom when I’ve sprawled across my desk, with old
Blowers’s voice grating away about predicates and subjunctives and relative clauses, and
all that’s in my mind is the backwater near Burford Weir and the green pool under the
willows with the dace gliding to and fro. And then the terrific rush on bicycles after tea,
to Chamford Hill and down to the river to get in an hour’s fishing before dark. The still
summer evening, the faint splash of the weir, the rings on the water where the fish are
rising, the midges eating you alive, the shoals of dace swarming round your hook and
never biting. And the kind of passion with which you’d watch the black backs of the fish
swarming round, hoping and praying (yes, literally praying) that one of them would
change his mind and grab your bait before it got too dark. And then it was always ‘Let’s
have five minutes more’, and then ‘Just five minutes more’, until in the end you had to
walk your bike into the town because Towler, the copper, was prowling round and you
could be ‘had up’ for riding without a light. And the times in the summer holidays when
we went out to make a day of it with boiled eggs and bread and butter and a bottle of
lemonade, and fished and bathed and then fished again and did occasionally catch
something. At night you’d come home with filthy hands so hungry that you’d eaten what
was left of your bread paste, with three or four smelly dace wrapped up in your
handkerchief. Mother always refused to cook the fish I brought home. She would never
allow that river fish were edible, except trout and salmon. ‘Nasty muddy things’, she
called them. The fish I remember best of all are the ones I didn’t catch. Especially the
monstrous fish you always used to see when you went for a walk along the towpath on
Sunday afternoons and hadn’t a rod with you. There was no fishing on Sundays, even the
Thames Conservancy Board didn’t allow it. On Sundays you had to go for what was
called a ‘nice walk’ in your thick black suit and the Eton collar that sawed your head off.
It was on a Sunday that I saw a pike a yard long asleep in shallow water by the bank and
nearly got him with a stone. And sometimes in the green pools on the edge of the reeds
you’d see a huge Thames trout go sailing past. The trout grow to vast sizes in the
Thames, but they’re practically never caught. They say that one of the real Thames
fishennen, the old bottle-nosed blokes that you see muffled up in overcoats on camp-
stools with twenty-foot roach-poles at all seasons of the year, will willingly give up a
year of his life to catching a Thames trout. I don’t blame them, I see their point entirely,
and still better I saw it then.
Of course other things were happening. I grew three inches in a year, got my long
trousers, won some prizes at school, went to Confirmation classes, told dirty stories, took
to reading, and had crazes for white mice, fretwork, and postage stamps. But it’s always
fishing that I remember. Summer days, and the flat water- meadows and the blue hills in
the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of
deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking
round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don’t mistake what I’m talking
about. It’s not that I’m trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know
that’s all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster. I’ll tell you
about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it
out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all
that. Needless to say he’s got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren’t in any way
poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.
A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape,
doesn’t give a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being
good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things — that’s about as near
to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of
longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time
stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for
ever.
I was rather an ugly little boy, with butter-coloured hair which was always cropped short
except for a quiff in front. I don’t idealize my childhood, and unlike many people I’ve no
wish to be young again. Most of the things I used to care for would leave me something
more than cold. I don’t care if I never see a cricket ball again, and I wouldn’t give you
threepence for a hundredweight of sweets. But I’ve still got, I’ve always had, that
peculiar feeling for fishing. You’ll think it damned silly, no doubt, but I’ve actually half a
wish to go fishing even now, when I’m fat and forty-five and got two kids and a house in
the suburbs. Why? Because in a manner of speaking I AM sentimental about my
childhood — not my own particular childhood, but the civilization which I grew up in and
which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick. And fishing is somehow typical of that
civilization. As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong to the
modem world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool —
and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside — belongs to the time before the war,
before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler. There’s a kind of peacefulness even in
the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike,
chub, carp, tench. They’re solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn’t
heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating
aspirins, going to the pictures, and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp.
Does anyone go fishing nowadays, I wonder? Anywhere within a hundred miles of
London there are no fish left to catch. A few dismal fishing-clubs plant themselves in
rows along the banks of canals, and millionaires go trout-fishing in private waters round
Scotch hotels, a sort of snobbish game of catching hand-reared fish with artificial flies.
But who fishes in mill-streams or moats or cow-ponds any longer? Where are the English
coarse fish now? When I was a kid every pond and stream had fish in it. Now all the
ponds are drained, and when the streams aren’t poisoned with chemicals from factories
they’re full of rusty tins and motor-bike tyres.
My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught. That’s usual enough, I
suppose.
When I was about fourteen Father did a good turn of some kind to old Hodges, the
caretaker at Binfield House. I forget what it was — gave him some medicine that cured
his fowls of the worms, or something. Hodges was a crabby old devil, but he didn’t forget
a good turn. One day a little while afterwards when he’d been down to the shop to buy
chicken-corn he met me outside the door and stopped me in his surly way. He had a face
like something carved out of a bit of root, and only two teeth, which were dark brown and
very long.
‘Hey, young ‘un! Fisherman, ain’t you? ’
‘Yes. ’
‘Thought you was. You listen, then. If so be you wanted to, you could bring your line and
have a try in that they pool up ahind the Hall. There’s plenty bream and jack in there. But
don’t you tell no one as I told you. And don’t you go for to bring any of them other
young whelps, or I’ll beat the skin off their backs. ’
Having said this he hobbled off with his sack of corn over his shoulder, as though feeling
that he’d said too much already. The next Saturday afternoon I hiked up to Binfield
House with my pockets full of worms and gentles, and looked for old Hodges at the
lodge. At that time Binfield House had already been empty for ten or twenty years. Mr
Farrel, the owner, couldn’t afford to live in it and either couldn’t or wouldn’t let it. He
lived in London on the rent of his farms and let the house and grounds go to the devil. All
the fences were green and rotting, the park was a mass of nettles, the plantations were
like a jungle, and even the gardens had gone back to meadow, with only a few old
gnarled rose- bushes to show you where the beds had been. But it was a very beautiful
house, especially from a distance. It was a great white place with colonnades and long-
shaped windows, which had been built, I suppose, about Queen Anne’s time by someone
who’d travelled in Italy. If I went there now I’d probably get a certain kick out of
wandering round the general desolation and thinking about the life that used to go on
there, and the people who built such places because they imagined that the good days
would last for ever. As a boy I didn’t give either the house or the grounds a second look. I
dug out old Hodges, who’d just finished his dinner and was a bit surly, and got him to
show me the way down to the pool. It was several hundred yards behind the house and
completely hidden in the beech woods, but it was a good-sized pool, almost a lake, about
a hundred and fifty yards across. It was astonishing, and even at that age it astonished me,
that there, a dozen miles from Reading and not fifty from London, you could have such
solitude. You felt as much alone as if you’d been on the ha nk s of the Amazon. The pool
was ringed completely round by the enormous beech trees, which in one place came
down to the edge and were reflected in the water. On the other side there was a patch of
grass where there was a hollow with beds of wild peppermint, and up at one end of the
pool an old wooden boathouse was rotting among the bulrushes.
The pool was swarming with bream, small ones, about four to six inches long. Every now
and again you’d see one of them turn half over and gleam reddy brown under the water.
There were pike there too, and they must have been big ones. You never saw them, but
sometimes one that was basking among the weeds would turn over and plunge with a
splash that was like a brick being bunged into the water. It was no use trying to catch
them, though of course I always tried every time I went there. I tried them with dace and
minnows I’d caught in the Thames and kept alive in a jam-jar, and even with a spinner
made out of a bit of tin. But they were gorged with fish and wouldn’t bite, and in any
case they’d have broken any tackle I possessed. I never came back from the pool without
at least a dozen small bream. Sometimes in the summer holidays I went there for a whole
day, with my fishing-rod and a copy of Chums or the Union Jack or something, and a
hu nk of bread and cheese which Mother had wrapped up for me. And I’ve fished for
hours and then lain in the grass hollow and read the Union Jack, and then the smell of my
bread paste and the plop of a fish jumping somewhere would send me wild again, and I’d
go back to the water and have another go, and so on all through a summer’s day. And the
best of all was to be alone, utterly alone, though the road wasn’t a quarter of a mile away.
I was just old enough to know that it’s good to be alone occasionally. With the trees all
round you it was as though the pool belonged to you, and nothing ever stirred except the
fish ringing the water and the pigeons passing overhead. And yet, in the two years or so
that I went fishing there, how many times did I really go, I wonder? Not more than a
dozen. It was a three-mile bike ride from home and took up a whole afternoon at least.
And sometimes other things turned up, and sometimes when I’d meant to go it rained.
You know the way things happen.
One afternoon the fish weren’t biting and I began to explore at the end of the pool
farthest from Binfield House. There was a bit of an overflow of water and the ground was
boggy, and you had to fight your way through a sort of jungle of blackberry bushes and
rotten boughs that had fallen off the trees. I struggled through it for about fifty yards, and
then suddenly there was a clearing and I came to another pool which I had never known
existed. It was a small pool not more than twenty yards wide, and rather dark because of
the boughs that overhung it. But it was very clear water and immensely deep. I could see
ten or fifteen feet down into it. I hung about for a bit, enjoying the dampness and the
rotten boggy smell, the way a boy does. And then I saw something that almost made me
jump out of my skin.
It was an enonnous fish. I don’t exaggerate when I say it was enormous. It was almost
the length of my ann. It glided across the pool, deep under water, and then became a
shadow and disappeared into the darker water on the other side. I felt as if a sword had
gone through me. It was far the biggest fish I’d ever seen, dead or alive. I stood there
without breathing, and in a moment another huge thick shape glided through the water,
and then another and then two more close together. The pool was full of them. They were
carp, I suppose. Just possibly they were bream or tench, but more probably carp. Bream
or tench wouldn’t grow so huge. I knew what had happened. At some time this pool had
been connected with the other, and then the stream had dried up and the woods had
closed round the small pool and it had just been forgotten. It’s a thing that happens
occasionally. A pool gets forgotten somehow, nobody fishes in it for years and decades
and the fish grow to monstrous sizes. The brutes that I was watching might be a hundred
years old. And not a soul in the world knew about them except me. Very likely it was
twenty years since anyone had so much as looked at the pool, and probably even old
Hodges and Mr Farrel’s bailiff had forgotten its existence.
Well, you can imagine what I felt. After a bit I couldn’t even bear the tantalization of
watching. I hurried back to the other pool and got my fishing things together. It was no
use trying for those colossal brutes with the tackle I had. They’d snap it as if it had been a
hair. And I couldn’t go on fishing any longer for the tiny bream. The sight of the big carp
had given me a feeling in my stomach almost as if I was going to be sick. I got on to my
bike and whizzed down the hill and home. It was a wonderful secret for a boy to have.
There was the dark pool hidden away in the woods and the monstrous fish sailing round
it — fish that had never been fished for and would grab the first bait you offered them. It
was only a question of getting hold of a line strong enough to hold them. Already I’d
made all the arrangements. I’d buy the tackle that would hold them if I had to steal the
money out of the till. Somehow, God knew how, I’d get hold of half a crown and buy a
length of silk salmon line and some thick gut or gimp and Number 5 hooks, and come
back with cheese and gentles and paste and mealworms and brandlings and grasshoppers
and every mortal bait a carp might look at. The very next Saturday afternoon I’d come
back and try for them.
But as it happened I never went back. One never does go back. I never stole the money
out of the till or bought the bit of salmon line or had a try for those carp. Almost
immediately afterwards something turned up to prevent me, but if it hadn’t been that it
would have been something else. It’s the way things happen.
I know, of course, that you think I’m exaggerating about the size of those fish. You think,
probably, that they were just medium- sized fish (a foot long, say) and that they’ve
swollen gradually in my memory. But it isn’t so. People tell lies about the fish they’ve
caught and still more about the fish that are hooked and get away, but I never caught any
of these or even tried to catch them, and I’ve no motive for lying. I tell you they were
enonnous.
5
Fishing!
Here I’ll make a confession, or rather two. The first is that when I look back through my
life I can’t honestly say that anything I’ve ever done has given me quite such a kick as
fishing. Everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison, even women. I don’t set
up to be one of those men that don’t care about women. I’ve spent plenty of time chasing
them, and I would even now if I had the chance. Still, if you gave me the choice of
having any woman you care to name, but I mean ANY woman, or catching a ten-pound
carp, the carp would win every time. And the other confession is that after I was sixteen I
never fished again.
Why? Because that’s how things happen. Because in this life we lead — I don’t mean
human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country — we
don’t do the things we want to do. It isn’t because we’re always working. Even a farm-
hand or a Jew tailor isn’t always working. It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives
us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There’s time for everything except the things worth
doing.
on the grass bank with the rod in my hands, with the flies buzzing round, and the smell of
wild peppermint fit to knock you down, watching the red float on the green water, and I
was happy as a tinker although the tear- marks mixed up with dirt were still all over my
face.
Lord knows how long we sat there. The morning stretched out and out, and the sun got
higher and higher, and nobody had a bite. It was a hot still day, too clear for fishing. The
floats lay on the water with never a quiver. You could see deep down into the water as
though you were looking into a kind of dark green glass. Out in the middle of the pool
you could see the fish lying just under the surface, sunning themselves, and sometimes in
the weeds near the side a newt would come gliding upwards and rest there with his
fingers on the weeds and his nose just out of the water. But the fish weren’t biting. The
others kept shouting that they’d got a nibble, but it was always a lie. And the time
stretched out and out and it got hotter and hotter, and the flies ate you alive, and the wild
peppermint under the bank smelt like Mother Wheeler’s sweet-shop. I was getting
hungrier and hungrier, all the more because I didn’t know for certain where my dinner
was coming from. But I sat as still as a mouse and never took my eyes off the float. The
others had given me a lump of bait about the size of a marble, telling me that would have
to do for me, but for a long time I didn’t even dare to re-bait my hook, because every
time I pulled my line up they swore I was making enough noise to frighten every fish
within five miles.
I suppose we must have been there about two hours when suddenly my float gave a
quiver. I knew it was a fish. It must have been a fish that was just passing accidentally
and saw my bait. There’s no mistaking the movement your float gives when it’s a real
bite. It’s quite different from the way it moves when you twitch your line accidentally.
The next moment it gave a sharp bob and almost went under. I couldn’t hold myself in
any longer. I yelled to the others:
‘I’ve got a bite! ’
‘Rats! ’ yelled Sid Lovegrove instantly.
But the next moment there wasn’t any doubt about it. The float dived straight down, I
could still see it under the water, kind of dim red, and I felt the rod tighten in my hand.
Christ, that feeling! The line jerking and straining and a fish on the other end of it! The
others saw my rod bending, and the next moment they’d all flung their rods down and
rushed round to me. I gave a terrific haul and the fish — a great huge silvery fish — came
flying up through the air. The same moment all of us gave a yell of agony. The fish had
slipped off the hook and fallen into the wild peppennint under the bank. But he’d fallen
into shallow water where he couldn’t turn over, and for perhaps a second he lay there on
his side helpless. Joe flung himself into the water, splashing us all over, and grabbed him
in both hands. ‘I got ‘im! ’ he yelled. The next moment he’d flung the fish on to the grass
and we were all kneeling round it. How we gloated! The poor dying brute flapped up and
down and his scales glistened all the colours of the rainbow. It was a huge carp, seven
inches long at least, and must have weighed a quarter of a pound. How we shouted to see
him! But the next moment it was as though a shadow had fallen across us. We looked up,
and there was old Brewer standing over us, with his tall billycock hat — one of those hats
they used to wear that were a cross between a top hat and a bowler — and his cowhide
gaiters and a thick hazel stick in his hand.
We suddenly cowered like partridges when there’s a hawk overhead. He looked from one
to other of us. He had a wicked old mouth with no teeth in it, and since he’d shaved his
beard off his chin looked like a nutcracker.
‘What are you boys doing here? ’ he said.
There wasn’t much doubt about what we were doing. Nobody answered.
‘I’ll learn ‘ee come fishing in my pool! ’ he suddenly roared, and the next moment he was
on us, whacking out in all directions.
The Black Hand broke and fled. We left all the rods behind and also the fish. Old Brewer
chased us half across the meadow. His legs were stiff and he couldn’t move fast, but he
got in some good swipes before we were out of his reach. We left him in the middle of
the field, yelling after us that he knew all our names and was going to tell our fathers. I’d
been at the back and most of the wallops had landed on me. I had some nasty red weals
on the calves of my legs when we got to the other side of the hedge.
I spent the rest of the day with the gang. They hadn’t made up their mind whether I was
really a member yet, but for the time being they tolerated me. The errand boy, who’d had
the morning off on some lying pretext or other, had to go back to the brewery. The rest of
us went for a long, meandering, scrounging kind of walk, the sort of walk that boys go for
when they’re away from home all day, and especially when they’re away without
pennission. It was the first real boy’s walk I’d had, quite different from the walks we
used to go with Katie Simmons. We had our dinner in a dry ditch on the edge of the
town, full of rusty cans and wild fennel. The others gave me bits of their dinner, and Sid
Lovegrove had a penny, so someone fetched a Penny Monster which we had between us.
It was very hot, and the fennel smelt very strong, and the gas of the Penny Monster made
us belch. Afterwards we wandered up the dusty white road to Upper Binfield, the first
time I’d been that way, I believe, and into the beech woods with the carpets of dead
leaves and the great smooth tru nk s that soar up into the sky so that the birds in the upper
branches look like dots. You could go wherever you liked in the woods in those days.
Binfield House, was shut up, they didn’t preserve the pheasants any longer, and at the
worst you’d only meet a carter with a load of wood. There was a tree that had been sawn
down, and the rings of the trunk looked like a target, and we had shots at it with stones.
Then the others had shots at birds with their catapults, and Sid Lovegrove swore he’d hit
a chaffinch and it had stuck in a fork in the tree. Joe said he was lying, and they argued
and almost fought. Then we went down into a chalk hollow full of beds of dead leaves
and shouted to hear the echo. Someone shouted a dirty word, and then we said over all
the dirty words we knew, and the others jeered at me because I only knew three. Sid
Lovegrove said he knew how babies were bom and it was just the same as rabbits except
that the baby came out of the woman’s navel. Harry Barnes started to carve the word —
— on a beech tree, but got fed up with it after the first two letters. Then we went round
by the lodge of Binfield House. There was a rumour that somewhere in the grounds there
was a pond with enonnous fish in it, but no one ever dared go inside because old Hodges,
the lodge-keeper who acted as a kind of caretaker, was ‘down’ on boys. He was digging
in his vegetable garden by the lodge when we passed. We cheeked him over the fence
until he chased us off, and then we went down to the Walton Road and cheeked the
carters, keeping on the other side of the hedge so that they couldn’t reach us with their
whips. Beside the Walton Road there was a place that had been a quarry and then a
rubbish dump, and finally had got overgrown with blackberry bushes. There were great
mounds of rusty old tin cans and bicycle frames and saucepans with holes in them and
broken bottles with weeds growing all over them, and we spent nearly an hour and got
ourselves filthy from head to foot routing out iron fence posts, because Harry Bames
swore that the blacksmith in Lower Binfield would pay sixpence a hundredweight for old
iron. Then Joe found a late thrush’s nest with half-fledged chicks in it in a blackberry
bush. After a lot of argument about what to do with them we took the chicks out, had
shots at them with stones, and finally stamped on them. There were four of them, and we
each had one to stamp on. It was getting on towards tea-time now. We knew that old
Brewer would be as good as his word and there was a hiding ahead of us, but we were
getting too hungry to stay out much longer. Finally we trailed home, with one more row
on the way, because when we were passing the allotments we saw a rat and chased it with
sticks, and old Bennet the station-master, who worked at his allotment every night and
was very proud of it, came after us in a tearing rage because we’d trampled on his onion-
bed.
I’d walked ten miles and I wasn’t tired. All day I’d trailed after the gang and tried to do
everything they did, and they’d called me ‘the kid’ and snubbed me as much as they
could, but I’d more or less kept my end up. I had a wonderful feeling inside me, a feeling
you can’t know about unless you’ve had it — but if you’re a man you’ll have had it some
time. I knew that I wasn’t a kid any longer, I was a boy at last. And it’s a wonderful thing
to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can’t catch you, and to chase rats and kill
birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It’s a kind of strong, rank
feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it’s all bound up with
breaking rules and killing things. The white dusty roads, the hot sweaty feeling of one’s
clothes, the smell of fennel and wild peppennint, the dirty words, the sour stink of the
rubbish dump, the taste of fizzy lemonade and the gas that made one belch, the stamping
on the young birds, the feel of the fish straining on the line — it was all part of it. Thank
God I’m a man, because no woman ever has that feeling.
Sure enough, old Brewer had sent round and told everybody. Father looked very glum,
fetched a strap out of the shop, and said he was going to ‘thrash the life out of Joe. But
Joe struggled and yelled and kicked, and in the end Father didn’t get in more than a
couple of whacks at him. However, he got a caning from the headmaster of the Grammar
School next day. I tried to struggle too, but I was small enough for Mother to get me
across her knee, and she gave me what-for with the strap. So I’d had three hidings that
day, one from Joe, one from old Brewer, and one from Mother. Next day the gang
decided that I wasn’t really a member yet and that I’d got to go through the ‘ordeal’ (a
word they’d got out of the Red Indian stories) after all. They were very strict in insisting
that you had to bite the wonn before you swallowed it. Moreover, because I was the
youngest and they were jealous of me for being the only one to catch anything, they all
made out afterwards that the fish I’d caught wasn’t really a big one. In a general way the
tendency of fish, when people talk about them, is to get bigger and bigger, but this one
got smaller and smaller, until to hear the others talk you’d have thought it was no bigger
than a minnow.
But it didn’t matter. I’d been fishing. I’d seen the float dive under the water and felt the
fish tugging at the line, and however many lies they told they couldn’t take that away
from me.
4
For the next seven years, from when I was eight to when I was fifteen, what I chiefly
remember is fishing.
Don’t think that I did nothing else. It’s only that when you look back over a long period
of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else. I left
Mother Howlett’s and went to the Grammar School, with a leather satchel and a black
cap with yellow stripes, and got my first bicycle and a long time afterwards my first long
trousers. My first bike was a fixed- wheel — free-wheel bikes were very expensive then.
When you went downhill you put your feet up on the front rests and let the pedals go
whizzing round. That was one of the characteristic sights of the early nineteen-
hundreds — a boy sailing downhill with his head back and his feet up in the air. I went to
the Grammar School in fear and trembling, because of the frightful tales Joe had told me
about old Whiskers (his name was Wicksey) the headmaster, who was certainly a
dreadful-looking little man, with a face just like a wolf, and at the end of the big
schoolroom he had a glass case with canes in it, which he’d sometimes take out and
swish through the air in a terrifying manner. But to my surprise I did rather well at
school. It had never occurred to me that I might be cleverer than Joe, who was two years
older than me and had bullied me ever since he could walk. Actually Joe was an utter
dunce, got the cane about once a week, and stayed somewhere near the bottom of the
school till he was sixteen. My second term I took a prize in arithmetic and another in
some queer stuff that was mostly concerned with pressed flowers and went by the name
of Science, and by the time I was fourteen Whiskers was talking about scholarships and
Reading University. Father, who had ambitions for Joe and me in those days, was very
anxious that I should go to ‘college’. There was an idea floating round that I was to be a
schoolteacher and Joe was to be an auctioneer.
But I haven’t many memories connected with school. When I’ve mixed with chaps from
the upper classes, as I did during the war, I’ve been struck by the fact that they never
really get over that frightful drilling they go through at public schools. Either it flattens
them out into half-wits or they spend the rest of their lives kicking against it. It wasn’t so
with boys of our class, the sons of shopkeepers and farmers. You went to the Grammar
School and you stayed there till you were sixteen, just to show that you weren’t a prole,
but school was chiefly a place that you wanted to get away from. You’d no sentiment of
loyalty, no goofy feeling about the old grey stones (and they WERE old, right enough,
the school had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey), and there was no Old Boy’s tie and
not even a school song. You had your half-holidays to yourself, because games weren’t
compulsory and as often as not you cut them. We played football in braces, and though it
was considered proper to play cricket in a belt, you wore your ordinary shirt and trousers.
The only game I really cared about was the stump cricket we used to play in the gravel
yard during the break, with a bat made out of a bit of packing case and a compo ball.
But I remember the smell of the big schoolroom, a smell of ink and dust and boots, and
the stone in the yard that had been a mounting block and was used for sharpening knives
on, and the little baker’s shop opposite where they sold a kind of Chelsea bun, twice the
size of the Chelsea buns you get nowadays, which were called Lardy Busters and cost a
halfpenny. I did all the things you do at school. I carved my name on a desk and got the
cane for it — you were always caned for it if you were caught, but it was the etiquette that
you had to carve your name. And I got inky lingers and bit my nails and made darts out
of penholders and played conkers and passed round dirty stories and learned to
masturbate and cheeked old Blowers, the English master, and bullied the life out of little
Willy Simeon, the undertaker’s son, who was half- witted and believed everything you
told him. Our favourite trick was to send him to shops to buy things that didn’t exist. All
the old gags — the ha’porth of penny stamps, the rubber hammer, the left-handed
screwdriver, the pot of striped paint — poor Willy fell for all of them. We had grand sport
one afternoon, putting him in a tub and telling him to lift himself up by the handles. He
ended up in an asylum, poor Willy. But it was in the holidays that one really lived.
There were good things to do in those days. In winter we used to borrow a couple of
ferrets — Mother would never let Joe and me keep them at home, ‘nasty smelly things’
she called them — and go round the farms and ask leave to do a bit of ratting. Sometimes
they let us, sometimes they told us to hook it and said we were more trouble than the rats.
Later in winter we’d follow the threshing machine and help kill the rats when they
threshed the stacks. One winter, 1908 it must have been, the Thames flooded and then
froze and there was skating for weeks on end, and Harry Bames broke his collar- bone on
the ice. In early spring we went after squirrels with squailers, and later on we went
birdnesting. We had a theory that birds can’t count and it’s all right if you leave one egg,
but we were cruel little beasts and sometimes we’d just knock the nest down and trample
on the eggs or chicks. There was another game we had when the toads were spawning.
We used to catch toads, ram the nozzle of a bicycle pump up their backsides, and blow
them up till they burst. That’s what boys are like, I don’t know why. In summer we used
to bike over the Burford Weir and bathe. Wally Lovegrove, Sid’s young cousin, was
drowned in 1906. He got tangled in the weeds at the bottom, and when the drag-hooks
brought his body to the surface his face was jet black.
But fishing was the real thing. We went many a time to old Brewer’s pool, and took tiny
carp and tench out of it, and once a whopping eel, and there were other cow-ponds that
had fish in them and were within walking distance on Saturday afternoons. But after we
got bicycles we started fishing in the Thames below Burford Weir. It seemed more
grown-up than fishing in cow-ponds. There were no farmers chasing you away, and there
are thumping fish in the Thames — though, so far as I know, nobody’s ever been known to
catch one.
It’s queer, the feeling I had for fishing — and still have, really. I can’t call myself a
fisherman. I’ve never in my life caught a fish two feet long, and it’s thirty years now
since I’ve had a rod in my hands. And yet when I look back the whole of my boyhood
from eight to fifteen seems to have revolved round the days when we went fishing. Every
detail has stuck clear in my memory. I can remember individual days and individual fish,
there isn’t a cow- pond or a backwater that I can’t see a picture of if I shut my eyes and
think. I could write a book on the technique of fishing. When we were kids we didn’t
have much in the way of tackle, it cost too much and most of our threepence a week
(which was the usual pocket- money in those days) went on sweets and Lardy Busters.
Very small kids generally fish with a bent pin, which is too blunt to be much use, but you
can make a pretty good hook (though of course it’s got no barb) by bending a needle in a
candle flame with a pair of pliers. The farm lads knew how to plait horsehair so that it
was almost as good as gut, and you can take a small fish on a single horsehair. Later we
got to having two-shilling fishing-rods and even reels of sorts. God, what hours I’ve spent
gazing into Wallace’s window! Even the . 410 guns and saloon pistols didn’t thrill me so
much as the fishing tackle. And the copy of Gamage’s catalogue that I picked up
somewhere, on a rubbish dump I think, and studied as though it had been the Bible! Even
now I could give you all the details about gut-substitute and gimp and Limerick hooks
and priests and disgorgers and Nottingham reels and God knows how many other
technicalities.
Then there were the kinds of bait we used to use. In our shop there were always plenty of
mealworms, which were good but not very good. Gentles were better. You had to beg
them off old Gravitt, the butcher, and the gang used to draw lots or do enamena-mina-mo
to decide who should go and ask, because Gravitt wasn’t usually too pleasant about it. He
was a big, rough-faced old devil with a voice like a mastiff, and when he barked, as he
generally did when speaking to boys, all the knives and steels on his blue apron would
give a jingle. You’d go in with an empty treacle-tin in your hand, hang round till any
customers had disappeared and then say very humbly:
‘Please, Mr Gravitt, y’got any gentles today? ’
Generally he’d roar out: ‘What! Gentles! Gentles in my shop! Ain’t seen such a thing in
years. Think I got blow-flies in my shop? ’
He had, of course. They were everywhere. He used to deal with them with a strip of
leather on the end of a stick, with which he could reach out to enonnous distances and
smack a fly into paste. Sometimes you had to go away without any gentles, but as a rule
he’d shout after you just as you were going:
“Ere! Go round the backyard an’ ‘ave a look. P’raps you might find one or two if you
looked careful. ’
You used to find them in little clusters everywhere. Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a
battlefield. Butchers didn’t have refrigerators in those days. Gentles live longer if you
keep them in sawdust.
Wasp grubs are good, though it’s hard to make them stick on the hook, unless you bake
them first. When someone found a wasps’ nest we’d go out at night and pour turpentine
down it and plug up the hole with mud. Next day the wasps would all be dead and you
could dig out the nest and take the grubs. Once something went wrong, the turps missed
the hole or something, and when we took the plug out the wasps, which had been shut up
all night, came out all together with a zoom.
We weren’t very badly stung, but it was a
pity there was no one standing by with a stopwatch. Grasshoppers are about the best bait
there is, especially for chub. You stick them on the hook without any shot and just flick
them to and fro on the surface — ‘dapping’, they call it. But you can never get more than
two or three grasshoppers at a time. Greenbottle flies, which are also damned difficult to
catch, are the best bait for dace, especially on clear days. You want to put them on the
hook alive, so that they wriggle. A chub will even take a wasp, but it’s a ticklish job to
put a live wasp on the hook.
God knows how many other baits there were. Bread paste you make by squeezing water
through white bread in a rag. Then there are cheese paste and honey paste and paste with
aniseed in it. Boiled wheat isn’t bad for roach. Redworms are good for gudgeon. You find
them in very old manure heaps. And you also find another kind of worm called a
brandling, which is striped and smells like an earwig, and which is very good bait for
perch. Ordinary earthworms are good for perch. You have to put them in moss to keep
them fresh and lively. If you try to keep them in earth they die. Those brown flies you
find on cowdung are pretty good for roach. You can take a chub on a cherry, so they say,
and I’ve seen a roach taken with a currant out of a bun.
In those days, from the sixteenth of June (when the coarse-fishing season starts) till
midwinter I wasn’t often without a tin of worms or gentles in my pocket. I had some
fights with Mother about it, but in the end she gave in, fishing came off the list of
forbidden things and Father even gave me a two-shilling fishing-rod for Christmas in
1903. Joe was barely fifteen when he started going after girls, and from then on he
seldom came out fishing, which he said was a kid’s game. But there were about half a
dozen others who were as mad on fishing as I was. Christ, those fishing days! The hot
sticky afternoons in the schoolroom when I’ve sprawled across my desk, with old
Blowers’s voice grating away about predicates and subjunctives and relative clauses, and
all that’s in my mind is the backwater near Burford Weir and the green pool under the
willows with the dace gliding to and fro. And then the terrific rush on bicycles after tea,
to Chamford Hill and down to the river to get in an hour’s fishing before dark. The still
summer evening, the faint splash of the weir, the rings on the water where the fish are
rising, the midges eating you alive, the shoals of dace swarming round your hook and
never biting. And the kind of passion with which you’d watch the black backs of the fish
swarming round, hoping and praying (yes, literally praying) that one of them would
change his mind and grab your bait before it got too dark. And then it was always ‘Let’s
have five minutes more’, and then ‘Just five minutes more’, until in the end you had to
walk your bike into the town because Towler, the copper, was prowling round and you
could be ‘had up’ for riding without a light. And the times in the summer holidays when
we went out to make a day of it with boiled eggs and bread and butter and a bottle of
lemonade, and fished and bathed and then fished again and did occasionally catch
something. At night you’d come home with filthy hands so hungry that you’d eaten what
was left of your bread paste, with three or four smelly dace wrapped up in your
handkerchief. Mother always refused to cook the fish I brought home. She would never
allow that river fish were edible, except trout and salmon. ‘Nasty muddy things’, she
called them. The fish I remember best of all are the ones I didn’t catch. Especially the
monstrous fish you always used to see when you went for a walk along the towpath on
Sunday afternoons and hadn’t a rod with you. There was no fishing on Sundays, even the
Thames Conservancy Board didn’t allow it. On Sundays you had to go for what was
called a ‘nice walk’ in your thick black suit and the Eton collar that sawed your head off.
It was on a Sunday that I saw a pike a yard long asleep in shallow water by the bank and
nearly got him with a stone. And sometimes in the green pools on the edge of the reeds
you’d see a huge Thames trout go sailing past. The trout grow to vast sizes in the
Thames, but they’re practically never caught. They say that one of the real Thames
fishennen, the old bottle-nosed blokes that you see muffled up in overcoats on camp-
stools with twenty-foot roach-poles at all seasons of the year, will willingly give up a
year of his life to catching a Thames trout. I don’t blame them, I see their point entirely,
and still better I saw it then.
Of course other things were happening. I grew three inches in a year, got my long
trousers, won some prizes at school, went to Confirmation classes, told dirty stories, took
to reading, and had crazes for white mice, fretwork, and postage stamps. But it’s always
fishing that I remember. Summer days, and the flat water- meadows and the blue hills in
the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of
deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking
round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don’t mistake what I’m talking
about. It’s not that I’m trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know
that’s all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster. I’ll tell you
about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it
out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all
that. Needless to say he’s got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren’t in any way
poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.
A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape,
doesn’t give a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being
good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things — that’s about as near
to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of
longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time
stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for
ever.
I was rather an ugly little boy, with butter-coloured hair which was always cropped short
except for a quiff in front. I don’t idealize my childhood, and unlike many people I’ve no
wish to be young again. Most of the things I used to care for would leave me something
more than cold. I don’t care if I never see a cricket ball again, and I wouldn’t give you
threepence for a hundredweight of sweets. But I’ve still got, I’ve always had, that
peculiar feeling for fishing. You’ll think it damned silly, no doubt, but I’ve actually half a
wish to go fishing even now, when I’m fat and forty-five and got two kids and a house in
the suburbs. Why? Because in a manner of speaking I AM sentimental about my
childhood — not my own particular childhood, but the civilization which I grew up in and
which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick. And fishing is somehow typical of that
civilization. As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong to the
modem world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool —
and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside — belongs to the time before the war,
before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler. There’s a kind of peacefulness even in
the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike,
chub, carp, tench. They’re solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn’t
heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating
aspirins, going to the pictures, and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp.
Does anyone go fishing nowadays, I wonder? Anywhere within a hundred miles of
London there are no fish left to catch. A few dismal fishing-clubs plant themselves in
rows along the banks of canals, and millionaires go trout-fishing in private waters round
Scotch hotels, a sort of snobbish game of catching hand-reared fish with artificial flies.
But who fishes in mill-streams or moats or cow-ponds any longer? Where are the English
coarse fish now? When I was a kid every pond and stream had fish in it. Now all the
ponds are drained, and when the streams aren’t poisoned with chemicals from factories
they’re full of rusty tins and motor-bike tyres.
My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught. That’s usual enough, I
suppose.
When I was about fourteen Father did a good turn of some kind to old Hodges, the
caretaker at Binfield House. I forget what it was — gave him some medicine that cured
his fowls of the worms, or something. Hodges was a crabby old devil, but he didn’t forget
a good turn. One day a little while afterwards when he’d been down to the shop to buy
chicken-corn he met me outside the door and stopped me in his surly way. He had a face
like something carved out of a bit of root, and only two teeth, which were dark brown and
very long.
‘Hey, young ‘un! Fisherman, ain’t you? ’
‘Yes. ’
‘Thought you was. You listen, then. If so be you wanted to, you could bring your line and
have a try in that they pool up ahind the Hall. There’s plenty bream and jack in there. But
don’t you tell no one as I told you. And don’t you go for to bring any of them other
young whelps, or I’ll beat the skin off their backs. ’
Having said this he hobbled off with his sack of corn over his shoulder, as though feeling
that he’d said too much already. The next Saturday afternoon I hiked up to Binfield
House with my pockets full of worms and gentles, and looked for old Hodges at the
lodge. At that time Binfield House had already been empty for ten or twenty years. Mr
Farrel, the owner, couldn’t afford to live in it and either couldn’t or wouldn’t let it. He
lived in London on the rent of his farms and let the house and grounds go to the devil. All
the fences were green and rotting, the park was a mass of nettles, the plantations were
like a jungle, and even the gardens had gone back to meadow, with only a few old
gnarled rose- bushes to show you where the beds had been. But it was a very beautiful
house, especially from a distance. It was a great white place with colonnades and long-
shaped windows, which had been built, I suppose, about Queen Anne’s time by someone
who’d travelled in Italy. If I went there now I’d probably get a certain kick out of
wandering round the general desolation and thinking about the life that used to go on
there, and the people who built such places because they imagined that the good days
would last for ever. As a boy I didn’t give either the house or the grounds a second look. I
dug out old Hodges, who’d just finished his dinner and was a bit surly, and got him to
show me the way down to the pool. It was several hundred yards behind the house and
completely hidden in the beech woods, but it was a good-sized pool, almost a lake, about
a hundred and fifty yards across. It was astonishing, and even at that age it astonished me,
that there, a dozen miles from Reading and not fifty from London, you could have such
solitude. You felt as much alone as if you’d been on the ha nk s of the Amazon. The pool
was ringed completely round by the enormous beech trees, which in one place came
down to the edge and were reflected in the water. On the other side there was a patch of
grass where there was a hollow with beds of wild peppermint, and up at one end of the
pool an old wooden boathouse was rotting among the bulrushes.
The pool was swarming with bream, small ones, about four to six inches long. Every now
and again you’d see one of them turn half over and gleam reddy brown under the water.
There were pike there too, and they must have been big ones. You never saw them, but
sometimes one that was basking among the weeds would turn over and plunge with a
splash that was like a brick being bunged into the water. It was no use trying to catch
them, though of course I always tried every time I went there. I tried them with dace and
minnows I’d caught in the Thames and kept alive in a jam-jar, and even with a spinner
made out of a bit of tin. But they were gorged with fish and wouldn’t bite, and in any
case they’d have broken any tackle I possessed. I never came back from the pool without
at least a dozen small bream. Sometimes in the summer holidays I went there for a whole
day, with my fishing-rod and a copy of Chums or the Union Jack or something, and a
hu nk of bread and cheese which Mother had wrapped up for me. And I’ve fished for
hours and then lain in the grass hollow and read the Union Jack, and then the smell of my
bread paste and the plop of a fish jumping somewhere would send me wild again, and I’d
go back to the water and have another go, and so on all through a summer’s day. And the
best of all was to be alone, utterly alone, though the road wasn’t a quarter of a mile away.
I was just old enough to know that it’s good to be alone occasionally. With the trees all
round you it was as though the pool belonged to you, and nothing ever stirred except the
fish ringing the water and the pigeons passing overhead. And yet, in the two years or so
that I went fishing there, how many times did I really go, I wonder? Not more than a
dozen. It was a three-mile bike ride from home and took up a whole afternoon at least.
And sometimes other things turned up, and sometimes when I’d meant to go it rained.
You know the way things happen.
One afternoon the fish weren’t biting and I began to explore at the end of the pool
farthest from Binfield House. There was a bit of an overflow of water and the ground was
boggy, and you had to fight your way through a sort of jungle of blackberry bushes and
rotten boughs that had fallen off the trees. I struggled through it for about fifty yards, and
then suddenly there was a clearing and I came to another pool which I had never known
existed. It was a small pool not more than twenty yards wide, and rather dark because of
the boughs that overhung it. But it was very clear water and immensely deep. I could see
ten or fifteen feet down into it. I hung about for a bit, enjoying the dampness and the
rotten boggy smell, the way a boy does. And then I saw something that almost made me
jump out of my skin.
It was an enonnous fish. I don’t exaggerate when I say it was enormous. It was almost
the length of my ann. It glided across the pool, deep under water, and then became a
shadow and disappeared into the darker water on the other side. I felt as if a sword had
gone through me. It was far the biggest fish I’d ever seen, dead or alive. I stood there
without breathing, and in a moment another huge thick shape glided through the water,
and then another and then two more close together. The pool was full of them. They were
carp, I suppose. Just possibly they were bream or tench, but more probably carp. Bream
or tench wouldn’t grow so huge. I knew what had happened. At some time this pool had
been connected with the other, and then the stream had dried up and the woods had
closed round the small pool and it had just been forgotten. It’s a thing that happens
occasionally. A pool gets forgotten somehow, nobody fishes in it for years and decades
and the fish grow to monstrous sizes. The brutes that I was watching might be a hundred
years old. And not a soul in the world knew about them except me. Very likely it was
twenty years since anyone had so much as looked at the pool, and probably even old
Hodges and Mr Farrel’s bailiff had forgotten its existence.
Well, you can imagine what I felt. After a bit I couldn’t even bear the tantalization of
watching. I hurried back to the other pool and got my fishing things together. It was no
use trying for those colossal brutes with the tackle I had. They’d snap it as if it had been a
hair. And I couldn’t go on fishing any longer for the tiny bream. The sight of the big carp
had given me a feeling in my stomach almost as if I was going to be sick. I got on to my
bike and whizzed down the hill and home. It was a wonderful secret for a boy to have.
There was the dark pool hidden away in the woods and the monstrous fish sailing round
it — fish that had never been fished for and would grab the first bait you offered them. It
was only a question of getting hold of a line strong enough to hold them. Already I’d
made all the arrangements. I’d buy the tackle that would hold them if I had to steal the
money out of the till. Somehow, God knew how, I’d get hold of half a crown and buy a
length of silk salmon line and some thick gut or gimp and Number 5 hooks, and come
back with cheese and gentles and paste and mealworms and brandlings and grasshoppers
and every mortal bait a carp might look at. The very next Saturday afternoon I’d come
back and try for them.
But as it happened I never went back. One never does go back. I never stole the money
out of the till or bought the bit of salmon line or had a try for those carp. Almost
immediately afterwards something turned up to prevent me, but if it hadn’t been that it
would have been something else. It’s the way things happen.
I know, of course, that you think I’m exaggerating about the size of those fish. You think,
probably, that they were just medium- sized fish (a foot long, say) and that they’ve
swollen gradually in my memory. But it isn’t so. People tell lies about the fish they’ve
caught and still more about the fish that are hooked and get away, but I never caught any
of these or even tried to catch them, and I’ve no motive for lying. I tell you they were
enonnous.
5
Fishing!
Here I’ll make a confession, or rather two. The first is that when I look back through my
life I can’t honestly say that anything I’ve ever done has given me quite such a kick as
fishing. Everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison, even women. I don’t set
up to be one of those men that don’t care about women. I’ve spent plenty of time chasing
them, and I would even now if I had the chance. Still, if you gave me the choice of
having any woman you care to name, but I mean ANY woman, or catching a ten-pound
carp, the carp would win every time. And the other confession is that after I was sixteen I
never fished again.
Why? Because that’s how things happen. Because in this life we lead — I don’t mean
human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country — we
don’t do the things we want to do. It isn’t because we’re always working. Even a farm-
hand or a Jew tailor isn’t always working. It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives
us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There’s time for everything except the things worth
doing.
