Waterlog Read online

  I walked along the water’s edge in my wetsuit to the town beach in Marazion where I swam the half-mile across the shallow sandy bay to St Michael’s Mount. My course lay to the west of the submerged causeway, into the mouth of the little harbour, where I paused in the sunshine by a row of cottages. The place was almost deserted, but I had no interest whatever in exploring it, because every inch was already so obviously too much explored. It bore all the hallmarks of the tourist industry: signposts to absolutely everything, and signs outside the pub that tell you what kind of coffee they serve. The romance of a fabled island castle has mostly evaporated in the usual ironic ways. It is attractive because of its air of splendid isolation, but instead of repelling all boarders, it beckons them like a siren. It was once the main harbour in Mount’s Bay before Penzance and Newlyn established themselves, and its extinct Benedictine monastery attracted a different kind of pilgrim. If I lived on an island, I would want it to be a full-time affair with no causeway and all the romance of inaccessibility. I can recommend swimming there and back as one way of restoring some sense of adventure to your visit.

  Back in the deserted railway siding, I sat on the balcony at one end of Alicante and poured out my tea. Perhaps all this destruction was simply what Robert Frost called ‘a brute tribute of respect to beauty’. These six coaches by the sparkling sea had always had something of Xanadu about them for me – always fired my imagination. Now I felt somehow robbed, as though romance itself were at a standstill. There was something practical and egalitarian about letting such symbols of the life of the Orient Express or Golden Arrow to working people for their holidays on the humble Cornish Riviera, like renting Chatsworth or Cliveden room by room. These carriages had travelled Europe, all the way to Istanbul and back. They were exciting and glamorous as well as lovely, and for a fortnight’s holiday you could call one home. Now all they stood for was the singular poverty of imagination that could let them rot and rust to extinction.

  3

  LORDS OF THE FLY

  Hampshire, 6 May

  THE MOMENT I arrived in Stockbridge I scented water. And when I switched off the engine, I heard it. Arriving by car seemed all wrong. I should have been tethering a horse, or handing him over to an ostler. The place has an air of faded gentility, dominated by the rambling Grosvenor Hotel halfway along a main street that must be at least thirty yards wide, like a scene out of the Wild West. Before the 1832 Reform Act, this modest village returned two members of parliament, who had of course paid for the privilege. It was a classic rotten borough. There’s an old Georgian rectory with two enormous magnolias either side of the front door, and the most beautiful country garage in all England. It still sells petrol from the original pumps. With perfect timing, a Morris Minor pulled up just as I was admiring the festive red-white-and-blue painted doors and a balcony festooned with geraniums to match, growing in suspended tyres.

  The village is a riot of small rivers, a rural Venice. Half a dozen different streams, all purporting to be the authentic Test, flow under the wide main street and emerge to gossip through the hinterland of gardens, paddocks, smallholdings, toolsheds, old stables and outhouses behind the facade of shops and cottages. The gurgling of fast-flowing water is everywhere, and mallards wander the streets at will, like sacred cattle in India. Their ducklings are regularly swept away on the rapids, so there is always the poignant dialogue of orphans and bereaved mothers to strike anguish into the heart of the passing traveller.

  How marvellous to find a place that values, uses and enjoys its river like this, instead of tucking it away out of sight, corseted in a concrete pipe. Stockbridge has made the most of the Test in a hundred different ways. And everywhere there are trout, as there are cats in the night streets of Istanbul. Renowned as the finest chalk stream in the world, the Test is a fly-fishing Mecca, home of the august Houghton Fishing Club. The fishing rights along these hallowed banks quietly change hands at over £1 million a mile and a day’s sport on the Test can cost as much as £800. If they caught me swimming in their river, these people might cheerfully have me for breakfast, poached, with a little tartar sauce. But there are no greater connoisseurs of fine fresh water than our native brown trout, and I was determined to share with them the delights of the Houghton Club waters.

  Five minutes out of the village down a waterside path, I was alone in the meadows on the brink of a wide, cold-water swimming hole, scene of the noisy reunion of the wandering offspring of Mother Test. Slightly to my surprise, there were no fishermen about, so I hurled myself straight in. The water made me gasp. The colder it is the better trout like it, because water’s oxygen content rises as the temperature drops. (This is why there is such a superabundance of marine life in the oceans nearest the poles.) I crossed a gravelly bend, swimming across the current into the confluence, a pool screened with bullrushes along the far bank. Some early swallows swooped low over the water. Squadrons of shadowy trout darted against the pale, stony bed creating bow-waves as they sped away. I turned and glided downstream, brushed by fronds of water crowfoot that gave cover to the trout as well as to the nymphs of the mayflies that would soon emerge to seduce them. No wonder trout love the Test. It is fast, startlingly clear, and alternates between riffling shallows and deeper pools. The bottom is chalky gravel with the odd worn brick. And there’s plenty of cover.

  Long Pre-Raphaelite tresses of water buttercup belly-danced in the current. I anchored myself on the weed, buoyed by the racing stream, then swam two hundred yards downstream to a peaty bay where the cattle come to drink. One side was kept clear of trees and vegetation to give a clear run to the rods, with all the cover on the opposite bank. A romantic-looking couple in their sixties passed by through the meadow and we exchanged a polite ‘good afternoon’. They did their best to look unsurprised. Growing acclimatised, or numbed, I swam on, expecting at any moment to encounter a fly-fisherman knee-deep in waders, wondering what on earth I would say if I did.

  The Houghton Fishing Club has its headquarters at the Grosvenor Hotel in Stockbridge, not, as you might imagine, in the village of Houghton a few miles downstream. Such are the oblique ways of English exclusivity. Houghton Club membership, which normally numbers between a dozen and sixteen, is by invitation only, as I was succinctly informed in a one-line reply when I later wrote asking if I could join. With its dining marquee pitched in Tent Meadow by the river and its annual springtide feasts to celebrate the first rising of the mayfly and the grannom (another species of trout fly which rises in April), the club in its early days was an arcadian affair. It was founded by the Rev. Canon F. Beadon in June 1822 as an offshoot of the original Longstock Fishing Club a few miles upstream, so it can claim to be the second oldest club in the country. The annual membership subscription at that time was £10. From the beginning, the twelve members of the club, all disciples of Izaak Walton, made it a custom amongst themselves to record their activities, observations and thoughts in a club journal, the ‘Chronicles’, kept at the Grosvenor Hotel where the Houghtonians would come down by stage coach, and later by train, to stay. When Walton published The Compleat Angler nearly two hundred years earlier, in 1653, he gave it a sub-title, ‘The Contemplative Man’s Recreation’. The ‘Chronicles of the Houghton Fishing Club’ captures the same thoughtful, playful, holiday mood of generous sociability, full of song and verse, engendered by the river.

  The Grosvenor was the club headquarters from the beginning. The anglers eventually bought the place lock, stock and barrel in 1918, and it is still full of stuffed fish in glass cases, sporting prints of every description, and dry flies mounted in frames: the Detached Badger, Red Quill, Gilbey’s Extractor, Blue Winged Olive and the Houghton Ruby. The convivial, Pickwickian spirit of this all-male ‘Fellowship of Anglers’ is well described by one of its founder members, Edward Barnard, in an early entry in the chronicles:

  For let it be here recorded, that in this Club the good example of Izaak Walton, our Patron Saint, has been so invariably followed that no jealousy, no envyin
g, no strife, no bickering has ever existed. The wish of an individual, whether expressed or implied, has been the Law of all; the happiness of each other has been the compass by which all have steered; no angry word, no selfish feeling has ever betrayed itself in our enviable circle. Every successive Meeting has been the means of uniting more firmly, if possible, that friendship and good fellowship which has manifested itself from the beginning; which it has been the object of all to encourage; which it has been the unalloyed satisfaction of all to have experienced, and which, with hearts so constituted, must remain unshaken. Our Society may be dissolved by circumstances over which we have no control, but the Friendship which our Meeting has established, and the remembrance of the many happy hours passed in the company of each other, can only terminate with our lives.

  The club had no rules but two customs; one, that no fish was to be killed under a pound, the other, ‘that no member was to fish before the 1st January nor after the 31st December in any year – Leap Year not excepted’. The Houghtonians were eccentric to a fault, often facing bleak, unsuccessful seasons when hardly a trout was landed, with equanimity and good humour. The journal vividly conveys the literary atmosphere of wit and raillery that prevailed, combined with an obsession with the minutiae of the craft of fly-fishing and a genuine love of natural history. On 2 June 1860 a hurricane wrecks the club’s dinner tent, yet on the same day someone records ‘six white water lilies in bloom in ditch at bottom of marsh’, and the members continue their interminable debate about whether or not to allow the handsome grayling to mingle with the trout in the club waters and be fished. (There were two schools of thought; the first that grayling made excellent sport and good eating versus the second, that grayling diminished the numbers of trout by preying on spawn and competing greedily for food.)

  These Lords of the Fly recorded their catch as diligently as any train-spotters, so that when the time came to celebrate their centenary with a dinner at Claridges on 7 June 1922, Lord Buxton was able to quote the exact number and weight of fish caught during the one hundred years the club had been in existence: 37,045 fish weighing just over 31½ tons, of which 30,483 were trout and 6,562 were grayling. The trout averaged 1 pound 15 ounces and the grayling 1 pound 12 ounces.

  All the members took a special, vested interest in ‘the Natural History of Fish and the Insects on which they feed’, recording in the journal the dates of the first spring appearance on the Test of certain birds and insects over more than a century; the swallow, sand martin, house martin, swift, cuckoo, mole cricket, glow-worm, and three of the most important local trout flies, the grannom, mayfly and caperer. The anglers often fished well into the evening or even stayed up all night dozing before the embers of the fire in the parlour of the Boot Inn at Houghton in their efforts to catch the opportunity of a rising of their quarry in the hour before dawn. In less auspicious conditions they would while away their days and evenings by writing verse, sketching or painting, performing conjuring tricks, or devising new ways to enjoy their catch: ‘A small pike wrapped in wet paper and placed for twelve minutes in the hot wood-ashes at the Boot, which proved most excellent when brought to table.’

  Mostly, though, they debated the rise of the fly, the metamorphosis of water-breathing larvae into air-breathing insects that can excite the wary trout to a moment’s indiscretion that may end on the angler’s hook. The club’s two main meetings, with feasts in the dining tent, centred round the rise of the grannom fly in April and that of the mayfly towards the end of May. In the days of the post-chaise it was important to the anglers, who were men of substance to whom time was valuable, to predict each rise accurately and time their departure from London economically so as to avoid having to drum their fingers in the Grosvenor Hotel reading The Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream by Skues, or glancing through The Fly Fisher and the Trout’s Point of View by Col. E. W. Harding whilst awaiting the pleasure of Ephemera danica.

  Writing in the journal on 17 April 1830 in ‘a state of uncertainty’ about the rising of the fly in dull windy weather, Edward Barnard makes ‘such observations as would enable me, at a distance from the rivers Itchen and Test, to judge of the precise period at which the first rise of the Mayfly would take place in these rivers’. Barnard was the grandson and namesake of a famous Provost of Eton, and was dubbed ‘Piscator’ when he was at the school, he was such an obsessive disciple of Izaak Walton’s art. The flowering of the common tulip in London gardens was Barnard’s first clue, combined with the full blooming of the whitethorn, elder and guelder rose and the coming into full seed of the common hedge garlic. Final confirmation of the imminent emergence of the Hampshire mayfly would be the full flowering of the double red peony in Islington or Chelsea. The birth of this unpredictable insect could come as early as it did on 18 May 1848 or as late as 11 June 1855.

  The club’s obsession with the metamorphosis of Ephemera danica led not only to the feast they held in their tent called simply ‘the Mayfly’ but to some elaborate prose in the club journal: ‘It is a marked characteristic of certain creatures – vertebrate as well as invertebrate – to pullulate in abnormal numbers at irregular intervals on the stimulus of some favourable concatenation of physical conditions whereof the nature has hitherto evaded recognition.’ As the Houghtonians raised their glasses at the mayfly feast to ‘The Rising Generation’, there was much animated exchange of fishing stories and natural history notes, often spiced by Barnard’s ‘keen perception of the ludicrous’: how Colonel Wigram saw a rat swimming, cast at him, hooked him by the near right foot and landed him; how an immense and elusive trout was landed on 29 July 1859 by James Faithful, one of the keepers, on a hook baited with the intestines of a moorhen; how, in the same month, the marsh helleborine bloomed in Machine Meadow; how an eel, spotted all over with yellow, was caught and pronounced by the British Museum to be a semi-albino, and another, creamy pink with a bright yellow dorsal fin, was captured by the village sweep on 14 July 1886; how, when the village street was first tarred, and it rained, the mayfly mistook it for the river and laid eggs on its glistening surface; how a 6-pound pike landed by Mr Warburton on 18 July 1853 was found to contain in its stomach a 1-pound pike, a water vole, and a live crayfish ‘which swam away merrily when restored to the water’.

  In 1854 nine otters were killed in the club waters; year in, year out, the journal dispassionately records the keepers’ steady war against them. For some reason, probably habit, their weight was always meticulously recorded: ‘Fine dog otter, 21 lbs. Female 16 lbs. Another male, 23 lbs’. Sometimes they were trapped but not killed, perhaps let go elsewhere for the benefit of the hounds. Now there are no otters at all in the Test.

  When the north wind blew and the members were confined indoors the club turned into a literary salon. They wrote songs, composed heroic couplets by the yard, and jotted Latin verse in the journal. They lampooned each other – and affectionately patronised their river keepers, Faithful and Harris, for their rich dialect: ‘7th May 1862. Faithful loquitur – “Yes, them’s dace; slender little ’umbugs! They slips through the two-inch mesh like nothink. The roach is the worst, though; they be nasty, guggling things.” Elsewhere, another of the Stockbridge men is quoted observing, ‘It ha’ been a cluttersome sort of a night, and I don’t like they whirlipuffs this morning, they never does fishing no good. Besides I heard the eels smack last night – that’s never no good sign.’ Here and there a keeper’s letter, with its phonetic spelling, finds its way into the journal as an occasion of further well-bred hilarity: ‘June 1830. SIR, I Rite To in Farmyu that this Last Weicke wee Have Been Trubeld very Much with Porchars and wee Watch them very Narely on Sunday mourning A Bout 7 o Cloack.’

  *

  The cosy Wind in the Willows flavour of the Houghton Chronicles is enhanced by the members’ close familiarity with their stretch of water. Every least feature of this landscape has a name. I was now moving further downstream, swimming where it became deep enough, wading or paddling through the frequent shallows, amazed at
the abundance of trout. The local names I recalled from the chronicles were so potently redolent of familiarity that they wrought in me an acute awareness that I did not belong here, that I was an interloper. Yet I was also half-enchanted by the world evoked in the journal. Boot Island, the Broken Trunk, Cooper’s Mead, Town Water, Sheep Bridge, Tanner’s Trunk, Goff’s Shallow, Bossington Mill were all as baffling to me as the nicknames for people and places at school when you first arrive. For all its natural attractions, there was no getting away from the fact that this river was a highly exclusive club, artificially managed for the benefit of a fortunate few.

  After perhaps ten minutes’ communion with the naiads of the Test, I glided out of the main stream into another shallow peat-lined inlet perforated by the hooves of cattle, who had chewed off the tops of the reeds. I arose less elegantly than the mayfly out of nine inches of water and looked around the deserted water meadow. Still no sign of trout rods. I hurried, shivering, back to my towel along a well-worn footpath, picking my way through the cowpats that were always regarded as a good omen by the original Houghton anglers.