A Clear Water Stream: Henry Williamson Collections, #11

By Henry Williamson

Whether the reader is an angler, naturalist, country lover or simply receptive to Williamson's limpid prose, A Clear Water Stream embraces all these passions.

The Williamson family moved to Shallowford on the River Bray in North Devon, England, in 1929. With his typical zest, the author set about revitalizing the river, stocking it with both salmon and trout, and building low weirs, thus creating new pools and improving the flow of water.

Mistakes were made, with sleepless nights spent worrying over poachers, predators, and upsetting the natural balance. Williamson's error was to apply a chalkstream ethic to the Bray, and upland, acidic water. His introduction of water-crowfoot, a relatively uncommon plant in West Country upland streams at that time, was the cause of much consternation among local fishermen.

There are stories of entertaining sojourns spent fishing in the Hebrides, Florida and Canada, and joyous moments with his children, but throughout, the thread - which is the stream - enchants the reader to the finale.

Henry Williamson's impassioned observations were later to become the genesis for his classic work, Salar the Salmon.

A Clear Water Stream is a delightful tale, interspersed with the author's deepest emotions. Henry Williamson's message, nearly eighty years later, stands as a prophetic work of genius. The River Bray today runs clear and vibrant. Salmon and sea trout still ascent to the foot of Exmoor, and the diminutive but beautiful wild trout continue to dimple the river's surface.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Henry Williamson
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781873507513

Henry Williamson

The writer Henry Williamson was born in London in 1895. Naturalist, soldier, journalist, farmer, motor enthusiast and author of over fifty books, his descriptions of nature and the First World War have been highly praised for their accuracy. He is best known as the author of Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1928 and was filmed in 1977. By one of those extraordinary coincidences, Henry Williamson died while the crew were actually filming the death scene of Tarka. His writing falls into clear groups: 1) Nature writings, of which Tarka the Otter and Salar the Salmon are the most well known, but which also include, amongst many others, The Peregrine's Saga, The Old Stag and The Phasian Bird. 2) Henry Williamson served throughout the First World War.The Wet Flanders Plain, A Patriot's Progress, and no less than five books of the 15-volume Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (How Dear is Life, A Fox Under My Cloak, The Golden Virgin, Love and the Loveless and A Test to Destruction) cover the reality of the years 1914–1918, both in England and on the Western Front. 3) A further grouping concerns the social history aspect of his work in the 'Village' books (The Village Book and The Labouring Life), the four-volume Flax of Dream and the volumes of the Chronicle. But all of these groups can be found in any of his books. Some readers are only interested in a particular aspect of his writing, but to truly understand Henry Williamson's achievement it is necessary to take account of all of his books, for their extent reflects his complex character. The whole of life, the human, animal and plant worlds, can be found within his writings. He was a man of difficult temperament but he had a depth of talent that he used to the full. The Henry Williamson Society was founded in 1980, and has published a number of collections of Williamson's journalism, which are now being published as e-books.

Book preview

First published in 1958 by

Faber and Faber Limited

New revised, illustrated edition 2008

E-book edition 2013

Smashwords edition

The Henry Williamson Society

14 Nether Grove

Longstanton

Cambridgeshire

Text © Henry Williamson Literary Estate 2008

Foreword © John Bailey 2008

Illustrations © Mick Loates 2008

ISBN 978-1-873507-51-3 (EPUB)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

In honour of Henry and Loetitia and the Shallowford family

Contents

 Introduction   John Bailey

1.  Fishing Cottage

2.  The Boy Who Loved Fishing

3.  I Survey the River

4.  I Visit a Fish Farm, and Meet Poachers

5.  Dark Months

6.  The Judge’s Warning

7.  I Make a Hatchery

8.  At Last, a Dry-fly Purist!

9.  Canadian Backwoodsman

10. I Stare at Water and Make Dams

11. Water Play

12. Spate

13. I Behold the Hebrides

14. Nog & Co.

15. Migration

16. In the Deep South

17. ‘All Things Linkèd Are . . .’

Illustrations

‘I was back in the summer of boyhood’

‘The fish was jerked into the cowslips of the meadow’

‘I supposed him to be a curate’

Henry and the fishmaster

‘To the south lay the Burrows’

‘Mullheads, or miller’s thumbs’

‘How pleasant it was, to stand on Humpy Bridge’

‘Looking over, I saw trout of all sizes’

‘I began to throw out my line’

‘It was a creeper of the March Brown’

‘She leapt and smacked down on her side’

Spate

‘Salmon endured for a purpose’

‘What parental curses had come from yellow beaks’

‘I hauled armfuls of dripping weed’

‘Yes captin, raised and born on dis here ribber’

‘The water, so beautiful with its pellucid flow’

Tailpieces

Bait!

Brown trout rising to the fly

Kingfisher

Old Nog, the heron

Otter chasing trout

Samlet

The Poacher, trout fly

Introduction

I DON’T FEEL it’s strange that I’ve been asked to write this introduction. It’s more like synchronicity. I was actually bought my first edition copy of A Clear Water Stream in Dulverton in the West Country on a summer holiday in the early 1960s. Unsurprisingly, even as a small child, I became immersed in the book, and the rivers around the hotel where I was staying, that Williamson seemed to be describing for me alone, took on a new fascination. Then, for most of my life, I’ve lived a handful or so miles away from Williamson’s Norfolk farm. As my obsession with the writer grew, I searched out the older characters who had been acquainted with him and learned from them what the man was like. Or at least what his public persona portrayed. Taciturn perhaps best summarises that.

So, we do have both ‘spiritual’ and geographical links. When I first began to write, too, I fancied myself as an observer of nature in the Williamson way. Years ago, at university, I had some articles published. I certainly didn’t consciously base them on Williamson’s work, but you don’t have to scratch the surface far to see his influences. Of course, my articles weren’t nearly as good. It is fine having a turn of phrase, but not if you don’t really have much to turn it around. That is what is important about Williamson: whenever he says something, you know he means it and it’s worth listening to.

I still take A Clear Water Stream on some of my more trying expeditions abroad when I know I’m likely to be up against it and, come nightfall, might need a bit of comfort. I was just alive in 1958 – when A Clear Water Stream was published – and I can dimly remember the England that Williamson was describing. In truth, much of ‘old England’ had already disappeared, but there were vestiges remaining that weren’t totally modern and spoiled. There were still wildflowers that hadn’t been eradicated by crop spraying. I knew villages that hadn’t been swamped by new building. There were plenty of roads that hadn’t then become nose-to-tail car parks. A Clear Water Stream, Williamson’s account of his stewardship of the stretch of the River Bray at Shallowford in North Devon, where he lived during the 1930s, is about a world of blacksmiths, shepherds, curates, keepers and tenant farmers, a world where drivers of open-top sports cars wear leather coats, goggles, flying helmets and greet each other with a cheery wave. Yes, I like to lie in some rotten part of the world reading this sort of thing, realising there was an age before road rage.

What I’ve always sensed and loved about Williamson’s work is that he was disarmingly honest and never tried to hide anything from his readers. Or from himself. Take chapter two in the book, ‘The Boy Who Loved Fishing’. Can there be a more heartfelt sigh for what is past, anywhere in literature? I had constant friends as a kid, but I was an only child, and there has always been that solitary streak in me that reaches out for that pang of loneliness that pervades Williamson’s writing. When Williamson talks about fish in private lakes where peacocks call wildly and rhododendrons flower under towering oaks, I know what he means. I can remember my own pools in summer holidays when time was so fragile and life so precious. I can empathise with Williamson as that boy alone, that boy on whom nature can imprint herself without rival or competition.

Of course, there’s much more to Williamson than a welcoming dose of comfort reading harking back to some whimsical Avalon. In his views on society, politics and militarism, he could be controversial but often modern. His environmentalism is certainly so. What he says about the management of a West Country trout stream could be read today in the most advanced journals of the Wild Trout Trust. Take the chapter, ‘The Judge’s Warning’. A more realistic and attractively portrayed interpretation of the aquatic food chain I can’t immediately think of. Think, too, of Williamson’s work on the river, building groynes and weirs; or of the agonising that went on with his stocking policies; or of his deliberations over the planting of alien weeds. This took place seventy years ago, but it would be up to date even tomorrow. What many of us think we are pioneering we could easily find in Williamson if we bothered to look.

So, writing in 1958, Williamson was living in the past but also in the future. Perhaps it’s best to say that he lived in his own time and no-one else’s. Whatever one thinks about some of the topics Williamson wrote upon, no-one, surely, can ever doubt that he was one of our great naturalists. It’s true to say that there have been those who have known more in a pragmatic, scientific sort of way, but none who have felt as much, or as deeply. There’s an intimacy to Williamson’s writing that is almost heartbreaking. You feel his gut-churning anxiety over a stranded salmon. His worry over lack of rainfall is so feverish that he writes it with a pain that hurts. Observing and interpreting nature is one thing, but I can’t think of anyone but Williamson so driven by its life force, its power and its dignity.

If there is one reason, though, why I will always champion Williamson’s name, it is this. Today, in virtually all nature writing and film making, fish are demeaned. Whatever the medium, a bird will be intimately identified. So, too, will reptiles or mammals. We will be told everything we need to know about meercats, Christian names and all, but this is not the case with fish. Endlessly in film or in magazine a fish is quite simply just that, and no-one cares or knows if it’s a trout or a tarpon.

Yes. Williamson understood fish and loved fish, and wrote wonderfully about fish. And I love him for that. Think back again to chapter two and his perfect description of a small roach. He painted it as the pearl of nature a roach truly is. Think of his tenderness for that old, dark brown trout that he feared constantly to be teetering on the edge of death; or of his admiration for the sparkle of his introduced Loch Levens – their vivacity, their colouring, their spotting patterns. Fish are brilliant and Williamson knew that. That’s why for me he will be always worth reading, will always be special.

Like many of Williamson’s books, A Clear Water Stream isn’t perfect. After all these years, there are pieces I’m happy to skip over. But there are many more sections that I can read and re-read and always extract new meaning and new enlightenment. It was my mother, I remember, who bought me A Clear Water Stream all those years ago. I guess she thought that she was doing a good thing for me. The pity of it is, she died before I could tell her exactly how good that gift actually was, how grateful I am that Williamson came into my life and blessed it like he has done for us all.

John Bailey

Salthouse

2008

Note: The quotation used as the title for the final chapter, ‘All Things Linkèd Are . . .’, is taken from Francis Thompson’s poem ‘The Mistress of Vision’, first published in 1897 in his collection New Poems, which includes the lines:

All things by immortal power,

Near or far,

Hiddenly

To each other linkèd are,

That thou canst not stir a flower

Without troubling of a star.

Fishing Cottage

WE HAD DECIDED to move at Michaelmas; and some time before quarter day we went to look at a small house in a valley below the moor. An advertisement in the local paper said that two miles of fishing were to be let with the place. A trout stream! I had not fished since before the war. Those days of boyhood seemed ended for ever: could I take it up again, would I feel the same?

Our first visit to the cottage was made in summer weather. We stopped at a bridge over the river, seeing thatched roofs through the leaves of tall beech trees. Around us were the pastures of a deer park, the cooing of wild pigeons, the distant jacks of daws, the humming of bees, the echo of running water. Looking over the stone parapet of the bridge, I saw the stream running clear over gravel. It was illumined by sun below one bank. The water flowing past a large tree on the opposite bank was deep, moving slowly: and as I stared down, into depths that had the bloom of a grape, it seemed that a tail was slowly idling by the roots. This was exciting; and as ‘our’ fishing ended at the bridge, we climbed the tarred railings on the opposite side of the lane, and descending by a vertical ladder fixed below the bank, walked forward on the grass, into sunshine, and the open space of the park. This was the place to live, we told one another, as we stood upon an ornamental bridge rising steeply upon three arches.

Below the bridge was a deep and wide pool, fed by three streams cascading under the arches. The pool shelved, and broke into innumerable murmuring rills over shallows lying between grassy banks. There was a break in the turf made by the feet of cattle and horses, which had gone there to drink, and cross. Was this the ford, which gave the hamlet its name?

Standing on the ornamental bridge of grey igneous rock, I looked into clear water upstream. There lay, sleepily, several trout, their hues varying with the colours beneath them: dark brown of back where they rested upon water-moss growing on rock-layers; brown over beds of gravel; and one, which had its stance by a little underwater glacis of sand, was light golden yellow. Did trout assume protective coloration in a few minutes, or were these colours derived from lying in habitual resting places? The spots along their backs were visible in the limpid flow: black with here and there one glowing vermilion in shafts of sunlight piercing the alder leaves high above the west bank. While I stood there I experienced a feeling that the day was fixed immortally, for ever, in blue space. For a moment I was back in the summer of boyhood. Water, mysterious water, was speaking to me again.

The cottage lay a little way outside the deer park, beyond a massiveness of lime trees and a tall iron gate. It was built of the usual Devon cob washed with lime, and stood on slightly sloping ground above, and away from, three smaller cottages which, we learned later, were occupied by workmen on the estate. A hasty look around inside, and we left to present ourselves to the agent, to declare our eagerness to take both house and fishery for £30 annual rent respectively, and to pay all rates and taxes as well. There were the usual formalities, of banker’s and two personal references to be provided; after which followed a period of waiting, during which time we paid our second visit to the valley.

What more could one desire, we said, as we gazed discreetly over the garden hedge? Sunflowers and hollyhocks grew against the lower casement windows. Behind them, pear trees were held to the wall by staples. The buzzings of wasps flying over our heads in two streams, past a summer house with conical thatched roof, made us wonder if any pears would be hanging there on Michaelmas Day. Apples with scabby faces hung green upon lanky trees in the small orchard; perhaps we could make cider? The summer air was still. High above the valley floated cirrus clouds. Under the scattered white flakes a pair of buzzards was soaring in wide circles, in draughts of warm air up-rising from the earth. Their nest, perhaps, was in one of the woods covering the hill behind the cottage.

Leaving my small son with his mother sitting beside the deep pool in the deer park, I set out, with ash-plant, to explore this new country. The way led up a timber-wagon track among trees. Soon it was apparent that the plantations there were of different ages. One nearest to the cottage, the roof of which now lay below me, had been replanted in 1914, as recorded on an iron plate clouted to an oaken post driven into the shaly ground beside the track. The trees, therefore, had been growing for fifteen years. Beyond these pale green Japanese larches and darker spruces, as I approached the crest of the hill, was an older plot, almost black-green. The ride led into sunless glooms which darkened into silence; the spruces were over thirty years old, and coming to maturity, probably for telegraph poles. They had grown away so high in their regimentation that even the humming of the wind in their tops, together with the cries of crossbills and goldcrests, was shut out. Leaving the summer day behind me, I entered into a sombre world. All around were dark poles set with withered branches, rising out of a soil seeming dead and covered by pine needles, layer upon layer, dry and brown; but under the fallings of nearly a third of a century lay the seeds of rose-bay willow-herb and foxglove, those flowers of the graves of timber forests, which arise to conceal with their beauty the wreckage of arboreal life which has passed. There they were lying, awaiting their turn in darkness and silence; and imagining them there, ready to spring up into beauty with the light, when the timber should be thrown and hauled away, I felt the tunnels through the boles to be mysteriously glowing within their shades; and as I walked on, the breaking-out into sunlight again was almost too harsh, with its aspects of bracken and dried bushes of birch and furze stricken by billhook and slasher, to give growing space for a new plantation of larch and beech no higher than my little boy standing beside his mother on the ornamental bridge, far below.

No plaques for these post-war plantings; no money for them; the land had entered upon a period of depression. Prices were falling, and through difficult times the inheritance of many centuries must be preserved.

These fleeting thoughts passed, and in dazzling sunshine I examined a landscape of hills and woods, and the sun beginning to sink down upon the distant Atlantic. Immediately below me the meadows were studded with tiny black sheep and cattle. The tree-lined river was a wandering riband of lead, with white flecks revealing the rapid flow over shallows. I leaned upon my stick, content with the world.

To the north, where the valley narrowed and the park ended in iron railings, arose a railway viaduct on stone pillars that were baseless, hidden by the foreground of growing beech and larch saplings.

The sun descending took my heart with it; I hurried down, and on the way home, I called at the agent’s office, to be told that if conveniently I could come into town on the following market day, his Lordship would be agreeable to see me.

Thither in due course I went, to meet a shy old nobleman dressed in a well-worn dark suit. He had a mid-Victorian cavalry moustache, and in his faded blue eyes was an expression of one who had thought, and perhaps worried much, in a solitary and unvocal way. In a soft husky voice, and with the barest glance, he said that he had approved the application for my tenancy, and hoped that I would find everything to my wishes. I thanked him, and immediately took my leave with the agent to another room. There, almost totally enclosed within shelves of paper files and japanned tin boxes, I signed the lease, and then went outside to tell the good news to my wife and son. We were the tenants of the cottage, the fishing was ours!

After the equinoctial gales of Michaelmas, after the sad golden stillness of St. Martin’s Little Summer – sad to the young man because the year was dying – the westerly winds brought much rain to the valley. During October I visited the cottage daily, with my manservant, to decorate and paint. It was nearly November when the family left the village by the sea and moved in with furniture, books and dog. By that time the last of the year’s leaves had been torn away by roaring winds, the river was swilling along bank-high, plunging massively over the falls, turbid with washings from innumerable fields of arable and pasture as steep as they were small.

The valley was sombre at noon, and darkening into night by four o’clock under clouds bringing more rains from the Atlantic. My boots squelched through plashes of drowned grass in the deer park as daily I walked from the ornamental bridge to the falls higher up the river, to stand there while mist below arising from beaten waters hung damply on eye-lashes and the nap of my Connemara tweed coat. Well, I had wanted to escape from the noises of a village about which I had written all I knew in two books; and as the place was beginning to ‘open up’, as local councillors said – red iron-stone dust of the roads making the lime-washed cottage walls a faint pink from passing motor-cars – it had seemed good to depart.

Meanwhile, in one of the wettest autumns for half a century, daily I sought interest in new surroundings. Sometimes the way led over the hills, beyond the conifer plantations, or upon the moor, from which I returned wet and weary, gladly to change before a fire. Then, intent on a book,