Waterlog Read online

  Sid is a wiry, weather-beaten man of medium build who knows the Great Ouse as well as anyone. He and his father used to trap eels in baskets or eel-hives. ‘They would sink naturally to the bottom once they were soaked enough. What we’d do was get a little tobacco tin and prick holes in it and fill it full of worms, and the eels would go in the basket after it.’

  Like many people who lived by the water, Sid and his dad also used to put out a night line for eels. It would be about thirty yards long with a dozen hooks baited with small fish, sparrows; anything dead and preferably rotting. They would throw it out last thing at night and harvest the eels off it before first light. Eels will try anything to avoid the light, and will tangle the lines if left until daybreak. There was always a market for eels in the Fens. People would sell them in buckets and baskets in Ely market until just a few years ago. But unless you sold out, you were left with eels on your hands, because you can only sell them alive. Once killed, an eel must be cooked straight away, and in warm weather they will die within five minutes of leaving the water.

  Sid steered the boat off the river into a narrow channel that leads under a railway bridge whose bricks are scored by the passage of barges from the old clay-pits, now themselves sheets of reedy open water. The cargoes of clay were for mending and building the raised banks of the fenland rivers and dykes. We slid past a great crested grebe on her floating nest and Sid began laying the nets straight off the stern along the edge of the reed-bed. This is where the eels would go to feed at night. A kind of anchor went in first, followed by a length of chain, and then the ‘leader’ nets that guide the unsuspecting creatures towards the mouths of the traps, which each have a series of funnels and chambers along the lines of a lobster pot. Sid laid twenty nets in two rows but didn’t seem to mark their position. Why? ‘Because I don’t want to lose them to anyone. I just say, “All right, there’s a tree there, or a bunch of nettles,” and make a mental note.’ As we chugged back in the sunset, and the eels began their night-life below us, Sid mapped the shape of his year.

  All winter he makes new traps in his attic and in the workshop at the end of his garden from yards of special sheep-netting. He starts trapping in April when the weather warms up. An eel trapper likes a sultry night with a reasonable flow on the river. The flow spurs the eels to move about and hunt for food. He keeps going all summer until September, when the silvers go away. Silvers are the mature eels that are ready to make the fabled journey across the Atlantic to the Sargasso Sea where they breed. Eels emerge from the Fens in three distinct runs to the sea in September, October and November, and they usually go on the new moon. The rougher the river the better they like it. They are caught in wing-nets, stretched right across the river. You see them dimly sometimes, swimming in processions about three feet down, always in midstream. Eels are clearly in close touch with the moon, moving with it like the tides and shunning the sun. It is no wonder, when you consider that they spend the first three years of their lives as elvers drifting on the ocean currents towards our shores. They are sea creatures living inland.

  The elvers arrive in May, after hitch-hiking along the Gulf Stream from the Sargasso, preyed upon by just about every living creature in the Atlantic. They swim up the river at night in dark brown shoals like tadpoles, although nowhere near so many now as there used to be. They are still caught in big landing nets on the Severn where they fetch prices that are inflated by their recent scarcity, and are sent off to the gourmets of France and Japan.

  I spent that night in Freckenham, dreaming of my mother teaching me to swim, cradling my head as I kicked my legs in the water. I returned through the Fens in mist at a quarter to six next morning to meet Sid and collect the night’s catch. His friend John was on board too, also dressed in yellow oilskin trousers but lacking the old tweed fishing hat Sid seemed to live in. John’s job was to help haul in the tackle and untie the netting at the bottom end of each trap to release the eels.

  As we approached last night’s reed-bed, Sid’s eye was on whatever subtle landmarks he had chosen to help him locate the row of sunken traps. He throttled down the engine and John swung a grappling iron over the side, waited for it to sink, then heaved. ‘I think it’s the nets,’ he said. ‘I hope it’s not a body.’ In came the chain, then the first of the traps with the dark brown glistening shapes and flashes of white belly. Nothing could be more streamlined or agile than this. An eel’s head, with its eyes set close together and high in the skull, and the sharp snout, bears a remarkable similarity to Concorde. Nothing could be so outlandish. An eel is so mottled and green and varnished in mucus it could be an uprooted plant, a mandrake root come to life.

  John untied each trap at the bottom and tipped the creatures deftly into the plastic tub, where they subsided into a glutinous tangle, making little kissing sounds. Their electric energy was astonishing. They reared straight up in the tub on the tips of their tails like snakes, waving their little heads about looking for a way out, swaying like puppets, naked as bedsprings. Every now and again an eel spilled on to the bottom of the boat and slithered in reverse, then forward, curling itself into a question mark as if to say: ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I noticed they picked it up with a towel, or a pair of kinked tongs, and Sid explained: ‘You keep your fingers away from them. If they did happen to get hold of you, you’d know about it. The trouble is they suck everything in, and the teeth go inwards and . . .’ He pursed his lips and made a sucking sound. ‘I did get nabbed once; they got this finger. But I got it out. Same as pike, you’ve got to be careful.’ Sid sorted the eels as they came in, flicking the smaller ones back. Some nets had as many as half a dozen eels in them. John had to keep disentangling young 3- or 4-inch bream out of the leader nets. ‘No ruff,’ he says, ‘thank God.’ Ruff are horrible little spiky fish that get tangled in the net like bits of thistle.

  It was a respectable catch: about 25 pounds altogether. Sid’s biggest eel to date weighed 7¼ pounds and measured nearly 4 feet. It was not as big as the 10 eels he saw recently that had come out of the lake at Holkham Hall in north Norfolk when they drained and dredged it. They weighed between 8 and 12 pounds and were up to 6 feet long. Nobody seems to know why some eels get the urge to breed and become silvers and others just stay where they are and grow. Some, like the Holkham eels, may just find themselves cut off from the sea. Sid says they’re usually between 10 and 20 when they go back to the sea, weighing between 1 and 4 pounds. They grow about an inch a year, so the 7-pounder he caught was probably a 45- or 50-year-old. Once they have gone back to spawn in the Sargasso, the silvers never return. Like spawning salmon, they simply die.

  On the way back Sid spoke of his best-ever catch. ‘It was May Day – the first Spring Bank Holiday on a May Day – and I was down here at the clay pits in a place I had netted several times before. That night I just thought “I’ll drop them here again.” There was a row of willow trees all along the bank with their roots in the water, and I know what had happened. The fish had gone in the previous day, because it was a nice day, and spawned. The eels had followed them in at night, but they couldn’t get at the spawn because they hit the nets first. I got 285 pounds out of 10 nets; about 250 eels, probably more.’

  He said the best conditions for catching eels would often be rough weather. ‘We used to say a good thunderstorm would get them started.’ Eels will travel overland during rain. Sid remembered a thunderstorm one afternoon about the time the silvers were making their way back towards the sea. They came out of a pond and across a field on Highflyer’s Farm just outside Ely, but the storm didn’t last long and the sun came out. Sid had the farmer on the telephone asking him why there were dead eels all over his field and where on earth did they come from.

  I asked what eels eat. ‘Everything,’ said Sid airily. ‘Fish, fish spawn, worms, frogs, snails, all rubbish, bodies, anything. They’ll eat one another. They’re proper scavengers.’

  ‘Bodies?’

  ‘Oh yes. When people drown themselves, if you pull
the bodies out you pull eels out with ’em.’

  Sid knew what he was talking about, too.

  ‘There used to be a pub down here called the Ship. They would come out of the pub and walk straight into the bloomin’ river.’

  Sid and his brothers and sisters all swam in the Great Ouse as children. ‘Father used to have a long pole and put a bit of rope round your waist and that was how we learnt. There was what we called the Ely Bathing Place near the station. It had a nice gravel bottom and you could nearly walk right across the river. There was an old crane there we used to swing off by the bonding house wharf. We would swim off the slipway, and by the Black Horse at Littleport. People have had their feet bit by pike. They can be vicious, especially if they’re hungry and you happen to go by kicking your feet. They’re out in a flash.’

  Sid’s grandfather, James, was famous for his life-saving on the Ouse. He was a crane driver on the Great Eastern Railway wharf in the days when most people still travelled around the Fens by water. At a civic ceremony in Ely in 1906, Mr Merry was presented with a variety of elaborate gifts that included a walnut chiffonier, a dining table, a ‘purse of gold’ and a framed testimonial inscribed: ‘Presented to Mr James Merry by his fellow citizens as a token of their appreciation of the bravery shown by him in rescuing twenty people from the River Ouse during a period of twenty years.’ He had been ‘received with much cheering’, and said in his modest reply that ‘the rescues he had effected were only what any ordinary Englishman would have done had they been placed in the same circumstances’.

  Back at the landing-stage on Babylon, Sid poured the eels out of the tub into a plastic fish-tray in the punt and began sorting them by size with the tongs. The bigger ones went into a keep-net under the boat with others reserved for a ‘special customer’. The rest went into another net, also stored in the cool shadow of the punt, to await the weekly visit of Bill, the wholesale merchant. He would take the eels back to London, jelly them, and sell them on. With added gelatine.

  Sid is a purist when it comes to jellying. ‘The actual jelly’s in the skin. A lot of people do wrong and they’ll skin an eel, but I never skin mine. All the goodness is in that liquor, and it will set like a jelly. Bring them to the boil, let them simmer ten to twenty minutes according to size, and stick a couple of shallots in too. If you’re having them stewed, make some white sauce and have them hot. They’re very good fried in butter with shallots and a glass of white wine, or dipped in batter and fried at my brother’s fish shop.’ As a man who eats an awful lot of eels, Sid should know.

  It was still only breakfast time when I left Sid and went off to swim in Adventurer’s Fen in a pool at the junction of Burwell Lode and Reach Lode. (A lode in the Fens is a small river, between five and twenty yards wide.) I went in across a raft of reeds and subsided rather than dived into the half-clear green water. It was surprisingly shallow: only three to five feet, with a soft, black, mud bottom. Reach Lode and Burwell Lode stretched away from the confluence in straight lines for as far as I could see, like two enormous swimming pools, banked and raised some twenty feet above the surrounding fen. Floating at this level, I felt half-suspended in the reflected sky and very remote from anywhere.

  I swam down the middle of the wide stillness of Burwell Lode to where it joins Wicken Lode, and, further on, the River Cam. I had a powerful sense of eels in the reeds and in the invisible mire below. Divers who go down in the Fens see holes in the river bottom where big eels lie up, growing their annual inch and waiting for nightfall. A fish rose before me in a lazy flick. The morning was already warm, with little white clouds bringing the sun in and out, and the shallow water felt mild enough too, in spite of a breeze that combed the surface in flurries. I breaststroked a few hundred yards along the deserted lode and began to appreciate the sense of space. The banks, contoured and softened by reeds, didn’t look nearly so uniformly straight once I was in the water. A marsh harrier came over, its quiet, loping wings darkening the sky for a moment.

  The rich, black silty earth along the banks of the Cam around here has been farmed by the same families for years. Because the river was the main artery of transport, the farmhouses and buildings were all sited along its banks. Two miles away, I had met a family who have farmed at the remote junction of Swaffham Lode and the Cam for over a hundred years, and have always swum in the river. In summer they have ten or twelve children swimming from the farm, and building elaborate carpeted rope walks as diving platforms in the trees. Thirty years ago, the whole village used to come out to the farm to picnic and swim in the river in summer. At harvest time, the farmers, farm workers and children would all be covered in the black peaty dust off the land at the end of each day. They would each be given a piece of soap to take into the river as they bathed, washing off the grime, larking about, and sending bubbles of lather floating off down the river. Even the grandmother, who was over eighty, used to swim in the Cam in a hat with her pearls and glasses on. Alver Badcock and his River Board gang would come along on a barge once a year to dredge the lode, with their own hut and stove on board. As recently as the 1960s, the sugar beet was taken away from the farm on barges, which would line up in a row to be loaded with thirty tons each.

  As I turned off to swim under a wooden bridge and up Wicken Lode, the sound of warblers was everywhere in the green clouds of sallow bushes on the opposite bank. A water pump was audible somewhere in the distance, a reminder of the energy-intensive measures which the draining of the Fens has made necessary. Like any other unnatural system of land management, it doesn’t quite add up. The Fens today will work only with the massive invisible input of electricity to run the pumps that keep the system working.

  The water in the lode was becoming brilliantly clear – ‘gin clear’ as they say here. The banks were thick with reeds. Roach were clearly visible under the lily pads. It was obvious that I was swimming beside a nature reserve, but since Wicken Lode is open to navigation, and, more to the point, none of the wild life seemed to be taking the slightest notice of me, I could see no objection to this. I could certainly think of no objection to the delicious water except W. C. Fields’s famous quibble about what fish do in it. I swam right up to a frog, which eyed me, but didn’t dive or even blink. As every member of the Special Boat Unit knows, you are pretty well hidden when you swim, and aquatic animals are relatively unconcerned about you once you too are submerged. You have become, after all, one of them.

  Just then, a group of birdwatchers appeared in the top of a wooden tower hide on the other bank and began scanning the fen with binoculars. Was this a search party? The moment was suddenly reminiscent of a scene in Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, in which the fugitive hero, half-dead from torture and in need of clothes, purloins the trousers of four bathers off a river bank and hides from them in the water, then steals downstream with his soggy raft of breeches. A group of us, sharing a Paddington flat in the sixties, used to know the book almost by heart and derived from it a coded cult language. One of our inventions was the verb ‘to quive’, meaning to move by stealth, covertly, as when stalking a wild animal, or up to no good. It derives from the name of the anonymous hero’s ruthless and relentless pursuer, Major Quive-Smith, a master of tactics and field-craft who runs our man to ground in a hidden Dorset lane, like a wild animal.

  I quived silently into the reeds and floated there up to my nose like a crocodile until they had gone, taking a good deal of boyish pleasure from their failure to notice me. The moment it becomes a subversive activity, swimming is that much more interesting. I swam upriver to a crystal pool where the New River flows in to join the lode and there is a mooring. Why was the water so very clear? I had two theories: first, that this was water pumped up from underground by the Environment Agency to prevent Wicken Fen from drying out and losing its essential character as a wet fen; and second, that it was springwater from around Snailwell, which is also the source of that quintessential fenland river, the Snail. Perhaps, because the fen is managed in such a benign way,
with no agricultural chemicals, this was just how water could be anywhere, if we would only look after it with more care.

  I scrambled out with the help of the reeds but still managed to daub myself in a woad of black silt, so that I had to face the walk back along the bank in my swimming trunks, looking like some neolithic erstwhile inhabitant. I passed a digger, fortunately unmanned, that had unearthed a huge tree of bog oak six feet down in the peat. This remnant of the ancient woods that grew here over 4,000 years ago was now almost pure black, with the peat that preserved it still fresh. Such trees were not necessarily oak; they may have been pine or yew and were often very tall, eventually killed by rising water levels and felled by storms. A boat came along the lode; some sort of pleasure launch. But the couple on board in yachting caps just waved a cheery hallo as though quite accustomed to meeting half-naked tribesmen at large in the Fens.

  Now fully clothed, I returned through the village of Wicken where the churchyard headstones sang a requiem of fenland names: Dorcas Bishop, Jabez Taylor, Violet Bailey, Albert Delph, Sophia Kettle, Joseph Tebbitt, Joshua Hatch, Steadman Aspland. I also met Mr and Mrs Bullman in the best bungalow front garden in England. They had built a model village complete with a working water mill, pub, village hall, manor house, cottage hospital, fish and chip shop, church, vicarage, barn, chapel, forge, fire station, hotel, bakery, butcher, post office, florist, hairdresser, various cottages with outside privies, a station, signalbox and railway. There was even a car-boot sale and a tourist information centre. Only one thing was missing: a swimming pool. Still, there is something generous and public-spirited about a beautiful front garden. It is quite different from the back garden, which is a private pleasure. Occasionally in a city you will see from the top of a bus a bright waterfall of windowbox flowers down the front of a house or flat in an otherwise dull street. The Bullmans’ garden was like the spontaneous gestures of welcome you encounter when you travel in the Arabian countryside, bringing the pleasure of surprise to passing strangers.