Everyman's England (2 page)

Only by the quayside and out by the harbour mouth is that feeling of inactivity dissipated. It is here that the real life of Berwick pulsates, for the Berwickers are fishermen, who draw into their nets not ordinary fish, but that king of fish, the salmon.

‘Such a fish! shining silver from head to tail, and here and there a crimson dot; with a grand hooked nose and grand curling lip, and a grand bright eye, looking round him proudly as a king, and surveying the water right and left as if all belonged to him. Surely he must be the salmon, the king of all fish.'

It is easy to picture the awe of lonely Tom at his first sight of a salmon. Even in death there is something about salmon which commands man's respect, to see him in his proper element as Tom did, and mark the lordly glance of that patrician eye was more than enough to make a water-baby suddenly tremble.

In Berwick, from February until September, the salmon is truly king. For the whole of the thirty weeks of the season salmon are caught, talked of, dreamt about, and sometimes eaten by the blue-jerseyed, sea-booted fishermen.

Whenever the tide permits, and they can only work at certain states of the tide, groups of fishermen may be seen at their stations along the river, from the mouth of the Tweed where it swirls out across the bar to the North Sea, to well above the great railway viaduct.

I walked at low tide out across the wet sands and patches of bladder wrack to where one crew was stationed just inside the harbour mouth. There were six men working their wear-net. The method of fishing is very simple. One end of the net is fastened by a rope to a portable windlass on the shore, the net is folded neatly into the stern of the boat and this is rowed upstream until it is far enough from the bank to shoot the net. The boat turns downstream in a circle, the net slipping over the stern as it goes. When the boat comes into the bank the rope on the other end of the net is fastened to another wind-lass and then commences the work of hauling, so often a disappointing task.

Three times I watched this particular crew shoot their net and each time there was nothing in it except a few dead branches and clumps of sea grass. Once, as they were folding the net back into the boat for another shot, a rent was discovered in the mesh. From the pocket of an old man with a greying beard came a wooden needle and thread and the net was repaired as they stood, ankle-deep, in the water. A cold wind blew in from the sea, fretting at their jerseys, and from the sands across the river came the crying of sea-birds, but the men seemed oblivious of everything except the net in their hands. They spoke very little to each other as the old man picked up the meshes and worked his needle in and out with a dexterity that was worthy of a woman. To them, though they would never express themselves so, the nets were sacred and their reverence was evidenced in the care with which they handled them…

At the next shot they were lucky, and three salmon came flapping and jerking to the sands. The greybeard carried them up the beach in a pannier and we began to talk.

The fishing stations, he told me, are now owned by fishing companies who pay the crews a regular weekly wage and a percentage on their season's catch; though at one time the stations belonged to individuals and some of them had been in the hands of the same family for generations.

‘It's a grand business,' the old fisherman confessed in a moment of enthusiasm, and then added with characteristic caution: ‘but ye ken it has its disappointments.' I thought of the times I had seen the nets shot without results and agreed with him.

He put the pannier down and pointed out the fish to me: ‘That's a grilse,' he said, indicating one of them, a handsome silvery fish that even in death retained a graceful strength and beauty; ‘a fish that is coming up from the sea for the first time since leaving the river where it was spawned.'

A salmon is generally called anything but a salmon, and the profusion of its different names points the various phases in its life. As the eel must leave pond and stream to journey down river and across the ocean to spawn in the dark fathoms of the far Sargasso, so the salmon must leave the sea and journey up river to the gravelly reaches of moorland becks and streams to spawn.

After hatching in the river the young fry grow into parr, and at the end of two years in the river the sea claims them.

Drawn downstream and out over the bar they become smolt. In the sea the fish develops its true salmon colours, and on its first return to the river becomes a grilse. The salmon stay in the sea for a varying number of years, and while they are there they reach full sexual maturity. After passing up the river and spawning they are known as kelts, emaciated, haggard fish that drift apathetically back to the sea there to recover their colour and vitality. For all the able research which has been done there is still much of the salmon's life which is a mystery. What deep-seated instinct keeps it moving from sea to river? It has been suggested that, as swallows migrate from the coming winter to the burgeoning summer of a far country, so salmon migrate from the rivers of decreasing oxygen content to the sea and a higher oxygen content, obeying some chemical impulse in their bodies which is prompted by lessening or increasing oxygen in the water. The theory is a plausible and ingenious one, but fish are not so easily observed as birds and the mystery of the salmon's movements may be with us for a long time yet.

It was darkening as I left the town and the bulky shape of the hill was speckled with growing lights. As the train crossed the viaduct I caught the gleam of a lantern down-river, and I guessed that the fishermen were hard at work, for when the tide forces them to it, they must work during the night. I knew that the old grey beard would be at his station, tugging at the oars or straining at the handle of a windlass to draw from the water that harvest of mystery and beauty which, even when it is served to us from a can, still retains a royal flavour; a flavour acquired during those dark, secret years in the sea when salmon harried herring and nosed around weed-strewn rocks unknown to man.

CHAPTER 2

The coastal road between the two Cumberland towns of Silloth and Maryport is about thirteen miles long. They are thirteen such miles as may change a man's mood from pessimism to optimism, and startle him from happiness to sadness within a hundred paces.

Silloth in name has a biblical sound. Poetically David and Samuel might have fled from Saul to Silloth in Ramah and the verse would have sounded as well.

‘Behold, David is at Naioth in Ramah' – And behold I was at Silloth in Cumberland on a cold winter's day, and the imagery of romantic speculation which I had built around the town's name fell from me. I should have known better than to have relied upon a name.

As a town Silloth presents to the casual visitor more works of man than of grace, and the works of man are not inspiring. The moment I entered it I felt depressed and spiritless. Perhaps the fault lay in my stars and not in the town. There are people, I have no doubt, who are prepared to swear by Silloth and praise its esoteric charms before all.

The tall stack of a busy flour mill, the bulging horror of a gasometer and the painted funnel of a cargo boat in the harbour, and everywhere that lifeless feeling of four o'clock in the afternoon – that is how I remember Silloth. Few people walked the streets, its hotels and shops looked dead and a cold wind sweeping in from the Solway Firth kept the papers dancing in the gutters and drove me away from the sea-front. I decided to leave Silloth and walk to Maryport. If I have wronged Silloth I apologise, but rather would I have wronged it than have chanced spending a night in the town…

From Silloth the road runs, twisting very little, along the great sweep of coast to Maryport. Here and there it cuts through the folds of the land that reach down to the sea, forming tiny bluffs that sometimes shelter bungalows and domesticated railway carriages and omnibus bodies. The ubiquity of the railway carriage is a characteristic of these times. It has always been a great mystery to me how these heavy compartments have reached some of the places which I have seen them gracing. Yes, gracing, for some have been so tricked out with bright paint and bedecked with brighter flowers, set about with well-kept gardens and crowned by crooked chimney pots that they have a gnomish air of concealing a host of delights. At one time if a man wished to eschew the transient and wicked pleasures of the world and give his life to the contemplation of his navel and lofty thoughts, he bought himself a hair shirt (I have always thought that this item must have been remarkably short to allow the practice of his first exercise) and retired to some isolated cave in the midst of a wilderness, from whence he would emerge at intervals to place lost travellers on the right road for Bath-Sheba, Ilion or Alexandria, or, if there was bad weather about entertain them in his cave for the evening on goat's milk, dates and the fantastic story of his youth, until the storm had passed. Today, if a man has a craving for solitude, he buys himself some of the Great Western Railway Company's discarded rolling stock and, by some method of which I am not aware, gets his railway carriage taken to the edge of the Cumberland fells, and there spends the rest of his life cultivating his polyanthus and godetia, smoking a pipe and sometimes chatting over the fence with the A.A. man in a way which has no sign of the rancour which might be expected from the A.A. man's usurpation of his ancient privileges towards lost travellers. Some of these modern hermits still keep goats, but the hair shirt has gone out of fashion.

When I left Silloth bright sunshine was filling the Firth with blue, leaping shadows, and tiny catspaws chased one another over the water. In the distance was the hazy outline of the Isle of Man, and I knew from the piling cloud masses that before I reached Maryport I might find myself encompassed by a snowstorm and discover the dark shape of Skiddaw inland hidden by a grey canopy. To my left were fields, brown patches of wasteland and the marshes, or mosses as the natives call them. Behind the fields, hedged about by stone walls, and across the long stretches of marsh, rose the faint outline of the Lakeland fells. I thought of Wastwater and brooding Scafell, and I remembered a hot day in the May of King George's Jubilee year. There was to be a Jubilee bonfire on top of Scafell and for weeks before the day there were piles of wood in Wastdale, Borrowdale and other convenient places, with little notices requesting walkers who were going to climb Scafell to take at least one piece of timber with them to the bonfire. The request sounds simple. Actually it is a work of no little honour and devotion to climb Scafell, hugging to your breast a young tree. Although the path is clear and not difficult, it is long and exhausting, and before the peak is reached a man is glad to have his hands free and sometimes wishes he could rid himself of the weight of the sandwiches in his pocket.

I started out to climb Scafell from the Langdale side, by way of Rossett Gill and Angle Tarn. A pile of wood in the valley made no appeal to me. I knew Scafell, and I thought, unloyally perhaps, that if King George wanted a bonfire in so inconvenient a spot other people must attend to it. My wan patriotism did not impair my enjoyment of the scramble up Rossett Gill, but at Angle Tarn, lying by the dark waters, I came across a stout length of ash trunk, deserted by some fervent but short-winded wood-carrier. To have carried it so far was an achievement. I decided that it should not lie deserted by the tarnside to rot. It should be taken to the pike and there burn merrily in honour of the King's Jubilee. On a sudden I was the most patriotic man in the Lake District.

The story of the carrying of that log is an odyssey. Many times I longed to jettison it; many times I cursed the villain who had left it by the lakeside to tempt me, many times I tripped and cut myself, many times it tripped me and clouted my shins, but in the end it rested up-ended in the pile of wood securely wired to the top of the pike. Two days later I finished a late supper in a Borrowdale cottage and walked out into the balmy dusk of a May evening to watch the beacon blaze to which I had contributed. That was to be my joy, my reward, to know that the new star blazing in the sable heaven owed some of its light to my toil, that I had laboured to help create that burst of orange and gold flame which was to light the rocky slopes of Scafell and signal to the other beacons which stretched across the country from end to end. I never saw the fire. It was a clear night and I stood on my vantage-point, recommended by the cottage wife, but no light suddenly sprang into life in the darkness. I waited until I was cold and I knew that the fire, if it had been lighted, must have burnt out. The next morning I found out that I had mistaken the good lady's directions and had waited in the wrong place, for between me and Scafell during my vigil had towered a host of fells and crags that hid from me even the glowing of the sky where the beacon blazed away, where my log burned to red ash and then scattered in the wind, grey flakes to be lost among the hills. I never told the cottage wife that I did not see the blaze. I have told this story many times to many people and always I have lied admirably, describing my proud sensations as I watched that flare of flame on Scafell. But now I must tell the truth, for a good lie should die soon to preserve its richness, and it deserves an honest grave.

The whole stretch of coast is a sanctuary for birds. On the firm islands of sand which lie out beyond the banks of grey shingle and stone, I saw companies of black-and-white oyster catchers, their heads to the wind, looking like a convention of waiters mysteriously isolated. Oyster catchers are very much like waiters in their habits; sometimes they stand wrapt in sombre idleness, eyeing the waste of sand with a weary expression of resignation, and at times they are spurred into a frenzy of activity, rushing here and there, prying with their long bills beneath the stones, turning over seaweed, for all the world as though they were in a City restaurant in the rush hour.

Wheeling in the breeze above the oyster catchers were clouds of gulls; the dainty black-headed gulls, their black caps at this time of the year changed for a white head-dress that hinted at its spring beauty by a black spot above the eye, the rapacious herring gulls, the swashbucklers of the sea, and here and there were those aloof Vikings, the great black-backed gulls that roam from the Arctic to the Equator with the same nonchalance that a clerk goes by tube from Belsize Park to the Bank. These last are now not so common as they were, and on the Kent and Essex coasts, where they were once common and known as cobs, they are very rare. It is the largest and, I think, the most beautiful of the British gulls, and to watch it in flight is to become conscious of the extraordinary power and dexterity of wing which these birds possess.

I have watched a cloud of gulls, perhaps some two hundred, wheeling and dipping over the carcass of a dead pig brought up by the tide while a wind at nearly gale force has been blowing, and in the midst of all their wild swooping, circling and dipping I have never seen one collision or anything which looked like an error of judgment. Man likes to pride himself upon his conquest of the air and his powers of flight. Two hundred aeroplanes mixed together like the gulls would produce a pretty carnage.

I walked for some time with the company of the gulls and other birds. The grey, wintry sky flashed with the points of their wings and the wind was alive with the noise of their screaming. Flying low along the water's edge, just skimming the waves, went curlew, redshank, uttering their thin, protesting pipe, and wild duck. The fields on the other side of the road held colonies of fieldfares and lapwings.

At Salta I came across a farmer leaning on a gate and watching a flock of black-faced Highland ewes nibbling at a feed of turnips. He laughed as I stopped in the lee of the hedge and tried to beat life back into my frozen fingers. The sky had darkened to a deep indigo and once or twice spits of snow came whistling in the wind.

‘Cold?' he questioned.

I blew on my fingers and he laughed again and then spoke in the Cumberland accent which is hard at times for a southerner to follow.

‘How would you like to lie out on yon moss for three hours waiting for the geese to come back at night?' he asked.

I told him that if geese-shooting entailed such endurance it was not likely to find me among its enthusiasts.

His eyes were creased at the corners with crow's-feet wrinkles and were a hard, healthy blue. He stood easily against the wind as he talked, his hands in his breeches pockets, a cap to one side of his head, and his jacket open to show an old woollen yellow waistcoat. I was almost shivering in a top-coat; he seemed oblivious of the cold and the sudden spurts of snow.

We stood looking over the marsh towards the coast, talking of the lambing season that would come in March, and he explained that the characteristic rounded thatched haystacks of the district were raised on circular stone platforms, about eighteen inches high, to prevent the rainwater that runs off the thatching from soaking into the bottom of the rick. In no other part of England which I have visited have I seen this precaution so generally adopted.

He lived in one of those grey Cumberland houses which, having no pretensions to beauty, being no more than four walls and a slate roof, somehow seem to harmonise perfectly with the countryside. When men, it seems, make use of local materials, build they never so badly, the stone carries with it the fitness which it had in its natural state and which defeats ugliness even in its new condition. The stone houses and flaked tiles of the Cotswolds, the red-bricked thatched cottages of Kent and the flint-walled houses of Hertfordshire have this beauty.

When I left the farmer it was snowing heavily. Down on the marsh some men had set fire to the dead grass and reeds to keep down the vermin that find a refuge there. Great streamers of smoke and flame flared away in the wind, twisting and coiling like angry snakes beneath the lowering sky. I stood, forgetting the cold in the beauty of the scene. A dark purple, gravid sky showed long barriers of cloud hurrying in from the sea to pile in great fantastic mounds above the fells inland. The green rock-brake on the stone walls trembled in the wind beneath the bracken skeletons, and a lapwing skirled through the air above me. The lashing tongues of flame were beaten close to the earth by the wind and fled from tip to tip of the clumps of dead grass, forming a string of tiny pyres that flared and wickered for a while and then died to a smouldering, smoky red gleam. The clouds swung lower, swathes of snow slanted earthwards, lodging in the wall crevices, and suddenly I became aware of something apocalyptic, some awful purpose in the play of natural forces, the fire, the snow, and the growl and smash of the sea mixed with the high whine of the wind. My whole being was tensed towards that awful moment when all these powers should break loose and run, maddened and uncontrollable, across the country, the fire roaring and devouring, the wind flattening and cruel, while the soft, pitiless snow followed softly behind them, covering the ruin with its uncharitable mantle. Human life was very insignificant before that display of elemental things…