The Secret Carp

CHAPTER ONE

The Perfect Pool

Any fisherman who dreams of the perfect pool is always hoping that his imagined paradise really exists and that one day he might actually find it. Many years ago I thought I had stumbled on such a place, but because it was night time and a mist was rising I could not, at first, be sure. It was the scent that originally led me to it, the soft, ripe smell of vintage water that is familiar to anyone who has spent half his life fishing for carp by the side of old lakes and ponds. I was on my motorcycle, riding back from a long day’s chub stalking on the Sussex Rother, near Petworth. It was late, but instead of making straight for home I took a foolish plunge into a maze of twisting lanes, looking for a particularly fine-sounding pub a friend had told me about. I didn’t find it, in fact I got hopelessly lost.

Then the lane I was following dropped into a wooded valley and I found myself passing through a cloud of that sweet evocative scent. It was so strong and so infused with all the other summer smells I associate with carp fishing that I had to stop and investigate. Slowing down meant the scents stopped rushing into my face, but though less concentrated in the stillness, they were just as infectious; a lovely pot-pourri of elder, dog rose, honeysuckle and wild garlic weaving through the denser smell of ancient water like wood smoke weaving through a barn of apples. Somewhere nearby was a pond or a lake and it was essential that I find it. The setting fulfilled all my requirements for perfect carp country: deep valleys, old woods, no obvious signs of habitation and lanes that had more traffic going across than along them (since leaving the main road I’d not seen a single car coming or going, but there had been roe deer, fox, rabbits and a hare crossing in front of me).

Taking off my crash helmet I leant my bike against a fence post and stood in the road listening. I hoped there might be the distant sound of water trickling or rushing over an outfall, but apart from the ticking of the cooling engine, all was silent. The canopy of beech trees reached overhead but there was not, at least, complete darkness. The moon was up, only a few days from full, dappling the lane with vague spots of light. I began walking, looking for an opening through the trees where I might get a better view of my surroundings. After a short distance the tall smooth trunks on my left became stark silhouettes against a weirdly luminous background.

Low-lying roads back along the way had taken me through several pockets of mist and, with the clear night rapidly cooling after a hot day, conditions were pointing towards a fine, fat fog. There seemed to be a hollow lower down the valley, a perfect cup for the kind of mist that wells up from deep tepid stillwater. By dawn it would probably have overflowed and drowned the whole county.

I stepped under the trees towards the light but bramble and blackthorn made an almost impenetrable barrier and I could not find a clear way through. However, after a few jacket-ripping yards I did find a large half-decayed tree stump which improved my view once I had climbed up onto it. Straight away I saw what I had hoped to see.

Between two beech trunks I looked down at what appeared to be an expansive, pear-shaped lake. It was surrounded on three sides by woods, but I could not see anything of the banks because of the mist. The low, early-summer moon was directly overhead and the mist looked as white and as a smooth-surfaced as a field of snow.

Only by staring at it for several minutes could I detect the slow shifting, the almost imperceptible rising and falling of the upper layers. Then a curious current of air drew a long column of vapour out of the main mass and it rose up, pale and transparent against the trees beyond before detaching itself from its base, only to dissolve and vanish.

Of course, all the while I was thinking that this might be my perfect carp pond. I even hoped I might sniff out the very smell of carp amongst the other scents, for the fish do exude a faint yet distinctive aroma. It does not actually have anything fishy about it, reminding me more of dried herbs and marmalade. There may have been something like that in the air, but it was not strong enough to convince and anyway, carp or no carp, I knew I would have to return in daylight. The place needed exploring properly and I wanted to discover what creatures, if any, haunted it.

I turned to go and as I began wading back through the brambles I heard, in spite of my commotion, a sudden, sharp sound. I froze and listened and it came again: the echoing crash of a heavy fish leaping.

Stupendous carp lived in that lake. It had never been fished, in fact its existence had become almost entirely forgotten by the locals and the owners of the huge estate on which it lay. It was overgrown and inaccessible, its banks a tangled wilderness, its margins speared by reeds, jungled with weeds, bristling with the gnarled branches of drowned, fallen trees. The great fish would emerge from the depths and cruise between and beneath these reefs of dead wood or they would materialise out in the lake’s centre, drifting just below the surface, looking like the shadows of passing clouds.

These were the images I carried home with me that night and which grew even more wonderful and improbable in the days that followed, despite the fact that I could not find the lake on my map. Perhaps, I thought, it had been further north than I remembered or maybe, as sometimes happens, the cartographer had, for some reason, failed to show it. However, as a lifelong carpologist and hunter of lakes, I felt my optimism was justified. As well as having the right smell, the place had had the right feel.

Since quite early in my angling career, I have had this picture in my head of an ideal carp pool. Moreover, I did not merely hope that such a place existed, I was convinced, even though my vision of perfection, as described above, was rather unusual. All the ingredients though – the unkempt banks, the solitude, the tangled margins, the shadowy depths – all were necessary for that essential and yet indefinable quality: mystery. Every water, from winding brook to mountain tarn, has an element of mystery, but the mystery, the enigma of a carp lake should be deep and profound, as befits the nature of the fish itself. The problem nowadays of course is that, because of over-intensive angling, too many carp waters have had their mystery literally fished out of them. There is Redmire Pool, for instance, in Herefordshire, a legendary place and once the most magical stillwater in the country. But its jewel-in-the-crown status has now robbed it of much of its enchantment. Over the last forty years it has generated so much interest and attention – much of it of the wrong kind – that its finest quality has become diminished.

But it is not simply a lack of mystery which, to me, can undermine the complete enjoyment of carp fishing. There are many other reasons, some obvious, some obscure, why a lovely looking place could never be called perfect. And, unfortunately, there have also been near-perfect pools that were despoilt and some that have always been denied me.

Beechmore in Devon, deep and dark, encircled by towering trees, seemed the epitome of my ideal but, like Redmire, it was rather too high up in the carp fishing hierarchy, rather too well-known. Furthermore, I felt that the atmosphere was cool and occasionally even disturbing, as if the pool was a perpetually staring, hostile eye. A much more affable water was Sheepwash, a pool of about three acres set in gently rolling Sussex farmland. When I first visited it, in 1973, it was unknown, undisturbed, unfished. There were plenty of carp, one or two of them very large, there were willows in the water, lilies and vast weed beds. Yet, though it was pretty and despite the fact that I and a few good friends had many enjoyable days there, Sheepwash could sometimes seem prosaic, even bland; it was like a person whose talents you could admire, but whose lack of depth discouraged any lasting friendship.

Abbotsmere, in a green, fertile valley in the Black Mountains, seemed almost perfect when I first fished it, in 1970. It lay in the grounds of a former monastery and had a lovely hallowed air about it; a small pool, not more than two acres, surrounded by crack willows, alders and oaks. The carp were genuine wildies whose ancestry obviously dated back to the time of the monks. Beautiful fish: graceful, streamlined, richly-coloured in various shades of gold, ochre and blue.

In 1972 the pool was unofficially stocked with mirror carp which grew quite large and it was subsequently invaded by anglers for whom size counted for everything. Nothing else mattered in their headlong rush to accumulate carp poundage. The tranquil paradise became littered with beer cans and bait tins; it became crowded; it became depressing. I crossed it off my list.

Another love affair that ended badly concerned Furnace Lake, near Felbridge, Sussex. It was a large, square sheet of water, surrounded by high woods and great beds of reeds. When I first saw it in 1968, I was immediately struck by its quiet grandeur, its cathedral atmosphere. The carp were mostly small wildies, but there were also monsters known through legend and by the occasional tremendous splash as something rose from the depths. I actually hooked one of these mythical creatures on a piece of crust and its inevitable departure still haunts me. For a few years this lake was overflowing the pages of my fishing diary, but then, tragically, a mysterious disease wiped out almost the entire stock. The spirit went out of the place and though it was later restocked (with mirrors) it was never the same again.

There was a chain of carp pools in woodland to the north-east of Lewes, the largest of which, with its overhung bays, its overgrown banks, its wooded island and its clear depths, struck me as one of the most attractive, seductive carp waters I had ever seen. Alas, the owner refused me permission to fish. I discovered another marvellous pond in a dense hazel wood near the village of Dunsfold in Surrey. Reedy, weedy, it was mostly quite shallow and had, despite its tranquillity and remoteness, a uniquely cheerful, optimistic character.

It was also the domain of a colony of immense carp and I thought that even if I never obtained a permit I would still have to fish there, regardless. Then, by chance, I discovered the identity of the owner and my pleading letter was sympathetically replied to. I was given permission to fish there whenever I liked. Yet there are places on earth that are more than simply mysterious. No matter how glorious or magical (or maybe because of their magic) they are somehow impossible to revisit. I still have the owner’s letter, dated May 1969, but it’s probably too late now to take advantage of it. For all kinds of not very good reasons, I never went back to Dunsfold.

However, ten years later, the mist-shrouded lake preyed more effectively on my imagination and after a few days I knew I had to return. Even in daylight, I presumed it was going to be difficult to find again without a map reference. But, after an hour, chugging aimlessly through the labyrinth of hedged-in, tree-hung lanes, I recognised a landmark, picked up my trail and so came once more to the place where the road had taken a dive into watery incense.

In the breezy afternoon the fragrances were unnoticeable and the air was merely fresh and sweet. Leaning my bike against the same fencepost as before (off the road the turf was too soft for the propstand), I quickly found a straightforward route through the belt of beeches, avoiding all the thorns and brambles; yet before I reached the edge of the trees I suddenly knew exactly what I was going to find. I walked out into an open field and looked down into a wide hollow that bristled with reed tussocks and clumps of sallow, but which contained not even a