MANFORD AND SERTON'S COSY NEST
It would be interesting to know who invented the phrase "Cockney
Sportsman"; we may fairly conclude, at any rate, that _The Pickwick
Papers_, backed persistently by _Punch_, gave it a firm riveting. It
applied perhaps more to the man with the gun than the rod, though the
most telling illustration was the immortal Briggs and his barking pike.
The term of contempt has long lost its sting, though it still holds
lightly. The angler of that ilk fifty years ago, as I can well
remember, for all his cockneyism, worked hard for his sport, and
enjoyed a fair amount of it. When, for example, I used to fish at
Rickmansworth in the middle 'sixties, you would see anglers walking
away with their rods and creels from Watford station to various waters
four or five miles distant. There are more railways now, but less
available fishing, and the anglers have multiplied a thousandfold,
making a wonderful change of conditions.
There were plenty of little-known, out-of-the-way places where common
fishing could be had for the asking, and excellent bags made by the
competent. Manford and Serton were two young men who, I suppose, would
have been in the category of Cockney Sportsmen, being workers in City
warehouses, members of neither club nor society, free and independent
lovers of all manner of out-of-door pursuits and country life. They
were both devoted to all-round angling, and Manford, in a modest
degree, fancied himself with the gun. These young men are here
introduced to the reader because a passing sketch of one of their
sporting excursions to the country will indicate a type, and show that
they might be cockney, but were also not undeserving the name of
sportsmen.
The young fellows made their plans in the billiard-room of the Bottle's
Head, just out of Eastcheap, chatting leisurely on the cushions while
waiting for a couple of bank mashers to finish their apparently
never-ending game. Thirty or forty years ago young fellows in the City
did not think so much about holidays as they now do. We have reached a
stage of civilisation when it seems absolutely necessary for our bodily
and spiritual welfare, however comfortably we may be situated in life,
to rush away for a change as regularly as the months of August and
September come round. Manford declared that exhausted nature would
hold out no longer unless he could take a holiday. Serton suggested
that he should try and rub along somehow until nearer October, when he
might go down with him to a quiet little place, where he gushingly
assured him there was splendid fishing, where they might live for next
to nothing, meet with nice people, and be in the midst of one of the
most beautiful parts of the country. The one condition was that
probably they would have to rough it a little. All these were genuine
attractions to S., who agreed to go, M. adding, as they rose to secure
the cues, that besides fishing there would be chances with the rabbits.
A spring-cart and a horsey-looking person were awaiting the travellers
outside the small roadside railway station at the end of their journey,
and they were already joyous and alert. They and their belongings were
bundled into the "trap" (how many misfits are covered by the word!) and
driven through a tree-arched lane. M. could extract something even
from the autumnal seediness of the hedgerows, affirming that they were
for all the world like a theatre when the holland coverings are on. S.
exclaimed with surprise as a squirrel ran across the track, telling M.
that this proved how really they were in the country, squirrels being
seldom seen, as weasels are, crossing a road. The driver, who was in
fact the keeper, found his opportunity in the uprising from a field of
two magpies chattering a welcome. "I think you'll have luck,
genl'men," he said. "'Tis allus a good sign to see two mags at once.
See one 'tis bad luck; see two it be fun or good luck; see three 'tis a
wedding; see four and cuss me if it bain't death."
A rustic cottage, approached between solid hedges of yew, was the
bespoken lodging, and M. and S. were quickly out of the cart, and
roaming the garden among fruit trees, autumn flowers, and beehives.
Thence they were summoned to the little front room, the oaken
window-sill bright with fuchsias and geraniums, the walls adorned with
an old eight-day clock, a copper warming-pan and antique trays, while
over the mantel-piece was a small fowling piece, years ago reduced from
flint to percussion. Upon the rafters there were half a side of bacon,
bunches of dried sweet herbs, and the traditional strings of onions.
The pictures consisted of four highly coloured prints of celebrated
race-horses, long ago buried and forgotten. It was in this cottage
that the young men remained, and very comfortable they were, for the
bedrooms were fitted up with the queerest of four-posters, made in the
last century, while the walls were covered with prints from sundry
illustrated papers, and illuminated texts. Serton had sojourned in
this humble dwelling-place before, and expatiated upon its manifold
merits to his friend, who prided himself upon being practical, and said
'twould do, but a five-pound note, he supposed, would buy the lot. "No
doubt," replied S., "but to me 'tis a cosy nest for anglers."
The fishing, however, was the first consideration, and with a sense of
satisfaction induced by good quarters out went the anglers, across
meadows, by the banks of a river. It was fine fun to help the
lock-keeper with his cast-net and store the bait-can with gudgeons and
minnows, and to crack jokes before the tumbling and rumbling weir, with
its deep, wide pool, high banks around, and overhanging bushes.
Serton, electing for a little Waltonian luxury, sat him down in
comfort, plumbed a hard bottom in six feet of water, caught a dace at
the first swim, and, with his cockney-bred maggots, took five others in
succession--three roach, and a bleak which he reported in town, at the
Bottle's Head, as the largest ever seen.
Meanwhile M., who was paternostering with worm and minnow, came down to
inform S. that he had already landed four perch, and that the shoal was
still unfrightened. With a recommendation to his friend to do
likewise, he returned to his station, and his basketed perch might soon
have recited, "Master, we are seven." Thereabouts a shout from S. made
the welkin ring; he cried aloud for help, and M. sprinted along in time
to save the fine tackle by netting a big chub. From the merry style of
the beginning, the captor had felt assured of more roach, and now
confessed that they and dace had ceased biting, though he had used
paste and maggot alternately. Then he took to small red worm and
angled forth a dish of fat gudgeon, that would have put a Seine fisher
in raptures. Next he lost a fish by breakage, and while repairing
damages was arrested by a distant summons from his companion, whom he
discovered wrestling with something--no perch, however--that had gained
the further side of the pool, and was now heading remorselessly for the
apron of the weir, under which it fouled and freed. The witnesses of
the defeat were probably right in their conclusion that this was the
aged black trout that had become a legend, and was believed to be the
only trout left in those parts.
During the afternoon M. and S., in peaceful brotherhood, sat over the
pool, plied paternoster and roach pole, and fished till the float could
be no more identified in the dusk. They carried to the cottage each
ten or twelve pounds' weight extra in fish caught, but in his memories
of the homeward walk S. must have been mistaken in his eloquent
reference to the crake of the landrail, though he might have been
correct as to the weak, piping cry of the circling bats, and the
ghostly passage of flitting owl mousing low over the meadow. These
alone, he said, broke the silence; in this M. took him to task, having
himself heard the tinkling of sheep bells and the barking of the
shepherd's dog.
Next morning the anglers were somewhat put out at first at the
necessity of fulfilling an engagement with the keeper, being reminded
of the promise by the appearance of a shock-headed youth in the cottage
garden, staggering under two sacks. M. was better versed in these
things than the other, and able to inform him that this meant
rabbiting; here were the nets and the ferrets, and he had undertaken to
stand by with the single-barrel and see fair play. Ferreting is a
business generally transacted without hustle, and the keeper was a
noted slowcoach. With this knowledge, and the presence under his eye
of a basket containing ground-bait kneaded in the woodhouse while the
breakfast rashers were frying, S. opined that he might snatch an hour
or so of honest reaching in the backwater while the rabbit people were
getting ready.
The roach master eventually came to the rendezvous, indeed, with a
dozen and five of those beautifully graded roach which are between
three-quarters and half pound, and which, when they are "on the feed,"
run marvellously even in size and quality. M. did not now concern
himself about the roach. He was no longer a Waltonian; his mind had
taken the tone of the keeper's. Yesterday his soul was of the fish,
fishy; to-day it was full of muzzle-loaders, nets, and ferrets. But
he, too, had his reward, and S. noticed that as they plodded athwart a
fallow he looked out keenly and knowingly for feathered or four-footed
game as if he were Colonel Hawker in person, and not the patient
paternosterer with downcast eye. After S. had witnessed his bright eye
and upstanding boldness when he brought the single-barrel to shoulder
and dropped a gloriously burnished woodpigeon at long shot, he
conceived an enhanced respect for him evermore, and was endued with a
spirit of toleration to watch the coming operations, in which he took
no part.
Nets were pegged down; there was much talk of bolt holes between the
keeper and the rustic shockhead working on different sides of the bank,
and M. and the dog Spider had vision and thought for nothing but the
open holes they guarded. It transpired that the keeper wanted rabbits
for commerce. The couples that speedily met fate in the nets were
insufficient. He required fifteen couple. M. rolled over a white scut
with obvious neatness and dispatch, and in shifting over to another
hedgerow he shot a jay and gloried in its splendour. The keeper,
however, moderated any secret intentions there might have been as to
the plumage by one sentence: "That's another for the vermin book. I
gets a bob for that."
The keeper's cottage gave lunch and rest to the party, and the talk was
either of ferrets, hares, and rabbits, or of the two rudely carpentered
cases which contained well-set-up specimens of teal, cuckoo, wryneck,
abnormally marked swallow, pied rat, landrail, and polecat, each being
a chapter in the life history of the keeper.
The tale of rabbits being incomplete, M. returned to his former
occupation, but S. fished again, continually finding sport of the
miscellaneous kind, such as a chub with cheese paste, perch with dew
worm out of the milk-prepared moss, roach rod with running tackle, and
leger tackle on a spinning rod. With this and a great worm on strong
hook he had the surprise of a fight that gave him not a little concern.
The fish at first appeared to be going to ground, even boring bodily
into it. Then it gave way to panic, and shot about the pool as if
pursued by a water fiend. Winched in slowly, it plunged into the bank,
thought better of it, and ran up stream. At this crisis M. arrived,
commandeered the net, and stood around offering advice. It was a
monster eel, he said. Give him more butt; be careful; be more
energetic; certainly, all right. The last remark was simply a receipt
in form of a little speech from S., who had briefly bidden him to mind
his own business. The unseen fish abruptly had given in. Was it
collapse? Slowly, slowly it followed the revolution of the reel, both
men peering intent for first sight and grounds for identification of
species. The first sight, however, must have been on the part of the
fish, which went off in a fright deep down with renewed strength, and
then it did surrender, a barbel of 6 lb., a somewhat rare fish for the
river, and only taken when, as in this case, it had wandered up into
the weir pool.
Having told M. to mind his own business with a minimum of ceremony, it
was not surprising that S. was left alone, not exactly to his sport,
since, as it happened, the barbel closed his account, unless one or two
losses may be included in that definition, and, to give him his due, he
was so thorough a fisherman that he did regard losses, shortcomings,
and mishaps as legitimate assets in the general game. He had forgotten
in his barbeline absorption to inquire, according to usage, how his
comrade had been faring, and did not meet him again till they were in
the throat of the lane cottage-wards bound. "Well, old 'un; what luck
with the paternoster?" he asked, cheerily. M., with a sly twinkle in
the eye, said, yes, he had done somewhat; three pike. It may be
premised that the young men had both been trying at intervals for a
certain marauding pike reported to them as a ferocious duck destroyer
by a gentleman farmer who came down to gossip. He indicated the field
and a gravel pit as a guide to the place where his cowman had seen a
duckling seized by a pike, and the man embellished his account by
swearing that the fish had ploughed his way down the river half out of
water, with the ball of feathers bewhiskering his jaws. Manford, it
seems, had revenged the raided ducks. A large pike lay at the bottom
of his rush basket underneath three jack and a covering of rushes, and
it was produced as a crowning show, a golden fish of 17 lb. lured to
execution by a live bait. There was talk of nothing else that night
but this prize at keeper's cottage, village tap-room, at the lockheads,
and by five-barred gates; and the exultant keeper, who took credit for
all, was heard to say that it was the best bloomin' jack he had seen
"for seven year come last plum blight," whenever and whatever that
might be.