Over
the years I have gradually grown accustomed to the fact that strange and irrational
events have a habit of occurring spontaneously whenever I go fishing. I could
tell you about the night I caught a bat, or about the grey lag goose that casually
walked forty yards along the bank of a pit, then jumped straight up and sat
happily on my lap, but these were fairly mundane events.
Once, while on my way home from college for the weekend, I was walking down
the slope of a pedestrian underpass in Hertford. A kid on a cycle came hurtling
past me, failed to apply his brakes in time, shot over his handlebars into the
wall and landed in a crumpled heap on top of his bike. I thought he was just
showing off, so I carried on to the bus stop. Once underway I was watching some
more kids cycling up and down the steep grassy slopes next to a footpath. They
collided and landed in a tangled heap. Only a few hundred yards further on
a man was just leaving his house; as he closed his glass-panelled front door,
it shattered into pieces.
I am convinced that when it is time for me to depart this earth, I will be forever
remembered in one of those "Strange But True" articles as the one who was impaled
by an icicle formed from the toilet discharge of a passing airliner.
Things started to go haywire in grand style one June night on the banks of the
Electricity Cut at Peterborough, way back in my school days. Now the Cut was
no stranger to all manner of unearthly happenings and not to be approached
by anyone of an even slightly nervous disposition.
My own personal poltergeist took the form of "the dead thing", an olfactory
apparition that was always somewhere very close to me no matter which swim I
chose to settle down in. This stench of decomposing flesh would always waft
into my nostrils within minutes of setting up and, no matter how thorough was
my investigation of the surrounding undergrowth, I could never find its source. Perhaps
it was the ghost of a long dead carp angler who had simply rotted away through sheer
boredom and inactivity. That was unless he had been eaten by the rats.
The Cut rats were of a deviant strain, typified by black matted fur, chewed ears,
peg legs and eye-patches; they carried cutlasses between their teeth. One night
I heard a rustle under my low chair, and looked round just in time to see my
plastic bag full of sandwiches bouncing off down the footpath and into the long
grass.
If anyone was daft enough to use dough bobbins, (this was the early 70s remember),
you would often see one twitch up and down mysteriously in the dark as if you had a bite, but
then they would abruptly disappear as the rat swallowed them, usually biting through
the line in the process.
On this particular night, we had arrived late due to car problems. Now at this
time I was still at school, and I was gratefully ferried on various reckless
fishing expeditions in whatever clapped out motor my older mate Graham happened
to have at the time. My task as the junior batman was to assist in whatever
task was necessary to keep the vehicle moving and to be generally mocked and
bullied at every opportunity. Typical tasks might involve shoving my hand into
the tangled mess under the dashboard and tugging at the nest of wiring until the lights
came back on. Some journeys required the clutch to be bled every twenty minutes,
or more mundanely, I might have to wind the side windows down and activate the wipers by manipulating the loop of string that was
fed from them through the windows and over the dashboard.
As we arrived at the Cut just before dark, it was obviously unfishable due to
a totally impenetrable cover of thick duckweed. Graham was in a foul mood as
usual and refusing to go back home, went off to sleep in his car at the end
of the track. I opted to sleep on the bank, far away from the car so as not
to be kept awake all night by his earth shattering snoring. We didn't go weighed
down with all the survival gear that seems so essential these days. These were
times when if you went night fishing, you actually sat upright next to your
rods all night. There was no regard for any of this poncy, modern nonsense about cloud cover, moon
phases and air pressure, we just sat there wide awake whatever the conditions,
nodding off only under the onset of hypothermia.
I curled up on the top of the bank under my blanket and with what I considered to be a stroke of genius,
pulled out my large, crusty loaf to use as a pillow. In spite of the hard river
bank, this arrangement was so comfortable that I soon drifted off to sleep
and slept soundly until I woke up shivering in the cold dawn mist. I was immediately
aware that something was amiss, as my head was lying at an acute angle and
I had a very stiff neck.
As I lay there with my eyes half closed, trying to push out the harsh realities
if daylight, my befuddled brain reacted neither to the sight of the corner chunk
of crusty loaf lying at the water's edge, nor to the trail of breadcrumbs leading
all the way back to my left ear.
Then the horrible truth finally dawned on me, as the pain in my neck and the fresh dent in
my head alerted me to the fact that whereas my head had once nestled snugly
on a soft, crusty pillow, it was now almost impaled on the corner of a semi
submerged house brick. I think I was too numb to scream. I just sat there, gingerly
fumbling around my face like a blind man, trying to verify that all organs and
appendages were still present and correct.
What if I had woken up in the night, finding myself face to face with that rapacious
posse of squealing, stinking, yellow-toothed pi-rat-es, tearing chunks from
under my eyes, distributing my face among their hungry youngsters?
The second of these little tales happened to me one summer's day, whilst stalking
a shoal of chub on the upper Welland at Lolham. The river at this point is heavily
tree lined, and I was attempting to manoeuvre my rod into a casting position
to intercept the ghostly, purple shapes as they melted in and out of the shadows
on the far bank.
Suddenly, my concentration was disturbed as an object bounced off my then-trendy
bush hat and landed at my feet. Looking down I was surprised to find a very
recently deceased mouse, which not accustomed to flying, had obviously veered off
course and, failing to lower its wing flaps in time, had crashed headlong into the
tree. On closer inspection however, I could see that it had met its end by murderous
means, as there were two fresh puncture wounds in the back of its neck. My first
thought was that it had been dropped by an owl, but as I looked upwards, peering at me from between a fork in the boughs, was a killer grey squirrel.
The thought struck me that perhaps I should contact the Guinness Book Of Records
to claim the world record for the greatest number of times that anyone has been
hit on the head by a dead mouse, thrown out of a tree by a grey squirrel, i.e.
ONCE.
A year or two later, I was to move temporarily from Bourne to Hertford, as a
budding teacher at Balls Park College of Education. Again, this was no coincidence.
Somehow, deep inside me, I just knew that out of all the colleges I had applied
for, that I would end up at that one. Even when I was accepted, instead of the
usual proud announcement in assembly, my headmaster, fearful of all the inevitable
juvenile sniggering, changed the name instead to Hertford College.
One day during a half term break, having read "No Need To Lie", I decided to
trace Walker's footsteps along the Hertford rivers. I found the spot where he
caught his two pound roach and one pound dace in the same session, but sadly,
the sluggish water with its sediment-coated brown weed, now looked barely capable
of supporting minnows.
My room mate Mike Plummer, though not keen on catching fish, was quite keen
on eating them, so we went off to look for the place where the great trout was
hooked, as also mentioned in the book.
After clawing our way through nettles and tearing ourselves on barbed wire,
we set off along the overgrown banks of the river, which like all Hertfordshire
rivers, was called the Wiz, Niff, Ping, or something like that. After walking
about a mile, we had seen just one or two small chub, which just wouldn't turn
into trout no matter how hard we concentrated.
There we were, by an open field with not a soul in sight, when there was suddenly
a great thud, as a rock the size of a cannon ball hit the sloping bank, missing
Mike by inches, then rolled out of sight into the thick bed of nettles. Thinking we were under
attack by a person or persons unknown (or even squirrels), we looked around,
only to find there was no-one anywhere and no cover behind which a practical
joker or murderous psychopath could hide. Looking upwards, there were no pterodactyls
or rogue hang-glider pilots. Nothing. What if it had hit him? How would I have
explained it in court? "Honestly your honour, we were just innocently proceeding
along the river bank when my friend was unfortunately decapitated by a passing
meteorite."