Once by Andrew McNeillie

soldier’s knapsack with webbing straps (just as my father had) and brass clasps, and his creel over his shoulder or stuffed in his bag, and his rod, his snack in his bag, his newspaper twist of black tea-leaves and sugar, his can and little bottle of milk, his matches, newspaper and tinder, or on some days in the warmer weather, just his Thermos flask and squashed cheese and ham sandwiches, to comfort him in the valley of the shadow of the Black Lake.
    Ifor was an all-weather amphibious man. He had slightly bulging eyes, permanently surprised by the world, and wore his iron-grey hair slicked with Brylcream or Brilliantine back from his temple. His nose was round enough for him to look like a seal, or perhaps an otter, especially on a wet day. He was a kind of freshwater seal, a wet-fly man for all seasons and conditions, and an indefatigable, taciturn foot-soldier, who had been an infantryman in the war. Nothing deterred him and once at the lake he would fish and fish, casting and casting, the same three flies if he could, with rarely a rest all the day, but for a reluctant brew, and pause to check his barbs were intact, and not ripped off in the back-cast, among the rocks, a great hazard of the place and cause of lost fish:

    To fish there you wade in air among
    the rocks angling for your balance.

    Black water chops ashore and the torrent
    holds you bubble-rapt in its sound-warp

    like a dipper submerged in a rushing pool
    intent on caddis larvae.

    If one of the others came by to know
    your luck it could startle you to death.
    Ghosts as they are, or not. They haunt here
    like the stories they told of ones that got away.

    The steep cwm will catch your cast more
    than ever those wily fish might rise before you

    to a hook ripped of its barb on a rock.
    I learnt in this place, from the age of ten,

    to curse like a man, ‘God damn it to hell,’
    to brew tea in a smoke of heather stalks and downfall,

    to tie instant bloodknots and a noose
    round the neck of the Bloody Butcher

    while the fish moved out of range
    as now that world has veered forever

    and every finger’s a thumb, my reading glasses
    beaded with rain, and not a fish to be seen.
    Ifor was a durable man, in the best way, as soft and gentle, shy and humorous, as you’d wish. He was palpably shy and would regularly blush, as if he was innocent. As if anyone was innocent. Don’t we dwell in a fallen world? I assure you we do whatever your religious view or view of religion. But you always felt he was a man to be in a tight corner with, if ever you found a tight corner to be in. He had a stubborn streak. You felt you’d have to kill him to succeed against him. He caught fish. He knew how to do it. He had no fancy rod or reel, just old tried, trusted standbys of indeterminate vintage. He kept his own company mostly, as did we all, though sometimes if fate brought us in each other’s way, the men might pause for a joint brew and a little metaphysics, about light and temperature and wind-direction and the feeding habits of the Black Lake’s trout, a dour race, denizens of a dour place, about prospects, about likely fishing flies.
    Solitaries we might be but we kept common worlds. We each had our trinity, our three lives: the one we escaped at home, work and school; the one we lived, here and now, in common things and the trance of thought; and last the dream-come-true by evening, weighed down with brown trout, none less than three-quarters of a pound in our creel, a full creel, never an empty creel, to cut into your shoulder for your trouble. We were nothing if we weren’t dreamers, dreaming meaning into being.
    â€˜Diw,’ Ifor winked at me, his lips pursed to smile, and chuckling to himself and to my father as he climbed in, ‘I see you’ve brought the tea-boy, then...’.
    Tea-boy I didn’t take to. But the beauty of boyhood among men is that it has no voice, or hadn’t one, in those days, when you were