Arthur Ransome (1884-1967)

Arthur Ransome, the son of Cyril Ransome and Edith Boulton, was born in Leeds on 18th January, 1884. Educated at Rugby, Ransome was a reluctant student. He studied science at Yorkshire College (later to become Leeds University) but left before taking his degree.

Ransome moved to London where he scraped a living writing stories and articles for various literary journals. In the summer of 1913 he was commissioned to write an English guide on St. Petersburg. While in Russia he began work on Old Peter's Russian Tales.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Ransome was recruited by the Daily News to report on the Eastern Front. Later he was also employed by J. L. Garvin, to write for the Observer. During this period he worked closely with Hamilton Fyfe, a journalist employed by the Daily Mail.

After the Russian Revolution, Ransome remained in the country and became friendly with Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. His reports provided a sympathetic view of the revolution and when he arrived back in England in 1919 he was arrested by the police. After being interviewed by Sir Basil Thomson, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Ransome was released after he convinced the authorities that he was not a communist revolutionary.

While in England he wrote Six Weeks in Russia (1919), an account of the revolution. Upset by what he had written, the Foreign Office refused him permission to leave the country.

Eventually, with the help of C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, he got his passport back and returned to Russia.

For the next five years Ransome reported on Russia for both the Manchester Guardian and the Observer and also wrote the book, The Crisis in Russia (1921). In 1924 Ransome married Evgenia Shelepin, who had previously worked for Leon Trotsky.

In 1924 C. P. Scott sent Ransome to Egypt. This was followed by two years reporting for the Manchester Guardian
in China (1925-26).

In 1929 Ransome began writing novels for children. Although not immediately successful, his books eventually became best-sellers. The twelve books include Swallows and Amazons (1930), Swallowdale (1931), Peter Duck (1932), Winter Holiday (1933), Coot Club (1934) and Pigeon Post (1936).

Arthur Ransome died on 3rd June 1967.
The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, edited by Rupert Hart-Davies, was published in 1976.

Rod and Line was published in 1929 and is a collection of newspaper essays.
The book is as much Arthur Ransome's philosophy of, and insight into, life, as a book on fly fishing. And it is this that gives it a wider interest than if it were simply a guide to fly fishing.

The First Day at the River

The pleasure of the first day at the river begins some months before it. It is in its beginning a little quiet, rippling pleasure, like a stream near its source, made up of all kinds of imaginings too remote to be very disturbing. It swells as time goes on. Tributaries join it, such as the pleasure on some cold winter's day of tying a few flies ready for the season, visits to fishing tackle shops, a letter from a friend showing that he has not forgotten that you and he decided last year that you would open this season together, occasional inspections of tackle, oilings of reels, small varnishings and other excuses for taking your fly-rod from its case. A trout scale clinging to the cork handle since last year has a quite notable effect when you discover it unexpectedly.
The little, almost secret stream of pleasure swells gradually as the day draws near and if the day is long postponed the effect is like that of damming up a river.

A day or two before you do at last get to the water you are likely to answer absent-mindedly if people question you on less important matters and to talk too long if they happen to mention the one subject which is now in almost complete possession of you.
On the eve of the day you plan to go to bed early in order to be able to catch the morning train without loss of sleep, but do, as a matter of fact, go to bed later than usual. In spite of all your long expectation there is so much to be thought of at the last minute, so many things that must not be forgotten, besides a sort of exaltation that would not let you sleep even if you were to go upstairs to bed.
The proper thing to do on the eve of your first day at the rivers is to lose a game of chess. You will have no chance of winning it unless your opponent is a fisherman and unless he, too, is visiting the river for the first time the next day. But you can play and lose with a good heart and the utmost equanimity, your mind fluttering to and fro between the winding river that you have not seen since last year and the chess board which, with its rectangular squares, its mathematical precision, is the greatest possible contrast to it.

Lord Grey, in an incomparable paragraph, has described going to the railway station to go fishing thirty years ago. He said that the best way to get the utmost relish out of that, when living in London, was to walk over Westminster Bridge and to neglect the hansom cabs, in some way different from all others, that were to be found at certain places by those who looked for them in the early morning. The best way today is to get there as quickly as possible, for, with all your preparations, you will be running it fine for the train. Also a scurry through the town at the last minute is the best prelude for the leisure of the riverside. It is like the pepper which Keats put in his mouth the better to enjoy the coolness of claret.
It is good, however, if, on the way to the station, you get a glimpse of trees, in bud or young leaf. The chalk stream season opens late enough for that and even with our earlier northern opening, trees in Manchester contrive to give us some foretaste of the spring.

The train journey, no matter how well you know it, will take longer than you expect. But, after you get out of the train, the further journey to the riverside is short, no matter how long you take about it. You are already there and ashamed of your previous hurry. You prolong these last moments instead of trying to shorten them. But you discover a curious indifference as to what you are to have for supper and accept without question the suggestion of the inn or lodging keeper.

I never take out my fly rod and put it together at the riverside for the first time in the season without an uncanny fear that l have forgotten what little l have ever learnt. I would always rather make my first cast in private. Last Saturday, visiting one of the small Hampshire chalk streams for the first time since getting back to England, I did not begin fishing until I had seen my companion, about a field away, rise and lose a fish. His season, at least had begun well.

It would be a rare bad omen to hook and catch the first fish you rise. The three miracles should come singly. The first is that your line does, after all, shoot out and that your fly does, after all, drop splashless on the water. The second is that a fish rises to your fly. If you were not to miss it you would be cramming the second and third miracles into one, for the third and properly separate miracle is that when you rise a trout again you find with a surprise new each year that you have hooked it.

With any luck that first fish will be undersized and you will put yourself on good terms with the stream by putting it back, not throwing it, but dropping it gently in the quiet water at the edge and seeing it suddenly realize that it is free. After that you are fishing in earnest and there is little to distinguish your first day of the season from any other day's fishing. Although, perhaps, in each year you get a particular satisfaction from the first of many small experiences, that will become habitual before the season is over. There is a little extra delight in the first flash of a moving fish that you notice under water, the first sight of a feeding fish approaching your fly before he breaks the surface, the first detection from, for example, the behaviour of bubbles, that there is in some unlikely place a bit of slow moving water which should hold a good fish and the first triumph when that good fish, so detected, proves you right by taking a firm hold of your fly when you drop it carefully just within reach of him. You are rather like a child going through it's whole vocabulary and delighted by the successful remembrance of each word.

The first day of the season should not end with an empty basket. It is not likely to, for the trout are as unacustomed to the angler as he to them. But there is no need that it should end with a full one. It would be out of nature and disheartening to make one's best basket on the opening day. No, it should be a day like last Saturday, ending for the two of us with nothing to quarrel about, four brace and three and a half, the best fish being with the man who had caught the lesser number and the two baskets emptied in the evening making a handsome sight upon a decent dish. And, even if everything has gone just as it should, perhaps the greatest satisfaction of the first day of the season is the knowledge in the evening that the whole of the rest of the season is to come.

The Benign Moment

The benign moment is difficult to define or explain, though every fisherman knows it. It is like one of those sudden silences in a general conversation when, in England, we say, 'An angel passes' and in Russia, in the old days,
they used to say, 'A policeman is being born.'
The day is not that day but another. Everything feels and looks different. The fisherman casts not in the mere hope of rising a fish but, knowing that he will rise one, concerned only to hook it when it comes. He knows that even the hooking of it is more likely than at other times. Weather, river and fish seem suddenly to be on the angler's side and prepared to do their best for him.

This is not the moment to be wasted in putting on a fresh cast. hawthorn trees seem to know this and, joining in the happy conspiracy, skillfully evade the flies that in moments not benign they reach out to clutch greedily behind the anglers back. Or is it that in these moments, trout rise so near the fisherman that he is never tempted to lengthen his line in dangerous places? But in other moments all places are dangerous. Flies cling to moss, to stones, to clothing, whirl themselves tightly round the rod or, in an instant, turn a straight piece of fine gut into a cat's cradle. When this last happens, wise fishermen take it as a kindly indication that the moment is not benign and that their flies may as well not be on the water.

If they swear they do so with such good temper and even gratitude that their words fall like a caress. They do not pull off the cast to be disentangled at home, but, there and then, sit down patiently at the riverside, observe with calm pleasure a wagtail or a dipper, enlarge their souls to leisure, and, without hurry, reduce the cat's cradle to order, stretch the cast anew and know that they have lost no time, no good time at all. And when this elaborate business is finished, if they do not arise suddenly with violence and stride with determination up-stream, they have a good chance of being rewarded in other coin beside that of moral satisfaction in which, already, they have been richly paid.

Half a dozen sand-martins may be skimming the water, picking up from above their share of a hatch of flies that the trout will be attacking from below. More: trout may be rising in the very water which the angler left when he came ashore to do his disentangling. The fish that was put down by being offered the tangle of gut that it was not his business to unravel, may now be rising again and ready to take the fly that was in that tangle, now happily straightened out. Again and again it happens that the benign moment follows immediately upon a moment so far from benign that it has compelled the fisherman to give the river a rest.

So often, indeed, does this happen that I am sometimes tempted to think that the benign moment is a wholly subjective affair, that it is less a state of river than a state of mind and that when we are told to take a rest when we are fishing badly, we are really being told to create, artificially, a benign moment for ourselves. But, when actually fishing, I am quite sure that the benignity of the happy moment, when it comes, is not of my making, is not dependent upon me and is dependent on some subtle combination of circumstances not under my control. It is a meteriorological not a psychological phenomenon. And with that I am back again at the difficulty, not so much of defining it as of explaining it, of analysing it into it's component parts. I sometimes fancy that it depends on some slight change in atmosphere pressure. This would explain why it seems not only to make the trout more willing to rise and to take flies well into the back of their mouths, but also to improve the fisherman.

I fancy that if, in addition to all the tackle we already carry with us(we could not do it if we had as many fish to carry as our grandfathers), we had with us barographs of sensitive nature, registering changes of pressure so that we could observe them from hour to hour and even from minute to minute, we should find that the benign moments of which we were conscious would be marked in some way in the line traced by the barograph’s recording needle. Those moments are not to be explained simply as coincident with a hatch of fly. In moments other than benign flies may sail down river in Ar­madas without the slightest effect on our baskets. And, in any case, how judge between cause and effect?

A hatch of fly does usually seem to accompany a benign moment, but may not the flies, like the trout and the fisherman, be encouraged by the moment instead of being its cause. Then, too, on our swiftly varying rivers, it is possible that prolonged observation would show that the benign moments would be indicated in some way on a curve that should represent from minute to minute the rising and falling of the water. For example, a benign moment often occurs when the river first shows to the fish signs that it is going to rise. To the fish, I say, for they know all about it before the duller angler has drawn his deductions from the flotsam carried on the stream, the first dry leaves picked from its shores as the river, higher up, brimmed above the line at which they bad been left. And when, after a freshet the river clears, such moments are sometimes to be enjoyed.

But here, we seem to be considering good conditions for angling in general rather than the conditions of those rare moments that sometimes make the difference between a blank day and one on which the returning angler sings or whistles in the dusk. The benign moment proper occurs, and is most noticeable when it does occur, in a day on which the conditions for fishing are, in general, poor.

Perhaps on account of our unsettled weather and uncertain streams, the benign moment may be considered as a phenomenon characteristic of north country fishing. On the equable chalk streams it occurs, but is, somehow, less important. On the prettiest chalk stream in England I have known a dull hour to be followed by this miraculous change, as if I had closed my eyes for a moment and opened them on a different day, as if a wand had been waved and a spell loosed by some invisible being in the water-meadows. In the south, however, the coming or not coming of the benign moment is not one of the chief interests of the day. Whereas, with us, the possibility of its coming is the thing that enables us to put up with much hardship and disappointment.

In this weather, with the barometer jumping up and down like a grasshopper, with the river one foot in drought and one in flood, to one thing constant never, the hope of the benign moment sustains the fisherman through many barren hours and sometimes puts something in his basket at the end of them.

Poachers

There was just the beginning of light in the sky and the thick mist over river and meadow was already white. When we came to the Marron Pool nothing was visible more than a few yards away. `Where are we?' `You'll find the big stone just before you. The thirty yards below it are the best.' Our voices were low, but in the windless quiet were enough to give warning. Somewhere in the mist below us there was sudden loud splashing. An otter? Then angry low voices. More splashing. Poachers! There was a minute of silence. Then a shrill whistle between the fingers produced a thunderous splash some forty or fifty yards off. Someone had been startled and missed his footing in the river.

We moved along the bank to Marron Foot, watching the ground. The Poachers, however, had crossed the river and taken to the high wooded bank on the far side, from which they have been known to stone anglers in the water. The pool was useless anyway, and as we walked upstream again, while the light grew and the mist rolled up, we found the tracks in the wet grass showing how the men had come. There could be no fishing in the Marron Pool that dawn.

Poaching in the Cumberland Derwent is not what it was five years ago nor what it is to-day in Wales, but the long drought has worn out the watchers, who have to be busy protecting the fish from every kind of disaster, and after all, watchers are few and poachers know that they must rest sometimes. The poachers had probably seen us fishing the pool at dusk, and, when we went off to brew coffee in the fishing hut and to talk the darkness out of the sky, they must have made sure that place was left to themselves and others on the same bad business, like the heron who, when we disturbed him, went off with loud indignant curses, most unlike the muffled anger of the humans. His attitude towards us was probably like ours towards them. He looked upon us as poachers, creeping quietly along his river to disturb by our crude methods his private, skilful fishing.

Most fishermen have a softness for the heron, as they have for the kingfisher and as they have not, usually, for the otter, though `G.W.M.' of the Derwent, who knows the otter more intimately than most men know their household cats, assures me that the otter is a harmless, not too successful fisherman, fit almost to be a member of an exclusive angling club. The poachers and the heron may have done better than we, but we found the sea-trout at their dourest, hooked one and lost it, rose another, but otherwise, except for the troutlings, might have been fishing an empty river. They were not feeding. That was all, for the river is full of fish.

Fishermen's Patience

Nothing is more trying to the patience of fishermen than the remark so often made to them by the profane: 'I have not patience enough for fishing.' It is not so much the remark itself (showing a complete and forgivable ignorance of angling as it does) that is annoying as the manner in which it is said, the kindly condescending manner in which Ulysses might tell Penelope that he had not patience for needlework.

What are they, these dashing, impatient sparks? Are they d'Artagnans all, rough-riders, playboys of a western world, wild desperate fellows who look for a spice of danger in their pleasures? Not a bit of it. They hit a ball backwards and forwards over a net or submit to the patient trudgery of golf, a laborious form of open-air patience in which you hit a ball, walk earnestly
after it and hit it again.
These devotees of monotonous artificial pleasures who say that fishing is too slow a game for them seem to imagine that fishing is a sedantary occupation. Let them put on waders and fish up a full river and then walk down it on a hot summer day. Let them combine for an afternoon the arts of the Red Indian and the mountaineer and, in the intervals of crawling through brambles and clambering over boulders, keep cool enough to fill a basket with the up-stream worm. Let them spin for pike in February, or trout in August. They will find that they get exercise enough.

Some forms of fishing are sedentary, in the purely physical sense, in that after a man has baited a spot for carp or roach, or anchored a boat for a perch, he keeps still. But he has not attained a sort of Nirvana, like a crystal gazer, isolating himself from nature by concentration on a miserable ball. His mind is not dulled but lively with expectation and, of all the virtues, patience is the one he least requires.

Of all kinds of fishing only one requires patience and that is trailing a bait after a boat when someone else is doing the the rowing. Even in those forms of fishing which do not mean moving about, it never occurs to an angler to pride himself on his patience. Self-control, if you like, but not the most leisurely of all the virtues. There would be patience needed to watch a float which (there being no fish in the water) you knew would never budge, but none in watching a float that may at any moment make a demand for instant action.

What other people mistake for patience in anglers is really nothing of the sort but a capacity for prolonged eagerness,
an unquenchable gusto in relishing an infinite series of exciting and promising moments, any of which may yield a sudden crisis with its climax of triumph or disaster.
Something rather like patience may be required by the kind of fisherman who casts a fly mechanically and uniformly and is jerked into consciousness only by some extraordinarily altruistic little trout who in a passion of benevolence hangs himself on the end of an undeserving line. But such fishermen seldom persist and, if they do persist, learn to fish in a different manner. Fishing, properly so called, is conducted under continuous tension. The mere putting of fly or bait on or in the water is an action needing skill, an action that can be done well or ill and consequently a source of pleasure. Many an angler returns with an empty basket after a day made delightful by the knowledge that he was putting his float exactly where he wanted it, casting his fly a little better than usual, or dropping his spinner with less splash at greater distances.

The mere athletics of casting give the fishermen all the golfer's pleasure in good driving or putting. But, and here is the point, there is no red flag to show the angler in what direction he should aim, to take from him all initiative, to put him, as it were in blinkers. His free will is limited only by his skill in execution.
If he is a trout fisher he is watching the river for a rise, for a boil, for the slight swirl in the water that betrays a fish feeding below, for the roll in the surface made by a submerged stone above which may be a motionless pocket, below which may be a minute eddy, either a fit place for a trout to lie in wait for his dinner. Now and again, if the river is new to him, he will find a hole in what he had thought was continuous shallow and will tell himself to remember next time to fish that spot before he comes to it. All the time he is watching for cover and will use the hole that he kicked himself for not seeing before he came to it to keep low and out of sight while he casts to another likely spot above.
He marks where the water runs slow under the banks. At the hang of a pool he tries to put his flies at once just where the fish is likeliest to be. He knows that a mistake is all but irrevocable, that a first cast has a better chance than a second and a second a much better chance than a third. His day is a long series of crises and demands on his presence of mind. Even in float-fishing so much depends on observation, on watercraft, on the reading of barely perceptible signs, that those who imagine that a good fisherman can watch his float and think of something else beside his fishing are very much mistaken.

So completely does fishing occupy a man that if a good angler had murdered one of those people who prate about patience and were allowed to spend his last day at the river instead of in the condemned cell, he would forget the rope.

The ultimate test is one of time. Patience is a virtue required when time goes slowly. In fishing time goes too fast. Fishermen's wives are unanimous in deploring the hopeless unpunctuality of their husbands at the fag-end of the day. Fishermen rarely have time to eat all the sandwiches provided for their luncheons. If, on occasion, they do eat in leisure at the waterside it is with the peculiar relish that accompanies stolen fruit. They run a race with the sun, and are always finding that it has beaten them and is casting their shadow on the water long before they had expected to have to cross the river. The only time that seems to the fishermen longer than it is is that in which he is playing a big fish. Then, indeed, his drawn-out anxiety makes him apt to think he spent an hour in landing a salmon which was actually on the bank in fifteen minutes. But no one will suggest that those minutes were so dull that they needed to be patiently borne.

Back to the Stone Age?

'A frank resumption of palaeolithic life without the spur of palaeolithic hunger.'

So Mr Graham Wallas in his good book on   Human Nature in Politics   describes hunting and fishing.
He does not mean it as praise. Huntsmen must make their own defence. Fishermen need question only the tone in which
the words are used, for the actual words offer a profounder justification of fishing than is offered by most professed apologists.

They do not mean a resumption of Stone Age barbarity. Mr Wallas wrote the words in 1920 when this age of flying machines, big guns, poison gas, cheap newspapers and other means of creating and justifying hate and panic had only recently given proof of barbarity on such a scale as had never been equalled in the history of man. We have no need to return to the Stone Age to look for barbarity. We have enough and to spare.

But it is true that fishing allows us to refresh ourselves by a temporary resumption of of a life in which a man's chief concern is not inextricably confounded with other men's activities, but is, simply, to trick a dinner out of the river.
The packet of sandwiches in his pocket, his possible dislike of eating fish, does not affect this matter in the least. Mr Wallas is right. We have no need for the spur of palaeolithic hunger. Our fishing satisfies quite another need. Escaping to the Stone Age by the morning train to Manchester, the fisherman engages in an activity that allows him to shed the centuries as a dog shakes off water and to recapture not his own youth merely but the youth of the world.

He may not know that this is his aim. Indeed if he were too conscious of it he would not be able to achieve it. But, if we watch him we notice a number of signs that show clearly enough that when he goes fishing his primary reason is not the need of fish. He imposes on himself unwritten laws that betray his real intention. He has a better reason than hunger for being a fisherman. He is not moved by a primitive instinct for slaughter. If he were he could satisfy it better by using a hand grenade, poison or a net. His unwritten laws give the fish approximately the same chance that they had against the hungry savage.
Most fishermen are secretly dissatisfied with themselves if they feel they owe too much of their success too the mechanical perfection of their equipment. For example, I have yet to meet a man who has done much spinning and fly fishing who would not agree at once that he would rather catch his two-pounder on a fly than with the help of one of the ingenious modern spinning reels. The fisherman sets the highest value on those fish which have made the highest demands on his personal prowess, his knowledge of nature, watercraft and his skill. A fish caught on a home-made fly is a greater satisfaction to the fisherman than one which has been tricked by a fly bought in a shop. Why? Because it better satisfies the fisherman's instinctive desire to re-create conditions in which he depends on himself alone in his voluntary contest with nature.

There is no hostility in this contest. The trout chasing minnows or picking flies from the surface of the stream is contesting with Nature in the same way as the fisherman chasing trout. Neither trout nor fisherman are opposed to Nature in their several activities. Quite the contrary. The home-made fly gives the fisherman a better right to say, 'Alone I did it.' That is why he prefers it. We should like to make our own rods, our own lines, if we could. But we must make some concessions to our modern inefficiency. We can comfort ourselves with the thought that probably even the Stone Age Halford borrowed his cousin's rod if it was better than his own and employed his wifes fingers in plaiting his horsehair line.

There may have been no horsehair lines in the Stone Age. There may even have been no rods. No matter. Mr Wallas slammed the big word palaeolithic at us not because he had any particular period in mind but because of the handy weight of its five syllables. We return in fishing not to the Stone but to the Golden Age. Historical accuracy is happily denied to us. We do not feel it necessary to go fishing in a wolf's skin instead of in a Burberry. The character of our return to this mythical age is far deeper than can be expressed by any fancy dress. What we are doing is to exchange an elaborate and indirect for a simple and direct relationship with Nature. This latter relationship is very hard to put into words. Is the fisherman returning to the Golden Age to enjoy aptitudes in himself which he otherwise might lose? Is he reassuring himself by happy experiment that he can still climb down his family tree?
Fishing cannot be explained simply as a means of escape from our over-elaborate life, for it is enjoyed by men who have lived all their lives on the river bank as well as by those who escape to their fishing from the towns. The happiness of Walton's fishing was as keen as our own, but the country then was at a Londoners back door. The truth, I think, is, that we resume 'palaeolithic life' not because of preference for any past age but to seek a relationship with Nature which is valuable in all ages.

When William Basse wrote ;

'My hand alone my work can do,
So I can fish and study too'

he was either a liar or a bad fisherman. For the good fisherman is always engaged in the active exercise of his imagination. He is the fish he catches. He, as that fish, feels the currents in the pool and pushes his way to shelter in a pocket of still water. The fish that go into his creel are so many testimonials to his right reading of nature.
The power of vision that he develops while fishing persists when the rod is in its case. The fisherman knows what is happening in the river when he is not there. As the rain pours down on autumn streets, he is conscious, as he buttons his coat about his neck, of the fish running up the Eden from the Solway Firth. The pavements are soft grass under his feet, the stone walls of the houses are no prison for him and through the roar of the towns he can hear running water. It is this that distinguishes fishing from such pursuits as golf, cricket, football, billiards, or chess. These games do not affect a man's relationship to nature. Fishing does.

In looking round for another pursuit of which this can be said, I think of gardening.
The gardener, like the fisherman, 'resumes palaeolithic life without the spur of palaeolithic hunger.' Like the fisherman he becomes so much a part of Nature that he is reconciled to the changes of the year. He welcomes the seasons as they come and no longer wishes to put a spoke in the wheel of time.
It is generally said that gardeners and fishermen make fine old men. This is not surprising. They have been caught up into Nature, grow old with a good will and no hanging back, and are without misgivings about their own mortality.

Fishing Inns

Fishing inns are of two kinds, good ones and downright swindles.
As the holiday months draw to an end, most fishermen have something to say about one or other. It is noticeable that they say a good deal more about the downright swindles than about inns of the other kind. This is not because there are more of them, but because a good fishing inn is something that is not often given away. The man who has found such an inn is inclined to keep it to himself, lest by becoming too well known it should come to hold more visitors than there are fish in it's waters, and so deteriorate into one of the downright swindles.
These everybody knows. Their advertisements are shameless anachronisms, since they describe as good fishing the depleted waters that were well enough fifty years ago. For them the fishing is merely what the feathers are to the bare hook, a means to attract, but a travesty of what is promised.

The visitors to these places are always new to the water, for no man would ever go there twice. The new-comer finds himself among other new-comers, bamboozled like himself, and, like them, hearing from the landlord of the great catches that have been made there in some golden age, lingers from day to day until his holiday is gone and he is himself almost out of conceit with the sport that has filled his dreams for months before. There is no one to undeceive him. All are new and full of hope, and do not realize until it is too late that the only successful angling in that place is done by the landlord, and that they are themselves the poor fish who rose to a lie in an advertisement, were played and landed, and will at last be 'put back', wise enough at least not to rise to that particular advertisement again.
That is, indeed, their only revenge, for they have been fed and bedded, and if they have paid an extravagent price for board and lodging on account of the fish which, not being in the river, are not to be caught, no one to whom they complain will understand their bitterness or put down their empty baskets to anything but their inadequate skill.

It will be a long time before the Anglers' Diary, for example, that invaluable guide to fishing, good and bad alike, has the courage to copy Baedeker and to distribute stars to those hotels where the fishing is really good and whole constellations to those whose fishing deserves it. When that day comes we shall judge fishermen with more accurate regard to the waters in which they fish, and the man who gets his brace of half-pounders from the waters of a fishing inn with one star will hold up his head with the man who has got his dozen brace from the ten-starred water elsewhere. Meanwhile there is nothing to be done, except to demand some more accurate description of the fishing than the word 'good', which, in the interests of an inn-keeper, is sometimes applied to the barrenest waters in the kingdom.

Good fishing inns are easily defined. They are inns the guests of which have the opportunity of good fishing. If they give us that, we can forgive them all else. Their beds may be boards, their food uneatable except at the close of a good day, when a fisherman will swallow anything.

One of the best I ever knew was not an inn at all, but a peasant's barn, inhabited by rats and chickens and such an enormous quantity of fleas that the sleepiest of men could count on being on the water at sunrise. The food was black bread and the fish we caught, with plenty of eggs and plenty of milk. We washed in the river, for there was nowhere else for that purpose. To get to that place we drove thirty miles along a bad road and nearly as many where there was no road at all, but we drove with delight, laughing at the bumps which on any other journey would have been no laughing matter, for we were going to the river or coming back from it, and on that river we counted it a poor day if we had not our ten brace of trout and grayling apiece. Perhaps that old barn, on the cliff above the river, is no fair example. But there are plenty of such places in England. If the fishing is good, nothing else matters much.

If I were writing a guide to fishing lodgings and fishing inns I should give that barn five stars, wheras I should give no star at all to the famous   __   at   __ ,  where the beds would satisfy the princess in the fairy tale and they serve a six-course dinner at night and a five-course luncheon in the middle of the day.
Luncheon in the middle of the day betrays a bad fishing inn (unless on one of those sea-trout rivers that are fished at night).
In a good fishing inn they have forgotten how to make luncheons, for all their guests grab sandwiches, rush out immediately after breakfast and come back hungry for dinner with the sandwiches still in their pockets, because they never had time to eat them.
An inn that expects its guests to come in for luncheon in the middle of the day is an inn with a bad conscience, which knows that its water is not worth fishing.

It is best, of course, if the people of the inn are a little interested in fishing. They should know enough to say the right things. I do not much like it if the landlord himself fishes. If he fishes too well he is apt to be a bore. If he fishes too badly he is apt to be a butt. we can do well without either.

The widow of a fisherman makes a good hostess for a fishing inn. Her relationship to actual fishing is near enough but not too near. She will not think that it is a good fishing day because the rain is coming down, and she will have learnt not only to accept excuses for failure but even to feel when they are necessary and to offer them herself. A good fishing inn is enhanced by a picture or two by Rolfe or some stuffed fish, but these should have the dates and places of their capture clearly visible inside the cases. There are bad fishing inns, I have been told, that buy stuffed fish and hang them in their halls as a sort of ground bait.

Lastly, of course, a good fishing inn has the right visitors. These are simple, kindly fellows, not desperate 'eye wipers' of the kind so delicately described by William Caine. They may disagree on all subjects but one. That one is a rhyme known as the fisherman's prayer. On that they should be unanimous. If any mutton-headed purveyor of second-hand wit should so much as begin to lead up to the quotation of that rhyme, they should be the sort of men who, without a word said, would arise all together and take that man and drown him in the river.

'The One That Got Away'

The sea-trout rushed across the pool while the reel screeched. At different moments I saw a long greenish flash in the water, a tail, a shoulder. But he never jumped, never came up and splashed. By all the signs I took it that he was well hooked. As for his weight, I could feel it. As for what he was, had I not seen a shoal of the fish in that very pool an hour before when prospecting from among the trees on the high bank? He drove forcibly about the pool, while I settled down to the routine business of tiring him out. Only once he frightened me by getting a rock between us. Then, suddenly, he began to go down-stream. Before I could move on the slippery stones he was below me. I hurried after him, but not fast enough, and presently he was nearing the rapids leading to the next pool, which, from my side of the river can only be reached with great difficulty. I backed ashore and put on all of the strain I could in hope of pulling him across into quieter water. This was extremely foolish. Again and again I have tricked a fish into coming up by slackening pressure on him. On this occasion the run down-stream was so sudden that it startled me into folly. And then, the hook pulled out and I had lost him as I deserved.

I was too sorry to keep this misadventure to myself when I met my companion. 'How big?' said he. Now I know my rod well and the feel of a fish on it. I had seen enough to know that this fellow was not foul-hooked. Speaking to myself, I put that fish down as from three to four pounds. Until I lost him I had put him at four at least. But so many lies have been told about fish that it has become, in such cases, almost uncomfortable to tell the truth. For my companion, I estimated that departed mort at about a couple of pounds. That would be easier for him to believe. But, even so, I had asked too much and I felt that his condolences were a concession.

Driving home, with the bitter knowledge that I had lost a four-pound fish and that even by cutting down his weight by half I had failed to make him altogether credible, I reflected with a good deal of resentment on the reasons that have brought people to describe as 'fishy' any statement in which they do not believe.

For at least 275 years the honesty of fishermen has been something questionable. It should be noted that Izaak Walton, whose book was published in 1653, spoke not of  'anglers and'  but of  'anglers or  very honest men'. Walton, of course, would have censured me for saying that I 'lost' a sea-trout which I never had, except pulling mightily at the end of my line. He would also, have censured me for describing as approximately two pounds weight a fish, lost or not lost, which I believed to be four. But he would have understood that my dishonesty in diminution was not an original sin but a by-product of a great many other people's dishonesty in exaggeration.

For too many years not all but too many fishermen have had 'a multiplying eye'. They have lied in words. They have lied in gesture. I think of that apparently involuntary, horizontal and centrifugal motion of the hands that inspired Mr Punch's picture of a scarecrow addressed by an angler returning from a club dinner with the words, 'My d...d...dear fellow, I d...d...don't believe you!' We none of us do, and disbelief of what is implied by that gesture has become so general that even the most honest fishermen are unpleasantly conscious of it. Even for them that natural and beautiful gesture has been spoilt. Nowadays, if you closely observe a man who by that motion of his hands is explaining to another the size of a fish, you will see that his hands have a nervous tendency to close again, especially if the other man looks steadily upon them. The fish would seem to be elastic and, having stretched, to discover, suddenly, a willingness to shrink.

I think that men tell lies about fish not so much from boastfulness, as is generally supposed, as from stiffness of mind. For there is no denying that the actual business of fishing is one of deception. When you offer a trout a bundle of silk and feathers you tell him, as well as your skill allows you, that it is a pleasant edible fly. You hope that he will not find out that you are lying until it is to late. When you offer a roach a maggot you hide from him as far as you can your intention to pull him from the water by means of it. Your ground-bait, the half-dozen hookless maggots flung in from time to time, are so many false asserverations that the maggot on your hook is equally harmless.

Now it is not your naturally deceitful but your stiff-minded man who cannot keep his falsehood in the proper place, who cannot without extraordinary effort tell lies to fish, but truth to men. It is stiff-mindedness, not wickedness, for there is nothing to be gained by it. You will find that the more noted liars among your fishing acquaintance are men with a marked lack of nimbleness of mind, no splitters of hairs, the sort of men who apply particular names in a general sense, who call, for example, everyone a Bolshevik who does not vote for the Conservative party. They are not romancers but simply dull fellows and probably bad fishermen. They are likely even to lie to themelves in their own fishing diaries. It is these dull fellows, a few of them in every generation, who have brought all talk about fishing to such a lamentable pass.

Good fishermen know that in talking about fishing nothing is interesting except the truth. Of what use is it to us to hear that B. lost a five-pounder in a certain pool when we know that five may mean two or one and that pounds in this connection are not registered weights, but vary in the most incalculable manner. It comes simply to this, that B. tells us that he lost a fish and that he puts it at five pounds because he does not expect us to believe him anyway. Neither party gets any satisfaction.

Of course it does not matter at all that we should be disbelieved by the main herd of humanity who, not being fishermen, can hardly be said to be more than partially alive. There is no need to talk to them on matters obviously above their heads. But it is sad that owing to the dull and stiff-minded members of our own high order we cannot talk to each other with confidence that we shall be believed.
When a big fish gets away the truth about it lies, if not at the bottom of a well, at the bottom of a pool in the river. There is no getting at it except on rare occasions. To speak of it is to ask a man to believe an unlikely thing on uncorroborated evidence; unlikely because many more small fish are caught than big; uncorroborated, because it is impossible to weigh the fish. Yet there is no point in lying on such a matter. It is no honour to have lost a fish. If we speak of it, it is to seek sympathy, not praise.
Yet, thanks to a few liars in every generation, we risk the insult of mere politeness. In general, perhaps, it would be better to say nothing about lost fish. But, when you are still smarting with the loss, still in the mood of Lucifer first dumped in Hell (for there are few more violent shocks than that with which a man playing a good fish finds that he is playing nothing at all), it is almost impossible to keep quiet about it.

Theatre of Blood
Letter to Hermione
Grandads Potting Shed
William Burroughs