Healing Stream (eBook)

Laurence Catlow (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
272 Seiten
Merlin Unwin Books Limited (Verlag)
978-1-910723-51-7 (ISBN)

Infos

One of the most candid and eloquent fishing memoirs ever written. This is Laurence's unusual fishing autobiography in which he talks openly about how, as a young man, his excessive drinking brought him to an important turning point in his fishing life. This is elegantly interwoven around his lively views on the northern upstream tradition, catch-and-release, worming and other topics. In the second part of the book, Laurence embarks on what he expects to be an idyllic time as he takes early retirement and looks forward to even more shooting and fishing - when a personal crisis plunges him into a nervous breakdown. This frank exploration of how fishing became impossible to contemplate during the darkest days but how it went on to form an essential part of eventual recovery, is a new departure in angling literature and will strike a chord with many readers. This is a surprisingly funny, honest and moving memoir which pushes back the boundaries of eloquent fishing literature.

Laurence Catlow is considered one of the finest and most thoughtful writers on flyfishing today. He has a doctorate in Classics from Cambridge University and was Head of Classics at Sedbergh School. He lives in Brough, Cumbria, and fishes mainly in that county and in Yorkshire, although his pursuit of trout also takes him further afield, to Scotland, Wales, Shropshire and Hampshire. His other interests include shooting and beating, walking his dogs, wine, religion and classical music. Laurence Catlow writes about shooting and fishing for the sporting press.  He is author of  Confessions of a Shooting, Fishing Man, Once a Flyfisher, Private Thoughts from a Small Shoot and That Strange Alchemy.  all published by Merlin Unwin Books. 

Textauszug

CHAPTER TWO

The first trout of my fishing life came at just the right time; if I had gone off to London without the remembered glory of that cloudy September evening, I might never have picked up my rod again. The dim sense of calling that I was beginning to feel, even before its sudden confirmation by the catching of a ten inch trout, would probably have faded quickly and soon been quite forgotten. I should have spent my summers travelling abroad, like most of my friends, or reading classical texts, like just a few of them; and so, along with golf and half a dozen brief adolescent passions, fishing would have been remembered as something trivial that belonged to the past. My waders would have grown mould in a damp corner of the cellar; perhaps the Mitre Hardy would at last have been sold; perhaps it would have stayed propped in its corner of my bedroom, undisturbed and unremembered, for seasons on end; and the money that bought me my first landing net would probably have been put towards the cost of a Greek dictionary, or bought me some tobacco and a few pints of beer.

That first net fell to pieces at last; I have bought other nets since, lost some of them and been given several more. I have worn out at least a dozen pairs of waders since that first pair was finally thrown away; but my first fly rod, the old eight-and-a-half-foot Mitre Hardy, still hangs on the wall in the same tattered green slip. Beside it there are three Sharpes, an Eighty Three and a Fario and a Featherlight; there are two more by Hardy an eight foot Perfection and a nine foot Halford Knockabout. The Perfection is now my rod of choice and it is years since the Mitre Hardy emerged from its slip; perhaps some day I shall take it fishing again and bless the memory of the parents who forbade its sale and so, without knowing it, made me a fisher for life.

Among the books that I bought in my first weeks at university, mostly books on Latin and Greek grammar and editions of classical texts, were two that had no connection with the Ancient World; they were Lord Grey’s Fly Fishing and Plunket Greene’s Where The Bright Waters Meet. Already I owned one or two fishing books, but these were of the how to catch them sort, even if they did not, like Baverstock’s Brook Trout, belong to the How to Catch Them series. I had read and unwillingly returned those books from the town library, but it did not take long for me to realise that their authors – I wonder if Dewar was one of them – could not hold a candle either to Grey or to Plunket Greene, who had soon come to mean just as much to me, in their own way, as did Homer and Vergil; for they helped, during that first real close season of my fishing life, and amid a welter of new experiences, to sustain my conviction that to be a fisherman was a deep and very special blessing. I had caught only one trout, which had turned me immediately into a passionate angler; but I was an angler with no hope of catching his second trout until at last next April came along. And so I fed my longing on the pages of Fly Fishing and Where The Bright Waters Meet. I would turn to them before sleep, when I found that Grey’s praise of the Itchen and Plunket Greene’s loving tribute to the little river Bourne both glowed more warmly in a mind mellowed by two or three pints of beer.

I read of southern rivers that I had never seen; they seemed wonderful rivers where great trout rose to suck down fishermen’s flies; but very often, as I read of the Itchen and the Bourne, my mind’s eye was moving along the banks of a northern trout stream, along the banks of the Ribble just above Brungerley bridge; and it was always September there; it was always a cloudy evening of soft and merging colours, an evening so quiet that the splash of a small trout seemed to shatter a reverent silence; and always, near the bank, there was an old bicycle imperfectly concealed in a decaying jungle of butterbur leaves, while out in the river, covered in a grey anorak and a pair of black waders, stood a figure with a fishing rod, casting his fly among the rising trout.

One of the few fishing books that had travelled south with me to London was a book with no literary pretensions and with no purpose of teaching its readers how to catch fish. It was a small paper-backed book, roughly the size of a pocket diary, and it was already dog-eared when I had owned it for less than a month. I bought it in Ambleside, perhaps a week before catching my first trout. I bought it because it was raining, because I had taken shelter in a bookshop and felt determined to buy something; I bought it because it was about fishing and because it was cheap and because I could not find a book that I really wanted to buy.

And yet this unassuming little book, which was bought in an idle moment and might well have been lost within a week, still occupies a position of high honour on my shelves. Somehow it survived its first days in my ownership and was soon transformed, by the self-sacrifice of a single trout on a cloudy September evening, into a possession beyond price, into a book even more marvellous than either Fly Fishing or Where The Bright Waters Meet; for I discovered that, whenever I opened its pages, I was immediately carried far from my surroundings, spirited off to strange and enticing lands of infinite content. I found that I could open it in London, in a students’ hall just off the Tottenham Court Road, and within seconds the Tottenham Court Road and with it the whole sprawling mass of London, together with all its brash sounds and festering smells, had been left far behind, had lost any power to influence or to intrude; for the page before me, whichever one of them it was that I happened to be reading, had taken me away fishing – either to the bare border hills of Scotland or to the tumbling streams of the Yorkshire dales, perhaps to the Wharfe or to the Nidd or the Swale; sometimes to remote tarns in the Lake District where char and mysterious fish called gwyniad were said to swim among the trout. I was taken to these and to hundreds of other places, and in all of them I caught fish.

I would open this wonderful book for five minutes in the morning, before settling down to Plautus or to Homer. Sometimes five minutes became half an hour. I would turn to it in the afternoon when I decided that I deserved some relief from Plato or Vergil. Often I preferred it to Plunket Greene or to Grey for reading on the edge of sleep. It was, throughout my undergraduate days, the best book I knew for soothing the guilty throb of a hangover. I fancy that its authors knew nothing of these marvellous powers. It was called The Northern Angler’s Handbook. It had been conceived by T.K. Wilson; its thirteenth edition had been revised and edited by Ernest Merritt. The cover carries the contented image of a fisher, with a rod in his hand and a deerstalker hat on his head. I know that it was a cheap book but I cannot tell you precisely how much it cost, because the corner of the cover that once advertised the price has long since been worn away. It was most certainly a bargain, for its descriptions of fishing waters in the North of England and the Scottish Borders, with information about who controlled them and whether day or weekly tickets were available, and with comments on the sort of sport you might expect at different times of the year: all this gave me untold hours of delight whenever I was weary with work or with London.

Within a few years, moreover, The Northern Angler’s Handbook had performed a still greater, an inestimable and lasting service by leading me to the Kilnsey water of the Wharfe. First of all it took me to the Wenning, and it was at least partly responsible for my appearance, fifteen or so years later, on the banks of the Eden round Kirkby Stephen. It is an unpretentious little handbook, but it is no exaggeration to say that, between them, T.K. Wilson and Ernest Merritt have influenced my life as decisively as any literary contact from Homer to P.G. Wodehouse. May God bless them and keep them happy to eternity in the spacious and exclusive region of paradise that he surely reserves for Yorkshiremen who have served humanity with unusual distinction.

In the January of my first year as an undergraduate, following the advice of The Northern Angler’s Handbook, I applied for a season ticket to fish the Ingleborough Estate water of the Wenning. It cost me five pounds, for which I gained access to about five miles of fishing in one of the loveliest stretches of country to which a fishing rod has ever taken me. Even today it sometimes comes between me and my sleep to think how the Wenning was later treated by men who were supposed to look after her. But when first I came there the little river still wound unmolested through the lonely fields that spread out on either side of her banks.

There was a mile of water on the very top of the river. Beyond this were the becks that formed her: Clapham Beck, Austwick Beck, Fen Beck. The lower limit of the estate fishing was the road bridge below the railway station. About a hundred yards upstream, a tall viaduct took trains rumbling over the river. There was no walkway underneath. I used to wade through the water, which was passable in all but the biggest of floods, where, with the sound of each step echoing under the tall arches, I left behind me the thoughts and feelings of common reality and splashed my way into a better world.

It was on the Wenning that I first spent long days on a river, from mid-morning to moonrise and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.4.2017
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Freizeit / Hobby ► Angeln / Jagd
• Schlagworte: Arncliffe • brown trout • Cumbria • Eden • Foston • Mental Health • Mental Illness • Rea • Sedbergh • Teme • wharfe • wild trout
• ISBN-10: 1-910723-51-7 / 1910723517
• ISBN-13: 978-1-910723-51-7 / 9781910723517