Free Once by Andrew McNeillie Page B

disaster, of lost tackle, and frustration, until success felt like the dimmest memory before round it would come again, to hook me.
    Such an event it was too, one pristine morning at low tide, at the end of the pier, at nine o’clock, when, as I was fishing from the eastern corner into two or three feet of water, my rod bounced on the rail so hard I might have hooked a whale. I struck back. But missed the fish or whatever it was. So I must reel in to check my hooks and bait up again, as nimbly as I could, not to lose a moment, all the while concentrating on the angle and range at which my original cast had been. Out went the paternoster on a wing and a prayer and my reel whirred round to almost the last of my line. (I had a cheap rod – with a bamboo lower part, and a greenhart top. My reel was an old-fashioned wooden one. Not even a fully-grown man could have cast any distance with it.)
    It was heartbreaking to think the monster had escaped. Nor did I expect to connect with it or anything again. I was used to blank trips. But almost at once, bang went my rod on the rail again, so vigorously that its butt-end skidded and the rod slid sideways on the rail. This time the fish stayed on, and up I wound a plaice bigger than any dinner plate we had at home, a surfeit, still flexing and alive when I got it home and into the sink, to clean away its purse of gut and foreshortened alimentary system. Not only was it bigger than a dinner-plate, it went a good way to filling the bottom of the sink.
    I’ve never caught a bigger plaice since, except later when helping aboard Mr Arundale’s trawler, the What-Ho! - between Trwyn Du and Great Orme’s Head, working Dutchman’s Bank and Lavan Sands. It was so marvellous that rather than persist in the hope there might be others like it out there, I packed up my gear almost at once and hurried back home down the prom and up the Donkey Path shortcut to the village. I was so thrilled I couldn’t wait to show my catch. I had other such days, each of a different order, and few perhaps, few enough to make them seem to have occurred many more times than they did.

    * * *
    Big fish and big catches are like big snows. A shoal of fish and a blizzard and a starry sky are one and the same in the mind’s eye of a boy. It didn’t snow every winter. I can’t pretend it did, even in those far-off days; and rarely did snow stay long on the coast. The salty air and warmer air currents by the sea worked against it. Through the images of snow still falling silently in my memory, I can make out perhaps three starveling snowbound winters in my first twenty years.
    Even so I’m blinded, wide-eyed flakes stinging my eyes, and unsure of my direction, unsure how to tell one big snow from another. I later wrote a poem about this business and called it ‘Sledging’:

    Just as less can be more, rarely can be often.
    It’s not so much the mind-body problem as
    the nature of truth and its conditions, the meaning
    of memory, the soul and its survival in the world,
    whirled in an infinite number of dimensions and planes.

    So I protest to myself, anyway, admitting
    when I say ‘I used to’, it might be I mean ‘once’.
    Upon a time, below a time, events winnow out
    their chaff. So with the grain, against the grain,
    the song steps out into the blizzard of the page.
    How rarely was there snow enough for sledging. I’m not counting the big snow of ’47 which I survived but could hardly be said to have witnessed to remember. Forget that memory starts its work before we’re born.
    But there was one Boxing Day, the one before I was thirteen, in which snow and fish came magically together at the end of the pier. Stars might have too, but the snow-clouds obscured them. I made a poem about it that opens with words of my great-grandfather McNeillie, and folds into its account the much later experience of seeing Dr Zhivago , a cold-war film of the