Wet Places - a Beginning

I must apologise. Some of my recent posts have been a bit joyless I think. So I'm going to try and write something a bit more upbeat...

Across its various incarnations NQS has changed. It has become less and less a diary type blog, vicarious birding is nowadays mostly off the menu, and cycling, fishing and pitiful nostalgia are regularly in the mix. Fair enough perhaps, change happens. But unfortunately I suspect also that it's getting a bit more moany. So, in an effort to lift the tone to somewhere sunnier I thought I would try and explore my love of watery places, and see where that leads...

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In 1964 my mother was a young, divorced single parent living in Roydon, Essex. Providing for two small children meant a hectic life, so she would have appreciated the Sunday invitation from a friend in nearby Broxbourne. While the women nattered and minded the toddler indoors, the little boy could be entertained in the garden. The boy was a handful, but my mother's friend's husband had a plan. Perhaps a spot of fishing might keep him quiet? The garden ran down to the River Lea, and that afternoon I caught my very first fish. Four bleak and a perch.

Or should I say they caught me?

One by one, as each was swung ashore, it was plopped into a bucket of water. I was five years old and, although I can vividly picture the scene, what I cannot do is genuinely evoke the emotions. My mum tells me I was absolutely ecstatic, eagerly dragging her out of the house to view my little bucketful of triumph. I'm sure she's not exaggerating, because I was never quite the same again. From then on, every single body of water I encountered drew me like a magnet. Ditch, pond or stream, all I could think about were the mysteries that lay beneath the surface. Yes, it was I who had been hooked.

Aged six, we moved to Harlow New Town. Hardly an oasis. I remember only the odd netted stickleback. Then at nine, after my mother remarried, we moved to Kenton, near Harrow in the NW London suburbs. Not far away was Barn Hill Pond. To get there involved a twenty-five minute walk, initially through residential estates, then over a railway footbridge, across a field and up a scrubby slope to the top of a modest hill overlooking Wembley Stadium. There lay boyhood heaven...

This is Barn Hill Pond as I remember it, so I'm guessing the photo dates from the mid/late '60s. My favourite fishing spot was half way along the left hand bank. (From the Brent Museum and Archives website)

Hardly an inland sea, is it! Admittedly the water level is very low here. Early '60s? The leaning tree in this photo is just a stump in the image above. I remember the stump. (From the Brent Museum and Archives website)

I spent many a happy day here, fuelled by rampant optimism and marmalade sandwiches. Often there would be four or five boys around the pond, drowning worms and swapping insults. The early arrivals would have dragged out one of the two milk crates to sit on. Very occasionally someone would catch a fish...

A Barn Hill monster. Or two, rather...

With hindsight, Barn Hill Pond was a bit tenth-rate in many ways. On a nice day it would be busy with families out for a stroll, dogs plunging into the water and, if you were unlucky, oafish members of 'the Little Kingsbury' coming to see if they could nick some fishing tackle...

But it was water. And it had fish. It was a lowly but important step along the road that has led me to love watery places my whole life...