The Old Man and the Sand Eel Read online

  Perfect. Zero resistance. The perch won’t even know it’s hooked.

  My whole life has been one spent surrounded by water and my happiness can be accurately measured by my proximity to it.

  I was born in the Cambridgeshire Fens; one of two, five minutes before my twin sister, Anna, with a little brother, Tom, coming along some seven years later. Ours was a house filled with nature, thanks, in no small part, to the unbridled enthusiasm of our dad.

  He was a magical figure to me as a scabby-kneed under-five. I didn’t really understand why he was so often not around, the demands of his job as the local village doctor frequently taking him away from us for longer than we all would have liked, but when he was there he poured his love of wildlife deep into the souls of his children.

  Through him I learnt to seek pleasure in bird-watching walks in fenland waterscapes, or to train my eye onto the very tiniest of life forms, dissecting the underside of a carefully lifted log with forensic precision, in the hope of snaring one of the worms or pungent ground beetles that lived there.

  He seemingly hadn’t inherited his father’s passion for angling, but in those early days he armed me with the essential patience and respect I would require to winkle out fish later in life.

  My earliest memories are really just a haphazard collection of senses and emotions, but they all revolve around the natural world brought to my palms by Dad. First there was Norman, the Airedale terrier. Unwisely purchased just before Mum gave birth to us twins, he was a mix of hyperactive, ginger, hard wire wool and smelly wet tongue. Next was the mustiness of Dad’s vast butterfly collection, which had a sort of pungent, slightly oppressive, perfume-like smell that you might also find around the embalmed corpses in the British Museum. I have always associated that scent with the dark wood and glass that contained his treasures and, if allowed, I would open the drawers with real care and reverence. The residents of these cases were frozen in time. Ossified and rigid, captured and sacrificed, all in the name of science. Even if I removed the glass they were trapped behind they could never grow or float through the sky again. I knew that this was not a time to smile or make jokes as the creatures that lived in there were actually just dead.

  Living animals in the house, apart from Norman and the occasional woodlouse that made it (very) briefly into the room I shared with Anna, were accommodated in the circular conservatory at the back of our home. This pleasure dome for captive wildlife all but guaranteed victory for the Millard twins on the Upwell County Primary School ‘show and tell’ table, something that was of extreme importance to me at that time; plus, it was perfectly placed at the foot of the garden, providing a thrilling portal between the familial and the feral.

  Dad would often hatch foreign moths and butterflies in the warmth of the glass house, the death’s-head hawkmoths were easily my favourites. With their human skull patterns emblazoned on their thoraxes like bikers’ tattoos, I thought they had to be just about the coolest insect that ever lived, but it was in the careful handling of the giant Atlas moths that I learnt the value of being gentle with any living creatures. Even the smallest brush of a wingtip could leave a guilty trace of their dust on my fingers. It was the Atlas depositing tiny scales from their bodies and would dull their colour instantly. Even today, despite having pulled a fish through the water with a hook in its mouth, I chastise myself at the loss of a single scale as a result of any rough handling on the bank.

  Dad taught me that it was sometimes okay to catch animals to study and admire, but, as he aged, his focus became less on capture and more on the observation. Photos replaced traps, his butterfly collection waned, and the insect population of the conservatory began to dwindle.

  I guess that was where Dad and I differed in our approach to nature. For him it was enough to simply observe and understand from afar; for me, it was necessary to get as close as possible, and, ideally, hold the creature in my hands. It wasn’t a case of wanting mastery over the natural world – I wasn’t one of those cruel kids who would pick the legs off a daddy-long-legs for a laugh. I just seemed to get infinitely more from something I could actually hold, touch and, years later, catch then release.

  One day, a new resident was installed in the conservatory fish tank. It was to be my first close encounter with a fish, and, my goodness, what a fish it was.

  In researching for this book I have since learnt from Dad that the brook lamprey was actually with us for only a single night, caught in a willow wicker-work trap by an eel-catcher from our local creek and given to Dad because he was ‘into that sort of thing’. Yet I remember it like it was there for the entirety of my early childhood. For the under-fives, time lengthens and memories compress in unusual ways; that one-night stand with the lamprey made a massive impression.

  According to the Wilson Encyclopedia the brook lamprey ‘rarely exceeds an adult length of 10 inches’, which is quite extraordinary as I was fairly convinced our specimen was the size and girth of a Burmese python. Wilson goes on to note that its ‘sucker-like mouth is used only for adhering to the undersides of stones’. Now, not that I wish to accuse a fisherman, of all people, of understating the facts somewhat, but at no point does Wilson highlight that this fish has to be one of the most bizarre-looking creatures in Britain, if not the planet Earth. Not only does it have no fewer than seven separate gills, running in a hole-punch-like line right down its body, but he also neglects to mention that its ‘sucker-like mouth’ is, in fact, a horrific circular suction pad filled with a truly nightmarish series of studded teeth.

  For hours my sister and I stared at the curious fish in the tank; utterly transfixed. It didn’t seem to move much, preferring instead to spend its time stuck hard to the glass side of the fish tank. Perfect for me, though, as it afforded a close-up view of those extraordinary mouthparts for the brief period it was in our custody.

  It was a highly unusual capture anyway. The brook lamprey is most often found in fast-running streams where it can happily breed on gravel deposits; in the turgid murky waters of the river outside my home it seemed an absolute imposter. That thought delighted me. Out there, beneath a brown theatre curtain of surface water, was a subaquan wonderland just waiting to be discovered: a place where real monsters lived and died, well away from the gaze of us land-dwelling, air-breathing mortals, yet it could be accessed briefly; if, and only if, you learnt how.

  Dad took its picture, and the next day the lamprey was gone, returned to live out its unlikely, and doubtless quite lonely, life in the water running around our tiny village, and I was left to advance an obsession with what else might be caught from water.

  In the ironed-out landscape of the Fens, water is absolutely everywhere and, as a result, I grew up an extremely happy little boy.

  I needed guidance to access water for the first time of course, but Mum and Dad were never afraid to let me go near the water’s edge, with supervision initially, and later on my own.

  I was lucky; lucky to have so much space to play in safely, but also lucky to have parents that understood the importance of allowing me to discover the outdoors and water for myself, by myself.

  I’m at that stage of life now where all my friends are starting to have children of their own. It only takes moments in the company of a young person to realize that a fear of water is inherited and not innate. Last week, my two-year-old niece Edie was utterly mesmerized by my fish tank, desperate to dip a net in and learn the names of the fish; her wild eyes reflected in the glass sides as her mind hungrily consumed every new scale pattern and plastic leaf. Eventually she reached out her tiny hand and ran it along the tank corner and on into the wet within, learning, in that moment, the curious interplay between glass and water.

  It’s fascinating to see, and I believe a vitally important part of development, yet most children these days are absolutely forbidden from taking any interest in water outside of the bathtub. How many times have you seen anxious parents grasping the hands of their children in horror as they approach the six inches of �
�deep’ water at the edge of the municipal park pond? Or adolescents getting terribly scolded for daring to place their fingers in a perfectly clean town centre stream? Eventually these irrationalities rub off and those children grow up with their own unnatural fear of wild water, and, somewhat inevitably, so do their offspring in turn.

  Not all of those fears are completely without foundation. Tragically, the last decade has seen an average of 390 people per year drown in accidents in British inland waters; but look a little closer into the figures and you will see that doesn’t automatically mean that the water outside our home is inherently dangerous for young children.

  Of those 390 the single largest category is males aged between their mid-teens and mid-twenties. Many instances are alcohol-related, most are avoidable: young people looking to prove themselves by swimming distances beyond their ability or fatal injuries caused by diving head first into surprisingly shallow water, or water that is dangerously fast, or too deep, or just shockingly cold. Instead of teaching young people to be aware of the risks and guiding them towards safer areas to play and wild-swim from an early age, the prevailing attitude seems to favour putting up warning signs, locking gates, building barriers and telling our children that natural water should not be entered under any circumstances, and especially not for your entertainment. Let’s face it: since when have any of those sorts of measures stopped your average young person hell-bent on besting his or her peers?

  Year on year more obstacles to accessing our waters appear, and year on year the number of deaths stays more or less the same. Surely it is better to invest in teaching our children how to manage risk in water, and thereby avoid tragedy, than to let them stay indoors, where they live their lives vicariously through the internet and television?

  There are reams and reams of studies proving the physical and mental health benefits of just being near water. More than that though – perhaps most importantly in fact – our fresh water desperately needs our attention.

  Thanks to myopic human development, rampant pollution and climate change, freshwater habitats are now easily the most endangered environments on earth. In the last half-century the doubling of freshwater withdrawals for our own ends has caused 50 per cent of wetlands to vanish altogether, and fewer than seventy of the planet’s 177 longest rivers remain free of manmade commercial obstructions.

  For freshwater fish, the news is even worse: one third of all species are threatened with extinction today, compared to 21 per cent of mammals and 12 per cent of birds. Yet if you cast a speculative eye on the adverts for all the major wildlife charities, you’d be forgiven for thinking our fishy friends are doing just fine; but if you are beginning to think it’s bad for them, you should check how awfully the amphibians and freshwater invertebrates are faring.

  You may well like to believe it is in the developing world, in the sorts of places where populations are dependent on harvesting freshwater fish just to survive, that the results would be at their worst, but looking at Europe in isolation we see that the number of fish species facing extinction is nudging up to a shameful 40 per cent, and, according to the European Environment Agency, half of our rivers and lakes are polluted. Things aren’t much better in the United States either. Over the pond, the rate of fish extinction is now over 800 times faster than in the fossil record.

  We are marching to the brink of a worldwide environmental disaster, and yet there is little more than a whimper of protest.

  Of course we should all be up in arms, but how can you reasonably expect people to care about saving an environment that they are preconditioned to believe is irrelevant and dirty at best, or a dangerous menace at worst?

  Every garden should have a pond. Ours was oval-shaped and about ten feet wide. At one end there was a neat little shallow area that allowed amphibians to come and go as they pleased and provided a safe nursery area for frogs and toads to spawn. It dropped to a depth of no more than a couple of feet from that shallow point and was stepped in at the edges so Mum and Dad could submerge baskets filled with aquatic plants and water lilies. In the summer the centre was near solid with Canadian pondweed, an invasive species that shrouded the pond’s surface with its green pipe-cleaner-like tendrils while providing oxygen as well as shelter to the host of invertebrates that lived within its bulk.

  It was here I learnt how to hunt frogs, the first living thing I ever knowingly caught from water (the first living thing I caught unknowingly from water was a ‘miller’s thumb’, a three-inch-long micro-fish with a fat head and rounded tail that slipped inside my wellies when I fell into a stream in Yorkshire).

  I was appalling at first. My ham-pink hands slapped the water’s surface like a drummer’s cymbal each time a frog dared to lift its head above the weed. The first rule I learnt then was to be patient and observe.

  Soon enough I realized the frogs in the centre of the pond were never to be caught: they always had a couple of feet of water below them to sink down into, whereas I was aiming at only about half an inch of a frog’s head. To go for them in the middle was to disturb the whole pond for hours; the best bet was to wait for them to approach the edge, as the shallower water would significantly narrow the frog’s options for escape.

  At first I would leap up and try to grab them the moment they came within reach, thus breaking the second rule: keep your profile off the horizon.

  Down the frogs would plop en masse. It took me some time to realize that if I stood up, particularly with the sun behind me, the frogs would see my silhouette ten times out of ten and scarper before I could get anything like close enough to catch one. So I took to lying on the grass, obscuring myself with the pond’s bordering plants and watching like a tiny blond otter.

  It was to be the beginning of a lifelong fixation with peering into water. As a child I couldn’t really make out the difference between a natural or a man-made habitat, but that hardly mattered as nor could the wildlife. I remember being amazed to discover that if you left rainwater to puddle in a bucket it would quickly become inhabited all by itself. Usually this just meant a colony of tiny waterbeetles or millions of species of swirling zooplankton, but sometimes I would find mosquito larvae jerking in the water like a tiny hairy finger trapped in a door, and, in bigger, older, water traps, like the defunct water butts or abandoned cattle troughs that got left around farms, it was possible to find small fish, thick black leeches, and, very occasionally, even an eel.

  Not all ponds are the same but the best times to observe, and afterwards to fish, were early mornings and later in the afternoon. In most ponds at such times, a background hum of life builds in a crescendo like an orchestra tuning up before the performance begins. This was when our pond was at its most magical. Bright damsels and acrobatic dragonflies, the assassins of the sky, hunted on the wing above my head as fearsome diving beetles plundered the unfortunate larvae living below. I had a soft spot for the alien-faced waterboatmen: they seemed like gentle souls who didn’t need to attack anything in the pond, but the pond skaters were always the most impressive. With their fine displays of nimble skills on implausibly long legs, these thumbnail-sized insects comfortably outmanoeuvred the birds and beasts that wanted to eat them by propelling themselves along the pond’s meniscus at incredible speed. Dad taught me that everything which lived in the pond relied on the health of its tiniest living organisms, and if I scooped the pond water into my hands and viewed it with my pale palms as a backdrop I could just make out what he was talking about. Hundreds of tiny haphazard dots made up a dense concentration of zooplankton: water fleas, daphnia and the water worms that held this whole environment together. Their presence was why he didn’t want to stock our pond with ornamental goldfish or koi carp. Pet fish would soon eat all these miniature friends, as well as the beetle larvae and the frog’s tadpoles, until, eventually, the entire system in the pond would stop being able to support itself. Then we would have to buy food to feed the pet fish, food which, I later learnt, was largely made from wild-caught baby sea fish, fish oil
s and even the krill that provided the foundation of the ocean ecosystem. It all seemed a bit crazy really: damaging one ecosystem to artificially prop up another, so we stuck with the wildlife pond.

  If I was really quiet I might be able to see the garden birds – the song thrushes, blackbirds and sparrows – bathing in the shallow end of the pond. They would do this all year round, even in the middle of winter when the pond had a skin of ice and I could scarcely stand to put my hands in the water, but it seemed to happen most often towards the end of a long hot day. They would shake themselves vigorously afterwards, puffing out their feathers and finery as if they had been placed in front of my mum’s hair drier and towelled down. As darkness fell, the pipistrelle bats with their coats coloured like old bricks, their dark ears, faces and wings, would funnel down flying insects by the thousand. I knew I would soon have to go back into the house for tea when that performance began, but not before I checked my surroundings for a repeat appearance from my most exciting discovery of all time: a small shrew that once crawled along the pond’s bank and right along my side as I lay there. It sniffed the air with its comically conical nose and screwed up its tiny eyes in disgust. It knew something was up, but I don’t believe it ever realized I was there or what I was, before it shuffled its way back into the undergrowth.

  The frogs had a curious habit. They would actively hunt and, to my juvenile mind, play in the deeper water, but they tended to come to a standstill when they were submerged in the shallows right in the gaps between the planting baskets. They felt safe there, I guessed, and with that I had cracked my third rule: find the sanctuaries and exploit the routine.

  Soon I had my first definite touch of slimy flesh; next I briefly clasped a leg and then, finally, after a summer of study, I proudly held my first frog. I only had it in my hands long enough to splurt out the ‘M’ of ‘Mum’, before it released its stripy legs from my clutches and powered its way back into the pond, but it was, in my mind, a massive accomplishment.