Journalist and predator angler Chris Bishop fell in love with the Fens when he moved to Norfolk five years ago. In a new monthly series, exclusive to FISHINGmagic, he gives us a glimpse of this unique landscape and some of the characters who fish it.
MARK PHILLIPS The handshake’s firm, the smile comes easy and you’d have to be in an oxygen tent not to catch a full-on dose of joie de vivre off Mark Phillips, as a summer’s morning burns the mist off Welney Washes. If the personalised number plate doesn’t give the game away, you can’t miss the bucket full of brightly-coloured lures. You wouldn’t think the surgeons were fighting for his life a few short months ago, as he fires a rubber frog across the Delph and plops it off the lilies. They’re either having it big time on here or they aren’t. We’re both agreed on that. If I don’t get one in the first 30 yards, I usually clear off somewhere else. Frequently, this means licensed premises. The last time I adjourned to the nearby Lamb and Flag, I met Mark in the car park. We got chatting, lobbed some lures around for an hour and I drove home thinking I’d just bumped into the most inspirational angler I’d met in ages. He’s no slouch at lure fishing, but it wasn’t that. After getting the most devastating news imaginable, at the age of 33, he fought and beat it. That’s what did it for me. As we pause for a breather on a hot July morning, when all we’ve managed is a few half-hearted swirls and follows, we compare notes and find we share a few mates in common.
“I can pin it all down to a day and a time,” he said. “It was November 2000, we were fishing Blithfield and no-one had caught much on the Saturday. We were in the pub in the evening. It’s normally a good drink, but I had a couple of pints and I had to go to bed early, I just felt like shit. “The next day in the boat I was struggling to eat a cheese sandwich, I just couldn’t swallow it. I spent the best part of the morning wondering what was wrong with me. I felt really rough. “In the end I couldn’t cope with casting any more so we had a go at trolling and I caught a 31:08.” Mark doesn’t look too cracky in the picture. He spent the next week going back and forth to the doctors, because he couldn’t eat properly. They told him it was indigestion. They said it was an inflamed oesophagus. By the time December came, Mark could hardly eat or drink and he spent most of the next trip to Blithfield crashed out on the bank or in the digs, as a cast of anglers that reads like the Who’s Who of pike fishing thrashed the Midlands’ reservoir in the hope of a forty. After waiting for a referral on the NHS, Mark went private in January. They sedated him and stuck a tube down his throat with a miniature camera at the end.
“I was 33 years old. It was just surreal. I went home to gather my thoughts and I was back at hospital the next day for a CT scan.” The news got worse. The tumour was advanced and they couldn’t get it out. Mark had eight to 12 months left on this earth – if he was lucky. “I was sitting there thinking why me, like everyone does. And there’s so much I want to do I haven’t done yet. “Like, here I am, half way through the fishing season and this happens. That’s really bollixed things up. Then I was thinking: ‘No way – this isn’t going to happen.” Intensive chemotherapy followed. The only hope was if a treatment the consultants dubbed “full-strength Domestos” could kill the tumour and stop it spreading. “By then I looked like Ghandi on a diet,” Mark said. “My mates were showing me pictures of fish they’d caught and I’m thinking: ‘Thanks a bunch – I’m dying and you’re showing me that.” He ended up on a feeding tube, carrying a bag of fluid everywhere he went. One night, he went down the local, people stared and he thought: “Sod this.” “I ripped it out, gritted my teeth and said to myself: ‘I’m going to start eating.'” Mark started to put the weight back on and feel better. He started fishing again. Chemotherapy had not produced any side effects, so a few weeks later – around February 2001 – the consultants gave Mark a course of radiotherapy. It caused a blood clot on his lung but another scan revealed the tumour had shrunk by 70 per cent and it was operable. “I went in with both eyes open, it was major surgery,” he said. “They told me it was dangerous and one in 20 don’t survive it.” They took out Mark’s entire stomach, chunks of his spleen and liver and part of his oesophagus. They connected what was left of his gut to his intestines and pumped him so full of diamorphine, he hardly recognised his mates when they came in to see him. “Dennis Moules came to see me in hospital one night and he smuggled in a can of Guinness. He said: ‘There y’are Mark, I’ve smuggled this past the Gestapo…’ “I said I can’t drink that Den, so he did – right in front of me.” Digger Dennis, Dick Culpin, Andy Pegram and the hard core of the Cambridge branch of the PAC all wondered if each time they came to visit Mark, it would be the last time they saw him.
“When I rang Richard Wesley and told him my cancer had gone, he said: ‘That brought a tear to my eye.'” Mark was back on his feet by the end of the summer. As autumn came, he was back at work and blanking on the drains with Fenland stalwart Dennis Moules. Holidays owed from work meant he could work for three days of the week and fish the other four. “I had 50-odd doubles in four weeks and three twenties in a weekend,” he said. “Everyone was getting pissed off with me because I was out so much. But come December I was still fishing four days a week and blanking, because if the fish aren’t having it, they aren’t having it.” It takes five years, after the surgery, before they give you the all-clear. After beating cancer, Mark collapsed in the shower and was airlifted to Papworth Hospital with a heart problem. Intensive chemo and radiotherapy had caused a build up of fluid around his heart. As he waited for the air ambulance his mobile phone rang and he ended up talking a mate through a swim from which he went on to win a pike match. Doctors drained the fluid and Mark made it through. There’s a lake at Papworth Hospital with some tidy carp in it. Mark watched them from his wheelchair, wishing someone would smuggle a rod in. The lilies hump and erupt in a swirl as something green and nasty takes a shine to Mark’s rubber frog.
Mark can still see the fish through his polaroids and thinks it’ll have another go. It’s fins are twitching and it looks up for it. Another cast and sure enough, it has another pop at the lure as I track it through a long lens. I hit the shutter on reflex, before I find I’ve left the camera on single shot mode and fluffed the picture. I used to snatch pictures for a living but your priorities change, I muse to myself, as I drop the camera and bung a Shad Rap at it, like you do, as Mark changes lures. No cigar. Mark jinks a jerkbait over it, tries another lure, but it doesn’t want to know. “Did fishing help, I mean getting over it all?” I ask lamely. “It gave me something to focus on and take my mind off it,” he says. “I’ve met most of my friends through fishing, the PAC were excellent. James “Doc” Gardner was there with words of support, so many people rally round you. Dick Culpin was a rock, he took me to and from hospital.
It was news to me that the guy concerned had cancer. He hasn’t made it generally known, so I agreed to leave his name out. And there we were. On a summer’s morning that makes you feel glad to be alive whether you catch or not. A morning like Mark Phillips never thought he’d live to see again not so long ago. There might be more to life than fishing. But it doesn’t half make you appreciate it I think to myself, as I shake hands with Mark and sling the rods back in the car. “I hope it helps, I mean anyone who ever finds themselves in the position I was,” Mark says as we pencil in another session later in the season. “They said it takes five years to give you the all-clear. So I’ve got around four to go.” I’ve blanked on this most glorious of mornings. Before I met Mark, I’d probably have considered myself hard done by. But I drive home feeling lucky to be alive. |
