by Will Millard
It took me until the final week of the game-fishing season to finally make the salmon’s acquaintance. The trees had turned a golden brown and the horse chestnuts had swelled and dropped their load, but my reel roared forward once again. I was up to my knees in water, my rod bowed to the river king.
The take had come from nowhere. Salmon have this ability to materialize, not like eels from the mud, but like some shape-shifting spirit blessed with the ability to metamorphosize from mineral to animal at will. The salmon may happily take the form of a rock for hours, even days, before deciding to emerge as a mighty fish and collide with your world with all the brute force of an articulated lorry meeting a wall.
On a city canal you will be noticed – runners have to go around you and pedestrians will take a passing interest in you as a curio – but in a big city river anglers are absorbed within its width like just another shopping trolley or abandoned car. As I fought tooth and nail with the fish the urban world swirled all around me like flakes in a snow-globe. A family chatted above the banks, a man threw a dog a stick, an ambulance screamed over a distant bridge and no one noticed my salmon pounding the rod and rocking the world beneath my feet. It isn’t that city folk don’t care, they just don’t believe in their wildlife.
Eventually I beached the fish and placed my hands across its sides. When you have to wait for something you really want, and have fantasized about it each day to such an extent that you feel like you must have experienced it in a previous life, sometimes when it happens for real it can all feel a little anticlimactic, that the thrill of the chase was truly greater than the capture itself. That was never the case with my first salmon: it was like I had been trapped in a dream where I had been reaching and reaching for something that I could almost touch, only for it to slip from my grasp at the last moment, but here, now, I had woken to discover the very object of my desires had been lying in my hands all along.
The fish was beautiful. I cradled it in my arms and took in its thickened, muscular body, its dark, paddle-like tail and its kype, an elongated and upturned lower jaw that resembles the tip of a billhook. It was a mature male fish, a ‘cock’, but it wasn’t the brilliant silver of an adult salmon just hours out of the sea. It had quite some colour to it: a hood of brown along its top and black spots that met with a dark silvery side. I had almost mistaken it for a giant brown trout at first glance.
Its smoked appearance was a sure sign that this fish had spent some weeks waiting to move upstream. I didn’t mind that at all. I was new to the salmon game and immune to the strange angler’s belief that a fish progressively loses its value with each day spent away from salt water. This was my fish, my first salmon, and I gripped it tenderly as it recovered in the shallows.
My friend Fred had been with me that day and took a couple of pictures on his phone, and so it was, later that evening, that I was able to post the picture on Facebook and change the trajectory of my life for the second time that season.
As was standard with my Facebook friends the typical commentary sidestepped the magnificence of the fish and focused entirely on some irrelevant detail, in this case the shortness of the pair of shorts I was wearing, but the picture did catch the eye of a girl I had long admired but hadn’t dared approach.
Emma and I had been friends since we worked together the last time I lived in the city. She was beautiful, smart and funny, and lived in the most delightful pool imaginable. But it was an impossibly difficult cast away, tangled right up in the complex branches of other relationships with far cooler guys who probably thought fishing was for nerds. I didn’t think I stood a chance.
She messaged me saying it was good to see that I was back in Cardiff, and that the fish was pretty great, but advising me I needed to purchase some new shorts. Then she asked me out for a drink. I overcast my finest lure right into the trees in my excitement to reply. Far too much punctuation and an over-liberal use of the caps lock button made me appear more than a little desperate in my message, and then I foolishly gushed: ‘I live in a right dump in Riverside these days so any excuse to get out of the flat is gratefully received.’
Incredibly, she considered my lure anyway. I mean, it was my finest, after all.
Sixty-five years earlier the life of a young man with a shock of black hair was slowing to a standstill. The other figures grinding and spinning in the dance hall were blending gently into the background, leaving behind just one striking, confident young lady.
Ken Millard was aware that this was like a moment in a romantic film, so it was possible it couldn’t actually be real. He straightened his tie, turned to his mates, and announced: ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’
Dad recently found Grandad’s diary from that year. It was a small, pocket-sized book with a black leather cover that detailed his everyday comings and goings. He was hardly going to pour his emotions into his prose, Grandad wasn’t that kind of man, but it was clear the shift in his behaviour after he met Grandma was seismic. The heavy-drinking, rugby-playing, cinema-going dance hall wag all but disappeared overnight, to be replaced by a man wholly and fully dedicated to his new relationship.
Nadine. He wrote her name in excitable large lettering with a dramatic use of space on the page; hers was a name that mattered. He eased right off the fishing as the diary filled up with the details of their various dates and trips out on his motorcycle. This was more than just a man in love; Grandad had found a new way of life through Grandma and it was obvious he was fantastically happy.
Grandma squeezed a teabag with her fingers and topped up my mug with a more than generous measure of milk. ‘I had lost my previous boyfriend in World War Two. He was a pilot returning to the airbase near Ripon when his aircraft became lost up in the mist on the Yorkshire Moors. I found out about the accident through the matron; it was all in the papers before anyone had told me. She just asked: “Have you read the news?”’ Grandma placed my tea on her coffee table. She still had the newspaper clipping somewhere, she said. Grandma was extraordinarily resilient. Years passed, the pain eased, and then Grandad swept her off her feet in the dance hall.
‘They were wonderful times,’ she smiled.
I had seen pictures of Grandma when she was young. She had striking dark hair, hazel eyes and an impish grin that stuck with her for life. ‘I was training to be a nurse and living in the nurses’ lodgings. The girls would all watch for him out of the window and shout: “He’s here!” Then in he would sweep on his bike with his long coat and black helmet. I would wear a canary-yellow swimming cap, just in case any rain would spoil my hair, and off we would go on all kinds of adventures.’
Grandad’s trips out with Grandma became fewer and further between as their relationship became increasingly more serious. They were saving coins for the day Grandad could write in his diary with the biggest letters he dared: ‘Got Engaged!’
They were soon married, but it was fair to say that some members of Grandma’s family were unsure about the suitability of my grandad for her hand. He was considered a coarse fish, as well as a coarse fisherman.
For 200 years fishing books had been written with a wonderful breadth and simplicity: no class divide, no alienating language, no suggestion of a hierarchy of rank, just the idea that angling involved a set of skills that anyone could learn to catch all species of fish. There were no discernible divisions in angling literature, and as a result very few obvious divisions in angling.
Things changed dramatically with the arrival of the twentieth century. As the fishing author Jack Hargreaves notes: ‘The salmon and trout were raised to piscine peerage and the rest were called by the new name of “coarse fish”. By the years between the wars the assumption that gentlemen went fly-fishing while ordinary men confined themselves to cork and quill was so well established that nobody would have believed the idea to be scarcely more than a generation old. The two tribes developed their separate private mysteries, and fishing books were pretty well divided into two classes – Where My Fly Has Fallen (cream
-laid in handsome boards), and Gentles and Groundbait (paperbacked).’
The prevailing wisdom dictated that ‘coarse’ fish were rougher, dirtier and easier to catch, to be targeted by the great unwashed public using their crude tactics, whereas the ‘game’ fish, by contrast, were much more exclusive. It all came down to little more than the presence of a small rayless fin found behind the dorsal. This, the ‘adipose’ fin, carried the weight of an elitist fantasy on its fleshy form, marking these fish, the salmon, the sea trout, the grayling, as the target of the more distinguished sportsmen. The sheer volume of writing since the world wars has only served to progress this prejudice. Quite honestly, I can count on one hand how many recent fishing books care to mention the fallacy behind the origins of the ‘coarse’ and ‘game’ classification. An utterly standard reading occurs in the opening pages of Jeremy Paxman’s Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life, where he highlights the sense of superiority of ‘the grander British rivers and clubs’ in describing the game fish as ‘wilder, freer and harder to catch’, before touting ‘fly fishing’ as the advanced version of the sport because it is ‘more dainty, more predicated upon observation of the natural world, requiring greater precision and skill’. Warming to his theme Paxman concludes: ‘The numinous properties of fly fishing are held to embody some Platonic ideal of fishing.’
Paxman, I believe, must have his tongue slightly in his cheek, but, really, the ‘Platonic ideal of fishing’? As any serious angler of any discipline will tell you, there is just as much skill and precision required in any aspect of fishing you choose to master. The lure anglers who can flick their trap to within an inch of an overhanging branch have equivalent finesse to the fly casters who can drop a fly on a handkerchief; the pole fishermen, who tie their rig to such a level of precision that it becomes virtually invisible to its quarry, pay the same attention to detail as the fastidious fly tier; and the trotting specialists, who can weave their float perfectly around obstacles and catch fish from a hundred feet away, utilize the same watercraft as the very best of the crack fly-anglers. In actuality, I have yet to meet any successful angler, of any discipline, who has not spent some several thousand hours reading the water and learning to interpret the habits and routines of whichever fish they hope to trap. As far as I can tell this game vs coarse snobbery is designed to catch the fisherman and not the fish: a carefully crafted sales pitch to boost egos and lighten wallets, as, make absolutely no mistake, when it comes to freshwater angling there is no division of the sport that can end up costing you more money than a few weeks on the fly.
Fish don’t recognize the size of your bank balance; nor do they care who you are or where you’re from, a fact borne out by the vast numbers of celebrities who go fishing precisely to feel a sense of anonymity. Just as game fishing does indeed attract a high percentage of the more well-heeled members of society, there is nothing to stop that very same class of person enjoying an afternoon drowning maggots down the local carp pond. Equally, for every salmon fisher dropping a rapper’s bankroll on a helicopter fishing trip to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, or a weekend fishing the Junction pool at Kelso, there are hundreds more catching salmon on cheap season tickets up and down the country, especially on urban rivers like the Clyde and my own Taff in Wales. We are all equal before the fish and yet this sense of a divide has successfully bored its way deep into our collective angling consciousness. It serves to do our sport absolutely no favours.
Of course, I was immune to all this nonsense as a child. I just did whatever Grandad told me to do, and as the only exposure I had to angling literature was the inclusively penned Wilson Encyclopedia, I had no reason to suspect there was any sort of divide in the sport. Age and experience narrow the mind. It wasn’t long into my teenage years when I began to notice a divide between ‘us and them’. None of the magazines I ever bought (Angler’s Mail, Angling Times, Improve Your Coarse Fishing, Carp Talk, etc.) ever mentioned fly-fishing, and when I did eventually locate the game-fishing publications I discovered they were in a different part of the newsagent’s altogether, apparently more comfortable rubbing shoulders with copies of Tatler and Horse and Hound than they were Auto Trader and Guns and Ammo.
Against my better judgement I began to buy into the prejudice. Fly-fishing and fly-fishermen really were fundamentally different to Grandad and me and, as we had no real chance to fly-fish in the Fens anyway, it wasn’t exactly hard to buy in to the idea. On the one occasion we did actually try it, during a family holiday to Scotland, it became pretty clear that we were both spectacularly awful at it anyway, and when you’ve spent most of your life getting good at one particular aspect of fishing it is extremely hard to go back to being terrible again. To our great discredit, the fly rods were quickly binned.
My dad, however, did have what it took to stick at it. His work had mostly kept him away from the bank with Grandad and me, but fishing wasn’t really his thing when I was a child anyway. By the time I was able to take myself fishing Dad had extended his hobbies beyond birdwatching and butterfly collecting to include scuba diving, a sport where he really could enter the fishes’ world and examine them at first hand. He loved to dive, and gave me a great many tips on finding fish, particularly the specific sorts of structure favoured by the perch, but around the same time my carp fishing was at its peak he had been forced to hang up his tanks. A fish-shaped void was left behind, and given he had recently moved north to the trout rivers of the Yorkshire Dales, it made sense that he finally learnt how to fly-fish properly.
Fly-fishing made sense to Dad. He understood a lot more than most about the trout’s invertebrate prey, and there was something about the surgical accuracy of the cast and meticulous preparation of the artificial fly that I think appealed to his diligence as a doctor, but the fact that game fishing was never taken seriously by Grandad would definitely have appealed too. Grandad was impossible to beat at any of the sports he played or followed. Even if you weren’t interested in having a competition with him, from dominoes to bowls, to rugby union and Test match cricket, or the FA cup draw on the television, you could not avoid being dragged into some sort of gentleman’s wager, which he would, with unerring inevitability, win.
Dad had tried to distinguish himself before. Grandma once told me he had taken up table tennis at school purely because it was a sport Grandad didn’t play. Grandad, who was also in the room at the time, laughed so hard that you could see his great golden molars shaking in their root canals, before regaling us both with a protracted and highly detailed story of a table tennis triumph that had seen him smoke the entire opposition in a county-wide Bedfordshire tournament. Grandad had, at least, the self-awareness not to let on to his teenage son about his latent talents at the time. Fly-fishing, though, was something he had genuinely shied away from. I am certain if I had ever pressed him for a reason he would have trotted out the idea of fly-fishing being a sport for a certain type of person, from a certain type of background, but I knew from our Scotland trip that in reality Grandad simply wasn’t very good at it. In our family, Dad became the master of the fly.
It feels right to me to have the salmon making its appearance in these pages after the eel. Both of them are undeniably magnificent travellers, but, I’m afraid to say, in terms of raw underdog spirit the eel has to trump the salmon. However, the eel will simply never move people in the same way as the salmon. The ‘King of Fish’ has achieved an enduring status in our collective imaginations, spawning hundreds of pieces of literature and featuring in innumerable documentaries, films, poems and folk stories. There is scarcely another freshwater creature on earth that has had such an impact on world culture: the salmon, quite simply, is one of the most instantly recognizable and well-known fish that ever there was.
Most have heard of the legendary Pacific salmon run of North America, where millions of returning chum, pink, chinook and coho salmon come back from the sea to spawn in salmon ‘redds’, those small nests dug by female fish into pebbly patches of gravel; but few realize t
his mass replenishment of salmon numbers also feeds thousands of bears, wolves and birds, and that, in death, the release of nitrogen from the salmon’s rotting body is so great that it sustains some 12,000 square miles of Canada’s Great Bear Forest. Indeed, in the peak years of the run, when numbers of salmon are at their highest, scientists have found spruce trees where 80 per cent of their nitrogen is provided by the fish alone.
In the UK, if you head to a weir on any of our Atlantic salmon rivers in early autumn, you stand a very good chance of experiencing the seminal salmonoid event of our own returning running fish. It was this season at the Blackweir on the River Taff where it last happened for me, and, although it might have lacked the sheer strength in numbers of a Pacific run, at least the action didn’t take place deep in some montane wilderness; in fact I was staring at the turbulent waters on the corner of Bute Park with a mother and child, a city boy in a suit, a cyclist in lycra and a man in a turban.
Such is the wonder of urban wildlife. We were bound not by action on a silver screen taking place hundreds of miles from home, but by the silvery flash we all witnessed just minutes from our own doors and offices. The salmon’s task was formidable, seemingly impossible, but this fish had already fought ridiculous odds just to make it back here. It leapt forward and we started to cheer.
Attacking the fast water head on it slid down the weir’s face again and again. We counted over a dozen fails. The Blackweir is a horrible obstacle, a steep tongue of smoothened concrete, a hangover from an age when we needed to harness our waters for industrial production, and with the river nearly in spate the sheer volume of water spilling down the ramp threatened to utterly overwhelm this fish.