Fenemere

There is a glacial lake in Shropshire known as Fenemere. Oddly, because when I knew Fenemere it was rented to a carp fishery syndicate, and in the special inner world of carp fishing enthusiasts the names of lakes are usually changed to keep them secret. In 1951 a record-breaking carp was caught in a pond in Herefordshire not called Redmire Pool, but renamed Redmire by all the carp men to try to keep it secret. Because of this one fish, some English anglers became mad about carp, and wanted obsessively to know where this carp had been caught, hence the name not found on any map. The next year an even bigger fish, named Clarissa, weighing 44 lbs, was caught at ‘Redmire’ and taken away to London Zoo where it lived for another 20 years before being varnished and put in a glass case. The carp in Redmire were only put there in the first place to control the weeds, but the hooking of Clarissa set off a whole angling subculture.

Fenemere was a lovely pool, a relic of the Ice Sheets which had covered the area ten thousand years before. In this area they had left behind four huge lumps of ice, buried in the glacial rubble that dropped out as the glaciers melted. When the ice was gone four lakes formed in the ‘kettle-holes’ left behind by these four icebergs, of which Fenemere was one. It was surrounded by alder woodland, fringed with rushes and yellow flag and patches of water lilies. It also probably had a rich collection of rare invertebrates, because those glacial pools are very special, highly prized for anciently wild things that may not have survived elsewhere. It was an oasis among the farmland, and the carp syndicate who rented the fishing wanted me to trap some of the eels because there were so many that the members thought they were a nuisance, getting caught and writhing round and being difficult to get off the hook.

.

I was not allowed to fish the lake by myself at least until they came to believe that they could trust me with their precious carp. I had to contact the club’s bailiff so that he could supervise me. The bailiff turned out to be one of a pair of brothers. When I called  Bob the bailiff brother on the phone to ask where he lived and how to find him, he described a giant model butterfly screwed to the wall by which I would recognise their house once I got to their village. I knew nothing of these butterflies and had never seen them before and only later found out that they came from an entrepreneur in North Wales who called himself the Butterfly Man. Once you knew about them you saw them everywhere, but I thought theirs was unique, which was how I came to arrive at 4am one May morning, as arranged, at a house in the village with a huge Peacock butterfly screwed on the wall, and was able to wake a neighbour who had also recently bought a butterfly from the Butterfly Man. He grudged my apology, slammed the sash of his bedroom window, and I carried on to the house of the water bailiff, who hadn’t told me to look out for a Red Admiral and not a Peacock butterfly.

The brothers lived in an old brick house with brick paths and brick outhouses, and damson trees in the garden with useful lengths of timber leant against them, that seemed to have pushed itself through the earth of the garden like a mushroom and been quietly mellowing ever since, standing in a wet meadow near another lake. I supposed that the brothers had grown up there and had never married. They had worked in a local feed mill a bike ride away, and quietly kept house together ever since their parents died. They seemed to be whiling away their retirement watching snooker on the box, keeping the house and garden trim, and fishing carp. They were courteous men given to inviting me in to share their chips, spreading a clean hospitable sheet of the racing paper on the table for me and passing the Bee Top sauce.

I, like them, had been brought up in the countryside and been interested in the natural world, and like many small boys in those days I had not known what to do with it. One of my solutions had been to collect birds’ eggs, and another was to catch sticklebacks and newts and put them in an aquarium. I started to doubt if it was right to collect eggs, and maybe I didn’t quite have the small boy collecting thing as badly as my peers, and eventually I decided that I would become some sort of scientist. I bought a stiff-backed note book, lettered ‘Nature Diary’ on the cover, and from then on observing nature, recording my observations, and devising scientific ways of investigating the natural world was my way of being in nature. Just mooching around watching it was not quite enough.

For the brothers, I suppose, the lakes surrounding their home had been a big part of their country childhood. Lakes like these were the closest thing to wilderness, for they contained creatures that were mysterious and difficult to see, and for them, as small boys with the same problem of not knowing quite what to do with nature, fishing became the answer, as it has for so many men drawn to lakes and rivers and canals, needing a suitable way to channel their love of the natural world. They had become members of what it is almost impossible not to call the brotherhood of carp fishermen, men whose fascination with great carp weighing maybe 50 or 60 pounds, wallowing like pigs among the lily beds of lakes like Fenemere, occupied a place in their emotional lives not always understood by wives and girlfriends. In their eagerness to catch these fish, many of whom they knew by name, and saw briefly as they were photographed cuddling  them before returning them to the lake, they tried to think like carp,  devised methods of catching them and enjoyed competing with each other for the best secret carp bait recipes.

Carp are often caught with balls of coagulated milk protein called ‘boilies’. Bob showed me the shed where he mixed up his personal favourite secret ingredients, and the old pan he used when he boiled them up on the Rayburn, but he would not tell me which secret colours and flavours he used.

Bob came with me to the lake to make sure I behaved. The fishery was equipped with some lovely old punts that had once been part of Shrewsbury’s flood precautions. I got in one and he got in the other. I piled fyke nets, weights and ropes into my punt, and we paddled through a little creek between alders and yellow flag irises into the open water. Fyke nets are tapering tubular contraptions several metres long into which eels find their way as they wriggle around in the mud on the bottom. Their shape is maintained by metal hoops and they are stretched out singly or in strings in the muddy bottoms of lakes, between weights or anchors attached to the ends of each net or string of nets.

I would have liked to be alone on this lake. I have known a few people with whom I would have loved to share it, but as a kindred spirit Bob didn’t quite make it. But I wasn’t allowed on the lake by myself, because the chairman of the club, a mysterious but apparently powerful figure who I never met, needed Bob to decide that I could be trusted. 

The next day Bob and I punted out to the nets. The first fykes were in a shallow peaty place in a cool backwater, shaded by ancient alders. I reached down to the cod-end of a fyke and tried to pull it into the boat. It was full of eels, writhing and clucking as I pulled the cod end into the boat.  There were so many eels in those first few fykes that I had to release most of them back in to the lake, confident that I would catch them again in a day or two.

Now looking back I wonder if I was troubled by having so many living creatures in my power.  I’m not sure that I was. I fished eels because I wanted to make a living in the open air, where I could interact with nature. I loved the independence, the being out early in a boat on a lake before shame had put her slippers on, as they say in Sweden. I had my share of a family to feed and rent to pay, a good way to insulate the conscience. Above all the notion of a sustainable fishery beguiled me. In those days lorries dumping poisonous industrial waste in landfill sites usually had ‘environmental’ painted on their sides, and the word ‘sustainable’ is still often used of things that are not sustainable at all.

The argument for sustainable eel fishing might be that you could only fish eels in certain places, and in those days they were everywhere in streams and ditches, where they were difficult to catch. My fishing would have little impact, and all the while elvers would be making their way back to the lakes and watercourses, wriggling up the rivers, climbing the wet moss of sluice gates, an irresistible tide of young eels replacing those I took. The eels I was catching were nearing maturity and would soon be off to the Sargasso Sea to breed.  These migrating eels would be part of extraordinary numbers of silver eels from all over Europe, migrating in flood conditions down huge rivers where it was very difficult to fish them. And fisheries scientists everywhere supported the notion of sustainable fisheries, where a certain level of fishing effort would result in a constant level of catches. The theory was that there would be more food for the survivors and their progeny, who would thus do well, and that a perpetually sustainable catch level could be arrived at by this balancing act. This very simple idea took no account of other variables in the ecosystem; it took no real account of the basic concepts of ecology. Fisheries scientists were even then busy using these ideas as they very scientifically watched over the destruction of the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and as they discussed North Sea fishing quotas. But I took comfort in my plan to buy elvers to restock all my fisheries, an uneasy mix of motivations, of wanting to conserve the eels, and wanting to be able to come back and fish the lakes again. 

I was also beguiled by the notion of a countryside producing extraordinary delicacies such as traditional cider, farmhouse cheese, smoked eels and saltmarsh mutton, and was then a little less concerned than I am now about how we balance our food production with care for the ecosystems that we depend on.

My ideas at this time also took no account of the role of the eel in the general ecology of the waterways. Now I believe that eels are involved in a circulation of nutrients between the freshwater and the sea; that the elvers entering our rivers every spring are a timely food source just as the fish and the birds are raising their young, a crucial pinch point for the survival and prosperity of many species. The eels had co-evolved with all the species in the lakes and rivers, all the freshwater shrimps and caddis larvae and so on, and all their lives were the better for being so intertwined, in ways that biologists may never fully understand. Such ideas make it hard to justify to oneself disrupting such ecological systems, but I had not then reached these insights. Mainly excited by the hope that my fishing was going to be a success, I started pulling the fykes into the punt and transferring the eels into the bags. Eels survive well out of the water if kept cool and damp, but as each bag was full I hung it in the water over the side of the punt. Bob looked on, interested in my methods and pleased that the eels were being caught and that there would be fewer of them to writhe impossibly when accidentally caught by the carp enthusiasts. Pleased until we came to a cod end containing a huge dead pike. He went pretty quiet then.

When I had stitched the otter guards into the mouths of each of the fykes, I had accidentally missed one out.

The chairman, who I began to link in my mind with Mao Tse Tung, was a fan of pike fishing, which is permitted at a time of year when you aren’t allowed to fish for carp. I quite like seasonality. I like keeping bees in the summer, and taking the winter off while they huddle in their hives. But the Chairman didn’t share this view and had gone to great lengths to get some pike so that he could fish in winter. He had caught the pike in a reservoir in South Wales and hired a vivier tank, a tank in which you blow air or oxygen through the water to transport live fish, and he had brought these two big fish back to Fenemere to enliven the winter fishing. The Chairman, I was told, would not be pleased. I might even have to stop the fishing, just when it was looking promising.

I began a process of negotiation, through Bob, with the Chairman and the committee, about paying compensation for this fish. He drove quite a bargain, but he did also want the number of eels reduced, and I ended up paying £180 compensation for the pike before I was allowed to carry on fishing.

Most days after that I was left to fish alone as Bob didn’t normally get up much before the snooker came on. The lake had patches of water lilies, opening wide to the spring sunshine. The carp could be seen gliding around below the surface, or sometimes splashing among the low willow branches where they like to mate. There were swallows skimming off the flies, and spotted flycatchers making little fluttery sallies, a single insect at a time, from their perches. Coots and moorhens made their fenland noises in the marshy fringes as I paddled around, lifting fykes, filling the eel bags, tipping eels into the keep box, strangely happy and untroubled in my work. Now and then I caught a tench, a secretive chubby fish that likes to lurk near the bottom among the weeds. Sometimes there was a heron, or a grebe, or a kingfisher.

So I carried on fishing this lake, spending hours quietly emptying and resetting nets, paddling in the sunshine listening to the skulking waterfowl, and dropping in on Bob and his brother to report my catches and drink tea, until it seemed to me that it was time to move on. I had not taken all the eels, and I had carefully graded out the small eels and returned them, and was planning to restock with elvers at the first chance. Meanwhile there was another lake a few fields away belonging to a local corn merchant. This one was had a false name, which had become so famous in carp fishing circles that it might almost be more discreet to call it by its real name.

This lake was quite different from Fenemere. It was surrounded by pastures. The cattle came to drink at the margins. They had that quiet herbivorous rhythm, slowly grazing across the meadows to arrive at the lake to drink when it was, as it were, time for tea, and their rumination was similarly routine, if one had enough mindfulness to notice. There were alders growing round the pool, and embayments in between them where the cattle trod the banks down and stirred up the black mire when they came to drink. There was no wetland margin, no strip of reeds and irises, and not so many waterfowl skulking and making fenny noises. But everywhere in the shallower waters were alders growing from primeval stumps. These looked a little like the boles you get in ancient woodlands, where trees have been harvested in the coppice rotation for hundreds of years. I have no idea whether it had been the custom for these alder stools to be coppiced at intervals for firewood, or whether what put me in mind of mangrove swamps was the result of some ancient natural process of death and renewal. The carp fishermen must have similarly wondered, sitting on the bank watching their floats, for their secret name for this pool was ‘The Mangrove’.

These fishermen were borderline fanatical. At one of the pools an angler had been so keen to catch two famous carp that he spent his holiday camping on one of the platforms that they had built out into the lake. One night, snugly mummified in his sleeping bag, he rolled off into the lake and nearly drowned while fumbling for the zip. The fishery was run by a man who published a magazine with a title like ‘Giant Carp Monthly’. He also had a business selling patent baits and boilies and suchlike, and it is hard to resist saying that whatever size of pond carp fishing is, he was quite a big fish in it, and as a result the people renting fishing by the day on The Mangrove were very keen to impress, and very jealous of their reputations as top carp men. They used every conceivable patent coloured and flavoured kind of ‘boily’ as carp bait.  Some of the eels, unknown to me, had eaten these concoctions and now had pink flesh that tasted of strawberries.

At this time I was working in loose cahoots with a Dutch eel man on the Severn and selling to a Dutch eel merchant. Pieter kept an eye on the pound and the guilder and only liked to sell to the Dutchman when the exchange rate was in our favour. As a result these eels went with Pieter’s to London, where I sold mine to a jellied eel merchant with premises under some railway arches near the Aldwich. He rang me later to say that pink jellied eels that tasted of strawberries had not been a hit in the East End pubs. I offered to return some of the money, but he said we would sort it next time we met, so I suppose I owe him still.

(This piece is a heavily edited extract from a memoir called ‘The Eel Trap’ which I hope to dangle enticingly sometime soon before a literary agent in order to persuade a publisher to take the bait. Wish me Tight Lines!?))