Second Nature

When I was seventeen in 1959, the lake was as wild a place as I knew. My friend Jeremy Hooker and I would arrive there at around four a.m. in early summer, ditch our bikes in the tangle of rhododendrons, and pick out the narrow path by torchlight as we tiptoed, in existentialist duffel coats, through the brush. Still a long way from the water, we moved like burglars, since we attributed to the carp extraordinary sagacity and guile, along with an extreme aversion to human trespassers on its habitat. Crouched on our knees, speaking in whispers, we assembled our split-cane rods. In the windless dark, the lake’s dim ebony sheen was at once sinister and promising. Somewhere out there, deep down, lay Leviathan, or at least his shy but powerful cyprinid cousin.

Our style of fishing was minimalist – no weights, no float, nothing but a hook concealed in a half-crown-sized ball of bread paste, attached to 150 yards or so of nylon monofilament. Though the fish in the lake ran to 20lbs and more, our lines were of 6lbs breaking-strain. The carp, we believed, had eyes so keen that it would baulk at nylon any thicker than gossamer 2X, soaked in strong tea to camouflage it on the muddy bottom. Before first light, and the first woo-woo-woo-wooing of a wood pigeon in the trees, like a breathless child blowing over the neck of a bottle, we’d cast our baited hooks far out, settle our rods between two forked twigs, and squeeze a bead of paste on to the line between the open reel and the first rod ring. A quivering movement of the bead would signal that a carp was showing interest in the bait. The rest was watching, waiting, taking gulps of hot coffee from a shared flask, smoking Anchor cigarettes, and talking in a conspiratorial murmur about books and girls.

The lake slowly paled, with helical twists of mist rising from the water. As the sun showed through the woods, a big carp jumped, crashing back like a paving stone dropped from the sky and leaving behind a pin-sharp, reminiscent after-image of olive and gold. We strained for signs of moving fish – the sudden flap of a disturbed lily pad, or a string of tiny bubbles filtering to the surface – and, tense with expectation, willed the telltale beads to tremble into life.

We nearly always had the lake entirely to ourselves. It was out of bounds to the boys in the prep school, a converted Queen Anne manor, in whose estate it stood, and we regarded it – and the permission we had from the headmaster to fish there – as our exclusive privilege. The lake was no more than two acres at most, but, with its resident water rats, moorhens and wagtails, its visiting herons and kingfishers, and its enormous, mysterious fish, it felt like a sufficient world, magically remote from Lymington, Hants, a few miles to the west.

As often as not, the carp disdained our bait, and we’d leave at mid-morning, five Anchors apiece for the worse, but on good days, usually after hours of waiting, the bead of paste would twitch, then stop, then twitch again. This could go on for half an hour or more. The carp – with its big, lippy, toothless mouth – is a leisurely feeder: it rootles along the bottom, vacuuming up silt; swills it about in search of delicacies, then ejects the muddy mouthful like a wine taster using a spittoon. The bead would rise an inch or two towards the first ring, and sink slowly back. Then, either nothing at all would happen, or, at last, the line might begin to slide steadily through the rings, uncoiling from the open face of the fixed-spool reel. That was the moment to strike – to lift the rod, engage the pick-up on the reel and find oneself attached to what felt like a speeding locomotive as the carp ran for the deep, the rod bent in a U, the taut line razoring through the water. Of the fish we hooked, most were quickly lost when they jumped, doubled back or buried themselves among the lilies, but sometimes we’d have a thrilling twenty-minute battle, never seeing the carp until the last moments, when it flopped, exhausted, over the rim of the extended landing net. Out of its element, it looked prehistoric, like a paunchy coelacanth; its armour of interlocking golden scales glistering in the sunshine, its great mouth framing an O of astonishment and indignity at its capture. Still jittery from our encounter with this creature from a netherworld, we’d unhook it, weigh it and return it to the water.

Jerry later wrote a fine poem about these expeditions, titled ‘Tench Fisher’s Dawn’ (there were tench in the lake, too, though they evidently interested him more than they did me), whose last line reads, ‘Then, casting out, we’re suddenly in touch.’ In touch with what, though? Nature was how it felt at the time, an engagement with the wild. But in England, nature and culture are so intimately entwined that their categorical separation is a false distinction. At the lake at Walhampton, the two were fused. The rhododendron jungle where we hid our bikes was made up of species introduced to England from the Alps, North America and the Himalayas between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Carp were first imported from Eastern Europe in the early thirteenth century. Until the monastery’s dissolution in 1539, Walhampton was one of the many outposts of the powerful Augustinian priory of Christchurch, Twineham. The lake was certainly artificial – probably a later enlargement of a monastic fish pond – and our fat carp were the direct descendants of the exotics farmed by the monks, or so I like to think now. The surrounding woods were sculpted by ‘improvers’ in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. We were fishing in the deep waters of several hundred years of patient engineering, cultivation, fish husbandry and landscape gardening – not first but second nature.