Once (9 page)

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.

With Scotia and its necessary accessories, happy cast-offs this time of my father's (reel and line and fly-box etc), arrived new boots, my black ‘oilskin', my sou'wester, gear fit and unfit for the worst of wilderness weather. With it too, at last, came my deliverance from Sundays at home with my mother and sister. Goats from sheep, I entered the world of men and legend, a slip of a boy, hardly weighing five stone. From now on I would feed my own wide-eyed reservoir of dreams and future stories.

I had lived for this moment, longed for it consciously and no doubt subconsciously. I'd even wept for it in the small hours, hearing my father on the landing and the stair, as he tried not to make a noise, closing the back door, and making good his escape down the side of the house, into the dark murk of the bottle-green morning and away. To what? From what? What mystery at heart? Escaping to and escaping from being inextricably coupled motives and motifs. I would find it all out for myself in good time.

So, as you see, passing the eleven plus meant the world to me, but not for the usual reasons. It meant escape, escape from home. What if I'd failed? It doesn't bear thinking about. Would Scotia have been my consolation prize? I can't think so. But I didn't fail and now no longer did I have to endure the day, waiting for my father to come home. No more did I have to play shop with my sister in the little cupboard in the alcove, or some such nonsense. She knew my heart wasn't in it. She it was I once when quite a lot smaller rebuked as a ‘blooded fool', meaning bloody fool, over some incident in that shop of hers. She it was who otherwise called me ‘the witness', she of the village Band of Hope, if not the Jehovah's Witnesses.

What did I witness on the home front? Nothing special, as you know. Those ordinary goings on, family life, differences, squabbles, arguments, violent outbursts of rage.... My sister's line was that I didn't participate, didn't do my share, didn't keep my end up, didn't protest at parental injustice. It was hardly the thing in those days anyway. I kept my distance, later at least, I'm sure. And I saw the heart of melancholy itself, I believe, of longing for what I couldn't have, of inarticulate loss thereby, from the start.

But whatever my sister's view I used also to chatter-chatter-chatter, and I was called a jabberwocky. My father would thump the table angrily to shut me up as he tried to listen to the news on the wireless. Undaunted I would continue whispering loudly to complete what I wanted to say. So I was any number of things, at that age, just as I am now. Except then I longed to be a man and go fishing for trout at the Black Lake. Which none of you did, I think. Or I feel I would have met you.

I bore witness to the brown trout and the wilderness, in life and death, and grew quieter and more withdrawn, as if spell-bound. Whatever my earlier flights round the tower of Babel, I made up for them in silence soon enough. It wasn't so much that I held my tongue, or kept my counsel. I just grew more inward, a receptor, not exactly pensive. I think therefore I am should here read I think therefore I was. Beyond home, among my peers, this withdrawal became especially marked, but at home too, until I was never quite at home. If I'd known what a
cogito
is mine would have been: I don't think, therefore I am, lost in the depths of things.

Sometimes my father would exclaim aloud at the sadness he saw in my look. He'd see me absent, and distracted, both when I was a boy and later, in first manhood. It pained him. But I think I was very happy in my melancholy, if now today no longer free from deeper sorrow. I was cast that way at birth. But man's inhumanity to man lends bias too. My father was a fine one to talk, anyway, in all the gloom that held him fast from day to day, so rarely lifting, so rarely light of heart, never it seemed at ease.

Now no more was it my sole compensation to gut and clean the fish he caught. This I had done in the high sink, under the cold tap, beginning when I was about eight. My brother was born when I was eight, and I did some sudden growing up, on being displaced, driven farther aside and farther into my self, a middle child now, and most fortunate in that, slipping from attention, pioneering no parental anxieties, inspiring no new cares, not needing nursing. How I loved my brother, and we all spoiled him: he was like a special gift. And I was doubly lucky he came along: for his arrival set me free; he served my solitude and independence and sharpened my sub-conscious focus.

I loved the work of gutting fish too, especially if the fish were big, though they were almost never more than three-quarters of a pound. Fish fascinated me. I loved them. I prized them. Every time I picked one up it was as if for the first time. Fish and fishing filled my head, made my head swim.

The characteristic Dulyn fish was dark-backed, as if dyed by the black water, sometimes with a golden underside – sometimes paler, depending much on the time of year – and strongly speckled with red. The Welsh word for trout is
brithyll
. One meaning of
brith
is speckled. The characteristic black peppering of speckles common to all trout was less clear to see on the Black Lake fish, especially above the lateral line. Often too the Black Lake
brithyll
was short and stocky. I believe a close Welsh equivalent of
brithyll
would be ‘common speckled fish'. So acquainted with them did I become that I could tell from the common speckled fish my father brought home, whether he'd fished at the Black Lake or a different water. In time, like a wine taster pinning a vintage to a year, to a village or a vineyard, I might just tell you which different water, the fish being, like an accent, precise to their place of origin. Sometimes the Dulyn fish had pale pink flesh and then it was said they were especially toothsome.

How I would look forward to my father's return and the ritual gutting and cleaning in the half-light of Sunday evening, the water seeming to get colder and colder, as it splattered out of the tap, all the way from the lake properly called Caw Lwyd but known to us then as Cowlyd, or when we moved to the Wooded Hill, all the way from the Black Lake itself. Then I cleaned the fish in their native water.

The world came round for those fish and for me. And the world was Welsh, as only much later would I see. In time I learned to inspect their gizzards, to find what insect life the fish had been feeding on. It meant everything to me, to see the fish, to wonder at them and to rejoice, to ask my father how he had enticed the bigger ones to rise, with what fly. So insistent was I and persistent in wanting to share in his expeditions and be close to him in that way.

So much did I love the brown trout, but not to eat until later in life. I loved it even when the bright-eyed shine had gone from it and matt rigor mortis set in, supplanting slithery slippery-eel suppleness.

It seemed my father always caught fish, whether anyone else did or not, brown trout from the Black Lake, or once in a way another place, Caw Lwyd, or Llyn-y-Foel high up under Moel Siabod, or Llugwy, or.... Names of such weight and depth to me, I drowned in them, as I said them to myself, a Sunday litany, a catechism, of longing. Places I could smell in my father's clothes and gear, in the bits of moss and other vegetation that got bagged with the fish, wet outdoor scents mingled with oilskin, when he came home. It was an intoxication to take to bed and sleep on, on the too-short journey to tomorrow. School in the morning to fend from my mind.

My father in his day fished every such North Welsh water known to man and some unknown, and others metaphysically, that he never found all day, out on the wilder moors and mountainsides, where anecdotal accounts of how to get there proved unreliable and maps stubborn to read, landmarks elusive to mark, ways hard to find. There were more than sixty lakes in our world, the world of Eryri, or Snowdonia. I would fish only a handful of them. Having explored far and wide, my father found the Black Lake best of all, as a challenge, both to get to, deterring others, and to fish. He loved it as no other water on earth, unless it was the smithy burn at Malzie, of founding memory, where as a boy he hooked his first trout and was hooked in turn, forever. It was his devotion to the art taught me the nature of faith and meaning. Some things have to be believed to be seen. Some fish must be imagined to be caught. The proof of life is passionate and unswerving devotion to dreams. As Yeats said – another fly-fisherman too – that's where reality begins.

Of course there must have been blank days I overlook here, when all my father came home with was an empty creel, too tired to be gloomy at failure, and the day up there itself more than compensation.

Now with Scotia at the ready, I was of the company, a boy-man among men (Ifor and Trefor) as they were men among themselves, or my father's sole companion for the day. I loved it especially when we went on our own. We delayed more. There was no one else to consider. We fished Afon Dulyn, the little stream that ran from the lake, especially if the water was up and danced around the boulders, foaming, purring, pouring, into black pooling holes, on a bend, such an enthralling sound-warp there. Such an inscape was there instressed in that rollrock highroad burn. Then the morning rise at the lake might be sacrificed to my instruction in casting, to the purism of fishing a small fly upstream.

My father would not fish, but crouching behind me, he'd coach me, correcting my action, and delighting in me when fingerling trout haloed overhead on my line, lured by the Welsh
Coch-y-bonddu
, the ignoble Bloody Butcher, the noble Mallard and Claret.... or the little black fly he designed himself, the bottle-brush fly that floated dry along the sheer surface of the narrows and rolled and bobbed in the turbulence of the pool, upstream, in those sharp acid-rain waters. There the small trout rose with roses on their silver flanks, to initiate me and be returned, instinctively, tenderly by first nature, to the dashing stream.

Then it was the same on the way home. But now we fished downstream, across stream, and in the dying evening when more fish chose to feed, in the thinning light, the cold air rapidly descending. Sometimes I'd hook one just big enough to eat.

When night began to close on us, my father might decide to trek away up the hill, on a vertical, knowing that to hit the track speedily would in the end make the final leg of our journey easier, no matter present suffering. Doing that one evening we stumbled on a rain gauge, a copper bucket in a hole, marked up in inches and fractions of inches. It had scarcely a drop in it, that high summer. So my father looked at me, and the next thing I knew we were bounding down to the stream to fill it, and then to struggle back a quarter of a mile or so and drop it all but full to the brim in its hole.

I could always depend on my father for lessons in delinquency. When I was ten, he was forty. We were ever divided by thirty years, as my son is from me, the true span of a generation, but sometimes it seemed scarcely more than half an hour. (The gauge we discovered was tended by the shepherd, who one day, with a knowing look, told of the time he'd found it full.)

So began my captivity in the wilderness, to things wild and wet. So I lay awake one fateful June morning in 1957, at 5.00am, pretending to be asleep, listening out for my father, as if fearful he'd forget me. At last he came into the bedroom and shook my foot through the blanket and whispered ‘Lad, lad...' at which I pretended to wake suddenly. The day had come, the day of days. The eleven-plus was a watershed. (This is all a story about watersheds literal, littoral, and other, till the end of time for me.)

Normally the first day would be at the start of the season, which ran from 1 March to 30 September. It would not be in the month of June or May or April, unless March proved especially bitter and locked the lake with ice. It would follow the close season, as early in spring as could be. Mine had been a ten-year close season. Even before I could stand on a stool and turn the cold tap on above the old sink, trout fishing surfaced in my life. The close season – close and dark, a snug wintry tunnel with autumn at the entrance and spring at its exit – drew everything in.

How I remember those wintry nights, with the wireless on, or with my father hammering the typewriter writing about fishing, as often as not, or else sitting at his bureau under the crane of an anglepoise lamp, tying pretty imitations of the natural fly or nymph or larva. Winter might roar and rock about the house and the trees in the Glen or up on the
allt
crash and run like a sea in storm and flurry in the chimney, but we were snug indoors, in a pool of lamplight, absorbed at this miniature, delicate work, as if at the eye of a storm, the still centre, the eye of the hook.

As to tying flies, my father was like an old biddy with knitting patterns in her head: knit one, pearl one, knit two together.... He didn't need recourse to patterns. All the patterns were in his head, and next in his hands, which were unusually big hands, unlikely hands for such delicate manoeuvres. Then there were adaptations and inventions, theories to put into practice, as to what a trout actually sees.