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Chapter 1

John the Fish

I yearned to become a part of that world, to be with those fish, those great olive-backed tench as they sauntered down the avenues amidst the weed, across floors of polished sand, into their darkened rooms beneath the drapes of lilies.

Voices from that August day will never be stilled, not now. Voices fine-tuned by fear raking over the marsh. Forty years ago? It seems like an eternal yesterday. My parents tense, sensing the blade of panic cutting the sea wind. My father running toward the desperately waving figures. I followed, like a child does, eager to be in on the action, lagging a couple of paces behind to be on the periphery. Two women and a man standing above the sluices where the river runs to meet the sea. Pointing, shrieking—a rising tide in the agony of men that rips your chest apart. “My daughter. Oh, my God. My little girl . . .” A woman’s voice, sobbing. My father, a hero in the war, a hero still, strips and in a graceful, diving arc enters the pool. I watch him breasting the currents like a white otter. Amazement and a burst of hope stifling the pain hold the horror in suspension. My mother comforts the woman. I’m small, shy, and I recognize my father as successful, important, his advice sought everywhere. But here, for once, I knew he was wrong. “My little boy plays in the sink,” said my mother always, teasingly, and lovingly, and she was right. Almost since crawling, I’d been compelled to learn how water works, how it curls and creates its own world. Now I understood both the river beneath us and that my father was exhausting himself in the wrong place. The river and the tide were meeting at such a pace that anybody caught between would be lifted, then pushed down and trundled away from the pool. Too diffident to voice my instinctive knowledge, I slipped unnoticed through the reed beds and there, at the first bend, a golden-haired girl lay in the margins, dress rippling, face as though in sleep.

Tench were always my beloved, mysterious species.

I think I shouted. I’m told I was found in the water with her, pushing her back to the bank but in truth the rest of that day is remote. I seem to remember my father over her, breathing into her. I know she lived and that it was I who became the hero. The little unexpected hero. “How did you know . . . ?” “What you did . . .” “How can we ever . . . ?” What was important to me, though, was that never again did my mother laugh when she saw me on the stool by that sink. No longer was I “an odd little fish.” Henceforth, I was her “little fish” only, as though my strangeness were now accepted.

In truth, I’d always been aware my obsession had isolated me from the other children who were only interested in cars, trains, dolls, or war games in the schoolyard. That near-tragic day gave me a confidence and eased the nagging doubts I had about my own passions. All I’d ever wanted to do was to see more and more fish, glistening in the water, dancing in the waves, big fish, small fish. Colorful fish or fish that to the rest of the world might well seem drab but to me shone like the sun. Jam-jar fish at first, minnows, sticklebacks, and then gudgeon—nobody’s favorite fish but mine with those delicate, shifting glints of blue. The dart-like silver of the dace, another baby miracle in a magic world. Perch, beautifully barred. Roach, pearl-like silver. Carp, golden-scale clad. Pike, new-moon toothed and mottled menace. On and on, more and more fish, always seeking to complete a cosmic vision. It wasn’t the “twitcher” mentality obsessively ticking away at a list, it was something more than that and still is. More like a dabbling in wonderment.

Nose pressed to the bowl, watching my two wretched goldfish swim a miserable, circular life, agog at how they twisted, turned, hovered, and fanned those fabulous fins. An old sink outside in the garden, filled with murky water and mysterious fish . . . the weather loach that only came up before a thunderstorm and wriggled manically at the edges of the porcelain. What went on in that life during the endless months between? What could have been the signals that sparked in its little brain as the thunder began to roll? The baby tench that blew up bubbles every time I dropped in chopped garden worms and the eel that only moved at night, snaking out to engulf the tadpoles I had moved in from the farm pond. A sinister world but enthralling for all that, almost uniquely unknowable.

It was never a case of whether I wanted to go fishing or not, for if I wanted to see different types of fish, it was very often necessary to catch them. And, to be honest, I was compelled toward the sport so inexorably that I believe I’m a fisherman either because of genetics or reincarnation. My grandfather was an angler, quite famous in his day and because he died sixteen years before I was born, he obviously didn’t influence me directly. Genetically, though, who can tell? And once I was regressed by a throaty, floaty sort of woman enveloped in swirls of hazy purples and only held down to earth by lashings of golden jewelry. When I was in a trance—overcome by eyes, voice, and perfume—it emerged that I’d been a Highlander in a past life, during the eighteenth century when I’d gone away to fight and suffered a hideous death. Don’t try telling me there wasn’t a stream running through my glen and that I hadn’t winkled out a trout or two before going off to tackle the Sassenachs.

Worse, the path down to the lakes took me past the tramp’s cave, and I could never be sure whether he’d be there and come out at me in the half darkness as I hared for home.

The first years of my fishing life were grueling, any tiny success hard won. They were spent largely on a mean, oil-veneered canal on the outskirts of Manchester. The nasty, sharp grit of the towpath was forever in my knees or the palms of my hands after I’d fallen from my bike or been in a fight with any one of the innumerable gangs of tough lads that patrolled from one bridge to another. Boys’ tackle then was cheap and seemingly designed to frustrate you. Lines “birdnested” as if through a hideous black magic. Reels seized when it rained and froze in the snow. A whole cane rod had the delicacy of a yard brush. The winters were achingly miserable, feet frozen in thin Wellington boots while the anoraks of those days soaked up sleet like blotting paper. If you ever did hook a fish, chances were it would be as pale, as thin, and as sick as the rest of us. The first roach I ever caught turned out to be blind in not one but both eyes, which explains why it overlooked the awkward hook and gangly knot in the first place.

Even then, travel seemed to offer a way out and at a seemingly vast distance from my home lay the Roman Lakes, grubby but full of fish. This Eden, though, could only be reached by a twelve mile round trip, a trek for a six-year-old. Worse, the path down to the lakes took me past the tramp’s cave, and I could never be sure whether he’d be there and come out at me in the half darkness as I hared for home. I couldn’t know if he wished me harm but he looked grotesque and once he came so close to catching me, I could smell the staleness on his breath. Eventually, the paper reported that the police had found his body but I was never convinced. In fact, the walk home became worse after that because it was his ghost that chased me. I could hear his boots on the dark stones padding relentlessly through the merciless night.

In these early days what I liked most about fishing was reading about it. Bed and books. An apple and milk. Angling adventures far away in space and time. It wasn’t too hard to dream of better worlds holding waters with fish more than matchstick big. Endless images, unlimited possibilities. A Hampshire chalk stream running through lush water meadows dotted with willows, a church spire in the distance, and a lark overhead. No rough boys there; just huge, speckled trout lazily plopping at mayflies the size of parachutes. And then my parents did take me away to the sea. Many days they left me at a lake wondrously named Bayfield and possessing the halo of beauty I’d only ever dreamed of before. The toe of the lake almost always lay in wooded shade, even though it was high summer, but when I walked out into the poppy-strewn field, the sun was full glow onto it, lighting it up with glistening brightness. Standing behind some yellow flag irises, I peered in and for the very first time saw some truly huge fish for myself—real fish, not just drawings—living in another world, a parallel universe so close to mine I felt I could reach out and touch it. I yearned to become a part of that world, to be with those fish, those great olive-backed tench as they sauntered down the avenues amidst the weed, across floors of polished sand, into their darkened rooms beneath the drapes of lilies. I understood that those fish were beyond my powers to catch but that did not matter then and nor have similar failures ever done so since. Just watching them showed me that the world could be kind, that the books that had so long sustained me contained more than dreams but were truth itself. That morning was my defining moment in life, I suppose. You could say either that I’ve never grown up since or that I was mature then. I’d found my purpose and never once have I been tempted to deviate from it.

Back in Manchester, I tried to explain my discovery to Brian Socket, my closest friend, and to Margaret, who I’d loved absolutely for all the preceding term. It was all perhaps too heavy for playground banter and neither understood. After a minute or two Brian’s eyes glazed over and he went off to play marbles, but then he wasn’t as plugged in as his name might suggest. Margaret, though, did try at break, at lunch, and then again on the walk homeward. But, even aged seven, she was woman enough to recognize a loser and pretty enough to realize she could do better.

I suspect my parents had a rather hard time but in return handed out wildly contradictory messages. On Saturday I’d hear that all that matters in life is happiness and it was fine if I became a water bailiff, pedaling my bike along the towpaths of the future. Come Sunday, I’d be told that money doesn’t grow on trees and why wasn’t I memorizing the yard of the Iliad that I’d been set for homework? Nor did they seem pleased when, at the age of twelve, it came to light that I’d been writing fishing articles during the year’s maths lessons. That two had been published and had earned me the grand total of four pounds ten shillings (£4.50) didn’t seem to make up for the fact that I’d come thirty-sixth out of a class of thirty-seven. As it was pointed out to me, it was after all the inevitable Master Socket that propped the rest of the class up in everything.

Give and take, revenge is sweet. “Boy escapes with his life,” ran the local paper’s report. I throw out my father’s lump hammer the thousandth time that winter of the 1963 freeze. It had to happen, the rope catching my ankle, and I float through the crystal air after the fourteen pounds of unforgiving metal. Cometh the canal, somehow escapeth the boy. Half a frozen mile away lived a friend. His introduction was recorded in the family annals: “Hello? Did you have a son called John Bailey? Yes? Well, he fell in.”

“Boy escapes with his life,” ran the local paper’s report.

Ten now and my parents drove me to a remote hotel perched right by the side of a wild and swelling river. They stayed with me for two days to check everything out and then left me for the remainder of the month. Of course, today when no child is allowed a rod’s length from a responsible adult, such a decision would be seen as irresponsible, insane, and probably criminal but to this very day I thank my parents from the bottom of my heart for it. There were times admittedly I felt very small, when I fell off a bridge, broke a rod, cut my knee, and sobbed miserably in the dripping rain. But that was the great thing about a child’s life in those days: you simply had to sort it out for yourself without any adult to help you back on your feet. It’s my sincerely held belief that both pleasure and pain are more vivid if you experience them for yourself rather than through outside intermediaries. Children, as much as grown-ups, need their space to explore the world first-hand. And how wonderful it can be.

Once more, I fell seriously in love. Together, we went to the cinema at a nearby seaside town to watch John Wayne and Steve McQueen kill their respective Indians and Germans. Her name was Julie and I really feel we would have been together still but for the fact that she was twenty-five years my senior and the hotel manager. A fellow guest was an artist, and the type of man my father would describe as a bounder, complete with cravat and MG sports car (which he drove wearing leather gloves) and who I suspected of having similar designs on Julie. He was earnest with me about his paintings but, when I pointed out that there were two trees close to a bridge that he was drawing, not one as he’d portrayed it, he became agitated. “What is reality? Am I real? Are you real? Never forget, young John, we create our own reality.” Hardly surprising I was so convinced that I was the man for Julie.

Diary entry August 3, 1961

It rained all night in big dollops and this morning the river was dirty and in flud [sic]. I caught eight trout (best yet) and saw some salmon. A sheep was in the river but it was dead. I slipped and bashed my knee and Julie said later I was a poorly tomato. She is very nice and I love her but I don’t always know why she says things. [Years later, when I phoned Julie to tell her of the death of my parents, she said fondly, “Still the poor little martyr.” So that was it!]

Shortly after the flood, I saw a salmon bow-wave upriver through the tiny village looking like a submarine. Also watching the fish was a much older lad whom I’d heard referred to as Murphy. At a guess, I’d say he was around eighteen, lean and mean, so I agreed at once to meet him by the bridge at five p.m. as he commanded. He led the way determinedly downriver, way past the point that the hotel fishing finished. With a quick look right and left, he climbed a fence and I scurried in his wake, deep into enclosed woodland.

Our pace slackened and he moved slowly from one overhanging tree to the next, peering intently into the water beneath. Then he froze, cupped his hands around his eyes, and spent a full minute in quivering concentration. He beckoned me toward him and pointed. A salmon. A silver, splendid salmon. In a trice he’d cut himself a stick, pulled out a snare from his pocket, and was inching the glinting copper necklace toward the fish’s gills. I had been nervous but now I was enthralled. All I could see was that velvety fish hanging in the crystal water. Which suddenly exploded in front of us. Murphy was in grave danger of being pulled in and yelled at me to anchor him round the waist. We pulled mightily and the salmon yanked back but after a frenzied thirty seconds or so the fish soared skyward like a cork from a bottle and we fell on it, rapturous in the long grass.

Taimen.

When we’d sorted ourselves out, when the quiverings of the silver giant at our feet had ceased, Murphy turned to me and said, “Take it. It’s your fish.” For a moment I could see myself walking into the bar in triumph, the fish over my shoulder, its nose dangling down to my Wellington tops. What would they all say? Wouldn’t I be Julie’s hero? I’d like to be able to say something dignified about myself at this point. That the realization of cheating, breaking the law, washed over me. That I wouldn’t want to win Julie in anyway ignoble. But it wasn’t that at all. Weedy little thoughts came into my mind: did I have a license? How was I going to convince anybody that I’d landed a fish the size of a porpoise on tackle put under strain by a stickleback? I declined the offer and for a moment Murphy looked at me thunderously. “How can I take it back? They’ll know for sure how I came by it. There’s nothing I can do with it so you’ve got to have it.” Though much smaller than Murphy, I’d always been stubborn headed and I refused again. With a grunt, Murphy put his boot under the fish and kicked it back into the river. For a moment it lay on the surface, and then steadily gulped in air and sank back to its original position by the tree roots. I watched it for several minutes until it decided to glide into deeper water where it slowly became invisible. I looked around and Murphy had gone, too, and I wasn’t to see him ever again.

Oh yes. I knew exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I brooded on all these events in the back of my parents’ car on the long journey home. Days had taken on a whole new significance for me. No longer the usual drudgery of getting schoolwork done, of wearisome bus journeys, of explaining nonsensical Latin grammar to the flagging Socket. No. Every day had been filled with the glitter of magic, with new challenges, new experiences, and new discoveries. Oh yes. I knew exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Snuggled up in the comforting leather of my father’s battleship Rover as we drove northward home, I didn’t then know what I was letting myself in for. How could I ever comprehend the worries that have since beset me when I only dreamed the dreams without a hint of the fears? It’s a fact of travel writing today that emotions are kept in check and barely, if ever, mentioned. Obviously, I’m reading tougher authors than I will ever be, but perhaps the uncertainties that beset me lurk also in their own minds. Understandable worries: air crashes, snakebites, and sickness. Ignoble worries: grimy toilets, meat full of gristle, fat, or blubber; squeezing out the ticks or pulling an obstinate leech from my shin. Absurd worries: I’ll run out of toilet paper, lose my air ticket, or suddenly develop appendicitis a thousand light years from home. Over the years there’s come to be a sort of realization of what I am and what I’m not, what I’m prepared to put up with. Illness, animals, and insects; heat and cold and food that would make a dog retch I can all take in my stride. What I can’t take, though, is naked human aggression. Perhaps because I’ve found myself threatened in the past I’m reluctant to have a bullet put in my brain now.

Looking moody in Greenland, waiting for my socks to dry out. The flowing road is inevitably in the background.

The days before a major journey are always frenzied, and it’s part of my neurosis that I’m forever packing and unpacking, checking and rechecking. Did I pack my knife, a whistle, some rope, and playing cards? Have I got enough dollars? Enough toilet paper? Enough clean socks? And then it’s the hateful night before departure. The demon alarm clock glowing there in the dark, its spiteful little hands beckoning me on toward an apprehensive departure. Why on earth do I ever set it anyway? When did I last sleep more than forty minutes uninterrupted on the night before a big flight? To be fair, I like to feel that these wobbles of the spirit are quelled to some degree when I’m actually in action. After all, I’ve remained calm when faced with a rearing tiger only five paces away—calm enough, in fact, to attempt a photograph. I reckon I’ve been comparatively stoic in rafting accidents, plane crashes, car smashes, and the rest but I’m always humbled by those I’ve hired to help me. Indian, Asian, or Inuit, I’ve always felt clumsy and cowardly in their shadow.

Attempting this book has been good for me because it’s taken me back to the rows of battered journals, records of my journeys. Reading them, I’ve been stunned by how much I’d forgotten and often how wrong my memories of events have been. Names, dates, and marginalities I can accept but really big things either totally forgotten or absolutely misremembered . . . how, for example, could I ever have forgotten falling off a cruiser in the Black Sea and bobbing around for half an hour before being picked up by a fishing boat? Without those diaries, often such a chore at the time, I couldn’t even have contemplated what I’m starting now. Bless them. Ripped spines, stains of blood, sweat, tears, and vodka. Mosquitoes squashed between their pages. Forgotten names and addresses scrawled indecipherably in the back . . . did I ever remember to send the photographs? All those memories, both miserable and magnificent. I believe that over the years I’ve written them down truly as I’ve experienced them, but perhaps they’ve here and there been distorted by circumstance. But what are truth and history anyway but perception and interpretation?

And so, for the love of fish, and with bated breath, here I go.

It’s important to enjoy every second of every minute of every day when you are fishing. There are fascinating people who can become friends all around the globe.