The first trout of my fishing life came at just the right time; if I had gone off to London without the remembered glory of that cloudy September evening, I might never have picked up my rod again. The dim sense of calling that I was beginning to feel, even before its sudden confirmation by the catching of a ten inch trout, would probably have faded quickly and soon been quite forgotten. I should have spent my summers travelling abroad, like most of my friends, or reading classical texts, like just a few of them; and so, along with golf and half a dozen brief adolescent passions, fishing would have been remembered as something trivial that belonged to the past. My waders would have grown mould in a damp corner of the cellar; perhaps the Mitre Hardy would at last have been sold; perhaps it would have stayed propped in its corner of my bedroom, undisturbed and unremembered, for seasons on end; and the money that bought me my first landing net would probably have been put towards the cost of a Greek dictionary, or bought me some tobacco and a few pints of beer.
That first net fell to pieces at last; I have bought other nets since, lost some of them and been given several more. I have worn out at least a dozen pairs of waders since that first pair was finally thrown away; but my first fly rod, the old eight-and-a-half-foot Mitre Hardy, still hangs on the wall in the same tattered green slip. Beside it there are three Sharpes, an Eighty Three and a Fario and a Featherlight; there are two more by Hardy an eight foot Perfection and a nine foot Halford Knockabout. The Perfection is now my rod of choice and it is years since the Mitre Hardy emerged from its slip; perhaps some day I shall take it fishing again and bless the memory of the parents who forbade its sale and so, without knowing it, made me a fisher for life.
Among the books that I bought in my first weeks at university, mostly books on Latin and Greek grammar and editions of classical texts, were two that had no connection with the Ancient World; they were Lord Grey’sFly Fishing and Plunket Greene’sWhere The Bright Waters Meet. Already I owned one or two fishing books, but these were of the how to catch them sort, even if they did not, like Baverstock’sBrook Trout, belong to the How to Catch Them series. I had read and unwillingly returned those books from the town library, but it did not take long for me to realise that their authors – I wonder if Dewar was one of them – could not hold a candle either to Grey or to Plunket Greene, who had soon come to mean just as much to me, in their own way, as did Homer and Vergil; for they helped, during that first real close season of my fishing life, and amid a welter of new experiences, to sustain my conviction that to be a fisherman was a deep and very special blessing. I had caught only one trout, which had turned me immediately into a passionate angler; but I was an angler with no hope of catching his second trout until at last next April came along. And so I fed my longing on the pages ofFly Fishing andWhere The Bright Waters Meet. I would turn to them before sleep, when I found that Grey’s praise of the Itchen and Plunket Greene’s loving tribute to the little river Bourne both glowed more warmly in a mind mellowed by two or three pints of beer.
I read of southern rivers that I had never seen; they seemed wonderful rivers where great trout rose to suck down fishermen’s flies; but very often, as I read of the Itchen and the Bourne, my mind’s eye was moving along the banks of a northern trout stream, along the bank
