Once (10 page)

My father had books on the subject, classic books. Their appeal to me lay in their pretty illustrations of the numerous varieties of imitations they discussed, and the feathers they identified. These books also had other guidance, as to key flies to use month on month: Iron Blue Dun for March and April, when it is cold, for example, a small fly on a number 16 hook. But that was not the heart of my interest. My pleasure was more simply sensual. I'd draw my chair up and watch my father's every move. His hands were so big that for significant passages you couldn't see what he was doing. It was as if abracadabra he conjured the bright pretty flies into being.

About him on the opened bureau lid would be all the materials needed for whichever design he was intent on: Lillputian tins and boxes, scissors, tweezers, little spring-loaded clamps for gripping and winding the silk thread, and other miniature gadgets, and reels of thread: black, olive being the shades most in use but all the colours of the rainbow to be had in one or other giant cigar box (probably supplied by a Ratcliffe boss); and bigger reels of narrow lurex ribbon: gold and silver, and red; and gold wire; and wool, and quills, and hackles in ‘capes' from the breasts of poultry: pointed cock hackles and rounded hen hackles, black hackles and brown and ginger ones: hackles of every kind and shade, some dyed ones of bright green or orange; horse hair; deer hair; dark hair from the hare's ear; mole fur; water-vole fur; tinsel; wax; pheasant tails and tippets and wings; peacock herl and ostrich plumes; blackbird wings and tails, and song-thrush wings and tails; blue feathers from the wings of jays; starling hackles and wings; coot and moorhen feathers; heron feathers; teal, mallard, widgeon, partridge, grouse, woodcock, tawny owl feathers.... Every feather that ever took wing, it seemed.

Such an evening would smell of moth balls and nail polish and other potions, and it resounded with a jew's-harp ring, created as the little hooks, gripped tight in the vice, received their first whipping of silk along their length, from bend to eye. I loved that noise. I loved on those occasions especially the scent of nail varnish, a beadlet on the point of a needle of transparent nail varnish being ideal for sealing the last hitch round the neck of the fly, once the thread is finally cut.

I loved the way the cock hackles would spill into a whirr of insect legs when wound round the shank, just behind the eye of the hook. And all manner of other effects delighted me, as the different materials were applied and the imitations completed: sedge fly, stone fly, caddis, nymph, beetle, spider, daddy long-legs, May fly etc, etc. You could not have enough flies. And as each one was made and set down on the desk, the mind could not help leap to ponder the trout it would take, to reflect on the lake, to imagine spring. Just so I would summon the lake to mind sometimes, when my mother filled the kettle.

You needed a great store of flies. Few survived the mauling they got when a trout rose and took the hook. Many besides were snagged and lost in the back-cast, or had their barbs ripped off by rocks, or got waterlogged and lost their glory. Veterans of successful days battered beyond further use would be hooked into jacket lapel or hat. My father wore successful flies in his hat, until it was so festooned with them you could barely make out the hat itself, for the besieging swarm of insects that forever buzzed about his head.

So the close season, when no fishing was done, had both a practical and a metaphysical role to play. Fishing went on. Fish were caught in the mind's eye. By the age of twelve I was tying my own flies, and there was a pride in it that made you prefer only to use those you'd tied yourself. Anyone might catch a hungry trout on a worm, but on an imitation fly, and one you'd made yourself? That was the heart of it.

And in another part of the dark wood of those days and times, outside with my airgun
Diana .177
– goddess of hunting – I would go to shoot a blackbird or a thrush or some other innocent creature, and be rewarded with a sixpence or a shilling for a good pair of wings. And away my father would go shooting wildfowl and game and every kind of edible bird or creature for the pot, and in the process furnish an abundance of materials for the close season task of tying flies. Nature red in tooth and claw was first nature to me to know.

We didn't drive to pick up Ifor at his house on this first trip, nor did we ever, but waited parked in the dim first of morning outside Ratcliffe's. Ifor lived on Fairmount and would now be coming down the hill to Wellington Road, which Ratcliffe's factory faced. (I was born on Fairmount at St Andrews Nursing Home.) There was Ifor in his wellingtons on Wellington Road, it used to amuse me to think. He was the only one who endured the rigours of the day in wellingtons and he never seemed to suffer from blisters. His oilskin was black and heavy. It was a bigger version of mine. But he also had matching water-proof leggings, whereas mine were light blue and very stiff and I didn't really like them.

Nor did he travel light otherwise, but with a soldier's knapsack with webbing straps (just as my father had) and brass clasps, and his creel over his shoulder or stuffed in his bag, and his rod, his snack in his bag, his newspaper twist of black tea-leaves and sugar, his can and little bottle of milk, his matches, newspaper and tinder, or on some days in the warmer weather, just his
Thermos
flask and squashed cheese and ham sandwiches, to comfort him in the valley of the shadow of the Black Lake.

Ifor was an all-weather amphibious man. He had slightly bulging eyes, permanently surprised by the world, and wore his iron-grey hair slicked with
Brylcream
or
Brilliantine
back from his temple. His nose was round enough for him to look like a seal, or perhaps an otter, especially on a wet day. He was a kind of freshwater seal, a wet-fly man for all seasons and conditions, and an indefatigable, taciturn foot-soldier, who had been an infantryman in the war. Nothing deterred him and once at the lake he would fish and fish, casting and casting, the same three flies if he could, with rarely a rest all the day, but for a reluctant brew, and pause to check his barbs were intact, and not ripped off in the back-cast, among the rocks, a great hazard of the place and cause of lost fish:

To fish there you wade in air among

the rocks angling for your balance.

Black water chops ashore and the torrent

holds you bubble-rapt in its sound-warp

like a dipper submerged in a rushing pool

intent on caddis larvae.

If one of the others came by to know

your luck it could startle you to death.

Ghosts as they are, or not. They haunt here

like the stories they told of ones that got away.

The steep cwm will catch your cast more

than ever those wily fish might rise before you

to a hook ripped of its barb on a rock.

I learnt in this place, from the age of ten,

to curse like a man, ‘God damn it to hell,'

to brew tea in a smoke of heather stalks and downfall,

to tie instant bloodknots and a noose

round the neck of the Bloody Butcher

while the fish moved out of range

as now that world has veered forever

and every finger's a thumb, my reading glasses

beaded with rain, and not a fish to be seen.

Ifor was a durable man, in the best way, as soft and gentle, shy and humorous, as you'd wish. He was palpably shy and would regularly blush, as if he was innocent. As if anyone was innocent. Don't we dwell in a fallen world? I assure you we do whatever your religious view or view of religion. But you always felt he was a man to be in a tight corner with, if ever you found a tight corner to be in. He had a stubborn streak. You felt you'd have to kill him to succeed against him. He caught fish. He knew how to do it. He had no fancy rod or reel, just old tried, trusted standbys of indeterminate vintage. He kept his own company mostly, as did we all, though sometimes if fate brought us in each other's way, the men might pause for a joint brew and a little metaphysics, about light and temperature and wind-direction and the feeding habits of the Black Lake's trout, a dour race, denizens of a dour place, about prospects, about likely fishing flies.

Solitaries we might be but we kept common worlds. We each had our trinity, our three lives: the one we escaped at home, work and school; the one we lived, here and now, in common things and the trance of thought; and last the dream-come-true by evening, weighed down with brown trout, none less than three-quarters of a pound in our creel, a full creel, never an empty creel, to cut into your shoulder for your trouble. We were nothing if we weren't dreamers, dreaming meaning into being.

‘Diw,' Ifor winked at me, his lips pursed to smile, and chuckling to himself and to my father as he climbed in, ‘I see you've brought the tea-boy, then...'.

Tea-boy I didn't take to. But the beauty of boyhood among men is that it has no voice, or hadn't one, in those days, when you were seen and not heard. Like a subject people, boyhood must be content to endure and bide its time. Boyhood dreams. It bears witness. It stares. It is capable of murderous brutality, with its airgun in the killing fields, its snares and hooks. (Or so it was all that time ago.) It is an eye. It is a soul and soul is never more fierce and beautiful than in its first encounters with the world.

Ifor and I had another thing in common. We had both passed the eleven-plus. That was one of the first things people would tell you about him, in some wonder. He had gone to the grammar school at Abergele. Would you believe that when you met him? The wives of the village would tell you, Ifor was a truant dreamer and a wastrel. There were those who claimed he wasn't all that bright. His eleven-year-old success must have been a mistake on the part of the examiners. Did they make the same mistake with me? (Don't ask.)

Sometimes at home things turned bad for Ifor now and then. Too many pints at the Sun, too many games of bowls or too much fishing. On these occasions he sometimes slept the night on a bench in the village hall. We seemed to know when he was in the dog-house and waited for him there. The prison-house of the grammar school had done little for him, perhaps, unless it inspired him to dream, as it surely did for me. You took him on to paint your house and one moment he was up the ladder and the next moment nowhere to be seen. It was as if the ladder gave him a leg-up away somewhere into the mountains (perhaps to Llyn Anafon, one of his other favourite haunts, haunted, as haunted me, by the story they used to tell of a fisherman who drowned there).

He knew the lakes at first hand, and he knew them from a classic book, a fisherman's Bible, that one day he'd give my father,
The Lakes of Wales
(1931) by Frank Ward. But he never talked to me about the book and nor did my father. I'd set eyes on it but I only discovered it to read after they were all dead, Trefor, Ifor, and John.

Who has not complained at not asking enough questions when young while the dead were living? The explanation is simple: we don't know what the questions are until too late. Here for whom I do not know, I am writing down my answers. So it goes round. And the truth is even harder, for hindsight's no more 20:20 than first sight.... Memory's selective, and writing must be more so, being founded in omission, where at best less might mean more.

We went to the Black Lake to fish and not to reflect on folklore and myth. The only myths we had time for concerned 6lb fantasy trout that no one ever caught. Though who never saw such a one, rising with a swirl like an oar's puddle? My father saw them all the time.

But here is what Ward's book had to say (his spellings preserved):

“The Black Lake” is about half a mile in length and lies in a remarkable rock basin at the foot of the precipices of Craig-y-Dulyn between Y Foel Fras and Carnedd L'ywelyn. Bare rock walls from 150 to 600 feet in height practically enclose it, descending steeply into the water. The outlet is very narrow, just wide enough for the small stream flowing from the lake, and the general aspect is decidedly sinister, suggesting a deep flooded crater. Dulyn may be reached in about three hours from Bedol Inn on the road from Trefriw to Tal-y-cafn. The trout here are shy but there are some good fish. Average weight is
1
/
2
lb., with a chance of anything up to 1 lb. or more. The water is very deep (it has been sounded up to 189 feet), black and cold, and contains many rocks and stones. It is a late lake and fishes best at dawn and sundown in June, July and August, but owing to its remote situation, and the fatiguing walk to and fro, is not often visited by anglers. It is one of the impounding reservoirs belonging to the Llandudno Town Council. Permits are issued at a charge of 5s per day by the Waterworks Engineer, Town Hall, Llandudno. There is no boat available for anglers.

In the seventeenth century a belief prevailed that whoever, on one of the three “spirit nights” – All Hallows Eve, May Day Eve, and Midsummer Eve – watched beside this lake, would see who were to die in the coming year.
*
 
There were unfounded stories of deformed fish and of birds avoiding the lake, also there was a causeway running into it, of which the farthest stone was called the Red Altar. It was believed that in hot weather, to stand on the causeway and throw water on to the Red Altar would cause rain before nightfall.