History of the Rain (4 page)
The Reverend came in and jutted his jaw.
‘Abraham?’
‘Father.’
Maybe the Reverend knew right then. Maybe that was all it took. The Swain men aren’t great for talk. What I imagine is the darkening of the Reverend’s shave-mask, the cold fish-glitter of his eye, narrow-nosed inhale as he realises this is his punishment for imagining Abraham would be The Next Big Thing in Holy World. He turns away to the long window, clasps one hand in the other, feels the chill of the Presence and begins to pray that his son will leap to a glorious death.
Preface
Let me begin by stating what, although perhaps evident to even the most inexperienced of anglers on their first day in this country, nonetheless deserves repetition here: Ireland is a paradise for the salmon-fisher. The plenitude of her rivers, the particular clarity of her waters and the undiminished beauty of her topography all combine towards the creation of the fisherman’s idyll. Indeed in certain weather it may seem that every part of this country is lake and stream and the angler can hardly journey a few miles without encountering waters teeming with salmon or sea trout. In times of flood from numerous miniature rivers fish freely ascend. Wet weather, which is usually plentiful, suits most rivers best and if the angler is properly attired and of sturdy character there is no reason why salmon-fishing in Ireland should not provide him with an experience as close to angling paradise as can be found anywhere.
It is the intention of the author that herein shall be a complete description, drawn from personal experience, of all of the salmon rivers of Ireland. We shall provide detail of the most noteworthy runs, annual close times, dates when netting may be plied, rods plied, as well as the best Irish salmon flies, tacklemakers, etc etc. While this alone would constitute all that is required of an angler’s guidebook it is the author’s belief that it would be remiss if this were all when writing of salmon in Ireland. For in this country to the salmon is attributed a magical character. Here it is not forgotten that he is in a figure of two worlds, both fresh and salt water, mystical, mythic, and in many eyes no less than an alternate God. It is not only that the salmon strives after the impossible, not only that he seeks to be a creature of air as well as water, but that in moments of startling beauty and transcendence he achieves just this. Nor is such appreciation confined only to salmon-fishers. The Irish admire the heroic and all who endeavour against outrageous odds. To give but a flavour, a small boy in Galway or Limerick or Sligo will tell you the story of Fionn MacCumhaill as if it were yesterday’s news. Fionn speared the Salmon of Knowledge, he will tell you, at the falls at Assaroe on the Erne. The salmon had derived its knowledge from eating the hazelnuts that dropped in the stream and now from the salmon Fionn learned that to make a poet you need: Fire of Song, Light of Knowledge and the Art of Recitation, thereby for ever sealing salmon and poetry in the Irish mind. All of which the author believes can only serve to enrich the salmon-fisher’s experience in Ireland. There shall therefore be occasional anecdotes, fragments of lore, superstition and belief, all of which in this country are inextricably entangled, not least because in Ireland Saints and Salmon have for a long time been on first-name basis.
Now, having followed the advice of Richard Penn, Esq. whose twin-volume
Maxims & Hints for an Angler
and
Miseries of Fishing
(John Murray, Albemarle St., London, 1833) have long been indispensable to the present author, namely ‘when you commence your acquaintance with a salmon, allow a brief period for introductions’, it is time to delay no more but take a steady stance, survey the river, breathe, and cast.
People are odd creations, this is my theme. None odder than Swains.
On the fourteenth of August 1914 the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry landed at Boulogne, France.
What happened next I imagine sometimes when I am brought out of the county by ambulance. When the Minister redrew the map of hospitals in Ireland, calling them Centres for Excellence, she forgot about Clare. It’s often done. We’re neither one thing nor the other, neither South nor West; we’re between the blowsy tramp of Kerry and the barrel-chested Galwegians, both of them dolling up, dyeing their hair and pushing to the front. So, if in Clare you have
Something
, as I have, you have to be brought out.
Timmy and Packy come for me. Timmy has flaming orange hair and the Hurling bug and if you give him the slightest encouragement he’ll let you enjoy samples of his throat-singing. Packy’s mother has done the impossible and made him think he’s good-looking, but they’re lovely really. We go without the siren but there’s still that smell that is the opposite of sickness but makes you think of it anyway. And there I imagine him, Grandfather Swain in France.
Nobody now living was there. That’s the thing. But a lot of them are in the pages of books. My grandfather is inside the skinny smoky copy of
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque (Book 672, Fawcett paperback, New York), in the stern stiff-feeling pages of
The Guns of August
(Book 1,023, Barbara Tuchman, Macmillan, London) and the buckled second-hand
Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War One
(Book 1,024, John Ellis, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore), books my father read to see if he could find his father.
Here is the long tall stretch of Abraham. He’s in a trench, cold rat-run muck-puddle, suck and splash, cigarette smoke and then stillness. He believes he is there for a purpose, that he was called for this and he waits in the line for the word to come. The waiting is the worst for someone like him. He’s got all that mind, all that inner country he keeps going around in, mines and craters, caverns and dead ends. Mind has Mountains, that’s in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Book 1,555,
Poems & Prose
, Penguin, London). Or, put another way, there’s a man, Gerry Quinn, lives under the shadow of Croagh Patrick in Mayo and says he goes up the mountain most days and when they asked him on the radio why he does it he said at this stage that mountain’s part of me. In Maurice Sendak’s
In the Night Kitchen
it comes out as ‘I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me.’
There in the trenches our Abraham goes up and down those inner mountains bigtime.
What am I supposed to do with this life?
is a common Swainism. It’s just about embedded under the skin and the way the hook is you can’t pull it out, it just makes things worse. So Grandfather Abraham wriggles on the question and waits for the word. When the command comes, when Captain John Weynsley Burke appears in the trench looking all dry-cleaned and Dad’s Armyish and says, ‘Cigarettes out, chaps. Today I’m going to get you medals,’ Abraham does not hesitate. He doesn’t think there’s German guns waiting to fire on him or that the next moment might be his last. He trusts that
This Is It, O boy
, he trusts that there is a purpose, however blind and mysterious, and it’s pulling him in now. He can hardly breathe with the swift tow, the sense of the Great Fisher getting him on the line, and the free feeling of just going, of release. He’s filled with a sudden bright-red bloom of elation. He tosses his ciggy, shouts out, and into the air already streaming with German gunfire he leaps.
Zip zip zip the bullets fly into him.
He sees the tears in his uniform and thinks:
that’s interesting
.
But he keeps going.
Then he sees the blood coming.
Why is that?
Because there’s no pain yet. There’s too much adrenalin and rhetoric in his bloodstream. There’s whole chunky paragraphs of What it Means to King and Country. Never mind God. There’s fine speeches still pumping up along his arteries, principal and subordinate clauses, the adjectival, the adverbial, in gorgeous Latinate construction and hot breath. It’s the Age of Speeches. There’s exclamation marks doing needle dancing in his brain, and so he gets twenty yards into the war.
Zip zip zip. Splash muck-puddle splash.
He looks sideways and sees Haynes, Harrison, Benchley, spinning backwards like they’ve been hooked, invisible lines whipping them off their feet and into the Next Life. It’s very Spielberg. Only without the John Williams soundtrack.
Grandfather’s running on. God bless him, Auntie D says when she tells it, as if she’s still not sure he’ll make it through her narrative and any of us will ever be born. The way she tells it, sitting bolt upright in Windermere Nursing Home, Blackrock, room at maybe thirty degrees which is the way the Filipino nurses like it, I’m not sure I will be.
Abraham’s leaking now, a sticky slather of blood gathered at his belt, but he’s still running and getting ready to fire his First Shot of the War. His rifle is wavering, they haven’t really explained this bit, that running & shooting is quite different to standing & shooting and that running & shooting
while being shot at
is for obvious reasons, chaps, not taught at all. It’ll come to you; don’t worry, men.
Grandfather doesn’t see any Germans. Germans being Germans, they’ve taken a practical approach and decided to keep their heads down and their guns up. It’s more technik than the valiant British method of running at bullets.
So, as Abraham is about to fire in the general direction of where there might be Germans, zip! another rip comes in his uniform just below the heart and instantly whop down he goes.
And that’s it for Grandfather.
There’s a Gap.
A white space in which he’s gone from the world.
I know what that’s like too, when the last thing you feel is the pinch in your arm and
this might hurt just a little
and you’re off into the wherever depending on the length and breadth of your imagination. My father has a whole section of his library just for this. Here’s Thomas Traherne (1637–74), poet, mystic, entering Paradise (Book 1,569,
The Faber Book of Utopias
, John Carey, Faber & Faber, London): ‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown . . . the dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The Gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through the gates, transported and ravished me . . . The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And the young men glittering and sparkling angels; and maids, strange and seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels.’
Paradise has actual
gates
?
Thank you, Thomas. We’re back: Grandfather’s dead in a hole in the ground.
It’s a bomb crater. The artillery boys have had fun blowing holes in France and some of the holes like this one are deep. He’s down there on his side, his mind doing last-minute preparations for the Afterlife, when the whole attack above retreats and the Germans take their turn to advance.
It’s like Dancing in Jane Austen, Advance and Retreat, only with guns and mud. The German attack passes Grandfather’s Hole.
But one German sees Grandfather move below and he jumps down. He does. He jumps down into the hole. And he whips out his bayonet.
It’s in this thin little protective scabbard that keeps the blade clean. What Grandfather sees is a flash of light. He pulls out his pistol.
Only his arm isn’t working so that doesn’t actually happen.
He tries again, thinking
pull out your pistol
, but there’s only this torso-wriggle in the mud, and now the German is closing in on him. Grandfather’s looking at his arms telling them to wake up but he sees his whole chest is this tacky darkness and he realises the bayonet is the least of his worries.
The German is standing over him, full sky behind his head, and knife in his hand.
And then, flat German face perspiring, eyes intelligent and calm, he leans down to Grandfather and does the most remarkable thing; he taps Grandfather twice on the shoulder.
‘Tommy okay,’ he says. ‘Tommy okay.’
Then he takes the bayonet and cuts a strip of cloth and with swift efficiency ties a tourniquet round Grandfather’s arm. He opens his pack of Whatever-To-Use-if-Shot that the Germans have given their soldiers and he splashes some on Grandfather’s chest wound.
