A Midsummer Night Stream

CHRIS NEWTON

A Midsummer

Night Stream

Scenes from an angling life

Smashwords Edition

Hooked on Books

2nd Floor, 6-8 Dyer Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 2PF An imprint of Memoirs Books Ltd. www.mereobooks.com

A Midsummer Night Stream: 978-1-86151-932-0

First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Mereo Books, an imprint of Memoirs Books Ltd.

Copyright ©2019

Chris Newton has asserted his right under the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover, other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The address for Memoirs Books Ltd. can be found at www.mereobooks.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

The canal

The pool in the wood

At sea on the meres

Shark and baked beans

BBC Bill and the Last of the Summer Wine

You can’t catch them on a line

Suits you sir

A dream of silver

The wildest fish

A fence too far

Potted sewin

Nuts in Mayo

A midsummer night stream

A river runs through it, but not on Wednesdays

Of wheels and water

Something in silver

In search of Hugh

Season’s end

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father,

Tony Newton, in gratitude for all the times he took me fishing as a boy, and to my late mother Nora for her

interest and encouragement, and for teaching me how to cook the catch.

By the same author:

Hugh Falkus, A Life On The Edge

(Medlar Press, 2007)

Golden Game Fair

(with Tony Jackson, Medlar Press 2008)

The Trout’s Tale

(Medlar Press, 2012)

Little Book of Fly-fishing for Trout

(with Richard Duplock, G2 Entertainment 2013)

How Not to Write a Book

(Mereo, 2016)

About the author

Chris Newton has been fishing for six decades and writing about it for three. Over the years the focus of his passion has moved from coarse and sea fishing to fly fishing for trout, sea trout and salmon, but he remains at heart an all-round angler and nature lover who is happy to be stationed beside any body of clean water at any season with rod, binoculars and camera. The author of two acclaimed books on fishing-related matters, Hugh Falkus, A Life On The Edge and The Trout’s Tale, and a regular contributor to Trout and Salmon and other magazines, he works as an editor and ghostwriter. He describes this entertaining book as ‘a little retrospective self-indulgence… a chance to write about my own experiences and my deepest feelings about fishing’.

Introduction

Some years ago, in a jaded moment, I set off for a solo angling holiday in Wales. Its declared purpose was the pursuit of summer sea trout, but the real agenda was the capture not of fish, but of the past. I wanted to try to get swallowed up by the lovely business of fishing as I had been thirty-five years before, as a boy on the banks of the Bridgewater Canal. I had become disillusioned by the superficial quick fix of the day trip, the impossibility of leaving behind the mobile phone, the deadlines and the family responsibilities. I wanted, in short, to take a holiday from being grown up.

I failed, of course. For a day or two, taking a little time off from real life did enable me to concentrate on water and weed and weirpools and to think a little less about my responsibilities back home, but the nagging awareness of the trivial headaches that might be waiting for me in the post, in my email inbox and on the telephone answering machine brought the holiday to a distinctly downbeat end in less than a week. More to the point, I was exhausted. After five days of exploring half the day and fishing most of the night, my back ached, my shoulders were stiff and my hands were scratched and sore. The rear-view mirror of my car revealed eyes of pewter in a mask of stubble. I felt I would never want to cast another fly as long as I lived. The truth is, fishing hurts. The piscatorial Arcadia portrayed in the more romantic fishing books and selectively retained in our own fond memories is very different from the sweaty, gritty, stiff-backed, hollow-eyed ordeal of a twelve-hour day by the river, let alone several of them in succession.

On the drive home I pondered the myth of the carefree schoolboy and reflected that the worries of the average ten-year- old – tedious or impossible schoolwork, parental retribution, peer rejection – are just as daunting at the time, if not more so, than those he will face in later life. And I remembered how often those early outings had ended in despair and anguish because the fish had failed to cooperate, at a time when I could not hope for another appointment with them for weeks, or months.

So I gave up trying to recapture the angling Arcadia which dominates the imagination of every angler with a soul (which is most of us, I hope) – until now. I decided to see if it was possible to capture the flavour of the angling dream in writing while giving an honest account of the reality of the fishing experiences behind it, and to this end I started assembling some stories of my adventures on the river bank, from memory and from my diaries. The stories are all true, subject to a few details that have had to be reconstructed from an incomplete memory, and there is no exaggeration about any of the fish mentioned. The people named are real too, in most cases - I have felt no need to disguise them, as I have (I hope) said nothing likely to upset them.

So here’s the book. I hope you like it.

Chris Newton June 2019

CHAPTER 1

The canal

Two small magicians, each with a jam jar

Cast spells on the water with hazel twig wands…

Ralph McTell, ‘Barges’

It was Howard Pemberton’s elder brother Brad, standing in the inspection pit in his father’s garage torqueing down the cylinder head nuts on the family Vauxhall Cresta with a wrench held between big, oil-blackened hands, who told us about the car that had gone into the Bridgewater Canal. There was a family of four on board, said Brad, Mr and Mrs Harold Longworth and their offspring, Graham and Valerie, and the car had shot off the towpath where it joined the road up past Broadheath and disappeared in a cloud of mud and bubbles, not that anyone was there to see it. It was a spruce green 1955 Ford Prefect, with the chrome side strips and bumper overriders but not the optional heater, according to Brad.

The next day the police located the Prefect and hauled it out with ropes, but of the Longworth family, said Brad, there had been no trace.

You ‘ave to watch your brakes with them Fords he said. Never ‘appen with this. Ten-inch drums. Stop on a sixpence, and he went back to wrenching.

For the rest of that summer of 1960 I fished in fear, imagining each time my line caught on a snag that I had hooked Mr or Mrs Longworth, or perhaps Graham or Valerie, and that my next heave on the line would bring a grinning cadaver lurching to the surface. I could find nothing about the tragedy in the Sale and Stretford Guardian, but Brad could explain that; it had all been hushed up to protect Ford’s sales figures.

Certainly there were bodies in the canal – those of domestic animals, usually, of the kind you’d expect from a watercourse which served several of the denser suburbs of south Manchester as an informal refuse disposal system; cats and mongrels, ducks and hens (people kept poultry then for the eggs, rather than as a statement of harmony with Gaia) and homing pigeons that hadn’t.

One year we had an Airedale. It drifted up and down between Timperley Bridge and the station right through the school holidays, sidling into our swims every so often to allow us to monitor its progress from cherished ex-pet to bleached, disintegrating blob.

That’s canals for you, squatting at your feet, oily and silent, waiting, watching and occasionally giving you a nasty turn, just to make sure you don’t start taking them for granted. I never liked to picture the squalor of the canal bed, particularly after the tale of the Longworths. No doubt there was all manner of esoteric refuse; tin cans, typewriters, footwear, the jettisoned hauls of burglars, unexploded bombs.

The barrier between the bright world above and the unseen one beneath was breached only by our lines and hooks. Though the water was dirty, it was by no means poisonous. To the repeated astonishment of non-fishing adults, it held plenty of fish – roach, perch, silver bream, occasionally even a stray tench to set our hearts racing.

Over the course of half a dozen seasons in the late 1950s and early sixties I got to know those fish very well. The canal was two miles from home or (once I was allowed to go under my own steam) about fifteen minutes by push-bike. I fished it for the first time on an August day in 1958, when I was eight. Brian Cowburn’s father had offered to take Brian, Michael Rogers, John Finlay and me fishing; real fishing, with rods. I was already nurturing an interest in proper angling because I had reached the age when paddling about in Baguley Brook (Paddly Brook, we called it) in shorts and wellingtons with a shrimping net had begun to make me feel self-conscious. I knew of older boys who did their fishing with rods and lines in real rivers and lakes, and felt I should be joining them. We didn’t have any rivers or lakes to speak of within a boy’s range of home, but we did have the Bridgewater Canal.

The afternoon began with an unbargained-for wait in John Finlay’s kitchen while his mother forced him to do the washing-up, an act of cruelty I had never imagined possible. I remember sitting at the green Formica kitchen table, my heart going out to John as his tears of desperation mingled with the suds.

When we eventually got to the canal, I assembled my home- made rig, which was a 5ft garden cane, painted with bands of blue to simulate whippings, and an old wooden Nottingham reel given to me by Great Uncle Alec and lashed on with string. The reel would turn only when great force was applied to its rim, but because I knew nothing of reels I concluded that this was how Nottingham reels were designed and that you had to wind the line on and off by hand; I did not realise that it had seized up and was all but useless. I had loaded the reel with string and to the end of the string I had knotted a length of 4lb ‘Luron 2’ nylon monofilament (the pun in the name did not occur to me until many years later). For the business end I had a red-tipped porcupine-quill float, some split shot and a packet of eyed hooks, bought from Haslam’s hardware shop in Washway Road with my father that morning. This was all the tackle I owned. For bait, we had worms in jam-jars – what else? It was hot and sunny as we tackled up on the cindered towpath. The others had boys’ fishing outfits – miniature glass- fibre spinning rods with tiny, useless, fixed-spool reels – except for Brian Cowburn, who was using a rod made for him by his father from a tank aerial. In those days, not much more than a decade after the war, tank aerials were thought to be just the job for a low-budget boy’s rod. I tried Brian’s and found it absurdly heavy and floppy compared to my rigid cane, but as

Mr Cowburn was there I praised it politely.

Every fifteen yards or so, openings had been cut in the reeds to allow access to the water. Most of these bays were occupied by grown-up anglers on baskets, so we trampled out little bays in places which were not really fishing spots and swung our tackle out over the reeds. When we trod on the reeds, they produced a sweet garden-pea fragrance; even now, when I smell crushed reeds, I am back beside that canal. We could hardly cast at all, but that didn’t worry us – the water looked deep enough to hold anything you wanted it to, right up to the edge. Compared to Paddly Brook, it was the Marianas Trench.

It took me a while to get my float to cock properly, like the pictures I had seen in books, but almost as soon as it had done so it went under. Is there a god of young anglers? He was certainly on duty that day. I pulled back, and up flew a perch

bright, stripy, spikey, beautiful and bigger than anything I had caught from the brook, even the six-inch stone loach that had lived for a year in an old washbasin with just some stones stolen from Mr Barlow’s rockery for company. It was exactly the way things are supposed to happen, and as you can see, I have never forgotten it.

We were there for perhaps an hour and a half, and I caught seven more perch, all the same size as the first. I’m pretty sure no one else had as many; Brian Cowburn, in fact, put in a complaint to his father because I had caught more than he had. On Mr Cowburn’s instructions, we put most of the perch back, though I defied him by bashing one over the head so that I could show it to my parents.

I couldn’t wait to go again. For the rest of that summer and throughout the next, I besieged my father with weekly demands for further visits. Most of them were granted; thanks, Dad.

After a while Dad started leaving me to fish while he and my brother and sister went off to do the shopping. Within a season or so, my parents found the pressure to allow me to go on my own unbearable, and relented. So from the age of ten, still in short trousers, I was cycle-born and free. I began to fish the canal pretty much whenever I wanted to.

The idyll continued through my twelfth and thirteenth summers. From Sale Library I borrowed books by the gods of the game, men like Richard Walker, Fred J Taylor, Bernard Venables, BB and Maurice Wiggin, and