A Curious Boy Read online

  When Daphnia and Tubifex were fed into the tanks back at the Fulham shop the tropical fish went into a feeding frenzy. They instinctively knew that this was the food of the gods, although some of them had probably never encountered such living delicacies before, after being raised on dried fish food. Tubifex worms thrashed ineffectually as they were gulped down. The fishes darted through the weeds to find every last water flea; up close, I could see the beating limbs of the tiny crustacean that jiggled its little carapace before it was sucked into the open mouth of some small tetra. Aquarists knew how to give the favourites in their collections a proper treat, and they bought small quantities of live food from my father to take home: it was pure profit. However, it was profit based upon knowledge.

  Harding’s of Willesden was a dark cavern of a place. I think my parents must have purchased it for a bargain price, not only because of its general decrepitude, but also because upstairs there was a sitting tenant, Mrs Oakins, whose rent had been fixed in about 1922 at half a crown a week (about £7 in today’s money). She seemed to me to be very old, and ran a spiritualist circle from her parlour. It would not be long before my parents had vacant possession (or so they said). Mrs Oakins disappointed them by living for ever: indeed she was very old. Her hundredth birthday came and went. For somebody who was supposed to have such a conviction in the afterlife she showed a remarkable reluctance to go there. The back of the shop had a small and dingy room that was another of my father’s redoubts. While Uncle Arthur tended the shop during the close season, when the trout are protected to allow them to breed (October to March on chalk streams in 2019), my father would disappear into the gloom of the back room and craft fly-fishing rods. Modern fishermen use rods made of sophisticated carbon fibre, but split-cane was high technology at the time of Mrs Oakins. These rods were bespoke: they were made for special customers, even the kind who might have fishing rights on the River Test.

  I still have one of them. The fishing rod comes in a brown cloth bag in three pieces for reassembly at the riverbank; above the cork handle is the legend ‘Fortey Special’. It is put together from cane slivers glued together to make a hexagonal rod about ten feet long and tapering to something hardly wider than a matchstick at its apex. The glue was a most horrible smelling product made from animal bones that had to be kept warm on a dangerous-looking gas ring: naked flame amidst papers and paraphernalia. The glue pot had congealed dribbles of coffee-coloured gloop around its rim. No doubt modern safety legislation would have made the whole process illegal, but legal or not there was something timeless about the intense work needed to complete the piece. Once the basic rod had been assembled, clamps were removed, and ferrules to guide the line were fixed in place at intervals along its length, bound by whipped cotton. Hollow brass joints were inserted to allow the three pieces to conjoin. The whole rod was varnished to a high finish. Some of the rods were for ‘wet fly’ fishing, where the idea is to catch the fish by the ruse of imitating the fly nymphs rather than adults. Ephemerid flies like mayflies had larvae that matured on the streambed, but finally came to the surface as adults briefly to fly free and propagate; the nymph was a halfway stage ready to come to the air but not quite liberated from the water. The imitation nymph had to be just under the surface (hence wet fly) rather than float above the target of its attention. This kind of fishing suited small streams and hard-to-reach pools. The customer list has long gone, but there is a note from a very smart gentlemen’s club on Pall Mall thanking Frank Fortey for his ‘Special’ and congratulating the maker on its suitability for a particular trout stream. I once saw my father pocketing a number of five-pound notes for one of his rods – those banknotes were rare, white things approaching the size of a small handkerchief. This was real money, almost a fortune.

  Most of the money from the sale of regular fishing tackle was made in the two shops at the end of the close season for coarse fish, which usually fell in the middle of June. After three months of deprivation much of the (overwhelmingly male) angling population of London could hardly wait to get hold of rod and line. The latest models of fishing reels, or shining spinners, or even cheeky floats disappeared in short order. Wormy must have been working overtime to satisfy the demand. In the Fulham Road there were queues. For our family it was all hands on deck and I was kept busy with the maggot and hemp measurers, while the ‘ching!’ of an old-fashioned cash register hardly let up all day. I learned that money really did have a smell. The only problem was that fishermen are naturally garrulous, and once they got the attention of Uncle Eddy or my father they would launch into tales of past triumphs – even of the ones that got away – oblivious to the desperation of those further back in line. Attempts to move the raconteur on his way were accomplished by deployment of cunning clichés. ‘Say what you like, squire, it’s a funny old game,’ my father would intone, drawing a conversation to a swift conclusion, ‘Next!’ My mother even made an appearance behind the glass display cases, though she never called any customer ‘squire’. The back room with the tropical fish was usually unpopulated, and I might slip in there for a few moments to watch the Japanese fighting fish on the lookout for an invisible rival.

  When trout were off limits my father went coarse fishing. He briefly held the British record for the biggest dace. During the 1940s he was the champion angler of the Watford Piscators, and the local newspaper showed him struggling to carry home a plethora of silver cups from their annual dinner. By the end of the Second World War many of the old canals were falling out of industrial use, but had become decent places for fishermen. The old Kennet and Avon Canal still held water for much of its length, and near the village of Kintbury my father attempted to teach me the technicalities of angling. There were roach to catch, and perch that could even be taken to the table, the occasional pike deeply lurking. The path along the canal was built for horses to pull longboats carrying loads of coal, but now the very occasional working boat that passed was diesel-powered. Fishermen had scooped out little nests at intervals among the lank plants along the bank, usually at some distance from the locks. Passing walkers would enquire: ‘Any luck?’ On this canal bank I learned that I would never become an angler. Like the literary critic who never writes a book, I am fluent in the language of fishing, and love it with a passion, but I am not, and will never be, a successful practitioner. I have devised scenarios to justify this failure. Does the son of a violin virtuoso take up the same instrument? Rarely. The truth is that I am cack-handed and easily discouraged. My attempts at casting resulted in tangled lines; I could effortlessly hook a waterside thistle but miss the large stretch of canal before me. I mysteriously landed a bacon sandwich hitched from the lunch box. Even when gentles and line made it into the water my own float was motionless while a few yards away my father’s was bobbing furiously every few minutes. The fish were filed in a large keep net, to be released later, but I fumbled with the little gadget that removed the hook from the fish’s mouth after it had been landed. Fishing really was the most complicated procedure, no question, and this was not even the fine art of landing trout. If I couldn’t scramble up the foothills, how could I tackle the mountain beyond? Nothing was said. That was usual with my father; but he must have been gravely disappointed. He would have started his angling life on the River Severn in Worcestershire when he was a similar age to me, and I know he must have been effortlessly good at it at once, as he excelled in all sports. His sporting skills had taken him from a small village near Worcester to an Oxford college. He had played serious hockey. He was boxing champion at Royal Grammar School Worcester in 1923, and twice school champion at fives. During the Second World War he had taken up golf, and acquired a fantastic handicap in no time at all. If he had played marbles it would have been at Olympic level. My mother was a good tennis player, and as strong a swimmer. Some quirk of genetics determined that these natural abilities passed me by. I even struggled to take a hook out of the mouth of a small perch.

  If I failed to be the angler my father might have wished fo
r then I was ready enough to absorb his knowledge of the countryside. He was a naturalist of the old school, with a broad catalogue of birds and wild flowers; he knew the signatures of the seasons. He used old English titles: the common lapwing was a ‘peewit’ to him, and the waterside willow herb was ‘codlins and cream’. I learned the mysterious poetry of proper names. I discovered that to identify and name plants or animals was, in a curious sense, to own them. Names were sequestered from the endless complexity of the living world to bring some sort of order. A name was more than a dry label that might be stuck to a specimen in a museum. It was as personal as an entry in a directory. Without names, the Lambourn swamp would have remained a vague muddle of collaborating plants and animals, a kind of generalised swirl of existence. With identifications added, it could make an ecosystem – even though that term was hardly current when I made my first guesses. I instinctively knew that naming was the first part of understanding. According to the Book of Genesis Adam named all the animals before Eve was created: evidently, the ancient scribes appreciated that taxonomy provides the key to grasping the world. Without such a foundation, humans wander blindly in an unstructured wilderness. A stream bank happened to be my baseline for cataloguing nature. Had I been born into a desert society I might have been fascinated by arrangements of thorns or anatomised the footprints of lizards on the sand. When I visited a South American rainforest with a local guide I was impressed by the long litany of species in his native tongue – every kind of bird and tree with its own identity. Species are the general units for getting a grip on the natural world. Maybe I also came to understand from early on that this primal task of recognition differs from classification. There are many ways to organise species: according to their edibility, or use in medicine; their diet, colour, taste or smell. The scientist prefers to structure his or her classifications to reflect the deep processes of evolution. Before such rationalisation is possible there must always be a process of making close observations, to satisfy curiosity, to answer the question: what exactly is this organism? I have continued to chase this simple question through much of my life as a naturalist and scientist. It must have first flashed into my mind somewhere near a brisk trout stream.

  * * *

  The Piscatorial Society owned fishing rights on the River Itchen, a fine stretch of chalk-fed water in Hampshire; it was the furthest of their beats from London, and my father did not get there as often as he did to the Kennet or the Lambourn. The stream’s clear waters ran directly into the ancient town of Winchester. It was strange to turn off an old city street immediately into a quiet field, where nothing could be heard except the licking sound of fast-flowing water. The city was founded by the Romans in about AD 70, when it was known as Venta Belgarum, capital of the local ‘Celtic’ tribe, the Belgares. When I studied Latin at school I was compelled to read the text of Caesar’s Gallic Wars (Book 3), which was stuffed with lists of the tribes the mighty Julius subdued one after the other: the Nantuates and the Sotiates float upwards from some deep recess of my memory, at the head of a long catalogue. The Celtic Belgares must have been yet another, later feather in the Roman cap. This outpost of the Roman Empire provided my first taste of archaeology. Close to where the anglers parked were piles of stones and debris brought up from a recent dredging of the riverbed. Two giant oak piers lay among the miscellaneous heaps. A local archaeologist who talked to my father was convinced that these were the remains of the Roman gates. In the second century the Romans had fortified Venta Belgarum with walls, and robust wooden gates halted visitors and traders before they could enter the prosperous city. These two giant, shaped trunks, now bleached with age, may have been the uprights that supported the gates to the old town. I do not know whether these speculations ever got the blessing of a scholarly assessment. What I do know is that from the debris I retrieved small pieces of ochre-coloured ceramics that really were from the era of the Romans. Humble tiles, maybe, but direct evidence of the ancient ruling power. There were fragments of glass grown misty with time, and how desperately I longed to find a coin! By the end of the day I had a small collection – the first collection of many in my life – and I had also gained some notion of antiquity. Time, I realised, had depth; there were vanished worlds to explore.

  In the fading light of the evening rise, a natural soundscape accompanied the fisherman’s slow tread along the bank of the River Itchen. The repetitive high bleat of the coot was almost startling as the black bird fussed around its nest concealed among the yellow flags. The hoot of an owl quartering the water meadow was not remotely spooky; it was more like a greeting. The most frequent sounds were gentle splashes into the stream from the bankside. Water voles were abundant along the Itchen in my childhood. These black rodents diligently swam back and forth across the river with their mouths stuffed with damp vegetation, rather like small aqueous retrievers, before disappearing into tunnels in the banks that led to their nests. My father even cursed them for undermining his fisherman’s beat; the bank sometimes wobbled alarmingly if the voles had been too thorough. The water vole was Ratty from The Wind in the Willows: no rat at all, of course, with its short face and furry ears. Rat and vole really only share a common gift for incessant activity: the vole vigorously chomping its vegetarian diet, and swimming largely submerged as busy as can be, and as harmless as it is blameless; the brown rat up to no good with anything edible, and spreading disease at a brisk trot. There was plenty of evidence for Mole, too, along the waterside. Molehills dotted the grassier patches as small tumuli of black soil. Kenneth Grahame was right to imagine Ratty and Mole becoming firm friends. After all, they were neighbours.

  In Grahame’s fictional waterside world the enemy hid in the Wildwood: untrustworthy weasels and stoats. He was almost right, but Ratty’s real enemy has proved to be another mustelid – the American mink. Once farmed for their fur, these escaped (or even ‘freed’ – by animal activists) carnivores have proliferated, and taken the water vole from the River Itchen. These mink are not intimidated by the vole’s freshwater habitat, and are the right size to invade their nesting sites with impunity. Nowadays, the Ratty that my father regarded as something of a pest has become a flagship species for conservation. In another part of Hampshire the Meon Valley Project is attempting to stem the decline of our native mammal, which is invariably described as charming, or even charismatic, when once it was merely common. A few years ago I came across a happy family of water voles in a marsh in Suffolk, going about their business single-mindedly crossing and recrossing a dyke, mouths stuffed with weeds. They could have been the same voles I had seen more than half a century earlier. I was taken back to evenings on the River Itchen, and for a few moments became that small boy again, absorbing everything into a sponge-like mind in a world pregnant with possibilities and discoveries. The voles were not swimming in the same dyke a year later and I could not help but fear the worst.

  Rivers have always been a metaphor for the passage of time. While I was at school we sang mournfully, and without much comprehension, a famous hymn that included the lines: ‘Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all his sons away’. Ranks of small boys in school uniform with all their shoes polished and their heads full of football failed to appreciate the truth in the familiar lines. The words were just there, like the portraits of previous headmasters in the school hall. When I looked into the limpid waters of the River Lambourn as an aging man I clearly saw the passage of years mirrored in the flow of the stream. I realised the importance of trout in the construction of the person I became. I mused on the passing of time: ‘A thousand ages in thy sight are but an evening gone’ the hymn continued. Much of my life has been spent contemplating those thousand ages. Once again, I discovered the suspension from time that overtakes the conscious mind when watching weeds tossing in the water, and hearing the trickle of currents over the shallows. The river bore my memories away like fragile trout flies.

  2

  Eggs and After

  In 2016 I found a bird’s egg on
the forest floor of my own small patch of woodland. It has a ragged hole on one side, its contents gobbled up by a thieving magpie. The egg is still as blue as the sky on a cloudless spring day – bright and clear, unsullied with any hint of green or yellow. At its wider end there is a scattering of black dots. Now, lying in the palm of my hand, it weighs almost nothing, but it stirs old memories: I know that the egg was laid by a song thrush. It came from a nest about the size of half a coconut and well concealed amid thick bushes. The outside of the nest would have been woven from grass and moss, but the inner cup would have been an almost perfect hemisphere of dried mud, painstakingly constructed by the parent birds. A clutch of perhaps four eggs lay within the nest, which was perfectly shaped for thrushes to incubate the next generation. As a boy I would have been drawn to the nest after locating the unmistakable music of the song thrush from a tree nearby. The thrush builds its song from short phrases: intensely loud clusters of a few notes are rehearsed perhaps half a dozen times, and then followed by another, different phrase to be repeated in turn. The improvised song can continue for many minutes during the mating season, phrase after phrase, endlessly inventive. These liquid notes used to wake me up in my bedroom in Ealing when glowing crocus flowers were announcing the end of winter with a different kind of display. However, most of all, the discarded eggshell reminds me of my guilt.