The first fishing day I recall dad catching eels that we later ate still sizzling from the pan. (It takes no effort to be looking back well over sixty years over dad’s shoulder from my kitchen chair as the flesh became golden and the skin curled back on each two-inch fish segment as the eels fried to readiness. I can hear him telling me that some of the fish were ‘silver eels’ that had changed from the dull olive river snakes into the shining livery of a fish about to undertake the most impossible journey of the wild world across the vastness of oceans to the far Sargasso Sea to writhe and couple and spawn their next generation.) I sat fidgeting while he whistled tunelessly.
My fishing rod was a garden cane with the line tied to the end. The hook was a safety pin moulded with pliers and hung with a big lob worm from Grannies garden. Despite all his advice my mind must have wandered as I all-at-once became aware that my float had gone and I panicked snatching the rod up and away with such force that I not only learnt how not to ‘strike’ but something of the aerodynamics of fish pulled too fast from the water as the hapless critter sailed over my head to flip on the bank. The two or three-ounce perch perished there, killed by the force with which it had hit the stony path.
I had yet to learn the etiquette of the coarse fisherman, that fishing is all about catching not keeping. So, I insisted that the perch went home with us for tea. When dad walked us home it was at the pace of a father. We wandered and whistled, paused to look at butterflies and feed milk-thistles to the cows. We had time to learn the lore my dad stored from years of loving wild things. We had time to marvel and time to smell the sweet smell of cud on a cow’s breath.
The little perch had dried to a twisted wreck as stiff as Bombay duck by the time we were home and was consigned to a hastily scraped grave under the blackcurrant bush that filled Gran’s living room with its musky, musty smell.
But this is not my first memory of proper fishing. That had yet to come. This was a tale of summer and parental care, of how a day in childhood is as long as most months in middle-age. It is a sweet memory of an innocent age and a naïve time, a free and fresh memory of eglantine thistledown, of buttercups and the ‘Darling Buds of May’.
I was privileged to watch Ash catch his first fish and the look of pride as he cradled it before returning it to the water.
He in turn captured the moment Owen caught his first!
