Home Features Diaries My Story – Sean Meeghan Part 2, Growing Up

My Story – Sean Meeghan Part 2, Growing Up

March 14, 2007

My Story – FishingMagic Members

We get to know each other on the forum to a great extent, and sometimes we meet at fish-ins, but how much do we really know about each other?

We have members from across the world, ranging from manual workers, office workers, solicitors, policemen, writers, editors, photographers, soldiers, actors, film producers, angling guides, technicians, medical people – you name it and we’ve got ’em in our ‘family’. Yet most often we don’t really know who it is we’re debating with or having a laugh with on the forum.

So now’s your chance to put that right. This is where FM members can tell the FishingMagic community all about themselves. Tell us who you are, what you do, what your fishing is all about and what it means to you, tell us what makes you tick, warts and all.

Stories can be anything from 1000 to 5000 words long, preferably, but not necessarily, with a selection of pictures. Email the words and pictures to me at graham@fishingmagic.com and I’ll do the rest.

Sean Meeghan

Sean Meeghan

Sean was born 50 years ago in St Helens, Merseyside and learnt to fish on the River Moy, close to his Uncle’s farm in Ireland. When he was 8 years old his family moved to Leicestershire and he continued his angling education on the headwaters of the River Soar near Stoney Stanton. Four years later he returned to St Helens and the culture shock of colliery flashes and the warm, sub tropical waters of the St Helens canal. Roach, tench and pike became his preferred quarry until another culture shock came when he went to Bradford University and his reintroduction to moving water in the form of the Yorkshire rivers. Climbing, Rugby League and women competed for his attention, but he always found time to fish and came to love the Dales’ rivers. A spell in Peterborough and a Fellowship at Cranfield University convinced him of the error of his ways and he returned to settle in Yorkshire.

Sean is a true ‘thinking’ angler and good all-rounder with both coarse and fly tackle. He is a popular member of FishingMagic and often gives valuable advice on the forum.

My Story – Sean Meeghan, Part 2, Growing up

IT’S A PERFECT early Winter’s morning as I drop down into the beautiful Vale of Belvoir. The early morning sun suffuses the misty landscape with a pearlescent haze that blurs the rich tones of the valley into a scene worthy of an impressionist masterpiece, but I’m in no real mood to appreciate it having just negotiated the massed speed cameras of the Nottingham ring road. A series of sinuous curves appear ahead and I grin as I drop a cog and anticipate the heady joy of threading the big Triumph rapidly and safely through them. Then another yellow revenue grabber pops into view and I almost scream in frustration as I potter at 50 miles an hour along a wide, empty road. The Nanny State encroaches more and more on our freedoms with almost constant video surveillance and an increasingly draconian safety culture. It’s frustrating enough for me, but I despair for the youth of today. Any opportunity for youngsters to learn by experience and stretch themselves physically has gone, smothered under a stifling blanket of risk assessments and looming law suits.

I think I grew up in almost the perfect time. My youth straddled the late 60’s and the early 70’s when cheap, reliable cars and good roads made vast areas of the country easily accessible. Outside of school my life was split, between 2 loves. Encouraged firstly by my parents and secondly by my school I came to love the mountains and the wide open spaces. As I gained in experience and confidence I moved further and further afield into the high mountains of the UK, Europe and the USA. I came to love experiences such as inching delicately out over an achingly vast space with the void tugging insistently at my heels, totally alone. Not so pleasant was watching a patch of snow approaching at near terminal velocity and knowing that if it was soft I stood a chance of surviving the experience, but if it was hard I would die. Through experiences like these I learned to trust my own abilities and developed a self confidence that was almost cocky until tempered by maturity. But my first love was still fishing and through my schoolboy years I began to develop a store of skills and experiences that I can draw on to this day.

The void tugging insistently at my heels – ‘Vector’ at Tremadoc

At least it was far enough away from Wigan

When I was 12 my family moved back to St Helens and I had to adjust from life in a Liecestershire village to a grimy industrial town whose only redeeming points were a world class rugby league team and the fact that it was a good distance away from Wigan. In the late 60’s and early 70’s the town was dying a slow death as the small mining villages around it lost their pits and sank into destitution. The town’s only other industry of note, the glass works, couldn’t take up the excess labour and unemployment rates soared. I experienced the heartache of decimated communities at first hand as my granddad Meeghan was NUM Lodge Secretary for the Clock Face pit (my home village) and so was at the heart of the doomed battle to preserve a way of life.

A water that held some cracking gudgeon

For me at least the cloud had a silver lining. As a dubious reward for nearly 50 years of backbreaking toil my granddad became one of the last few employees at his beloved pit and became the watchman as the shaft was slowly filled and the pit buildings demolished. The silver lining was the lodge dam, a grim, dark expanse of water that contained some cracking gudgeon and so was a magnet for the small boys from the village. The watchmen turned a blind eye to this, only keeping a watchful eye on the safety of the young anglers.

On a warm summer’s morning I step off the 22 bus in the centre of the village and walk up to my grandparents’ house. The village, once considered a shining example of a mining community, consisted of long rows of red brick terraced houses loosely arranged around a central green space that contained a number of rugby and football pitches and was bounded at one end by the ‘Stute with its bowling greens, bingo and cheap beer. I open the back gate walk past the neat rows of vegetables, through the back yard with its wash house, ‘coil ole’ and outside loo and go through the back door into the kitchen. I leave my tackle behind the door and burst into the front room.

“Hi! When are we going?”

“Sit down and have a cup of tea”

Nanna goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on while I sit on the settee and look at the fishing tackle in the Embassy catalogue. In those days smoking yourself to death had some perks!

I gulp down my tea and fidget until: “Come on then Seanin lets have a look at the lodge.”

We cross Gorsey Lane and head down a track through the fields until we come to the old rail track to the colliery. We turn down here, the air becoming heavy and still as we drop below the embankment. We are now in a secret linear world, the old gravel base is green, with short rabbit cropped grass, and the embankments are rich, tilted meadows. In the distance the derelict pit head looms and, just before the embankments draw back into the old marshalling yard, an old pill box glowers with blank eye slits back along the track at us.

I rush ahead to explore, scattering rabbits as I run down the track. I pause as I approach the entrance to the pill box, which exudes a cold damp smell and a faint air of menace. I creep cautiously to the door and peer in. As my eyes become accustomed to the dim interior I cautiously ease my way through the entrance and poke about inside. It’s surprisingly tidy inside, maybe a tramp has used it as a shelter at some time, or maybe it’s just so out of the way that it is rarely visited. I gain confidence and poke around. Kicking at a pile of rubble in the corner, I notice a smooth, rounded shape poking out of the earth floor. I kick at the earth around it: maybe it’s a gun! I’m slightly disappointed with the object that emerges: it’s an old pen-knife. I rush outside to show my granddad.

“Do you think it’s an army knife?”

“Could be, it’s the right colour. Still works as well.” He prised a tarnished blade from its holder.

“I’ll use it as a fishing knife!” It disappeared into my bag.

The lodge dam was a dark rectangular expanse of water with grey, graded banks of old mine tailings. In dry weather these were safe enough, but in the wet they were a slick, greasy death trap for the unwary. I crouched on the short grass at the top of the bank and set up my short fibreglass rod and Intrepid reel. My float was a large cork-bodied affair that had been given to me by an uncle. It was currently my favourite as the weight it carried allowed me to cast a fair distance. Bait was a worm dug from the back garden. I set the float to about 6ft, which was about as much as I could manage, cast out and retrieved until the bottom shot rested on the bed of the lake, then sat on a handy piece of wood and waited. The day was still and the surface of the water was mirror smooth with the rainbow shimmers of an oily film. Just to my left was an old pump house and in the gap between it and the corner of the lake an untidy mess of flotsam had gathered. This was a far cry from the upper Soar, but I was becoming used to it! A whiff of pipe smoke and a quiet conversation drifted down from the top of the bank as my granddad passed the time of day with his mate from the opposite shift.

Some time later the float bobbed and drew slowly under. I struck and felt the wriggling quicksilver resistance of a good gudgeon. I swing it in, carefully unhook it and hold it out for granddad to admire. He comes down the bank, nods appreciatively and watches me return the fish. Through the rest of the afternoon we sit side by side in companionable silence as I catch a steady stream of gudgeon. Throughout our trips together we often hardly exchanged a word. It’s as though, having skipped a generation, the family genes had combined to produce an almost exact replica. Our thought processes were so similar that words were often redundant and each understood the other’s need for silence. We looked alike and I became used to a double take when I passed old miners as they paused to draw a laboured breath against the ravages of the ‘dust’.

The afternoon draws to a close and we set off back up the track.

“What’s for tea?”

“Tripe and onions.”

“Urrgh! Not tripe!”

“She’ll have something else for you I expect.”

Granddad Meeghan has gone now. He made barely more than a year into his retirement before the stresses of his past caught up on him and he died suddenly one summer’s afternoon. It seems that we are still connected and sometimes when I’m alone and at peace I sense a ghostly presence looking out through the windows of my mind. I smile and settle back into a companiable silence.

The Snig

Pete and I are huddled in the doorway of the Co-op Funeral Parlour. Its half past four on a cold April morning and we’re waiting for the club coach to collect us. Like many fishing clubs in the grimy industrial North, St Helens AA offered its members the opportunity to escape from the drudgery of the coal face and the factory floor for a brief moment. For many of its members the weekly coach trip had become an institution: a green and watery oasis in their lives. Our club owned its own coach, a venerable vehicle of somewhat questionable reliability which made every trip an adventure.

It’s too early for a bus and we’ve had to trudge a couple of miles, past the alkaline wastelands of the chemics and down Croppers Hill, all the while breathing air tainted with the heavy aroma of fibreglass resin from the Pilks factory. We slump in the doorway, almost indistinguishable from the corpses inside, until a diesel clatter and a pair of dim headlights announce the arrival of t’auld bus.

“Come on lads get thisselves in!”

Bleary eyed we push our gear into the luggage compartment and clamber into the warm smoky interior, redolent with the fumes of Saturday night’s excesses. We doze in our seats, disturbed only by a detour to knock up Les Bromilow who has dozed off by the fire after a heavy night at the club. He eventually emerges from his front door to cheers from the coach. I wake again to a perfect early spring morning as the coach turns off the motorway at Penrith and heads for Ullswater. It’s the close season so we’re going Trout fishing, but there’s still a competitive element and we stump up 50p for the sweep as the coach lurches round the curves of the Ullswater road. Soon the road drops down to run along the lake and we stop intermittently to drop small groups of anglers off at various access points. Pete and I choose a stop at random and trudge along a gravel shore looking for a spot to fish. We stop at a small bay and decide to fish the points on either side of it.

I sit for a while on my basket to have a cup of tea and take in the view. The morning is so still that it seems the world has caught its breath for a long moment and I dare not break the spell. The lake is mirror smooth and holds a perfect reflection of the surrounding fells. There’s still a sprinkling of snow on the higher tops, but the trees on the shore are showing that haze of pale green that is peculiar to early spring. The powder blue early morning sky is almost cloudless and holds promise of a hot sunny day. Even the rings left by rising trout seem as though they are painted on the canvas of the lake. My reverie is broken by a shout from across the bay.

“Come on Seamus stop dreaming and get fishing!”

Philistine! I attach my reel, a Mitchell Prince, to my swing tip rod and thread the line through the rings. Like all self respecting swing tip anglers in the early 70’s my swing tip is home made from a length of cane. A