The Old Man and the Sand Eel

by Will Millard

  Fishermen reflect their life in their fishing. Grandad just didn’t have anything left to prove, to himself, to the world of man, fish or his son, by the time I turned up with my ‘Argos Introduction to Fishing Kit’. Grandparents often become second parents, but they get second chances too.

  ‘I make a very close link between our belonging here and the will to fish,’ Bernard Venables said towards the latter stages of his own career. ‘Most of the things which are least pleasant about life now are the things which are most antithetical to fishing.’ Fishing, he believed, was sullied by competition, by men taking on other men, by obsessing over size and records, by inviting self-promotion and all the jealousy that came with it. It took my Grandad a long time, but as we headed towards our last casts together he cared for nothing more than company.

  There was more to Grandad curbing his enthusiasm for competition than simply a mellowing with age, however; if he really had always been obsessed with just catching, then the commercial carp fishery would have represented the absolute zenith of his angling ambitions, and the modernization of the sport, the carbon elasticated poles, the baitrunners on reels, the bite alarms and synthetic baits, would all have been must-haves in the decades before his epiphany. Yet, even when he was at his most addicted to the sport, his methods barely changed from when he was a child.

  Grandad despised the commercial carp fishery as it suppressed the wild and precarious element for which he fished. Fishing rivers was a distillation of his character: unpredictable and bold. He felt changes in fishing eviscerated the sport of its elemental sense of fairness and dulled the angler’s wits and skill. On that, he had common ground with his son; plus, they were both fantastic observers of the natural world.

  Fairness and a keen eye for nature. For all Grandad’s faults, they were two great traits to pass on to his son. Dad had just applied their uses to different ends and standards, but he was still his father’s son.

  Stepping out of your dad’s shadow can be hard. Grandad had been a legend in his own lifetime, and my dad, the local doctor, was known by everyone in my area. I occasionally found it hard too. A lot of people really looked up to my dad and I felt, as the doctor’s son, that I was expected to behave in a certain way. People knew who I was, and even though it wasn’t ever said, I felt whatever I did would be held up for extra scrutiny as a result of my dad.

  I wonder whether that influenced me in my determination to plough my own furrow later in life. I knew my expeditions were something that Dad could and would never do. They were dangerous and risky, and they had no obvious outcomes, pay cheques or prospects. He made it very clear he didn’t approve of me leaving steady jobs to pursue those dreams, and that served to spur me on even more to make a success of what I was trying to do.

  It was hardly a wholesale rejection of him, though. I massively coveted my dad’s attention and approval, more than anything else in fact, and when he showed any interest in what I was doing I gratefully embraced him within my world.

  It’s the curious dichotomy of growing up, the desperate rejection of figureheads while secretly wanting to imitate them at almost every stage of our lives. For most of us a predictable pattern inevitably follows that sees us steadily morphing into a version of the very role models we spent so much of our energy and time denigrating. In that, I was no exception.

  More and more I see my own father in me. Not just a zero-tolerance attitude for lateness at airports, but an appreciation of life’s details and an interest in how the world ticks, for both good and bad. I don’t feel like I am in such an enormous rush any more, that it’s me versus the world, or that I’m constantly having to prove myself to other people, but I haven’t quite abandoned Venables’ second stage of the angler’s evolution either. So I still occasionally seek big fish and big challenges, but at least I know enough now to try to live and fish for the things that make me, and the people closest to me, happiest. I have always loved my dad, and only hope I might be half the man he is one day.

  I was alone in the gorge as my fly descended neatly into the mouth of a salmon. It rose up from behind a rock and sucked it right in. It was so close I could see the sun reflecting off the white on the roof of its mouth. Indeed, I was so close I was also able to perfectly track the frame of the fly leaving the fish’s mouth and disappearing around the bend.

  The old suck and blow. It had done me in.

  It was as close as I got to snaring my first salmon on the fly but I wasn’t too disheartened. As Dad, Nigel and I made to leave, Dave stayed on with his new recruit, another superb salmon fisherman named Jon. ‘We used to fish all the time with a friend who once went thirteen years without a salmon,’ Jon began. ‘He’d come with us and we would always let him take the first cast in the top pools or the water that was easier to fish but he just caught nothing. It must’ve been so disheartening, especially when we would catch on a pool he had just left. Then, one day on the Dee, he caught two grilse to start, then a springer salmon. It was like a curse was lifted, he didn’t stop catching after that.’ I just needed some more time.

  Nothing was caught for the rest of the week but I emerged from my time on the Findhorn deeply satisfied in a way I hadn’t been for years. If I had already been surprised to learn that it doesn’t matter if you don’t catch anything big, I was quite shocked to realize that it actually doesn’t matter if sometimes you don’t catch anything at all.

  ‘Grandad, I’ve got someone I would like you to meet.’

  I had seen Grandad almost every day when I lived with my sister and James back in the Fens, but since I’d moved back to Cardiff to work on the BBC series my visits to his home had become inevitably more infrequent. His dementia had been steadily worsening over the last year, but in the last few months it had become really quite severe. He was living in a residential care home away from Grandma and spent the greater part of his days asleep in a chair, not really aware of where or who he was most of the time, and barely speaking at all.

  I squeezed his hand and repeated my words. I had warned Emma about his state, but I had wanted him to meet her anyway, even if it was only to be a token gesture.

  She took his hand tenderly and, quite suddenly, some light penetrated the dark clouds that had previously been puddling his mind. He woke up, and in that moment seemed to return to the saddle of his motorbike. Screaming into the nurses’ quarters with his shock of black hair and that ‘devil may care’ attitude.

  ‘Grandad, this is Emma.’

  He took her in through his big brown eyes and flashed her a handsome grin.

  ‘Hello, Ken,’ Emma blushed, ‘is Will a good fisherman?’

  ‘He thinks he is,’ he replied.

  The cheeky bugger.

  I held his other hand. They were the last words we would share together.

  Three years after I caught that first Taff salmon, Emma and I returned to the very spot where the fish was caught. It was cold and the River Taff was in a foul mood. I had a couple of casts but sometimes there is no serendipity to fishing. I knew I didn’t need that fish any more. Perhaps the river knew it too.

  That weekend we were married.

  Coming Home

  For all our time together in the Fens the thick-lipped and fat-chested chub was very much Grandad’s fish. He talked about catching them from the running water around Bedfordshire with relish: ‘Large lumps of bread crust or a plump slug, that’s all you need for a whackin’ great chub, my boy.’ I caught my first one on a metal spinner and wisely elected not to tell him anything about it; my second came twenty years later and told me with certainty that he was finally on his way out.

  Dad took him out fishing just one more time. It was to a local pond in the centre of a town park, and, despite a cancer beneath his right eye and floating blobs that cruelly obscured his vision, he still managed to winkle out a tiny perch or two: the tiny perch, the fisherman’s escort in and out of the sport. On the front cover of the order of service at his funeral was a picture of him holding the monster per
ch caught from our favourite swim at Popham’s Eau. I felt my chest heave and eyes fill with tears as I looked at it. He had been on his way for a long time, so there was no sense of robbery at his loss, but time did little to dull the impact of actually losing him for good.

  The gathering of friends and family brought out many of the old stories. Some were familiar, such as the time his friend was so thoroughly depressed at being out-fished by him they swapped rods, only for Grandad to continue to catch more; other stories were new even to me, including one outrageous tale involving Grandad’s knowledge of the Russian word for ‘ice cream’ and an interrogation at the hands of the KGB. I made a small speech about what he meant to us grandchildren, but I struggled to talk about his relationship with his son. It felt uncomfortable, as if all the awkwardness of his alpha-male posturing and the resultant shunning of real emotions had been transferred directly onto me for the day. Grandad was very different to Dad, but he was none the less extraordinarily proud of his son and loved him deeply. He just couldn’t bring himself to publicly show it. If I had my time again I would say what he once told me on the riverbank. The banks always were his confessional box. ‘Just aim to be like your dad, Will,’ he said. ‘Aim to be like your dad.’

  I wanted to end this journey back where it began. I wanted to come home. I wanted to see the Creek again and fish Popham’s Eau. I needed to see the Fens. I hadn’t been back since his funeral over two years ago, and I hadn’t fished Popham’s Eau since I carried Grandad off the banks on our last fishing trip together. Almost every fish I’ve tried to catch from when this challenge began has been influenced by what he tried to teach me there. I need to go back now to really see what else I have learnt. Going full circle, right back to where in effect it all began, is the only way I will know if I’ve really changed at all.

  It was the week before Christmas when I began the long drive cross-country from South Wales to fenland. I had returned from a honeymoon in Zambia and headed straight back out to New Guinea for more filming with BBC Two, so I really wasn’t ready for the cold on my return, and nor was the van. Strong cross-winds and exposure made it a bit like steering a sail between the great concrete pillars that hold up the M4 bridge into Wales, fittingly rising up like giant rugby posts in this rugby-mad nation. I love crossing the River Severn in bad weather, though, just so I can see the bleak savagery of the wind-whipped tidal currents, the coal-black exposed rock at low tide. The fish are probably impossible to catch in conditions like this. I gaze into the turbid waters and imagine the advancing squadrons of bass as the tide changes, the flatfish and the elver eels on their way up on the ride. I’ve rarely seen it worse than this down there but the fish are just fine; humans, though, would stand no chance. Stripped down and bare, without technology or clothing, the far bank would hang tantalizingly in view but your body would slide away on the savage current long before you froze to death. I sail over the bridge and on into England.

  There is great value to keeping an eye out for wildlife, even on motorways as barren in feel as the M4. There are always red kites to be spotted, cutting through the sky and seeking roadkill, and a great many deer species hang on the fringes of the woodland set aside at the road’s edge, staring forward with their twitching ears and glassy, doll-like eyes. Everything drops away as the sun fades. Three hours in and the earth is flattening around me, an indication I am entering the far east of the country.

  By the time I finally reach the outskirts of the Fens it is already pitch black. Fen black. It should be its own colour. The density of the darkness on the long roads between communities here is something you can only fully experience on a clear winter’s night like this. It feels like I’ve been ejected into deep space, ploughing my van on through some infinite void. Wispy, frozen mist envelops me as I head out onto the fields; but I am calm. I learnt to drive in these conditions and am far more fearful of driving in big cities than I ever will be driving out here.

  A buzzard rests near the royal-purple sign that welcomes me back into fenland proper. I catch its feathers in the headlight beam of my car. Its wings are angled down and flattened by the moisture in the air. It looks like the large, leathery hood of an axe-wielding executioner from the Middle Ages when it hangs in the trees like that. The bird is waiting until first light to hunt. We both are.

  This darkness, especially nightfall, had a big role to play during my childhood. It was the time all activity, fishing and war games must come to an end. No matter how far from home we were, we all knew the consequences of arriving back through the front door in the Fen black. My life was one without mobile phones, or even clocks, we ate when we were hungry and used the passage of the sun across the sky to dictate what we would do next. Everything else could be pushed to the limits, but there was no justification for a post-dusk homecoming; besides, we respected our parents and valued our liberty far too much to ever push our luck too far.

  It was only when I left this area and met people from outside that I began to realize how different my childhood had been to most. As long as we were home before dark, and didn’t speak to strangers, my friends and I pretty much did as we pleased. We looked after each other and stuck together. As long as we kept to the basic rules, we had the chance to be free. Really free.

  Although the draining of the Fens began in 1630 it would take right through till the 1850s for the fertile farmland to be effectively free of water. The introduction of Victorian engineering and the first steam-powered pumps saw the land increase in value some four times over; the Fens would become the vegetable basket of Britain, and people flocked to help with the massive harvests on the exposed blackened peat.

  Soon the sense of familiarity is so intense I feel I can almost close my eyes and drive the rest of the way home: Ring’s End, Guyhirn, Wisbech St Mary, Leverington, Wisbech and the spectral glow of the old factory site I used to work on; all so well-known yet so distant, as if they were locations cast off from another life I had once led.

  The A47 leads me on down to the roundabout by the Elm Hall Hotel. This is the place where I turn towards my village, but I always knew it for the little roadside fishing pond stocked for the workers in the local canning factory. My friends fished it once and spoke of catching dozens of little common carp on sweetcorn. I was much older when I eventually made it there to fish, but it was already long barren of its anglers and carp. At one end the wind was corralling hundreds of super-strength cans of Polish beer on the water’s surface. When change came here, it came quickly.

  The modern-day mechanization of farming practices after the Second World War both dramatically reduced the number of labourers needed and boosted the land’s productivity to stratospheric proportions. By the late 1980s the Fens were accounting for more than one third of the national output of vegetables, and the supermarkets’ use of new computer technology meant orders could be placed the moment a product had been purchased. With the scan of a barcode and click of a mouse, the supply chain was essentially streamlined and retrofitted around the exact buying habits of the consumer. Massive orders of fruit and vegetables were now capable of doubling or halving overnight, so farms and their factories took to calling in their workers to pick, pack and process at the shortest notice possible, but supermarket competition and customer expectation demanded the product price was still kept as low as possible. There was no real rise in wages for the legions of workers who had survived when the machines replaced people, but the uncertain shifts, unpredictable hours and now the crap wages on top meant many locals finally felt that enough was enough. There were still many jobs that needed the human hand, though; the farmers and factory owners were going to have to look elsewhere.

  I was sheltered from these monumental changes as a child, particularly as I was still able to find local work fruit picking as a teenager well into the 1990s, but in the time it took me to leave school and finish my degree I went from being able to walk onto a factory line anywhere to finding it virtually impossible to get a job at all.

  Many of
my friends in the fields and factories blamed the migrant workers for ‘coming over here and taking all the work’, but this was as far from the mark as those that pointed fingers at the ‘lazy benefit-scrounging’ local population who were ‘all just racist’.

  When the locals had started to refuse to meet the new demands, farms and factories simply turned to foreign gangmasters and agencies to pick up the shortfall. Eastern European workers from the poorest parts of the former Soviet bloc, Poland at first, but latterly Latvians, Lithuanians and Russians, flooded to the area on the false promise of good wages and regular jobs, but when they arrived they discovered that the meagre wages they were to be paid were largely siphoned into the hands of criminal gangmasters under the guise of being ‘back payments’ on transportation costs, or taken as outlandish rental rates for the overcrowded houses they were placed in. Away from the houses, I began to notice tents cropping up, concealed deep within hedges and patches of trees. Out on the banks, fyke nets and long lines turned up for the first time in my lifetime. People were desperate. Desperate enough to spend winter in a tent, desperate enough to risk a criminal record for poaching fish; accruing debts with terrible people and sinking into a worse state of poverty than the one they had left behind.

  The rate of new migrants coming into the area was higher than anywhere else in the UK – it had to be, no one else would tolerate that sort of treatment longer than they had to. Soon, some of the worst examples of poverty in the country were to be seen right on my doorstep, but that should hardly be surprising, should it? When we demand our food is available at bargain prices, around the clock and throughout the seasons, there was always going to be someone paying the cost somewhere.