Once (7 page)

So one thing follows another, and off you go, and before the day's much older you are back with a few worms and a little number 12 hook on a length of nylon and a stone for anchor, and cord line to join your tackle to a secure place, carefully concealed in the ivy. The anchor twists and turns in the force of water, then finds a hold, and your bait hangs in the stream. There it swims to await your return, perhaps before evening has fallen, perhaps quite early next morning. Pull the line in to find a little trout on your hook, beautifully spotted and green-backed, luscent, and cream-bellied. Just stare at it there, as your mind takes its indelible snapshot impression, ever bright to see again, the speckled fish. And don't now forget the wagtail's nest, fish meanwhile for your pretty speckled egg as well.

Everything was inward and immediate, and called forth ingenuities. How did I know how close to hatching an egg might be, if I hadn't found the nest before the clutch was complete? By experience and guesswork, by the week of the month, by the parent bird's reluctance to desert, by holding it up to the light, weighing it in the palm, or, if the ditch nearby had water enough to support it, or if there was still-water anywhere near, by testing to see would the egg float, or sink. If it floated the embryo was too highly developed to blow it through the pinprick hole. Better put it back and hope for the best.

The conventional way to blow an egg free of its white and yolk was to prick a hole at either end, a hawthorn or a wild rose thorn from the hedge was handiest for pricking, and then to blow through it, from the rounder ‘big-end' until its contents came out, over your fingers sometimes, over your chin if the wind blew, and sometimes back into your mouth. You could blow the eggs of larger species through a single hole about mid-way down the egg, through a fine straw or grass stalk. There was a coarse kind of grass you could find by the stream. Pull it and it came like a joint from its socket, and with a careful cut from your penknife you could get a treasured length of three or four inches with the finest bore to blow through.

You could wish for nothing better. But either method the hazards were the same. When what was in proved too thick to come out, you must blow harder, and the exertion might cause you to grip the egg too tight and so break it, especially if it was a small egg, like the delicate egg of a warbler, a whitethroat, a blackcap, or a wren, a dunnock or from up at the farm a swallow. Or you might suck the last of it out into your mouth. Or the embryo was too advanced to come out, or the egg was addled, a too-early egg, or the nest recently abandoned, perhaps because of prying boys, like that much coveted greenfinch's that you came upon too late.

There was a code, never to take more than one egg from any nest. But two or three boys might together exceed it, boys being boys, nasty, brutish and short, with no savagery too base. So I remember being one of a righteous trio who found a young cuckoo in a dunnock's nest. The sight of the decayed corpses of its fellow nestlings on the ground being consumed by ants and other creatures, inspired collective indignation. Until, like a crowd that has worked itself up into beating someone to death, we removed the fat cuckoo chick from the nest and killed it. I will not name the boy who sat on it. But it was not I. I daresay I'd have killed it with a stick, or stamped on it. The RSPB would have found all three of us guilty. It didn't seem that way though. We weren't tender or squeamish. We were fighting the cause of the dunnock. But really we were murderous brutes.

* * *

As to tender or squeamish, I am sure there would be health and safety rules and regulations, and laws against it now, but in those early years, a special treat was to go with Dick's father in the back of the van to the slaughterhouse when he had business there.

The extended family had a farm at Llysfaen. Their best meat was home grown and killed just down the road at Abergele. I can remember wandering around the slaughterhouse, while Dick's father attended to business. We'd see cattle shot with a bolt gun, great beasts toppling, suddenly weak at the knees, and sheep rolled onto a wooden cradle kicking their stiff legs as the gun was put to their heads. We saw their carcasses disembowelled – what a membrane sac a bowel is – steaming, hanging from hooks, all in a mayhem of bleating and lowing and bellowing and squealing and clatter and skid of hooves, and the shouts of men, and the rattle of crush bars and pens, and aisles, and urine, bowels and dung everywhere under foot and in the air, reeking healthily, before the purging hose.

It was life. It was everyday. So was the man in the basement back at the butcher's shop, sitting on a stool in his vest, under a bare light-bulb that dangled from a long flex, plucking away in a room caged off with wire netting, surrounded by feathers and Christmas chickens and turkeys. When he'd finished plucking one, he'd lunge, arms spread, to snatch up the next one and wring its neck, as we stood by, feathers billowing everywhere, and a sudden cacophony of gobbles and squawks and frenzy.

We'd watch the scene fascinated a while. It was like a sideshow in hell, down there in the dark cellerage. Once in a kind of dumbshow for our benefit, the man held up a plucked bird by the neck and easing his hand down its body to the rump, produced an egg. Either it was a fowl on the brink of laying, which is quite likely, or a clever bit of conjuring, if not as clever as Dick's baked-bean trick. As to the chicken and egg, I always believed my eyes, whereas with the baked beans, you couldn't, so fast Dick moved, defying time.

* * *

To everything its season. There were shoreline seasons too, and tidal passions that came to fill my waking thoughts, to distract me from lessons, to keep a weather-eye on the window, to worry not about the timetable but the tide-table. A prospect of the sea within sound of the sea, piers and jetties and harbours, boats inshore and ships on the skyline, tugs at me now as I write, like a mooring, hauling me back into the solitude and unlonely loneliness of those shoreline days. This was my self in the making.

By the time I was ten, about three years before we moved to the wooded hill, when a different balance between the hill and the sea was struck, the coast took strong claim on my free time. It is hard to accept now what fishing there was to be had on Colwyn shore, between Penmaen and the point of Rhos when I was young. Nothing like it survives, just as nothing like the freedom to come and go remains today for children as young as we were. ‘Drive carefully, free-range children at play', I saw on a sign remote in Argyll the other day. We were free-range children in every way, except as to word from the unknown world.

It was quite early one morning would be the way to start to tell you.

But it started well before morning. It was afternoon, is closer yet, if there's a beginning to find, the day before, in the backyard at ‘Thornfield'. Eleven going on twelve, twelve going on thirteen, I'm a free being, too young to be employed in a holiday job. With all the time in the world on my hands, except the time of the tides that rule my thoughts, I'm away in my dream, trying my hand at a nightline.

My ambition is unlimited. I'm all imagining without a thought in my head of failure. Every hook I'm tying to the line on its little length of 12lb breaking-strain nylon will take a fish in the course of the night. You believe it. I bite through the nylon droppers at the knot, tough bite through tough line for young teeth. I'm so hooked I think of nothing but being ready for the night, as the afternoon softens in the yard and my mother calls me for tea.

This boy that I was – I remind you – is eleven going on twelve, at the youngest. The ages of eight, ten, thirteen are defining points of moment in his story and make it possible to relate it with some degree of accuracy, as to what happened when. He won't reach thirteen before his world is transformed and he's transported elsewhere, away, seven miles off, under the wooded hill. There nightlines will lengthen unimaginably, dreams deepen and fish multiply. What he's doing now in the Red Wood is merely preparatory. He thinks it is the real thing. And so it is, until he learns otherwise. And as you'll realise when you reach ‘The Black Lake' he's begun to harden just a little now, and has a slightly clearer sense of purpose, resolve discovered in the mountains at the Black Lake.

Soon you'll see him emerge with his nightline over his shoulder. The line consists of a length of stout, domestic electrical wire, rescued from the tip at Fairmount, hung with hooks on ‘droppers', and wound round three sticks. He's slung the silvery canned-fruit bait-tin along the handle of his spade. And off he sets, both hands full, his spade over his other shoulder. The can slides now and then and bangs against the step of the spade as he walks, then slides back onto his shoulder. He's like a one-man band. There's a way to go to the shore, though not far as the crow flies. But he's no crow and he has to round Pen-y-Bryn and make his way down Llawr Pentre, daring the dank shadows under the viaduct where the rats come out in the evening, to reach Beach Road and follow the stream to the sea.

It takes some determination, certainty beyond doubt, to go to so much trouble, at such an age. What does he have in his head? And he still has to dig his bait: at least a dozen lugworms for his dozen and a half hooks. He knows he must pitch his line as near the margin of low-tide as he can, to maximise the time it's under water. That will make his night longer, his night of disturbed sleep and watch-checking in the dark between submarine slumbers. He has an Ingersoll pocket-watch on a leather strap, like an old man before his time. It ticks as loud as a bomb on the chair by his bed.

He must come down as early as daybreak to inspect the line, to see it come to light, or be pipped at the post by the gulls. They'll swim round his surfacing tackle and hack at his catch with their blood-tipped beaks if they can't snatch it away from the hooks. He knows this from experience already. He's learning every step of the way lessons never to be had in school, things too that he doesn't know he's learning: resolution and independence and how to survive on Inis Mór, though as yet he's never heard of the place, on which his future's converging and his folly, at thinking to resist the world and its business.

So now it is dusk. The tide is slack at low ebb, right at its last of land and motion, and the night lies ahead, at Easter towards the last of spring, or at the front edge of summer to September, as school holidays run. Lamps are glowing dimly along the promenade, gaining strength as the sun lapses, all the way round to Rhos. There's no-one about but that boy and a few herring gulls, right at the tideline, a dog barking at gulls at the sea's edge and its owner strolling along the sand, below the point where Colwyn stream disperses into shingle and sand, far beyond the longest breakwater. The ribbed, the chevroned sand is soon mole-hilled where he's digging....

Evening stretches itself out in every direction, darkening quicker inland, thinning more slowly to silver and shadow at sea. The pier is stranded on its little legs, as if too cautious to go the extra few yards to dip its toes in the slack tide. Lights cluster at the landward pavilion, but the length of the pier itself is unlit, except from this angle for a green starboard light at the pierhead. A dank darkness gathers under it. Hove to off Penmaen a quarry-boat rides, minimally lit, waiting for the morning, when it will come in to the old wooden jetty at the easternmost margin of the long wide bay of Colwyn. This is not a shore to offer much of a port in a storm for a good many miles. Captains must look elsewhere whichever way the wind blows or stand off far out and ride it through.

The nightfishing boy makes a start. It's a daunting business at first. The sand has drained. But the lugworms in their underground hammocks, slung between dimple feeder hole and cast are thickest where it's wettest, not on the dry banks. The tide holds off. It hasn't turned. It won't turn for half an hour perhaps. But when it does it won't be backward in coming forward. He's digging as fast as he can. The spade must go down deep and fast and be turned smartly, or all he'll see is the worm's greeny sandful tail slipping away as the water wells in. Nor is this the first time he's dug for bait. You can tell he's served part of his apprenticeship at least, making ready to fish at the end of the pier. Not for him Darky Lee's ‘fresh bait', sold to tourists from his shed on the front, down below the station. Not for him the packets of salted lug at the tackle shop.

But what solitude and solitary determination. The sand sucks and socks about his spade. In these wetter reaches the going's heavy, and the worms are quick off the mark. He'll chop one or two perforce, and stain his fingers yellow. But hook-length pieces will do, and then he'll start to take some whole, reddish worms, and here and there a big black one, of a length to make up for two or even three lesser mortals. The moment he turns one he darts in like a gull to pick it out. The gulls are already hovering and shrieking hungrily round the molehills and water-holes he's left behind him. Sometimes he has to hold onto a worm for a while and little by little ease it back from its urgent escape, trying his best not to let it break in two.

Soon he'll have to cut his losses. Some hooks will have half a worm, some a whole one. The tide has turned by the time he's driving his stakes into the sand with the back of his spade. His line's not straight but set across the tide in a ‘V', arms open to it. It seemed like a very long line when he had it in the backyard, but now it's dwarfed by the wide shore. The sea is almost over his wellingtons as he baits the hooks. His bait tin swirls this way and that swimming on the flood, as he keeps it looped over his forearm. His spade, planted in what was clear sand, falls as the water undermines its footing. He mustn't lose it. He has one eye on his hooks and can, and one eye on where his spade was when he last saw it, and struggles to bait the last couple of hooks. He's in over his boot-tops and his jeans are wet well above the knee by the time he's done.