Once

by McNeillie, Andrew

  So now it is dusk. The tide is slack at low ebb, right at its last of land and motion, and the night lies ahead, at Easter towards the last of spring, or at the front edge of summer to September, as school holidays run. Lamps are glowing dimly along the promenade, gaining strength as the sun lapses, all the way round to Rhos. There’s no-one about but that boy and a few herring gulls, right at the tideline, a dog barking at gulls at the sea’s edge and its owner strolling along the sand, below the point where Colwyn stream disperses into shingle and sand, far beyond the longest breakwater. The ribbed, the chevroned sand is soon mole-hilled where he’s digging....

  Evening stretches itself out in every direction, darkening quicker inland, thinning more slowly to silver and shadow at sea. The pier is stranded on its little legs, as if too cautious to go the extra few yards to dip its toes in the slack tide. Lights cluster at the landward pavilion, but the length of the pier itself is unlit, except from this angle for a green starboard light at the pierhead. A dank darkness gathers under it. Hove to off Penmaen a quarry-boat rides, minimally lit, waiting for the morning, when it will come in to the old wooden jetty at the easternmost margin of the long wide bay of Colwyn. This is not a shore to offer much of a port in a storm for a good many miles. Captains must look elsewhere whichever way the wind blows or stand off far out and ride it through.

  The nightfishing boy makes a start. It’s a daunting business at first. The sand has drained. But the lugworms in their underground hammocks, slung between dimple feeder hole and cast are thickest where it’s wettest, not on the dry banks. The tide holds off. It hasn’t turned. It won’t turn for half an hour perhaps. But when it does it won’t be backward in coming forward. He’s digging as fast as he can. The spade must go down deep and fast and be turned smartly, or all he’ll see is the worm’s greeny sandful tail slipping away as the water wells in. Nor is this the first time he’s dug for bait. You can tell he’s served part of his apprenticeship at least, making ready to fish at the end of the pier. Not for him Darky Lee’s ‘fresh bait’, sold to tourists from his shed on the front, down below the station. Not for him the packets of salted lug at the tackle shop.

  But what solitude and solitary determination. The sand sucks and socks about his spade. In these wetter reaches the going’s heavy, and the worms are quick off the mark. He’ll chop one or two perforce, and stain his fingers yellow. But hook-length pieces will do, and then he’ll start to take some whole, reddish worms, and here and there a big black one, of a length to make up for two or even three lesser mortals. The moment he turns one he darts in like a gull to pick it out. The gulls are already hovering and shrieking hungrily round the molehills and water-holes he’s left behind him. Sometimes he has to hold onto a worm for a while and little by little ease it back from its urgent escape, trying his best not to let it break in two.

  Soon he’ll have to cut his losses. Some hooks will have half a worm, some a whole one. The tide has turned by the time he’s driving his stakes into the sand with the back of his spade. His line’s not straight but set across the tide in a ‘V’, arms open to it. It seemed like a very long line when he had it in the backyard, but now it’s dwarfed by the wide shore. The sea is almost over his wellingtons as he baits the hooks. His bait tin swirls this way and that swimming on the flood, as he keeps it looped over his forearm. His spade, planted in what was clear sand, falls as the water undermines its footing. He mustn’t lose it. He has one eye on his hooks and can, and one eye on where his spade was when he last saw it, and struggles to bait the last couple of hooks. He’s in over his boot-tops and his jeans are wet well above the knee by the time he’s done.

  As he turns to leave the shore he realises the figure up there leaning on the rail is his father. Alarm shoots through him, and mars the occasion. It’ll soon be dark, he realises. But no, whatever worry he’s had, it’s all right. He’s greeted happily. It’s all right, and they walk up together, pausing to look through the dim and darkening light to see the big trout that lives up the drain pipe, opposite the public lavatories. Is he there? Can you make him out? Look, there he is, his nose at least, beyond the end of the pipe. He’s big. How big is he? A wonder no one’s ever caught him but folk must have tried or he wouldn’t be so wary.

  That trout intrigued me, tempted me. The stream ran quite deep and dank there, below a stout wall of dressed stone, just up the road from the railway viaduct. The tail end of a steep municipal garden petered out there, below the Priory on Cefn Road. On the opposite bank a path bordered at its end by a clump of canes led over a flat, concrete, railed bridge to the road and shore. The stream was then channelled under the promenade to the beach through a big round tunnel. You could straddle your way up that tunnel to the shallow last reach of the stream. Or should you have nothing better to do you could ricochet pebbles and cobbles down it and make a great echoing watery racket.

  At high tide on a wild day sea-water might be punched up into the stream in its lowest reach. But here beside the road the water was pure of brine, however otherwise impure, and clear, except after sustained heavy rain. I didn’t obsess about the big trout but now and then he swam in and out of my thoughts. And I would plot his downfall when he did so. It was no good leaving a line there overnight. Someone was bound to notice, and take it, or beat you to the fish. Not that it’d be safe to eat it anyway, living where it did. I grew up to know it mattered that what I caught and killed might be eaten, and this it was that kept the big trout safe, at least for now.

  But I remember well the afternoon I did for it – as with my snare I did for the big buck rabbit on the railway embankment above the Irish Sea – with tough resolution and Black Lake know-how. I hooked it out on a coch-y-bonddu dangled and twitched on a piece of nylon tied to a bendy bit of bamboo cut from across the stream. How he splashed and lunged, and jigged in the air, the cane bent double to my fist. I took him home, as if officially to record my skilful success. We weighed him in at just under a pound. Then we put him in the dustbin. It would have been better to have left him to live out his days fattening on sewer-juice. But I’m answering the questions you won’t ask, now, as frankly as I know, ready for when I’m gone, as to what my growing years were like, no punches as to barbed-hook barbarism pulled.

  Once home in bed that night I didn’t think of trout at all, but of whiting and flounder, codling and plaice. I loved to catch flatfish. I loved their queer look, with one eye round the corner, the other overhead. Their chins turned up, as if they were about to blub at their sorry flat-earth overhead horizon. Ever since the world rolled over, and they got out from under it by the skin of their teeth, there they were condemned to the bottom of the deep. Yet all their dreams looked up, from the wrinkled sea-floor, through a wrinkled roof, to stare at a wrinkled star. I loved their rusty stigmata, and I even quite liked eating them – the one fish I liked on the bone, because their skeleton made them so easy to tackle.

  I lay there thinking of my line and took comfort in the quiet of the night. It was a still night. You could hear the owl across the Glen in the still trees. The sea wouldn’t wreck my line, sag it with weed, uproot its stakes, half bury it in sand, still less wash it away. It was a perfect night, but not for sleep.

  I live nowadays about as far from the coast as it is possible to live in the unnameable archipelago. I can’t set a nightline anywhere but on a page. I can’t lie in disturbed sleep impatient for the day, except when I have a line or two out towards a poem. Fish and poems: you dream them both into being and then they press against you, nose you awake. It’s not quite the same. But it is similar, being linear and of the nature of possession. And it’s also a matter of luck, notwithstanding craft and knowledge. And so there you lie, tucked up in bed fathoms away, if you can sleep, that is.... But your sleep at best is as turbulent and crossed by currents as the sea. Intermittently you keep the night watch, the dog watch. That dawn will come is the old argument from experience. But when?

  Starting suddenly, as if hooked from my sleep, I’d find
it hours away yet, and still so again, and so slow you’d think it at the bottom of the world and never to dawn. Then when I’d be at the bottom of the world myself, something terrible would prompt me to wake. The hour had come just when I wanted another ten minutes, another hour, just when I didn’t want to stir, still less rise and shine. But there it was the hour of my doom and up I stole bleary-eyed to hurry unwashed into my clothes and run down to the shore before the morning was too many minutes older, the tide too many inches lower.

  Here came the first train from England, trailing silvery-grey steam clouds, hauling the day with it, to station after station, impatient for Holyhead, rattling now over the viaduct as I ran under it. How far out was the sea? ...And there it was limping out, scarcely ruffled, slow to wake from its own night’s nuzzling against the sea-wall. And there was I escorting it back, like Moses dividing the waters, restless for the first sight of my unpromised catch. And then when I saw the tops of my stakes, slightly askew now, how long before I could learn my luck or lack of it?

  What a thrill when there I saw, not two, not three, but nine fish in a row, whiting and a ling. It was an intensely bright morning and I remember thinking the whiting at a distance looked like starched handkerchiefs pegged at a corner blowing on a washing line. That sort of a catch set me up for many days and nights of failure, of disaster, of lost tackle, and frustration, until success felt like the dimmest memory before round it would come again, to hook me.

  Such an event it was too, one pristine morning at low tide, at the end of the pier, at nine o’clock, when, as I was fishing from the eastern corner into two or three feet of water, my rod bounced on the rail so hard I might have hooked a whale. I struck back. But missed the fish or whatever it was. So I must reel in to check my hooks and bait up again, as nimbly as I could, not to lose a moment, all the while concentrating on the angle and range at which my original cast had been. Out went the paternoster on a wing and a prayer and my reel whirred round to almost the last of my line. (I had a cheap rod – with a bamboo lower part, and a greenhart top. My reel was an old-fashioned wooden one. Not even a fully-grown man could have cast any distance with it.)

  It was heartbreaking to think the monster had escaped. Nor did I expect to connect with it or anything again. I was used to blank trips. But almost at once, bang went my rod on the rail again, so vigorously that its butt-end skidded and the rod slid sideways on the rail. This time the fish stayed on, and up I wound a plaice bigger than any dinner plate we had at home, a surfeit, still flexing and alive when I got it home and into the sink, to clean away its purse of gut and foreshortened alimentary system. Not only was it bigger than a dinner-plate, it went a good way to filling the bottom of the sink.

  I’ve never caught a bigger plaice since, except later when helping aboard Mr Arundale’s trawler, the What-Ho! - between Trwyn Du and Great Orme’s Head, working Dutchman’s Bank and Lavan Sands. It was so marvellous that rather than persist in the hope there might be others like it out there, I packed up my gear almost at once and hurried back home down the prom and up the Donkey Path shortcut to the village. I was so thrilled I couldn’t wait to show my catch. I had other such days, each of a different order, and few perhaps, few enough to make them seem to have occurred many more times than they did.

  * * *

  Big fish and big catches are like big snows. A shoal of fish and a blizzard and a starry sky are one and the same in the mind’s eye of a boy. It didn’t snow every winter. I can’t pretend it did, even in those far-off days; and rarely did snow stay long on the coast. The salty air and warmer air currents by the sea worked against it. Through the images of snow still falling silently in my memory, I can make out perhaps three starveling snowbound winters in my first twenty years.

  Even so I’m blinded, wide-eyed flakes stinging my eyes, and unsure of my direction, unsure how to tell one big snow from another. I later wrote a poem about this business and called it ‘Sledging’:

  Just as less can be more, rarely can be often.

  It’s not so much the mind-body problem as

  the nature of truth and its conditions, the meaning

  of memory, the soul and its survival in the world,

  whirled in an infinite number of dimensions and planes.

  So I protest to myself, anyway, admitting

  when I say ‘I used to’, it might be I mean ‘once’.

  Upon a time, below a time, events winnow out

  their chaff. So with the grain, against the grain,

  the song steps out into the blizzard of the page.

  How rarely was there snow enough for sledging. I’m not counting the big snow of ’47 which I survived but could hardly be said to have witnessed to remember. Forget that memory starts its work before we’re born.

  But there was one Boxing Day, the one before I was thirteen, in which snow and fish came magically together at the end of the pier. Stars might have too, but the snow-clouds obscured them. I made a poem about it that opens with words of my great-grandfather McNeillie, and folds into its account the much later experience of seeing Dr Zhivago, a cold-war film of the greatest force and moment for my later youth and its romance. But the snow in the poem and ‘The Whiting’ of its title date from Red Wood days on Colwyn Bay pier:

  Snow falls when you least expect it.

  A rural saying to amuse the sceptic.

  But none the less

  a clichéd Christmas greeting

  fooled the coast that year

  with stinging flakes, as perished flocks

  of redwing refugees in comas

  fell dying through the silent branches,

  out of Scandinavia,

  or a northern elsewhere, anyway,

  its serrated horizon of pines

  sawing the blue cold of a brief day,

  as glimpsed at the Odeon

  by Sharif’s Zhivago.

  That day we went to the pier-head

  and fished all evening in a yellow storm.

  And as if to show

  how dreams-come-true

  establish norms, the whiting rose

  in blizzards from below

  and stormed our hooks

  at every single throw

  until they skidded round our boots

  in translucent lobes of ice

  their eyes like melting snow.

  So that was my seaboard Red Wood life. But I kept another world too in those years, and other company than my own, as you will learn.

  The Black Lake

  My birthday falls in August, on the glorious or not-so-glorious twelfth. So for a minor miracle I was still ten in May 1957 when I passed the eleven-plus. That was the watershed exam that divided children as sheep from goats. For me it was life’s first stark lesson on the subject of equality, to say nothing of liberty and fraternity. And if I didn’t see it in those terms, as I could hardly have done, not being any kind of genius, I nevertheless felt its barbarity. My best friend Dick went one way, I another. I was saved and he was lost. Our respective places in the scheme of things were decided for the rest of our lives. Little by little we grew apart. Not that I didn’t know the stigma of failing an exam. Up until then I’d proved as good at failing as the next boy. As I am still, at falling short in life’s hard way. But wonder of wonders, to me at least, I passed the eleven-plus when I was ten.

  I don’t remember the occasion for any noble reason, as to injustice, or out of pride. I remember it for the reward it brought me and the change in my life beyond school and the Red Wood road that it wrought.

  My reward for passing was a three-piece Greenhart fly-fishing rod made by Alex Martin, bearing the name Scotia. This Scotia became my pride and joy, even if I never quite forgot that it wasn’t a split-cane two-piece Hardy ‘Perfection’ such as my father had bought on our Irish adventure, at Watts Bros, No. 18 Inns Quay beside the Liffey (no longer in business), when I was a little short of five. I remember all that, as if it was yesterday. I carried Perfection through customs. This was in ca
se it might catch the exciseman’s eye as a new purchase and attract duty. So years later my father would smile to recollect, amused at his caution, amused at the way the world was then, just after the war.

  Scotia means Scotland and for me that endowed my rod with superior qualities, even beyond perfection. Scotia’s dark grainy wood pleased my eye. I seemed never to tire of inspecting its varnished surface, of assembling its three pieces, its delicate, springy top-piece, and taking it down. The silver rings to guide the line had their mounts whipped in place with black silk. This too shone under a coat of varnish. The ferrules were similarly bound, and there were little lugs of silver wire whipped in to serve as grips for your thumbs to help you dismantle the rod at the end of the day. Which could be a struggle, on a cold wet evening after a cold wet day, in a small boy’s perished hands, away in the mountains, miles from home. The whole thing would catch the sunlight, if sunlight there was and the water dappled, blinding bright, in a brisk breeze. And it had a proper cork handle. It was the real thing and not a hand-me-down either, as almost everything else had been, apart from an airgun called Diana. (I brooded especially on an antiquated bicycle called ‘Hercules’ painted bright green for me one Christmas: most humbling the absence of shiny chrome; the once-rusty wheel rims painted black, the handlebars green. How other more fortunate boys looked down or askance at me and knew my status.)

  What was most important was what Scotia set afoot. It was a magic wand. I practised wielding it, in the backyard at ‘Thornfield’. I was just about to come of age, at all of ten years old, my heart greener than the greenhart tree, if far from innocent. No one can be conscious of being innocent, except of a crime. I’m sure I’ve never felt innocent. I knew guilt at heart, from the start. It tinged everything. How it got in I don’t know. But I know what fuelled it was fear, a fear to be feared indeed, and temptation, not to do what I was expected to do but to escape it and go my own way.