THE HUMOROUS SIDE OF FISHING

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 87, 4 July 1927, Page 11

THE HUMOROUS SIDE OF FISHING

GRADUATING AS AN EXPONENT

THE illustrated weeklies and the bestsellers, which exercise co-ordinate jurisdiction in all matters relating to sport, have taught us that fishing is a fashious business demanding great possessions, prolonged holidays, an ornate costume, the constitution of a gal-ley-slave, the skill of a Red Indian, the relentlessness of an inquisitor, and the good-humour of a village idiot. But in Grough we cared for none of these things, writes W.G. in the "Manchester Guardian.” A crust of bread, a flask of wine, or its modern equivalent, a fishing-rod, a canal in which the eye of faith could see fish, and a place in the sun, if possible, were all that we needed. Instead of strutting and fretting up and down a mountain torrent, sowing the seeds of all diseases that begin \» ith pains in the back and end with -itis. the Grough man folded his coat, sat on it. adjusted his tackle, and retired into his inner consciousness. If the gods smiled on him, the family had fish, species vague, for tea. If not, Socrates faced his Xantippe upborne by the recollection of an afternoon's unsDotted rectitude. The Tale of Alf Alf had learned to li,ke fishing before the comic papers pointed out the funny side of it. He had achieved tranquillity at an early age—that is to say. his mother called him an idle young scamp. He possessed that sublime indifference to reward and punishment which we label stupidity in the young and philosophy in the old. On Saturday mornings he usually worked hard, chopping the wood, running the errands, and cleaning the boots, on fulfilment of which duties he was given his letters of marque. In the shape of an old fishing-rod and some hunks of thick bread and butter. Once free, he hurried off to the canal, some four miles distant —walking was not yet a lost art—and chose for himself a spot on the further bank where the canal was of such a width that the passage of boats would not interfere with his operations. It was a place just above a lock, sacred to rhetoric, for here the lock-keeper, his eye rolling in a fine frenzy, was moved to impassioned flights by every boat that came by. When the skippers of the boats and their wives struck in. at first antiphonally and then in chorus, the canal trembled to hear the replication of their sounds. To Alf this was pure gold. He did not attempt to imitate it one does not use gold for houisehold purposes, for it might attract too much attention — but he felt that the English language held more possibilities than the gram-mar-book had led him to suspect. Real fishermen, it is understood, move in ghostly silence, and speak with bated breath, scowling whenever the wind rustles the leaves, all for fear of frightening the fish. The canal fish must have been a specially hardy breed, for the most vigorous periods of the lock-keeper had no effect on them. Either they were - biting, in which case Alf returned home with his pockets full —baskts were held to be a tempting of Providence —or else they were not biting, and Alf gave it up and listened in somnolent content to the fireworks. Reaching the age of discretion, he took the usual post-graduate course—the fishing competitions. These possessed the stimulus of prizes, but

were guaranteed innocuous to the most highly strung nature, since neither exertions, prayers, nor tears could affect the result. A fishing competition must be an excellent school for fatalists. Matters were at this stage when the war broke out. and fishing was suspended for the duration. Alf did indeed try to fish in the ponds at Arras, using bombs as the medium, but the amount spent in beer for the consumption of the quartermaster-sergeant. outweighed the value of the catch. On another occasion he fished one of those dirty little Flanders brooks that flowed through the lines, but with no result. He also drank a fair amount of the brook in the hope of catching enteric or anything else that would send him to hospital, but three years of army cookery had proofed his stomach against anything less convincing than dynamite. THE LURE OF THE BROOK It was while he was a convalescent in an English village hospital in the last year of the war that he came face to face with the stark realities of life. To escape the strain of living up to the Y.A.D. nurses' bright social chatter he had taken a moorland walk, in the course of which he came across a brook foaming and cascading over pebbles and lying deep in still pools above boulders. In one such pool he saw two angel forms, and, like Gray’s cat, he purred annlause. Taking off his coat and rolling his shirt sleeves up to the shoulder he lay down on the boulder and succeeded, by a combination of mira les. in grasping one of the fish. Flushed with triumph, he turned and looked into the horror-stricken eyes of the village Dogberry. A painful scene followed, in the course of whicli Alf, irritated by a ta.c* less remark about the by-products of the Industrial Revolution (although it was not put quite like that), was so injudicious as to fling the trout in Dogberrv’s face. The ponderous machinery of the law being thus set in motion, Alf was called on to stand his trial in the big room at the Institute. The squire. a red-faced brigadiergeneral, who was said to remember the manual for bow-and-arrow drill, was in the chair, and the peasantry filled up the court, displaying emotion which would be considered exaggerated at Hollywood. As Dogberry’s horrid tale unfolded itself, coil by coil, like a python, the squire grew redder and redder, and the peasantry shuddered and turned pale. When Alf avouched the deed with what ought to have been disarming simplicity they averted their eyes and started away from him like the chorus when the Mikado laughs. The squire. after speaking at some length on the hidden hand, the decay of the Constitution, and the twilight of the Empire, inflicted the maximum fine, paid it himself, and followed it up with the present of an old fishing outfit. Thereafter Alf had to submit to a course of fly-fishing lessons, interlarded with reminiscences of the Waterloo campaign—at least that is what it sounded like. He persevered, but there were times when he wished he had gone to gaol. . He still has the outfit, but dare not produce it. He fears the guffaws of the brotherhood of the canal and is beginning to see that one social code may be as hidebound as another.