In this enforced lockdown my thoughts have been recently turning to events, some happier than others, that have shaped my life. Events and people have come to mind and then wandered off, but two strands around which the rest have circled have retained their place very securely in my mind. It is not surprising that these are fishing and horn playing. I have been asked to talk about both on separate occasions. The one about fishing had a soporific effect on two or three of those present. I seem to remember one actually woke at one point and muttered quite distinctly “where am I?”. The other talk had more funny stories in it and I feel was more successful, although there is no record of either, and I have lost my notes.
I was introduced to fishing by a bassoon-playing friend. His father was an ENT doctor and got permission for us to fish on the beautiful little stream that ran partly around a school that the good doctor visited. It is called the Cound Brook, south-west of Shrewsbury, only a few miles away by bike. I remember the first two trout that I caught here, one on a worm and one on a wet fly that was a sort of violet-y purple colour. The second was a thrill comparable with meeting Dennis Brain at about the same time. I was still in short trousers. Meeting the great man made me practise, because he told me to.
But before this, as well as at school I was occasionally playing the horn near Newtown in Wales in the upper reaches of the Severn. I tried to catch fish in all the tributaries between here and Shrewsbury. The Vyrnwy, the Lugg, the Cound, the Teme around Ludlow, the Rea and the Perry and the Tern. There are so many places called Newtown people must have been confused sometimes. My wife went to Dorchester Abbey to play a concert and, arriving only just in time for the rehearsal, and was told the town’s abbey was actually situated just outside Oxford. I’m told a chamber musician went to Paris to play in a concert, when he should have been in Texas. But this may not be true.
At Llandinam (the only place with that name I believe) near Newtown there were chamber music weekends. I got to know a flute player of ninety who had marched down Fifth Avenue at the head of John Philip Sousa’s band in the 1890s. The Hallé played in Newtown every year, and once an elderly lady tugged at Sir John Barbirolli’s sleeve just as he was about to bring the baton down for an oratorio. She asked whether we could play Walford Davies’ Solemn Melody in memory of her husband. Unfazed, he explained that we could not as we did not have the music. The following year the concert opened with said piece. Barbirolli was like that.
Another place I played in my youth was at Attingham Hall, three miles from Shrewsbury. I was a week-long Easter orchestral course, where I heard the name of Alan Civil for the first time. After hearing him on the radio I wrote a fan letter to him, little realising that thirteen years later he would be buying me my first White Shield Worthington, and at the same time offering me a job playing in his horn section. Later, when I once found myself attempting a rather tricky solo piece by R. Schumann, I looked up in the only one and a half bars rest I had, saw him not only yawning, but looking at his watch at the same time. The lady guest of honour on that occasion was Elisabeth Lutyens (CBE), who, later, up at the bar, told me interesting things about her war.
It was at Attingham that I fished the little stream that went into the Severn nearby – for eels, and roach and the odd pike. A pike took my smally shiny penknife once, thinking it was lunch. The main river there is in the pleasant village called Atcham. Its church’s exterior walls strangely slope outwards, as if wanting to encompass more sky. Here was born Dick Sale, one-time friend of my father, when they both taught at Repton school, and who played cricket for Derbyshire. Dick Sale’s batting average was just over 27 and he only bowled two balls professionally in his career. The first was hit for four and with the second he caught and bowled the opposition’s last batsman, thereby ensuring Derbyshire won the match.
In 1959 there was no rain in Shropshire from April to early October. The Severn at Atcham was so low that I was able to fish from a newly emerged island in the river. This spot was a few hundred yards down from the two road bridges, one old and one new, that cross the water. Using a dry fly called a Tups Indispensible size 12 I hooked and landed, after a strong initial downward pull from the fish and – as usual for this species – the subsequent lesser resistance thereafter, a chub that weighed on my spring balance three pounds and two ounces. I was immensely proud of myself, and left it, wrapped in grass, on the riverbank while I returned to my island. Half an hour later I went to retrieve it and found that it had a rather large neat bite taken from its shoulder. This phenomenon is known as the ‘Otter’s Bite’ I believe; I have the photo somewhere. When my mother reluctantly cooked it and it tasted like cottonwool that had been poorly manufactured on a Monday morning after the workforce of the cottonwool factory’s local team were still reliving a heavy defeat at home on the previous Saturday.
Upstream from where I was casting, but below the first of the two Atcham Bridges, my friend, Richard was fishing. He was told – by a small group of short-trousered and gym-shoed rover scouts, fully toggled and no doubt woggled – that he had discovered the remains of the long-lost Roman bridge built seventeen hundred years before. In order to cast, he had found himself standing on a curious square stone base that had supported one of the original piles that once upheld the bridge. The next day, I went into the library in Shrewsbury, found the map with the dotted line across the river marked, and filled it in in biro.
A few years later I was in the Hallé orchestra and one of the first things I did in Manchester was to find a river to fish. And I found it a longish ‘bus ride away in Bakewell, in the form of the lovely river Wye – not to be confused with its larger cousin, the Welsh Wye. In the last sixty seasons I have only missed an annual pilgrimage back to this magical stream a handful of times. It is one of only two rivers I know of in Britain in which rainbow trout (not native to our waters) breed naturally. Over the front porch of the local hostelry there is a carved pineapple, signifying Welcome and Fellowship. Years later, upon joining the Royal Opera House orchestra the principal horn, Tony Tunstall, bought me a pineapple as a welcome gift. On my first day, in the canteen, he was convincingly feigning interest in my rather overlong peroration on the life of the Mayfly. In 1984 while I was covering this water (with a Pale Watery, if I remember rightly), I was surprised to see some of the ROH horn section, led by Tony Tunstall with Ian Harper and Chris Satterthwaite running across the field towards me armed with lamb pasties, Bakewell puddings and beer from the market.
If you are on a river fishing a quite fast stream –with a wet fly (that is, beneath the surface of the water) you might start higher up and work downstream and across the current. But if using a dry fly (that floats on the surface) you walk and cast upstream above the waiting fish and float the artificial insect down over it. If, however you were idiotic enough (if you hooked a fish you would pull the hook out of is mouth before it connected) to be fishing ‘dry’, and be gradually working down, there is the chance that you are upstream of another angler you had not yet seen. If you then scare or ‘spook’ a fish, it will invariably rush downstream and disturb the water below, where that someone might be casting. A potential friendly colleague becomes in one cast of the fly-line a scowling adversary, and cause ice to form on his upper slopes. I have seen something similar in a horn section where the third player is quite obviously, but unwittingly ‘out-phrasing’ the principal. It is better therefore to check who is below you and if in doubt start at the lower end of the beat – the fishing beat, that is, not Klemperer’s beat, which in my experience had no visible lower end – and work gradually and steadily upstream. When horn players arrive for a film session but are not told which seat in the section they are to occupy, the first to arrive always takes the bottom chair both out of politeness, and in order to avoid the musical spotlight. (Was there not a fabled member of the club to which I belong who was reputed, during the Normandy Landings, to have said to him men, “Follow me, men – I’m right behind you”?) In fact, players often try to arrive first for this very reason, and place their instrument on the lowest horn chair, before they go for a cup of tea. It has the added effect of discouraging lateness. I once arrived late and out-of-breath for a film session at Wembley only to find the other five players – all much more eminent than myself – and all smilingly pointing me to the first horn chair. Another lesson learnt.
The fourth horn in an orchestra plays the lowest notes. Sitting on the fourth horn chair, horn players know that they need more air in the lower reaches just to maintain the same dynamics, just as one uses a longer line to cover the river’s ever-increasing width and amount of the water downstream.
My personal river has had many twists and turns. Like the river with fish in it its current was sometimes romantic, fast and exciting, and at other times slow and placid. And it was sometimes extraordinarily uncomfortable keeping one’s balance, especially standing nearly up to one’s waist on the rounded stones in the Usk. Once, after a previous rain-filled night I looked round to see a foot of brown water advancing on me like an incoming tide. Rarely have I moved so fast. Notes made up the music that has flowed through my life. The link between rivers and music was forged early. I failed all of my ‘O’ Levels except two, because I was preferring to fish the Habberley Brook (all of 6 or 7 feet wide) underneath Pontsford Hill, rather than revise my irregular verbs or remind myself of the dates of Agincourt (erm), Crécy (erm), Stamford Bridge (erm) or The War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748).
In April and May there was often a cuckoo waiting for me at the end of the eight and a half miles cycle ride to the fishing and its oddly comforting repetitive song accompanied me not only during the late afternoon on the stream but also on the 7-inch EP of Delius’ little masterpiece which my father thought I was now ready for and which I listened to during the few moments my mother thought I was revising. On that old RPO recording – as on every other – the bird‘s song switches very precisely from minor third to major third over a short period of about two minutes, while my personal cuckoo’s two notes ranged from a faintly sharp minor third in April to a less than perfect fourth in July and (if it had not by them migrated) early August. If one is being somewhat pedantic (and of course I am) in terms of natural harmonics the span of the wider interval would be the equivalent to about the tenth to the thirteenth harmonics on an F horn. Different notes, of course.
Barbirolli’s favourite song was Smoke gets in your Eyes, which was quite apt, as in the very early 1960s he (and half the orchestra) still smoked throughout the rehearsals. Barbirolli’s Christmas present to the members of the orchestra was twenty Senior Service to each male and a bar of soap to each lady. His over-indulgence in the score was becoming unfashionable in those days. Now, a more individual interpretation of the music is once more becoming appreciated by those who understand what music means to them. Talking of On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, I was lucky enough to take part in a recording of it in 1966. The serenely flowing result lasted 7 minutes 27 seconds and Barbirolli’s reading, though slow-ish as befits a lazy summer still sounds magical to me. Many years later there was another recording done by another ensemble I occasionally played with. It romped past the post at 5 minutes 13 seconds. Some conductors would not recognise the difference between a good phrase and a slice of cheese on toast, with or without watercress (the best of which grows in water which harbours trout). I know which version I prefer, because I’ve experienced the mood it conjures up so often, but especially hearing it in my head by the river and on the ‘Idle Hill of Summer’.
