by Will Millard
I scoop that rod off its rests. Its feels like gripping the trunk of a tree in comparison to the roach rod but this is no time for clever comparisons: the line is pulling alarmingly taut, signalling that it is high time to strike, and strike hard I do.
At first I feel solid resistance and the line grinds horribly. It is locked up against something but I sense instinctively that now is not the time to ease off on the pressure. Suddenly the line pings free and I can tell from the opening, steaming, pile-driving run which follows that this is going to be the biggest fish of my journey by an absolute fucking mile.
Despite the mammoth run I feel strangely in control. Don’t let the fish bully you. I pile on strain when I feel it is trying to rest and give it line and space to run when it decides to assert itself. After ten minutes I get my first glimpse of the fish and it is, as expected, a very big pike. It shakes its head angrily at me, like a bullock caught in an electric fence, and, to my absolute horror, I notice that there is only a single, barbless, hookpoint left in the fish’s mouth, sat right between its bony teeth like an after-dinner toothpick. It is, as they say, brown-trouser time.
The pike steamrollers towards the dead lilies and reeds on my side of the bank so I apply as much side-strain as I dare; if it goes in there I know I’m done for. Mercifully, she turns her head at the last moment and drives back into open water. It’s definitely a female pike: the solid belly, shoulders and head are unmistakable. The reel whines and my hands and knees begin to rattle with adrenaline. I know now that this is not just the biggest fish of the journey, it is the biggest fish I have ever seen in Popham’s Eau. It is the beast.
In front of me, in a flash of a second, I swear blind that a giant shoal of roach rolls on the surface of the river, momentarily rippling the place with a life I haven’t seen in a hundred winter visits here. In the middle of them all is my great fish, wallowing like a hippo just out of reach of the net. I hold the rod up to its maximum extent and slowly win back the line, gently heaving the magnificent animal back towards me. The weight of the fish leaves my rod the moment it hits the base of my net; at the same time another, unseen, weight slides right off my shoulders. I stare up to the sky and feel my eyes heave with tears.
Thank you, Grandad. Thank you for teaching me how to fish and thank you for everything else. Thank you for just being there.
I didn’t break any angling records during this journey and, in reality, I was always quite some considerable distance off the mark. That greater sand eel is still as close as I’ve been to a submission to the hallowed British Record Fish Committee and its list, but, still, I had a lot of fun and did break several personal bests. In my own way, I did at least avenge the memory of that greater sand eel.
The fact is, you just can’t drop into any old swim and hope to catch a record on wild water. Yes, the chances are significantly narrowed when you know there is a record fish trapped within a lake, or even behind a lock gate, but you still need to learn that creature’s habits and harmonize yourself to the natural rhythm of a place. That all takes more time than I had, and yet I still wouldn’t have changed how I approached this challenge one bit.
I realized ultimately that I’d had infinitely more pleasure catching fish from ridiculously unlikely spots, meeting new people and discovering new places to try, than I ever did from actually chasing a record fish. The sand eel was beautiful not because it was a record on some other man’s list but because it was a total surprise and the first I had ever caught. What is fishing without the element of surprise?
There have been many failures in this book and plenty of days when I caught absolutely nothing at all. In the past this would have been a major problem, rectified quickly with a trip to my nearest carp stew pond to confirm I hadn’t lost the magic. In fact, this very act confirmed I had already lost the magic. Fishing is our way of tapping back into something we have lost in our comfortable and cosseted lives, a throwback to a time when we did need to catch to survive; it should not ever be reduced to purely a competition to catch the biggest fish. The baited line is our link to the secret underwater world and it reconnects us with nature in an immensely powerful way that few other pastimes ever could. We are a part of a much wider, wilder system, and not simply above it. Failure to catch demonstrates we do not have full dominion over nature all of the time and plugs us back into the notion that we, as humans, should only ever be participating in a mutual and fair exchange with the natural world, one where we can’t always guarantee a win.
At the end of it all I have discovered that I am still at my most relaxed when I am by water, but I am also at my happiest when I’m fishing a river. My river fishing, like my family, has always been there for me, and I’ve been at my lowest when I’ve abandoned them both. I now realize that it is the fishing, and not actually the fish, that has provided the levelling presence throughout my life. Even when I’ve neglected it, river fishing has waited for me. I promise I’ll never leave the rivers again.
My hero, John Wilson, made 160 television programmes in a career spanning over twenty-five years. In 2009 he justifiably received an MBE for services to angling and eventually retired to Thailand, where he runs a fishing lake with his brother, Dave. I spent a wonderful evening drinking beers in the bath while watching episodes of Go Fishing back to back for hours on end, drunkenly raising a glass to the man who inspired a legion of young fishermen just like me. Thanks, John.
My grandad was not a second father. I already had one of those and never needed another, so what was he to me? He was my older best friend. He would do anything for me (as long as it didn’t cost too much money!) and I would do anything for him. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell him, and no judgement he would ever pass. He was a superficially hard and competitive man to his death, but his core held an utter softness. He brimmed with absolute and unwavering love for his son, his family, his grandchildren, and for me.
Grandad and I kept the secrets we shared with each other on the banks, but there was one of his musings that I knew I would eventually have to tell Dad about when the time came. I was ten years old and we were fishing Popham’s Eau side by side. He was sat there with his floppy white hat on, watching his float while absent-mindedly moulding breadcrumb groundbait all around the cork handle of his rod. It was a fairly typical summer afternoon. Then he leant towards me and said: ‘When I go don’t put me in the ground with the rest of the silly buggers. Put me in the river, back where I was a boy, my boy.’
Dad found the exact spot he spoke of in words Grandad had written in Bedford, My Bedford, and one crisp spring afternoon my dad, my brother and I carried him back home: up the River Great Ouse above Bedford, below a bridge, across a field, and into a break in the eight-foot-high common reeds.
Grandad finished his journey where his passion began. Gently we eased his ashes between our fingers and let him slip into his infinite water.
Acknowledgements
This book has focused far too much on men at times. I would like to thank three of the most important women in my life: my loving mum, for everything she did for me growing up, giving me my self-belief and providing an environment for all her children to flourish; my brilliant twin, Anna, for being there for me and having my back for, quite literally, my entire life; and, most of all, thank you to my wonderful wife, Emma, for always believing in me, for keeping me going, and for putting up with me heading off to catch fish in the same year we got married.
Grandparents are quite often the unsung heroes of any family. Thank you to both sets of mine for the unconditional love they always gave. I wish you were all still with us, and that you can forgive my occasional swearword in this book; I don’t really mean it. I’m blessed with some really awesome friends and a fantastic wider family. I won’t turn this into a mammoth love-in as I hope they already know how much they’ve helped shape me and my writing, but I would like to single out my brother Tom for special praise. Thanks, Tom, both for putting up with a brother who was as obsessed with fishing as I was as a child,
and for giving me the metaphorical boot-up-the-arse I needed when I was spending too much time watching fishing on satellite TV and not enough time writing about it.
I am very grateful to the Society of Authors for their generous grant for yet more tackle and miles more in the petrol tank. Huge thanks to everyone who has helped along the way at Viking, Anna-Sophia Watts for her beautiful illustrations, John Hamilton for his superb cover art, Mark Handsley for his copy-editing patience, and to Emma Brown for handling the latter stages of the book edit. Emily Robertson has been the best editorial partner I could have ever hoped for. Without your guidance and encouragement this book would never have happened. Thanks for convincing me this would work, Emily, and for understanding what I was struggling to commit to words.
On the banks, my thanks go to the Canal and River Trust and especially John Ellis for switching me on to the wonders of our canals, Jake Finnegan at Wykeham Lakes for relating the story of his monstrous pike, John Horsey for his exceptional knowledge of Chew, and for letting me blow his chance at a big pike, Peter Rolfe and Pam for their incredible hospitality and introduction to all things crucian, Verulam Fishing Club for being so kind in letting me fish their pond, Dr Carl Sayer for his patience in explaining his research to a dullard like me, Glamorgan Anglers Club for the access to all the excellent fishing to be had in South Wales, the guys at Garry Evans Tackle Shop, especially Rich and Andrew, for all of their advice and help, and to Dad’s salmon mates, Dave, Nigel and John, for letting me gatecrash their trip. Thanks also to my childhood friends Lee Wales and Paul Woods, who picked up where Grandad left off, and helped create some of my fondest fishing memories.
The final word of thanks must go to Dad, Grandad and John Wilson. Thanks for the inspiration, guys. May your lines be for ever tight.
THE BEGINNING
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VIKING
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Viking is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Viking 2018
Copyright © Will Millard, 2018
Illustrations copyright © Anna-Sophia Watts, 2018
The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted
Eel illustration © AKG-images
The publisher is grateful for permission to quote from: Fishing for a Year by Jack Hargreaves (Medlar Press 2011), reproduced by kind permission of Jack Hargreaves’s stepson Simon Baddeley, owner of rights in all Jack Hargreaves’s ‘Out of Town’ films for Southern Television; John Wilson’s Fishing Encyclopaedia (Boxtree 1995), reproduced by permission of Pan Macmillan; The Secret Carp by Chris Yates (Merlin Unwin Books 2000), reproduced by permission of Merlin Unwin Books; Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (Atlantic Books 2010), reproduced by permission of Sky Horse Publishing, Inc and Atlantic Books Ltd; The Book of Eels by Tom Fort (HarperCollins 2002), reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Ltd; Somewhere Down the Crazy River by Paul Boote and Jeremy Wade (Hodder and Stoughton 1994), reproduced by kind permission of Jeremy Wade; A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (HarperCollins 1991), reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Ltd; ‘Pike’ from Lupercal by Ted Hughes (Faber and Faber 1960), reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean (University of Chicago Press 1989), reproduced by permission of University of Chicago Press; Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life by Jeremy Paxman (Penguin 1995), reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.
ISBN: 978-0-241-97769-9