Gone Fishing

“Fill your boots Lads!” I cheerfully choked as young Brian and Terry helped me sort through Alan’s old things.  I’d been dreading this moment, but life goes on as they say and his hoard of teenage effects has been littering his old room, and with it my mind, for far too long now.

Terry held up a shabby, misshapen hat, “What about this Mr Pearson?  This’d be good for my next fishing trip.”

My eyes welled up.  You’d never think of him as the shrewdest mind, but young Terry Jones really does have one of the worst cases of foot-in-mouth disease I’ve ever known.

“Terry, put that back!” snapped Brian, Terry’s older and wiser brother, who had been absent-mindedly leafing through a pile of Loaded magazines.  “Think about what you’re saying.  He’s sorry Mr Pearson.”

“It’s fine lads.” I eventually reciprocated.  “But no, I-I’d rather like to hang on to that if you don’t mind.”

To most people this hat would appear unremarkable: made of once fine Harris Tweed and covered in hand-tied fishing flies.  It had been my father’s and, as I grew up, there was barely a Sunday afternoon when I would not see him leave the house wearing it, his rod and tackle bag clutched in either hand.  It had long been his ambition to share these stolen afternoons at the waterside with me, but the gentle pastime of angling and a Kevin Keegan-obsessed, highly-strung ten year old really do not mix awfully well.  On the two occasions we did venture to his favourite spot by the river near Cambury Manor, he snapped angrily at my attempts to break my “keepy-uppy” record with an empty bottle of Dandelion and Burdock and erupted with apoplectic rage when I dared skim a flat stone across the water’s surface.

“For the love of Pete, you silly young tyke!” he bawled, convulsing with ire. “You’ll scare away the fish with your blessed tomfoolery!”

“But father, we’ve barely seen a stickleback all day.  Besides, aren’t you scaring them off now by shouting at me?” I demurred.

No, fishing trips with my father never did turn out to be happy occasions.  The closest we came to bonding was as we “legged it” together from the Cambury Manor Squire – who’d clearly been alerted by my father’s clamorous protestations – like a couple of apple-scrumping schoolboys, my father trying carefully not to drop his catch – that elusive stickleback.

But my father’s fishing legacy sat rather better on the shoulders of my son Alan – a keen angler from the day he could hold a rod without losing his balance - and, some years before his death, my father passed down his treasured hat and tackle bag to him.  Initially proud to wear the hat, Alan bowed to teenage fashion sensibilities and replaced it with a black Nike baseball cap a year after my father passed away.  I doubt either would have given much cushioning against his tragic fall by the riverside when a loose bank of earth gave way causing him to strike his head on a large rock and be carried unconscious down the River Aire.   I’d lost a son...and finally gained a hat.

“Thanks Mr Pearson!” shouted the two boys, their arms laden with various records, magazines and posters as they shuffled down the path through my front garden.  I looked hard at the hat.  After wiping it free of dust and re-affixing two my father’s hand-made flies, I placed it on my head and looked sternly at myself in the mirror.  Without switching my glance, I reached for Alan’s old rod and my father’s tackle bag which had sat mocking by the hatstand these last three months.