Rambling

If you want a diagnostic tool to tell who is genuinely posh, I suggest a couple of smoked eels.

In the days when I made my living catching eels I occasionally went to a long-established shop that sold game, fish, fruit and vegetables. Pheasants and rabbits hung around outside, and hares with white cups below their hare lips to catch the blood. You could get quinces and green walnuts and all the traditional produce of a county that had never heard of biodiversity. The owner, amusingly nicknamed Fishy, also smoked anything that could be smoked, and occasionally I would take him a couple of the finest fattest silver eels to smoke. I would collect them, tied together with a length of twine through their gills, and carry them off while I went shopping. If I took them with me into ordinary shops people tended to recoil, or even shriek with a kind of horrified fascination.  But if I went into one of those posh estate agents where the young women in reception seemed to have been chosen to look and sound as if they knew a thing or two about country estates, they would poshly exclaim ‘Smoked eels! How scrummy!’ thus demonstrating their authentic membership of the sporting aristocracy that loves to eat over-ripe pheasants and small birds complete with their intestines.(When they shoot snipe, which fly off in a zig-zag fashion and pass a motion on the third zig, they are supposed to follow the bird with their gun saying ‘’left, right, shit, shoot” to make eating the snipe a little more palatable).

At that time I was always on the lookout for lakes where I could fish eels. Increasingly often, lured by a gleam on the horizon, I tracked down plastic-sheeted strawberry farms that sparkled like distant lakes, but on this occasion I had found a real lake and been told that a land agent managed the estate while the owner was off managing his hedge fund. Behind the reception desk with the scrummy girls I was ushered into the office of the land agent, a relative of the Lord Lieutenant of the county who with a perfectly straight face wore a Viyella shirt and a canary yellow pullover, and had a bottle of sherry on his desk. He told me that there were plans to drain and dredge the lake; that as far as they knew there were no fish worth bothering with, but when they decided to go ahead they might possibly let me know.

Later that year, around Christmas time, the hedge fund man seems to have been throwing a party. One of his guests was a member of a local regiment which, if you believe Irish republicans, was once noted for shooting first and not bothering to ask questions afterwards. Talk at the party got round to the problem of draining the pool, and before long the soldier had rigged up some explosives he seems to have happened to have on him and blown a hole in the dam. True to form, he had blown the dam before asking if there were any fish in the lake. The lake was frozen at the time. The level started to fall, the sheets of ice took on crazy angles and the water dropped a few feet and then stopped. The soldier by then had other fish to fry, or bomb, or had maybe run out of ammo, and the estate agent in the yellow woolly and the cavalry twill phoned me on the Monday morning.

‘There’s a bit of a problem at the lake. We’ve got a chappy with a digger turning up. Could you be in attendance?”

The digger man was remarkable for his democratic approach to the problem. What we were doing, with a big machine perched on a crumbling dam that might be washed away once we got going, was clearly dangerous, and he consulted his son and me at every step. When we decided on an action he double-checked our consent every time, asking: ‘Do you agree?’ before every new attempt to get the water flowing out again. As the water level started to drop it was suddenly clear that the pool was full of fish. It was, as we say around here, sniving with them. There were huge carp flapping around among roach and perch, half out of the water. The digger man switched off his digger and sat back waiting for me to think of a way to rescue the fish, and I called my friend Graham because he seemed to positively enjoy doing mucky jobs. The wetter, colder, muddier the work, the more he liked it. I have crosscut trees with him by hand, waist deep in a cold river, graded eels on muddy lakesides and bagged charcoal until we both looked like coal miners, and he was the clear choice as an assistant for rescuing fish from the deep treacherous mud of a frozen lake.

I also contacted a man who ran a fish farm that specialised in coarse fish, who came with a small tanker for transporting live fish, and a large net to drag the pool. This didn’t work at all. The fish seemed to slip underneath the net, and eventually Graham and I started wading into the mud and bringing the carp out like babes in arms. You couldn’t really walk in the mud because there seemed to be no bottom, and we ended up more or less swimming in it, towing a boat full of big carp. I’ll be skilled up ready if ever I get into quicksand, because we found that if you found yourself sinking you could throw yourself forward and the mud would buoy you up. (I’d be a good man to be with in a vat of treacle too). It was bloody freezing, but we spent several days doing it, fully dressed in what we had hoped might have been waterproof but ended up filling with muddy water in the manner of a wet suit. The carp we rescued went off to various carp ponds and are probably still there, enjoying their retirement. We went on to rescue the roach, which didn’t do so well. They don’t much like having their gills clogged with mud, with which I sympathise. Finally we caught the eels, which I put in the net bags that eel-men use to keep them in, and put them in the pool below the dam ready to sell to the Dutchman.

The next morning I came up very early to take the eels away. As I pulled up below the dam I was aware of people running towards me. I’m pretty sure they were blowing whistles too, though it is just possible that I added that detail to the story so long ago that I’ve started to believe it myself.

Below the dam the stream ran past a Steiner school, and some of the roach that had slipped past us, and that didn’t like the mud in their gills, had washed up on the stream bank where the children played. Naturally the teachers had called the authorities, who sent water bailiffs to lie in wait to arrest me. I was accused of catching fish with an ‘unlicensed instrument’ – a net. I explained that we hadn’t caught anything at all with the net, because it hadn’t worked, and they calmed down and put their whistles back in their top pockets where they belonged.

I was released and went off with the eels to meet the Dutchman at our favourite rendezvous, or possibly his favourite plaats van sammenkomst, which was a layby on the approach to the Severn Bridge, and that was that. I hadn’t been back since, until I discovered that a long distance footpath runs through the estate, past the house and the lake, so that I could revisit without the hassle of confronting gamekeepers. And I decided I would do a bird count as we walked through this thousand acres of prime Herefordshire farmland, something I have been meaning to do for a while to document the loss of wildlife.

The path sloped gently past woods and parkland on one side, and cornfields on the all he lower ground. Nothing but cornfields, which if you know about farming is a little puzzling, because you are not supposed to grow wheat, for example, on the same ground two years running. It is a great crop if you know more about hedge funds than hedges, because you can arrange for agronomists and contractors to do everything on your behalf, which is a very bad idea if you care about the environment because they will inevitably grow it using a rake of pesticides and fertilisers. So I wasn’t expecting much wildlife, and saw none whatever until we came to a long stretch of fence covered in brambles, and were delighted by large numbers of Meadow Brown butterflies, and a few Gatekeepers, a single Tortoiseshell and a Red Admiral out enjoying the sunshine. We passed through a snicket into a long ride in a wood, where there weren’t even any pheasants (they probably haven’t let them out yet) and finally as we emerged alongside another wheat field I saw a Robin. It flew back and forth a bit, causing a bird counter’s dilemma – do you record 1 robin or 3 sightings – but I’m pretty sure it was just one individual. Then I saw a crow at the bottom of the field, bringing the running total on these 1000 acres of prime country estate, last sold for £15m,  to 2 birds, and 2 species.

At this point we saw one of those little green quadbikes with a flat-bed on the back, being driven in the direction of the crow. Gamekeepers like green quads, they can colour-coordinate them with their camouflage fatigues. He disappeared behind a well-funded hedge and we heard a bang. Another bird-census dilemma – do you deduct any birds shot during the census?

I kept looking around in case there were any birds that might bring the count back up to two. Luckily we soon came to the lake where I had floundered in the freezing mud all those years ago, now refilled and decorated with a mock classical temple on the island. And there at last were birds. There were so many coots and moorhens and ducks of various species that it was not possible to count them, and I contented myself with reflecting on the importance of water and wetlands in our countryside, never before having been confronted with such a stark contrast between farmland almost devoid of birds and water sniving with birds scooting around the surface and doubtless fish gliding among the lily beds.

On the way back we saw one more bird, a raven. This one was flying just above the boundary of the estate, and he didn’t hang around long. They are pretty smart birds. If you fly across this kind of estate and you can’t swim ornamentally on the lake, your best plan is to fly for the hills.