the river god

A break from Giard today. I've just bought an anthology of fishing stories published in the US under the title Fisherman's Bounty. It's an interesting collection and I started reading it last night. The first story is called 'The River God' and is by the actor and writer, Roland Pertwee (who was the father of John Pertwee and the second cousin of Bill Pertwee). An angler in his forties looks back on his first steps in fishing as a ten-year-old. Pertwee was born in 1885 and, although we  always need to be careful about identifying authors and narrators too closely, I think the story is probably set in the 1890s, the period of his own childhood, or shortly after.

The story examines in some detail the boy's emotional responses to the extraordinary world that he is discovering. It communicates the awe that he feels in handling a 'two-guinea' rod for the first time, opening a tin  full of flies and casts, standing on the edge of a salmon stream in Wales having spent two years casting in the garden without the opportunity to go near a river. There is an alternating sense of joy, fear, and despair, as well as an attention to the younger self's powerful determination to do things properly - his aspiration to be like a grown-up in this one compelling area of life. I'll just quote one section - a short reflective passage on the important of knots:

I have often wondered how I was able to control my fingers well enough to tie a figure-eight knot between the line and the cast. But I did, and I'm proud to be able to record it. Your true-born angler does not go blindly to work until he has first satisfied his conscience. There is a pride in knots of which the laity knows nothing, and if, through neglect to tie them rightly, failure and loss should result, pride may not be restored nor conscience salved by the plea of eagerness.

This reminds me of something Steve said in the meeting at the youth centre. You have to be confident that you've made your preparations properly - otherwise you'll sit there anxiously wondering if you made a mistake and eventually start reeling in to check.

I like the way the adult, narrating self expresses his approval of the younger, experiencing self - the boy's concern to get it right. And, in fact, a central element of the story is the way in which the child's resistance to the discouragement of many of the adults around him has stood the test of time and matured into a way of life:

'What do you want to do this afternoon, old man?' [my father] asked.  
'Fish,' I said.
'But you can't always fish,' he said.
I told him I could and I was right and have proved it for thirty years and more.
'Well, well,' he said, 'please yourself, but isn't it dull not catching anything?'
And I said, as I've said a thousand times since, 'As if it could be.'

The River God of the title is an old military man - a Colonel 'of the older order that takes a third of a century and a lot of Indian sun and Madras curry in the making.' He is the one adult who treats the boy with understanding and respect and the narrator says of their first meeting (on a family holiday in Wales): 'I had been talked to as a man by a man among men'.  The Colonel is presented, I think, as a figure of wisdom. He has an intuitive understanding of how the boy is feeling throughout the events of the narrative and finally helps him to land a salmon that has broken the lad's rather inadequate rod and made off with the hook still in its mouth. As the older narrating self implies, the Colonel forms a model of a life wholly and seriously committed to fishing, a life in the which the virtues of understanding, generosity, and kindness are also manifest.

At the end of the story we return to the narrator's present and he tells us that, although the Colonel, the last of the veterans of the Indian 'Mutiny', is now dead, he still 'meets' him on the river banks:

The banks of a river are frequented by a strange company and are full of mysterious and murmurous sounds - the cluck and laughter of water, the piping of birds, the hum of insects, and the whispering of wind in the willows. What should prevent a man in such a place having a word and speech with another who is not there? So much of fishing lies in the imagination, and mine needs little stretching to give my river god a living form.

And the man who lives on in the imagination continues to grow and change: 'He has begun to take an interest in dry-fly methods - that river god of mine, with his seven-league boots, his shaggy head, and the gaff across his back.'

There are lots of interesting elements to the story - the code of conduct that the narrator presents as underlying angling as an activity and which 'the laity' do not understand, the idea that one can - in childhood - realise that one is a 'born fisherman' and that fishing is one's calling, the figure of the wise older man who treats the hero with generosity and understanding.  (C.G. Jung springs to mind again.) I'm even interested in how the Colonel's life in India forms a background of violence to the pastoral scenes of the story itself. We are told early in the narrative that, coming upon a band of Indian soldiers 'conspiring mischief ... with a barrel of gunpowder', he had thrown the butt of his cheroot in so that 'presently they all went to hell'. How does fishing relate to these kinds of experience - the thirty years in the Indian sun that it takes to make a Colonel?

The Afon Lledr (River Lledr) at Pont-y-Pant, the setting of the story. Image by Eirian Evans [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.