A Curious Boy Page 2
That is what has changed. When I drove down some of the same roads recently, in the dying light, I arrived at my destination with perhaps a dozen insects on my windscreen, and only one moth. Maybe the aerodynamics of windscreens have changed during my lifetime to kill fewer insects, but I am certain that their flutterings do not catch the headlights any more, regardless of whether they finish up as dead bodies. If a symbol were needed of the decline of the country habitat since the 1950s then a clear windscreen would be hard to beat. The recent reduction in the number of insectivores of many kinds hardly comes as a surprise. Blame is easy to dish around, but the hegemony of monocultures on ranch-style farms and the liberal use of insecticides is going to be on the list of prime suspects. Sometimes, a long memory is a recipe for gloom.
What of the River Lambourn? In 2015 I went back to Boxford, a mile or two north-west of a now expanded Newbury, to revisit the chalk stream that had nourished my first awareness of the richness of life. The old bridge was still there, with the clear, rushing stream beneath it. A grey wagtail welcomed me back, bobbing and flitting like a coquette. The village had changed completely. When my parents bought a simple, thatched cottage in Boxford almost sixty years ago there was no mains drainage. Primrose Cottage was pretty enough, but we did our business in a closet, sterilised by something called Elsan, and then occasionally buried the digested produce in the vegetable garden. I recall the lush gratitude of the cabbages. Nowadays, Boxford is as smart as Chelsea. It looks positively groomed. The hedges that surround the old cottages are shaved as close as a glamour model’s armpits. Somehow, the village no longer feels like part of the countryside, more a lifestyle accessory. However, while the clean river still flows vigorously, all is not lost.
I had joined a team from the Environment Agency that has been monitoring the health of the River Lambourn. Boxford Meadows is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest. One of my early sources of biological wonder now has the imprimatur of an official classification. In wellington boots I followed the team as they counted the fish that were retrieved from a stretch of water they had selected for sampling. Crack willows still leaned precariously over the rippling stream, and the water crowfoot was sporting its white, buttercup-like flowers in profusion, each bloom held aloft from the water to be pollinated in the air just like any other flower. The good news was that there were still wild brown trout in the Lambourn. The biologists used ‘electric fishing’ to take a census of the fishy life. Place electrodes into the water from a small punt and native species cannot resist being attracted to the positive pole. The lure of electricity turns them into zombies drifting towards the electrode – where they soon become statistics, before being returned to the water unharmed. Along with the trout I saw the brook lamprey (the lampern), a fish so primitive it does not even have a proper jaw. It looked superficially like a small eel, until I noticed the strange lines of gill openings behind the head. Like the mayfly, it is a fugitive from deep time. Some species failed to turn up, like the ‘miller’s thumb’ (Cottus gobio), a small, fat-headed, spiky fish I caught long ago using a small net poked between the flint pebbles that covered the bed of the river. Then an unwelcome stranger barged into the inventory: the American signalling crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus, as big as the palm of my hand. When I was a child, a smaller, native, white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) was there instead. I remember picking one up by the carapace just behind its claws, which opened like miniature nutcrackers when the creature left the water. Our own modest crustacean has since become virtually extinct, bullied by its distant cousin from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The signaller was introduced to Britain in the 1970s as a ‘cash crop’ and has since relentlessly advanced into all streams with pure running water, where it has exterminated its native ecological rival. It is voracious – even cannibalistic – and I cannot help wondering whether the absence of the ‘miller’s thumb’ might also have something to do with this interloper.
Nor was every trout a ‘brownie’. A few rainbow trout among the sporting fish identified themselves by red stripes running along their flanks and dense spots above. The rainbow is the farmed trout familiar from every supermarket. They originated from cool streams in North America that flow into the Pacific Ocean, and they, too, have become naturalised in Britain. Many trout-fishing clubs stock their rivers with rainbow trout grown in stew-ponds to give their members an easier catch: they grow faster than the native species, and raised fish are less wily. My father rather despised them. He believed only brown trout truly tested the artistry of the fly fisherman, and the wilier the better. We rarely ate rainbow trout. The soft pink flesh of the wild brown trout, nurtured on freshwater shrimp and flies and snails, was considered a far superior food. It was many years before I could bring myself to purchase a pack from a supermarket, by which time my memories of the wild fish from the chalk streams had begun to fade; but I still knew something was missing.
My day by the River Lambourn left me feeling curiously empty. I had first been encouraged by the integrity and enthusiasm of the young scientists monitoring the stream, which still retained its transparent fascination for me a lifetime later. I could hardly expect it to be unchanged, crayfish notwithstanding. Then, too, so many wild flowers had gone: my sister and I used to gather marsh orchids and ragged robin from the water meadows, when these plants were so profuse that the boggy fields were coloured red with them. I could see that the young biologists did not really believe me when I told them about it. ‘Rose-tinted memory,’ I imagine them thinking, although it was as true as my recollection of the crayfish. My sister was tiny and her bunch of flowers was enormous. Nowadays, we would be horrified by the thought of picking such recherché glories, but it was not the thoughtless picking that prevented their survival – these plants had been thriving on the water meadows for generations. Changes in drainage and the addition of artificial fertilisers to increase yields are more likely culprits. How, I wondered, can you properly convey such loss. When I see those rich leas in my mind’s eye they provide more vivid and solid memories than those of my own father.
Ambivalent feelings did not stop me from further exploration of the Lambourn Valley: I wanted to know the worst. I followed the minor road that runs alongside the stream north-westwards towards Lambourn town, through the villages of Welford and Great Shefford. Now the whole valley had been tastefully prettified. The original cottages were built of cob, or brick and flint, both humble materials that did not have to travel far. The chalk country offered no natural tiles for roofing, so thatch, much like that on our Primrose Cottage, was still a common sight. The river is dwindling. It is easy to follow its course, as lines of willows track it faithfully at the bottom of the valley, their roots nakedly plunging into pools and rills. But somewhere north-west of Great Shefford the streambed seems to have run dry. Maybe it flowed in the winter, and disappeared in the warmer months: there were still trails of flints that marked its course. In Lambourn itself I saw the channel where it was supposed to run through the town, but the stream seemed to have deserted its name-giver. The water table must have fallen to the point where the upper part of the famous chalk stream had run dry. It reappeared downstream where the water table reached the surface, and by the time it reached Boxford the Lambourn was approaching its old self. What was happening now in Berkshire had probably happened some years ago in Hertfordshire to the River Gade, from which a great trout had been snatched a few months after my first birthday. Extraction of the chalk aquifer for too many thirsty throats caused diminution of both rivers. People like to drink chalk water because it has been cleaned and purified by its passage through the white limestone rock: it tastes good. Loss of animals and plants is the cost of tap water ad libitum.
The Lambourn taught my sister and me to swim. The Piscatorial Society ‘beat’ on the river extended south of Boxford to its lower reaches at the village of Bagnor, very close to Newbury. An old mill house interrupted the smooth passage of the stream and below that disused buildin
g a mill pool was fed by a cascade that fed through a weir. The river spilled out on the other side into shallows with many a ‘miller’s thumb’. The mill race was fast, but fed into a great deep eddy, so that a floating object would be carried around it in a circle. Along one side of the pool was a submerged ledge. Spring-fed water straight from the chalk was allegedly the coldest in southern England, and every fresh immersion in it provoked a squeal. On perfect summer days it was the equally perfect place for a picnic on the bank, while my father was off with his rod. Under our mother’s eye, we children started with rubber rings around our waists, and jumped from the ledge into the mill race to be carried like flotsam around the eddy to repeat the experience all over again. At some point the rubber rings were shed – and we were swimmers. My sister Kath was two years younger than I was, but she learned to swim first; I can still feel the touch on my feet of the special moss that grew on the mill race and I can still smell the strange exhilarating odour of pure rushing water. Once, after swimming, mother and children went to a scruffy pub on the far side of Bagnor village green. My mother was extravagantly flattered there by an aged charmer, who insisted on buying her a drink – and an expensive one at that. At that time she was at the peak of her womanhood, tall, fit, and often wearing her ‘sundress’, a light flowery confection that exposed her tanned shoulders and flattered her figure. Before this, I had never realised that she was a sexual being, which is probably why this incident has lodged so obstinately amid the general fuzz of my growing up. Afterwards, she giggled and referred to her admirer as an old fool.
The old mill is now the smart Watermill Theatre. It offers a judicious mix of classical plays and popular shows, and an evening out (with supper included) for the people of Newbury. The mill race is still there, but it is hard to believe now that the wildest of wild swimming happened in its frigid waters. When I visited recently I thought I caught a glimpse of a native trout in the shadowy depths. The marsh orchids have declined, and the water meadows are now little more than civilised places for dog walking. Nobody seems to remember that this was once an untamed place, alive with insects and warblers.
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Fishing was not just for the weekends. It was my father’s business. He had two fishing-tackle shops in London: Tooke’s at 614 Fulham Road, and Harding’s, in Willesden High Street. The names of the previous owners were retained because anglers are a conservative lot, and the shops themselves were survivors from before the war with nostalgia as a selling point. Neither shop was in a smart part of London. The Willesden shop seemed to belong to a London that had vanished from elsewhere in that city, a dim cavern of a place that Dickens might have peopled with a minor character bearing the name Mr Crepuscule. The Fulham premises was much smarter, with a glass shop window displaying desirable fishing rods, Hardy’s reels, and keep nets. Inside, glass-topped display cases showed off a selection of the angler’s accoutrements, while against the wall fishing rods were lined up vertically, ready to be demonstrated to customers wishing to find the magic recipe for the big fish. There was a sign saying ‘live bait’. Fulham is now a middle-class area, largely populated by City workers, but in the 1950s it was working class; and parts of Willesden were even considered rather rough. The rods on sale were predominantly for coarse fishing. The arcane refinements of the trout rod were rarely discussed, because the items on display were there to hook roach, carp, bream, chub and the mighty pike. The customers did not parade along the banks of the River Test or the Itchen. They were Thames fishermen, or canal fishermen, or went on expeditions to the Lincolnshire ‘drains’ to hunt out giants. Angling was the great sport of the working man. The two shops had local managers, known to us children as Uncle Arthur (Willesden) and Uncle Eddy (Fulham), who wore brown coats, and addressed the customers as ‘squire’.
The rear room of the Fulham shop was a different world. The walls were lined with glass-fronted fish tanks, and freshwater tropical fish were on sale. There was a constant bubbling sussuration as the tanks were kept oxygenated. This part of the shop was mostly dark, so that the lights that illuminated the tanks pointed up their exotic occupants. Green waterweed decorated bigger tanks, and they became small stage sets, through which the fish played and darted. I learned the cast of characters. Zebra fish were small, black-and-white striped, and active – but I noticed that the stripes ran the length of the fish rather than zebra-like down the flanks. The name felt slightly wrong. Guppies bred in some tanks, the little female fish so dowdy compared with the male, with his tail like a gaudy streamer. The female gave birth to live young, and the tiny fry hid among the weedy fronds. Diminutive and slender neon tetras had the most extraordinary luminous blue stripe on the side of their bodies, as if they were lit from within. Angel fish had very deep bodies and moved slowly, while black mollies were busier, regular-looking small fish but so dark they could look like moving, fish-shaped holes in space. Swordtails carried red ‘swords’ on the lower part of their tailfins. Tiger barbs had a few black slashes down their bodies – hardly a piscine tiger but the stripes did at least run in the right direction. Lilliputian, dark catfish cleaned the gravel incessantly. Gouramis were larger, deep-bodied fishes aimed at the connoisseur, decked in stripes of all colours, or spotted in interesting ways. Some of them were expensive. The king of them all was the Japanese fighting fish, with fins as spectacular as a flamenco dancer’s twirling skirts. These fishes had to lead solitary lives because they were so territorial; if another male was introduced battle commenced. I spent hours closeted with these tropical fishes, and it may have been in their company that I acquired the habit of taxonomy, the urge to name names founded upon close observation. I got some idea of the diversity of life, of the way nature could play around with bodies and colours, and how there seemed to be no end to natural invention. I may, or may not, have known about evolution; I cannot remember whether or not the Cooper trout was hanging in that same back room. But I remember the angel fish.
My mother, who was very aware of social distinctions, urged me to describe my father’s profession as that of ‘aquarist’ when talking to the mothers of my friends in Ealing. She thought it sounded far more acceptable than ‘fishing-tackle dealer’. ‘Trader in maggots’ would have been truly humiliating, but that is what happened on Saturday when the anglers came into the shop for their bait. I lent a hand at busy times in Tooke’s, serving quantities of writhing maggots to paying customers. These grubs were known in the trade as ‘gentles’ and were served in half-pint measures – I had to dip the measure into a bin containing thousands of fly larvae and dish them out into boxes with perforated lids that let the creatures breathe. They came plain or coloured – the angler could pay a little more for dyed pink or yellow gentles. An adjacent bin contained worms – bright red ones – favoured as succulent bait by many customers. Other anglers liked to ‘dope’ a popular patch of river with broadcast hemp seed to attract fish towards their baited hooks – this seed was stored in yet another bin. I have no idea whether the hemp seeds would have grown into cannabis plants. The fact remains that my first commercial experience was as a maggot dealer, with hemp on the side.
My father once took me to pick up his supplies of maggots and worms. He drove our Austin to a decrepit farm on the western outskirts of London, where the countryside was slowly giving up the struggle against being built over. Scrub was commonly the only crop. The supplier to the trade was known as Wormy. I suspect he had no other name. Wearing an ancient cap, and grinning through snaggled teeth, he took us to a kind of industrial gamekeeper’s larder, a low shed with lines of condemned meat corpses dedicated to raising the gentles, which were collected into trays as they fell off. The buzzing of flies was overwhelming. Regular red worms were raised in compost heaps fed with cow manure. They could be grabbed by the shovelful. Wormy loaded the next week’s supplies into square tins with tight-fitting lids. It was important to the anglers that the gentles should be vigorous wigglers of a similar maturity. If they were kept in the shop too long, they slowed dow
n and pupated, on their way to becoming yet more flies. Money changed hands (‘cash terms only’). I don’t remember saying anything on the way home.
Gathering fresh food for the tropical fish was a much more pleasant routine. Walpole Park in Ealing, the ‘queen of the suburbs’, was close to our London home. Some years later I would go to the school right next door to the rose garden, which was part of the park surrounding Pitzhanger Manor (a mansion built by Sir John Soane, the notable architect, in 1800–4). The large manor park passed into council ownership, and remains so today. On one side of it a landscaped pond was home to waterfowl and entertained young families. It also supported uncountable numbers of tiny water fleas (Daphnia). These minute crustaceans often flourish in fresh water that is low in oxygen, and in Walpole Park there were so many that they coloured the water pink. The tiny creatures manufacture their own haemoglobin, the same component as in our own blood, helping them get the oxygen they require to thrive in an unfavourable habitat. In the water they were no more than masses of tiny, twitching specks. My father took out a very fine but capacious net on the end of a long pole, the handle of which was made of several lengths screwed together. He swished the net back and forth, harvesting thousands of the water fleas. They made a kind of sludge at the bottom of the net, which he tipped into a large jar filled with water, brought for the purpose. Then back to the pond again for another haul until the jar housed a dense, living pink broth. From Walpole Park we went down to the River Thames near Brentford, just a couple of miles away. This was before London’s river had been cleaned up, and most aqueous life struggled to survive in its soupy waters. At low tide a strange and unpleasant smell assailed the nostrils, while banks of glistening dark mud were exposed, shining sinisterly in the afternoon light. Pulling on wellington boots my father marched along a greasy rivulet that crossed the mud towards the river and proceeded to scoop up handfuls of mud that he immediately dunked into another jar. As the water cleared he showed me that the harvested mass actually consisted of thousands of tiny, thread-like worms: Tubifex. They writhed like tiny versions of the myriad snakes that crowned the Gorgon, and they were red, coloured the same as the water fleas, and for the same reason. They had developed red blood to cope with the foul conditions of the Thames mud. Where other living things found life unbearable, for Tubifex it was an opportunity to prosper. I would take that lesson on life’s exuberant opportunism into the rest of my scientific life.