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", 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 it. Perhaps
it was the ghost of a long dead carp angler who just
rotted away through sheer boredom and inactivity. Unless
he had been eaten by the rats.
The Cut rats were of a
deviant strain that had 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 see them twitch up and down mysteriously as if
you had a bite, but 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 wires
until the lights came back on. Some journeys required
the clutch to be bled every twenty minutes, or more
mundanely, the wipers needed to be activated by the
string that was tied to them and fed inside the
windows.
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. None of this modern, poncy
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 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 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.
The truth finally dawned on me when
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, while 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 used to flying, had obviously veered off
course, and failing to lower its 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,
there 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 Guineas 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, and a rock the size of a cannon ball hit the
sloping bank, missing Mike by inches, and rolled out of
sight into the 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."