Tethered to the line

This is a love story; the story of a man’s love for a river – the Wharfe in Yorkshire, to which Laurence Catlow has been tethered umbilically by a fishing line for all of his adult life. It is also an inquiry into great mysteries: how running water and a brace of trout (for Catlow it has to be a brace) give peace; why you are closer to an animal you kill than to an animal you just watch; why we never get used to the idea of our own death; why atavism and “high” culture need one another.

Catlow is a prolific writer on field sports (his book The Healing Stream, 2016, about his depression and how fishing saved his life and sanity, should be compulsory reading at all medical schools), and it’s tempting to compare him with the high priests of piscatorial literature: with Viscount Grey, Harry Plunket Greene or even the mighty Izaak Walton. But it wouldn’t do. For he is himself, as few of us are ourselves, and therefore incomparable.

Fishing might not be your thing. No matter. Speak the incantatory names of the flies – Poult Bloa, Snipe and Purple, Dry Simon, Pitt’s Little Black – and you’ll be there peering into Catlow’s bag, helping him choose what to tie on next. Read the names of the Wharfe locations – Spout Dub, Black Keld, Sycamore Glide – and you’ll hear the rush of peat-brown water and see the dipper bobbing on a stone.

A classicist by trade, Catlow can write with the poise and pulse of his beloved Horace, but when he takes us to the fells it never feels like writing. He knows the land can tell its own story; we feel the hypostatic union of author and place. On the Wharfe he fishes in “far-stretching hinterland”, “wading through deep streams of memory”, in the company of dead friends, under the trees that leant over him when he was a callow undergraduate who did not know a False March Brown from a Yellow Evening Dun.

He is splendid company, whether we are sharing his lunchtime claret on the river bank, eating flaccid Co-op sandwiches in the old Land Rover as rain hammers on the roof, or listening with him to Mozart piano sonatas as he ties flies and tells us that Mozart would be a far better fly fisher than Brahms, for Brahms would be a clumsy caster, “prone to play his fish too hard”. Catlow sometimes sheds an unembarrassed tear at the thought that he may have only a few Wharfedale summers left. He says this is his last book. I hope he’s wrong.

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