Tentative and Solitary Steps
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- Published on Sunday, 02 September 2007 09:27
- Written by Simon Howellls
I don’t remember the first time I went fishing. I do have memories of my father holding me with one hand and a kid’s net and my right hand with the other and scooping tiddlers from the water. I’d stare at them, fascinated, as they wriggled, all gleaming and wet, before Dad scooped the net back in, allowing them to swim free.
By the time I was five or six, I’d spend nearly all day with the gang of other kids from the estate in South Wales where we lived. The oldest of us must have been no more than nine and at weekends and in the summer holidays, we’d head off together to explore, free from adult surveillance and cosseting. Sometimes, if we remembered, we might even return home for lunch. There was the disused railway line with a viaduct and no walls or fence at the sides that went over the river, the abandoned farmhouses that bordered the estate, the town park with its boating lake full of frogs, tadpoles and minnows ready to be scooped into jam jars. And the river itself, the tumbling Afon Dare at the bottom of the valley, reputed to hold trout, but for us, mainly an opportunity to chuck things into the water; stones or each other, we were pleased by both in equal measure.
In those days, I think it was unusual for parents to worry too much about strangers and paedophiles. Certainly, at that age, the only row I can remember my parents having with other adults was one evening when I told my Dad that two of the regular gang had gone home because they weren’t allowed to play up at “the Line”, the name by which the disused railway track was known.
“Why not?”, asked Dad. “Because it’s getting dark.”, I replied. My father said nothing, just gave me one of his looks that told me this wasn’t adequate explanation. I told him, “Their mum says they can’t come up the Line ‘cos the bogeyman will get them. Cerys said she told them that he takes kids away.”
Dad didn’t even hesitate. My sister and I were told gently but firmly that she was making it up, the bogeyman did not exist and we were to play where we wanted. Later that night, I overheard my Mum ask, “Did you speak to her?” My father nodded, “Told her she could fill her own kids’ heads with shit but not mine.”
Dad was and is a great outdoorsman. He loves mountains and wild country and nature in all its forms, but he’s no fisherman. That, however, did not stop him from trying. In truth, I think it was simply a case of him recognising that, as I approached my teens, my burgeoning interest in fishing was his own opportunity to spend more time in the countryside and less time cooped up with the endless stream of DIY devised by my mother. And more time instilling a love of the outdoors in his son; he wasn’t entirely cynical.
So we fished. We fished on holiday for bass off rocky headlands in Pembroke and Galloway, we fished for trout in the beck that flowed across the fields from the northern English estate to which we had now moved and we fished for whatever the reed-lined pool that lay alongside the route one of our regular Sunday walks might hold. “There’s pike in there, I’m sure of it.”, he’d say, as I wound the spinner back for the umpteenth time, hands so cold I could barely feel the handle of the reel. And he may well have been right, too, but to this day the truth remains unknown; for everywhere we fished, it was, invariably, without success.
My father’s inability to catch a fish or, more accurately, his inability to get me catching fish was, perhaps, the first occasion on which he fell from the demi-god pedestal on which I’d placed him. Until then he was all-conquering and unfailing, the font of all wisdom. I desperately wanted to be able to catch fish like my schoolmates, but now, my dad had let me down.
Of course, I’d not have been able to articulate it in that way at the time; the boy needs to become a man himself to achieve that kind of recognition. I know now that it wasn’t that my father couldn’t fish, for if there’s one thing that he taught me it’s that there’s very little you cannot do if you truly want to. Quite simply, my father had no interest in fishing. His interests lay elsewhere; in founding and then running the rugby club in the town that we’d moved to and when that alone didn’t sate his appetite for the game, to referee matches now that my mother insisted he was too old to play.
Nevertheless, there must have been something of a dawn of understanding, because, in fairly short order, I decided that if fishing with my father wasn’t going to bring the results I craved, then fishing with the schoolmates that I so envied just might.
We’d fish at every opportunity. Weekends, long evenings during summer schooldays and during the holidays. We’d now moved into the town proper, which lay above a river famous for its fishing and we were of an age where we free to roam its banks for miles in search of fish. On occasion, we’d even bunk off school when word of a sea-trout or salmon run filtered down the grapevine. Our talk was filled with breaking strain, lead shot, spinners and worms. And tales of brothers and uncles who had caught a 5lb trout or 10lb sea-trout.
But always tales. Looking back on that experience, today I’m always sceptical when I read of a particular stretch of river being “wormed-out” by kids and of how the tradition of worming is passed on like some kind of lore. Because fishing with my mates proved no more successful than fishing with my father – we never caught a bloody thing. And, it would be fair to say, the majority of our little gang came from the rougher end of the market, too; if there were Masonic secrets and initiations doing the rounds, we’d have got wind of them.
Most of us were discouraged by our stark lack of success. That and, perhaps, the teenage boy’s desire to leave what was perceived as a childish thing behind meant that by fourteen few of us still fished. Those few who did went to coarse fisheries, something which, where we lived, required a father, uncle or older brother who was prepared to take you. I’m sure I could have cadged a lift from a friend on one of their trips, but for some reason it held no appeal. I was still fascinated by those trout we’d failed to catch and by the gentle outward spread of rings of water under the oaks as a fish rose in the deep pool below the weir. Increasingly, I’d find myself alone down by the river on spring and summer evenings, just watching.
On several such occasions, I actually saw someone catch a fish. They weren’t kids. And they didn’t use worms.
I watched, enthralled, as the rod was lifted and the line snaked gracefully out behind to then repeat its arc forward and land gracefully beneath the overhanging trees. The man pulled a fish, then two, then three from the run. I waited until he left. Fish were still rising. On went the lead weight and the worm, swiftly dug from the bank. Out went the line, to land with a splash that terrified every fish for a hundred yards. I waited – nothing.
The next day, I said to my father, “I want a fly rod for my birthday.” And, despite Dad’s initial scepticism, I got one; a shiny new Daiwa with Gladding Intrepid reel to match. But beyond that, I was on my own. I bought a book on fly-fishing with pocket money I’d saved and learned I needed not just nylon, but a special sort of fly-line to put on the reel. I needed flies, too and so became an habitué of the town’s tackle shop, pestering the owner for advice on which flies would work best. And then I’d go and buy whichever ones looked good to me. My trips to the river resumed with new enthusiasm and I spent long days and evenings disentangling line from bushes and, on more than one occasion, extracting flies from the back of my neck. Pocket money was saved religiously to enable me to replace the flies that I lost no sooner than they were purchased.
Unknown to me, my father must have become aware of my growing frustration. “Do you want to go fishing next Sunday?”, he asked when I returned home one evening after yet another fruitless trip.
“Where? Are you going to take me?”.
“No. There’s a chap I know from work, a teacher at another school – he fly-fishes and he’s agreed to take you if you want.”
I agreed, of course and the following weekend sat, waiting nervously, for my lift to the reservoir high in the Pennines. I don’t think I said an awful lot on the way there; though this man had been generous enough to take me fishing and was the source of the knowledge I craved, he was still an adult and I still a teenage boy. To my shame, I have to confess that now I cannot even recall his name.
The reservoir was very low when we arrived and we had to pick our way carefully around exposed muddy banks to reach my tutor’s chosen spot. We set up, my tutor showed me, to the best of his ability, how to cast and then he moved down the bank to fish on his own. I don’t remember much about the afternoon’s fishing; I do recall the frequent crack of the fly-line behind me, the fact that I didn’t catch any fish and that my tutor caught several rainbows. The afternoon was memorable for other reasons.
Our route back around the reservoir took us over the same muddy creek, made negotiable by a log laid across the top that we’d managed successfully on the way in. Only this time, I fell off the log into mud that came up nearly to my chest. I was cold, wet through and utterly dejected. My tutor pulled me out, took me back to the car and drove as quickly as he could to his own home, his being much closer than mine. There, despite my protestations, I was made to strip and put on several pairs of his wife’s tan coloured tights. “It’s what I wear under my trousers to keep me warm in the Winter.”, he assured me, studiously ignoring what I considered to be the crucial difference between that situation and my present predicament – “under my trousers”.
As we drove back to my parents’, I sat in utter silence, even his offer of a couple of spare trout failed to lift my gloom. And worse was yet to come; the dash to the front door clad only in a t-shirt and a pair of ladies tights. I prayed with all my heart that none of my mates in the street would be passing or looking out of their windows.
When we arrived I ran up the front path in record time and hammered on the front door. Silence. I hammered again. Nothing. “They went out about ten minutes ago, Simon.“, came a voice behind me, “……..Or should that be Simone, ya big puff.”, I turned and saw my classmate Paul, a huge grin splitting his face. I sprinted round the side of the house and sat on the back step, crying, until my parents’ return thirty minutes later.
The following week, news of my cross-dressing proclivities was all around the school. I had more fist fights in the space of the next fortnight than in the rest of my school career. The summer holidays were weeks away but for me the fishing season was already over, my rod and reel retired to the back of the garage.
Weeks into the following season, I looked at my father askance when he asked why I’d yet to make my first visit to the river; I’d grown up, I had no time, I’d discovered punk rock and girls, though it would be a few more years before girls discovered me. My fishing tackle continued to gather dust in the garage, if not exactly a childish thing to be put away then a reminder of my shame, something to be buried if at all possible and certainly not to be exhumed.
The past, however, has a habit of coming back to haunt us. Twenty-five years later my partner got a job that involved her travelling to residential homes and assessing the competence of the workers in caring for the residents. Many of the homes were in the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and the Welsh Borders, so she would arrange her visit for a Friday or a Monday, I’d book a day or two’s leave and we’d spend the weekend walking whatever hills we could find. I quickly discovered that I am not a solitary walker and whilst I can understand the motivation of those who are, for me walking has always been a pleasure to share.
So what to do on those days amongst dale and fell whilst waiting for Liz to return from work? The answer, when it came, was as instantaneous as it was surprising; I’ll learn to fly fish, properly this time. And twenty-five years on, I now realise that far from blaming my father, it’s him I have to thank for this gift. In the intervening years our relationship went through the familiar changes, barely speaking in my middle and late teens, and then slowly starting to repair once I’d left the nest.
We took our first faltering steps when I returned home from college one Christmas. Prior to leaving I’d played rugby for the school, for the town’s Colts team and, on occasion, for the fourth XV. Now, having put on size and weight, I was called up to the second XV.
It wasn’t unusual for Dad to travel with us to matches; he was on the referees’ assessment panel and if he wasn’t refereeing himself he’d arrange to watch a match involving one of the club’s teams. So I thought nothing of it when he drove me to the clubhouse and offered other players a lift to the game. And I was only slightly surprised when I looked across the changing room to see him stripping off,
“You can’t ref this one Dad, not exactly unbiased, now, is it?”
“Bugger refing, I’m playing.” And, with a wink, “No need to tell your Mum, either.”
Playing on the opposite wing and already more than twice my age, he scored three tries to my one that day. I later discovered that he turned down the award of player of the season that year, realising that acceptance at the annual dinner-dance would blow his cover with my mother.
My father hadn’t needed to teach me to fish, knowing that if it was something I truly wanted to do, I’d find a way of doing it. He had needed to instil in me a love of nature and an ability to realise that it is often in solitude, amidst landscape that dwarfs us, that we come to recognise our own selves. What else but that were those first tentative and solitary steps of mine on the river bank?
Simon Howells is an long time exiled Welshman living and working in London. He returned to fly fishing four years ago after what he describes as a twenty-five year "hiatus". He divides his leisure time between fly fishing, mountain walking and divising schemes that might pursuade his girlfriend and employer to allow him more time fly fishing and mountain walking.