Everyman's England Read Free

uncaring whether customers came, talking to the man across the way and occasionally bidding Mrs Sinclair or Mrs Jarvis good morning, or better still, if one ached for action, to lead a dog along the grass-topped ramparts and feel the sea breeze upon one’s face and smell the salt in the air… Even the Great North Road which crosses the new bridge seems to lose its hurry and bustle through the town, as though the drivers sense the gentle spirit of calm that drenches everything and unconsciously slacken their pace below even the statutory thirty miles an hour.
    Only by the quayside and out by the harbour mouth is that feeling of inactivity dissipated. It is here that the real life of Berwick pulsates, for the Berwickers are fishermen, who draw into their nets not ordinary fish, but that king of fish, the salmon.
    â€˜Such a fish! shining silver from head to tail, and here and there a crimson dot; with a grand hooked nose and grand curling lip, and a grand bright eye, looking round him proudly as a king, and surveying the water right and left as if all belonged to him. Surely he must be the salmon, the king of all fish.’
    It is easy to picture the awe of lonely Tom at his first sight of a salmon. Even in death there is something about salmon which commands man’s respect, to see him in his proper element as Tom did, and mark the lordly glance of that patrician eye was more than enough to make a water-baby suddenly tremble.
    In Berwick, from February until September, the salmon is truly king. For the whole of the thirty weeks of the season salmon are caught, talked of, dreamt about, and sometimes eaten by the blue-jerseyed, sea-booted fishermen.
    Whenever the tide permits, and they can only work at certain states of the tide, groups of fishermen may be seen at their stations along the river, from the mouth of the Tweed where it swirls out across the bar to the North Sea, to well above the great railway viaduct.
    I walked at low tide out across the wet sands and patches of bladder wrack to where one crew was stationed just inside the harbour mouth. There were six men working their wear-net. The method of fishing is very simple. One end of the net is fastened by a rope to a portable windlass on the shore, the net is folded neatly into the stern of the boat and this is rowed upstream until it is far enough from the bank to shoot the net. The boat turns downstream in a circle, the net slipping over the stern as it goes. When the boat comes into the bank the rope on the other end of the net is fastened to another wind-lass and then commences the work of hauling, so often a disappointing task.
    Three times I watched this particular crew shoot their net and each time there was nothing in it except a few dead branches and clumps of sea grass. Once, as they were folding the net back into the boat for another shot, a rent was discovered in the mesh. From the pocket of an old man with a greying beard came a wooden needle and thread and the net was repaired as they stood, ankle-deep, in the water. A cold wind blew in from the sea, fretting at their jerseys, and from the sands across the river came the crying of sea-birds, but the men seemed oblivious of everything except the net in their hands. They spoke very little to each other as the old man picked up the meshes and worked his needle in and out with a dexterity that was worthy of a woman. To them, though they would never express themselves so, the nets were sacred and their reverence was evidenced in the care with which they handled them…
    At the next shot they were lucky, and three salmon came flapping and jerking to the sands. The greybeard carried them up the beach in a pannier and we began to talk.
    The fishing stations, he told me, are now owned by fishing companies who pay the crews a regular weekly wage and a percentage on their season’s catch; though at one time the stations belonged to individuals and some of them had been in the hands of the same