Country Fair. Max Hastings
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a lot of the trout I hook, sometimes deliberately, simply because nobody in the house will eat it more than three or four times in a summer. It is a problem with fish that until one tastes them it is impossible to guess how they will turn out. Some are delicious pink things, rich with shrimp, while others prove to have grey flesh, and to taste only of pellets. The latter is bad enough if one is eating alone, sorely embarrassing if there is company. Even salmon cannot be relied upon, unless they are fresh-run. In ignorant youth I killed a lot of stale fish for smoking or fishcakes, before realising that a horrible old red thing will always taste that way, however one processes it. We try to eat every fish within a month or two of committing it to the freezer, before it dries out.
We are fanatical consumers of garden produce, our big extravagance. Even the crudest calculation by most honest amateur gardeners reveals that one could have fruit and vegetables delivered weekly from Fortnum & Mason more cheaply than growing one’s own. I speak as one who has just put in a new fruit cage. Only around 2035 might the strawberries and raspberries grown therein pay back the price of the frame. But that is not the point, as we peasants tell each other. The issues are quality and self-sufficiency.
The quality bit starts looking shaky when we contemplate our asparagus. It is thin stuff compared with the fat, rich stalks from the pick-your-own place down the road. We struggle on, however, pouring onto the soil ever more dung at £65 a load, together with chemical fertilisers in industrial quantities. Cabbages, beetroot, onions, leeks and the rest flourish mightily on our acres and are eaten in bulk. The gardener cheats, however, by leaving every week at the back door baskets groaning with produce from his own allotment, rather in the spirit that Nigella Lawson might display a cake before the camera, saying smugly: ‘And here’s one I prepared earlier.’ He is especially eager to produce earlier samples of species which I have planted with my own hands. This twists the knife, or rather the trowel, about my horticultural limitations. In a cynical moment, my wife suggested that we could simply get the gardener to maintain regular deliveries from his own patch, saving the expense of doing our own tillage as well. Shame on her.
My favourite technical innovation, purchased four years ago, is an apple press. Every season now, we squeeze and freeze about forty litres of apple juice, lovingly stored in plastic milk containers. As I point out, this also saves the gardener from having to clear up thousands of windfalls. As Penny points out, however, using an apple press requires physical effort matching that of child labour in a coal mine circa 1840. I am bathed in sweat after an hour of turning the great screw, manhandling the truckloads of fruit needed to produce a litre or two of juice. I find the process therapeutic, pleasingly Hardyesque. Others, however, gaze wistfully down the road that leads to the supermarket as they mop their brows in the autumn sunshine.
We are self-sufficient in firewood, thanks partly to fallen branches, and partly to the fact that we don’t use a lot when we cuddle the Aga all winter. Like most men, I thoroughly enjoy an outing with a chainsaw and a chunk of fallen timber, though at least once a season I give myself a fright, using the saw up a tree. There was a delicate moment when I severed a big ash limb. As it plunged to the ground, the lightened butt sprang upwards, trapping my arm between itself and a rung of the ladder on which I stood, twenty feet above the ground. It took a lonely ten minutes to disengage myself, during which I contemplated my immortal soul, and reflected that these experiences are not quite so bracing at fifty-something as they seemed at twenty-something. I got no sympathy indoors, either.
Most of us get lazier with the passage of years. I no longer make my own sloe gin, nor point chimneys, hang wallpaper or demolish pigeons in the garden with a .22. The more expensive tools I install in the workshop, the less likely I am to use them for ambitious woodworking of the kind I enjoyed thirty years ago. Yet it still gives pleasure to see things around house and garden which one has built or repaired with one’s own hands. The consequence of a childhood during the rationing era is that I never feel entirely comfortable about the state of the household, unless it is provisioned for a siege. In my complacent bed at night, I go to sleep counting not sheep but game in the three freezers, poised in the epicurean waiting room en route to my plate. I do not despair of learning to pot my own shrimps. We would have to call our Hastings Towers version The Quite Good Life rather than the whole package, but we do our rustic best.
NOT LONG AGO, I watched a young girl cast a fly on a Scottish salmon river. Her line fell in a bundle amid the stream, and straightened only five, ten seconds after landing – which of course meant that it was unlikely to impress a fish for half the time it was crossing potentially active water. My heart bled for her. Yet I need not have worried. She caught a fish. This turned my mind to a general question. We know that a good dry fly trout fisherman will always catch more than a bad one. Unless one is plying a river in the mayfly season, or addressing oneself to tame fish lately released, the fine caster prevails over the coarse one, because presentation is all.
Yet different rules apply to salmon fishing. Again and again, we see novices and indifferent fishers achieving startling success. I have been a beneficiary myself. Many years ago in Sutherland, I remember looks of pained disgust on the faces of others in the party, who were enamoured neither of my company nor of my casting, as they saw me land an indecent number of salmon. For sentimental reasons I was fishing with a huge old greenheart Hardy of my father’s. Returning with a fish one night, I heard a fellow-guest mutter disgustedly: ‘And with that rod, too.’ In short, I was lucky.
Luck can carry an incompetent fisher a long way on a smallish salmon river, with good water. A long cast is seldom necessary. Most beats contain pools dominated by rushes of fast water, which will rectify a poor cast very quickly, whipping the fly round into touch. Maunsell, author of one of my favourite sporting books, The Fisherman’s Vade Mecum, urges that one should never retrieve a bad cast, but leave it to complete its course. That cast can never be exactly repeated, he observes. Every now and again, however unjustly, a tangle of line will catch a fish, because some whim of the water will advance the fly in a tempting fashion. I follow Maunsell’s advice religiously, and never try to recover a poor line.
On a big river a better caster will usually catch more salmon, because he or she will cover more taking places. On the Tay not long ago, in a nasty wind, telepathically I knew exactly what my boatman was thinking: ‘Unless that big bugger can throw a better line than this, he won’t catch many fish here.’ He was right. I landed a grilse which took in streamy water directly behind the boat, but my attempts to cover a distance remained unconvincing. The salmon thought so, too. One is sometimes rescued by a wind, which can flatter casting outrageously. But it is a wry law of fishing that most winds blow the wrong way. It is dispiriting to see flies whipped round behind the line, and not infrequently knotted as well. Those are the moments when I hate suffering under a gillie’s eye. Alone, I can sometimes sort myself out, and make the best of a bad blow. With sceptical eyes present, however, I can never do so. Worst of all in these circumstances, the gillie finds an excuse to take the rod himself for a moment, and flicks the fly effortlessly across the flood as if that accursed zephyr did not exist. Those are the times when I am tempted to take up bowls.
At low water, the quality salmon fisherman comes into his own. The duffer is confounded. When the flow dwindles, the river shrinks to expose acres of rocks and pebbles on the bed, the man and woman who know what they are doing can achieve amazing results, while the rest of us are put in our places. It is an object lesson to watch a really gifted caster place a fly, and move a fish, when we lesser mortals despair of stirring the surface, save to drive salmon into flight. I fished the Naver for many years, sometimes in conditions verging on hopeless. A party fishing the next beat from us never seemed to lack something on the account. ‘The Farquharsons are the best fishers on the river,’ our gillie observed approvingly, refraining from comment upon our own doings. Likewise, I met an exceptionally skilful friend fishing a neighbouring beat of the Naver during a boiling, arid July when our own party had despaired. I found that he had taken two salmon out of a mere puddle of a pool at 6 o’clock that morning. I too was fishing at 6 a.m., but without success.
I recently suggested to Angus, a notably skilful gillie, that in all conditions and all