It’s a long drive to the salmon beat; well, it is if you happen to be an Essex lad and you’re picking up ‘His Wyeness’ from Maynard Mansions in Middlesex. But it’s an entertaining one.
For a start there are no fewer than four equally sensible routes and many more if you’re in no rush and you’re keen to take in some extra scenery. The Chepstow-Monmouth portal to the valley is pretty enough for those daily constrained by strips of asphalt, shopping emporia and fast-food joints, and reaching this unfailingly welcome contradistinction is something of a pleasure: you just click into cruise-control, sit back and put the world to rights with your buddy. Harmonizing with Simon and Garfunkel and allowing Jethro Tull to destroy your hearing are luxuries reserved for the journey home; it’s a way of weaning yourself back onto the coming week of traffic-jams and Essex surliness you suspect.
Once you’re over the bridge of your choice – they’re both enormously expensive but hey…try walking it – you can re-run the customary exchange about which exit to take at the roundabout then opt for the wrong one. You get fully under way when you see the much-welcomed sign for the racecourse. How did you make that mistake yet again? Likely as not, your pal will apologize for the confusion and you’ll insist on taking the blame. But you’re on your way and there’s twenty miles or so of narrow, winding tarmac pushing its way through the shade of the conifers on either side. As ever, one of you moots the possibility of pike at Tintern Abbey: do they get this low down? Is the river brackish here? You’ll never find out for yourself; you’ll just continue to wonder because you know, deep down, the value of conjecture and mystery in your angling life. At some time though, you’ll happen upon a report telling you precisely what you didn’t want to know.
There’s a café twenty minutes further on, once you’ve crossed what you assume to be the Monnow; you’re in Monmouth so you suppose it must be. The café’s unremarkable but it’s clean and the all-day breakfast is value for money. The toilets are clean too – something you can reasonably expect in the twenty-first century – but you needn’t be ancient to recall the ritual destruction of dog-ends at the deep-end: some things do get better.
Half an hour and you’re back on the road, braking for female pheasants and swiftly summing-up the houses with ‘For Sale’ signs. Could you make the move? Would you really want to? Could you stand the isolation? And what a lot of hassle. The musing recedes a little more slowly than it came, but recede it does, the thought of your line singing to the weight of a tired downstream fish taking hold.
You slow down for the villages, not because you must but because you need to fill the spiritual void imposed by the motorway. There’s Postman Pat! It’s very English isn’t it? Or are we in Wales now? Ok, it’s very British. Long may it stay that way, dominated by the pub and the church. You agree it’s unlikely but, well, it’ll see us out – and the kids will see the mosque as normal. Then you’re descending into Middle Earth where the last webs of mist linger over a gentle Wye.
Little has changed at the hut; only the symmetry of the creeper-leaves, now curling red with the onset of autumn, and an extra mystery-hole at the rear: perhaps this time you’ll get to see the culprit. Inside it’s unmolested as far as you can tell: no chewed newspaper and ruined fly-lines to be seen this time, but what about the dresser? Earlier in the year some entrepreneurial rodent had moved in and converted it to Hereford’s Premier Rave Venue. Ribena and apple-juice had flown freely; Ritz Crackers, Chocolate Hobnobs and even His Wyeness’s Mint Imperials had been gorged with hedonistic abandon. And what had been that white powdery substance on the chopping board?
But the comprehensive dung-out and the application of anything and everything remotely toxic seems to have done the job: not nice but, well…at least you hadn’t given them a dose of Weil’s. The kettle’s on and the door’s chocked-open to frame your very special wallpaper; and over the river a buzzard is joined by its mate to twist and wheel and mew their dominion.
You’re home.
The house back in Essex is somewhere you’re obliged to visit but this is where you belong, in the company of crocks and tea-pots, Tilly-lamps and tackle, in a hut by clean water. You thank His Wyeness for the tea and exchange a few words about the evening meal: his chilli or your stew? Chilli. You’ll inspect the beat, chuck some fluff in the afternoon then settle in for a few hours barbelling before returning to eat – that’s settled then.
How lucky can you be?
Less than two years before his elevation to royalty, Mr. Maynard had been the mysterious mortal who checked and published your scripts, but just a few exchanges revealed your roots to be the same council estate in ‘arold ‘ill, three miles from Romford. Of course! You knew the name! He’d flicked inky pellets in the same class as your brother and had fished the ancient ponds in Dagnam Park Woods; he’d jumped the stream, dammed it and probed the pool with a sixpenny net for red-throats and palmate newts. You’d both been beaten up by Johnny Daniels. Within minutes of re-acquainting yourself at a pool just off the A12 at Sandon, you knew the man again, the man who’d shattered your cheeser and the man who’d shared his frozen Jubbly that day ‘Snudge’ came to open the fete. You’d both seen the world: you on a push-bike, he with a guitar and tuppence a’penny.
Evening.
You’re close to your rod and willing the cane to thump over. You’ve had nothing so far and a curious air of contentment and despondency has quelled your expectations. A lone blackbird flutes from the skeletal oak by the feeder-stream and the first pipistrelles flicker in the gloom. There’s no sound. Just you and the Wye – no, not the Roding – the Wye, and the damp of dusk is seeping through your corduroys. You rub your legs for a few moments of warmth then reach for the blanket in your rucksack. Not daring to avert your eyes you twist in your seat but unfurl on seeing a nod. Your talon is there, hovering over the cork and the Redditch winch your father used to use; then the rod is bending and stabbing at the river like a frenzied conductor and yearning to be with the fish – barbel!
