Free Once by Andrew McNeillie Page A

on a piece of nylon tied to a bendy bit of bamboo cut from across the stream. How he splashed and lunged, and jigged in the air, the cane bent double to my fist. I took him home, as if officially to record my skilful success. We weighed him in at just under a pound. Then we put him in the dustbin. It would have been better to have left him to live out his days fattening on sewer-juice. But I’m answering the questions you won’t ask, now, as frankly as I know, ready for when I’m gone, as to what my growing years were like, no punches as to barbed-hook barbarism pulled.
    Once home in bed that night I didn’t think of trout at all, but of whiting and flounder, codling and plaice. I loved to catch flatfish. I loved their queer look, with one eye round the corner, the other overhead. Their chins turned up, as if they were about to blub at their sorry flat-earth overhead horizon. Ever since the world rolled over, and they got out from under it by the skin of their teeth, there they were condemned to the bottom of the deep. Yet all their dreams looked up, from the wrinkled sea-floor, through a wrinkled roof, to stare at a wrinkled star. I loved their rusty stigmata, and I even quite liked eating them – the one fish I liked on the bone, because their skeleton made them so easy to tackle.
    I lay there thinking of my line and took comfort in the quiet of the night. It was a still night. You could hear the owl across the Glen in the still trees. The sea wouldn’t wreck my line, sag it with weed, uproot its stakes, half bury it in sand, still less wash it away. It was a perfect night, but not for sleep.
    I live nowadays about as far from the coast as it is possible to live in the unnameable archipelago. I can’t set a nightline anywhere but on a page. I can’t lie in disturbed sleep impatient for the day, except when I have a line or two out towards a poem. Fish and poems: you dream them both into being and then they press against you, nose you awake. It’s not quite the same. But it is similar, being linear and of the nature of possession. And it’s also a matter of luck, notwithstanding craft and knowledge. And so there you lie, tucked up in bed fathoms away, if you can sleep, that is.... But your sleep at best is as turbulent and crossed by currents as the sea. Intermittently you keep the night watch, the dog watch. That dawn will come is the old argument from experience. But when?
    Starting suddenly, as if hooked from my sleep, I’d find it hours away yet, and still so again, and so slow you’d think it at the bottom of the world and never to dawn. Then when I’d be at the bottom of the world myself, something terrible would prompt me to wake. The hour had come just when I wanted another ten minutes, another hour, just when I didn’t want to stir, still less rise and shine. But there it was the hour of my doom and up I stole bleary-eyed to hurry unwashed into my clothes and run down to the shore before the morning was too many minutes older, the tide too many inches lower.
    Here came the first train from England, trailing silvery-grey steam clouds, hauling the day with it, to station after station, impatient for Holyhead, rattling now over the viaduct as I ran under it. How far out was the sea? ...And there it was limping out, scarcely ruffled, slow to wake from its own night’s nuzzling against the sea-wall. And there was I escorting it back, like Moses dividing the waters, restless for the first sight of my unpromised catch. And then when I saw the tops of my stakes, slightly askew now, how long before I could learn my luck or lack of it?
    What a thrill when there I saw, not two, not three, but nine fish in a row, whiting and a ling. It was an intensely bright morning and I remember thinking the whiting at a distance looked like starched handkerchiefs pegged at a corner blowing on a washing line. That sort of a catch set me up for many days and nights of failure, of