The first wild trout I ever saw was in France. It’s still there in midair, in
a picture in my head. I was on holiday with my parents and their friends,
and fishing with their son Warren and his friend, Justin, I think, or
Julian. J can smell fish, Warren had said, and he was a fishing god because
he owned a Mitchell reel.
He caught half a dozen small fish from a Brittany harbour and cooked them on
an open fire, though they tasted like a sewer and the first mouthful made me
gag. The brown trout came from a rocky stream, on a float run through fast
water, and I can remember the float dipping, the strike, and the fish
leaping into the air.
From then on I always associated France with trout, though I’ve been back many
times and rarely caught one — the wrong time of year, or the wrong place.
But for three summers during college I took the train south with friends
from art school. We crammed ourselves into a narrow railway carriage, taking
turns to stretch out on the floor, filling up on baguettes jambon-beurre and
coffee that made our eyes bleed, until we fell out blinking into the
southern sun of Cahors, made for a sort of artists’ summer camp we’d heard
of, and eroded our stomachs and morals with a fortnight of black wine and
tent hopping.
Then a London cab pulled up at our den in the woods, and in it were friends of
a friend, dreary pseudo-hippies for the most part, but also Juliet. I had a
thing for Juliet, and I don’t think it was merely lust. I was overdosing on
Yeats and nurturing a sense of Celtic melancholy. She had this long hair,
and a face from a painting. She was cool and she could dance. And I was
young and had an erection for most of the day.
So I defied my better judgment and joined the dropouts for a drive around the
hills. I remember making pasta in some derelict barn, and realising through
an eight-francs-a-bottle haze that she was getting her hair stroked by one
of the pseudo-dropouts. All of a sudden I didn’t know what I was doing
there, so I left, walked down through the woods to a gorge I’d seen earlier
in the day, and cut a branch, strung it up with a hook and line, and fished
with cheese in a pool between huge boulders. A railway train clattered over
a stone bridge high over the gorge and a few minutes later I caught the
second wild trout I’d seen in France.
And when, years later, I came to the Dordogne for the first time, only to find
it in full flood, and ended up on a nearby river running through a gorge and
below a high-arched railway bridge, I realised I’d been there before.
There was no fire in my head that time. Well, a gentler one, mellowed by
surety. I had tagged along with Jean-Pierre, who was guiding some regular
clients. We climbed from the flooded Dordogne onto the plateau of the Massif
Central, and meandered south until we found a gorge so deep our ears popped
twice on the way down, and Jean-Pierre’s worn-out Renault had an alarming
case of brake fade.
At the bottom we drove past the brutalist concrete architecture of a
hydroelectric barrage, and parked up in the cool woods. There was clearly no
hurry to the river — I’d pulled on my waders before I realised Jean-Pierre
and his rods from Paris were breaking out red wine and a garlic sausage so
strong that I felt sure it would ward off the vipers I’d been warned about.
“La Cère est bonne, mais il y a beaucoup de vipères. Gardez,”
a local had warned me the day before. “They’re batty about vipers,” said Jim
later. “Obsessed. They all go round mixing home-grown vaccines, far more
dangerous than the snakes themselves. More of these guys end up in hospital
each year from vaccines than snakebites.”
We lay under the trees with the Cère tumbling past, and Jean-Pierre sliced up
the sausage, laid it on chunks of white bread and handed pieces around.
We rummaged through fly boxes. Jean-Pierre saw the two types of fly I’d been
sold at the shop in Argentat the day before. “C’est parfait.”
One had a fiery brown collar hackle. These hackles had a sheen that you only
got from Corrèzian birds, the shopkeeper had told me. Take one of these
crea- tures to the north, and the sheen goes — and it’s the sheen that
attracts the trout. I listened sceptically, admired the fine-looking hackles
and bought a few.
“Regardez.” Jean-Pierre picked up his rod and waded out into
the first pool. “Comme ça, et ça.” He turned the
rod in the air like a conductor beating out a slow rhythm, his arm at full
stretch, a fixed length of line hanging from the tip of the rod. The river
fell down the gorge from one small circular pool to the next, squeezing
between boulders the size of cars.
Jean-Pierre got in close behind one of these pools, cast on to it with a
graceful rise and fall of the rod, and then, lifting gently, he kept all the
line off the surface as the collared dry fly floated downstream more slowly
than the current. After a few casts his rod dipped and a small brown trout
leapt clear of the water, throwing spray into the sunshine. “C’est
facile, non?”
I nodded, and shrugged my shoulders. “Go, Charles, va, et attraper
les truites.” He gestured me upstream, and I left him with his two
pupils. The sun shone hard and split the valley in two — my bank was dark
and cold, the far one shone brilliantly. Heat rippled off rocks, and ached
the backs of my eyes. When I slipped into the water I felt the chill wrap
itself around me. The river tumbled down past giant boulders, and where the
falling water caught the sun, it glistened. At the top of the run was the
railway bridge.
I flicked my line onto the first pool, and lifted the rod as Jean-Pierre had
shown. I saw a copper flash in the water as a trout turned on the dry fly,
and in the next pool the same happened, though this time the line
straightened immediately after, and a small trout rushed around the pool.
Working up this run I felt as if I was fishing in a corridor, searching behind
doors to see what was there, teasing bright creatures into the sun. I caught
only small trout, though Jean-Pierre assured me there were bigger ones. I
fished up under the bridge and found the boulder I’d sat on years before. I
rested there for a bit, watching the current in midstream, and thought about
how the water just there had been flowing past from that day to this, and
would do the same for thousands of years.
A train clattered overhead, and I carried on upriver, catching trout until the
sun left the water. Jean-Pierre was sitting by the river with his two
clients, finishing the wine we’d opened at lunch. I asked about the chances
of fishing on the Dordogne the next day. He shrugged. “The Dordogne, she is
still a bad woman. She will not behave.”
I found a small stream called La Doustre, and picnicked there with Vicky and
our tiny son Patrick. We drove into the valley by accident, taking a
backstreet out of Argentat, following it across a small meadow and up a
steep, wooded escarpment, until the road dropped steeply and broke out into
daylight.
Immediately we crossed a bridge, and I jumped out to look. In the pool
downriver I could see a trout, its dark back lit up by the sun that shone
through the trees. A single-lane road followed the stream through small
farms and villages, before climbing up and over the range of hills beyond,
on to the vast emptiness of the Massif plateau. It was not on the way to
anywhere.
The valley was narrow and bounded by steep wooded hills and outcrops of white
stone mottled with moss. The river snaked through in easy curves, rattled
into long quiet pools under lines of poplar and willow. Even at midday the
place had the silence of dawn. I could hear Patrick shouting about tractors off
in the woods somewhere, and every so often a dog barked, or a 2CV buzzed by.
Over the stream, dragonflies the size of toy aeroplanes swooped on the few
light olives that were hatching, and along the edge thousands of water
boatmen skittered across the water. Every so often one would disappear in a
violent splash.
I ran a small sedge through these flotillas and caught fat trout with
coal-black spots. One old fish had a vast head and a kype on his jaw. The
trout were too closely packed to get big in a little stream with long
winters, but this ancient fish had seen at least eight or 10 of them.
Our week unfolded changelessly, confined to side streams near Argentat, but
each evening we’d walk along the quay and sit and watch the Dordogne. She
flowed hard, two or three feet up on summer level and as cold as space. We
had to leave before the bad woman river would let me near her. It was just
the time of year, we reasoned.
Extracted from Somewhere Else by Charles Rangeley-Wilson, published by
Yellow Jersey at £12.99. To order a copy at the reduced price of £10.39,
excluding p&p, call The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585
