The Backtraps

THE BACKTRAPS (part i)

By JS Harding

Author’s note, December 19th, 2020.

From the desk of Edward Ladler!

With it being the Christmas holidays – and only 24 hours until Shakespeare (most likely!) returns to Loudwick Mill, I’ve been reflecting on the events from 28 years ago. That night down at the Backtraps…

I haven’t been fishing since that terrible night. All the same, I’ve retained a surprising amount of fishing knowledge in the 28 years that have trickled by since - my approximations of the British records for freshwater fish, their favoured haunts and the best baits and methods to catch them are likely pretty dated now, I reckon, but still roughly accurate.

Tom would know all the latest. Back then, he was the one who had always knew which record weights had just been smashed, which were the latest boilie flavours rumoured to be sending the carp wild. All that jazz. He always had a deeper connection with the rivers and the lakes and the fish that swim in them than the rest of us. He was the real fisherman among us.

Ah, Tom. He’s the one I feel for the most.

I reckon that were he alive today, Tom’s Facebook profile pic would be of him, grinning and holding a nice fat mirror carp. His kid – a mini Tom, all blonde curtains of hair and toothy grin – would be squished into the pic too. Little and large happy faces. How cute would that’ve been? Ach, well. It’s a lovely thought. But that ain’t happening, so I’ll just go on and tell the story. It’s never far from my mind after all.

I’m starting to drift already, heh. Best I just set the scene – that’ll help you (and me!) when I switch to third-person mode!

It starts in the little town of Loudwick.

Loudwick sits on the Great Ouse, a slow bleeder of a river that meanders through our little part of Bedfordshire, then up on through East Anglia on its way to the wash. Being so close to the little bungalow I shared with Mum made Loudwick Mill my home patch, or so I felt: I could gather up my fishing gear from the garage, walk up our road, turn left, and be staring right at the grimy old WELCOME TO LOUDWICK MILL sign in just a couple of minutes.

Sauntering along, crunching on gravel, would take me past the Miller’s Arms (adjoined to this pub was the long defunct mill, which continues to rot in a little offshoot of the river to this day), past a little marina office (the marina itself was hidden somewhat by the pub). Following a dirty access track that runs alongside a stretch of grassy riverbank leads to bridged weir that spans the width of the river.

The smell of the river intensifies as you approach the weir; a curious mixture of life and death - of nature, I suppose. There was decent fishing to be had all along this side of the river - we’d caught hundreds of gudgeon, bleak, and perch. The occasional chub, jack pike. Even the odd eel! Strong buggers, eels – even a straggly, foot-long one would put up a hell of a fight, twisting their black, muscled forms all around your fishing line in the process. Sometimes you’d have to cut off the poor bugger’s head to get your hook back! Not something I personally relished, but the other boys seemed to cope alright with this.

Pretty good fishing for most river fish around the Mill. Tom’s stretch of river, over the far side of Loudwick, was better for bream. The water is slower and deeper there. Bream prefer that, see.

Anyway, keep on track, Edward!

Should I haul my gear over the rusty old bridge that spanned the weir where tea-coloured foam formed and broke apart, to the other side of the river, past a latticed metal fence that precluded one from fishing this side of the water, was the start of the Backtraps.

28 years ago, Tom and I, and Dav and Mut, all of thirteen years old each, plotted to go winter nightfishing on the Backtraps, looking to land a barbel –“ the golden torpedos of English rivers,” as an Angling Times feature writer had described them. Tom’s big brother, Mikey, had landed a 12lb4oz barbel down in the Backtraps the previous winter. His catch had made page seven of the Angling Times! A few paragraphs about the catch under a colour photo. The fish was much more handsome than Mikey – sleek, bullet-shaped, its scales a gorgeous golden brown; its near-namesake barbles hanging from its lips - whereas Mikey had cold little blue eyes and a blonde mullet and thin, pale lips that stretched and grinned inanely for the camera. The fact that a local’s catch had made a national publication made the Loudwick Gazette, who reproduced the AT’s picture and the gist of the story by sheer virtue of it having made a national publication.

Loudwick was not a particularly buzzing place when it came to news. Still isn’t, in fact!

Mikey had caught the barbel as a fluke, Tom reckoned. Had been using maggots as bait (and not, as we had keenly read in the AT, the barbel’s favoured sweetcorn and/or luncheon meat). Was probably after eels to sell to the Chinese takeaway, Tom had laughed.

Tom was set on trying the Backtraps, and beating Mikey’s lovely specimen.

Nightfishing in winter, though. We had been once before in the summer, just the he and the me, up around his end of Loudwick. Tom had caught a 4lb bream and a few gudgeon. I had blanked! A really super young fisherman, was Tom.

Probably would’ve made the AT a dozen or more times, had he had the chance to, I reckon. Ach, well.

It took me all day to write up our story. It flows alright, I think, now it’s written down. Although I always thought it would be something I might like to do, Mum says – said – I’d never make much of a writer, always urging me to do things with my hands instead. Well, here you go, Mum! Tell you what, pandemic may have had us cooped us at home since the spring but it sure has been good for letting people have a pop at stuff they never thought they could do!

Ach, well. All this has slithered about in my memory banks for so long it’s kind of funny to see it all typed up. My memory is a bit like the Backtraps anyway, I reckon, rocky and black and not in the main flow of things.

Haha!

Enjoy it.

- Edward.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 20th, 1992.

For Edward, living so close to Loudwick Mill had its pros and cons: the shortest amount of walking to do, and also be the first to be back inside a warm, cosy, bed.

On the flip side, this meant that Dav, Mut, and Tom, who lived with half a mile of each other on the other side of Loudwick, had half an hour’s headstart on the flagrant piss-taking that is at a particularly febrile state among early teens.

The kind that it doesn’t do to be absent from when you’re thirteen years old.

Edward arrives at the top of his road just before eight, setting his gear down quietly underneath a lamppost. He has eaten a huge bowl of cottage pie and been allowed a kingsized Coke and a similarly-sized Mars Bar by his mother. You’ll need the energy, she had said.

Minutes pass, Edward shivers. He watches his cold breath swirl in the lamplight. He keeps calm; has expected the others to be late. As time wears on he feels exposed shuffles his gear around the corner and waits out of sight from his neighbours, lest they see saw him standing all alone . . . Or worse, his mother coming out to check on him.

He smells the others before he sees them. Cheap weed, dirty and malodorous to Edward, wafts through the cold night air, chased by the others’ voices. It will be Dav’s, he thinks. Bets that Mut has joined Dav in smoking the joint. He believes (and hopes) that Tom would decline; Tom and he were a step or two behind Mut and Dav when it came to such experimentation.

This makes Edward feel like such a baby. He had been dog-sick after drinking some of Dav’s father’s homebrew in the summer, was widely mocked, and is yet to touch another drop. His friends are way above him on the ladder to adulthood. He would be happy if the rungs above him broke and he would never have to climb them.

From the approaching boys’ noises, Edward can now discern words.

“The fuck is he . . .?” – Mut.

“That him up there?” – Tom.

“What’s he doing . . . ha!” – Dav.

Edward, just out of sight round the corner, jolts. Admonishes himself for staying hidden in the dark and failing to slip back to the lamppost upon hearing his friends. The boys pass the lamppost, and they dump their kit beside him.

“Alright,” says Edward to the three, his hands gripping tight around. The cheap weed grasps him.

“Yo man,” drawls Mut. Dav and Tom stick with alrights.

Then, silence. Edward feels his fears coagulating.

“Ed, why you waiting here in the pitch fucking black,” asks Mut, looking back at the available lamppost light, then peeking at Dav and Tom before his eyes resettle on Ed.

“Getting used to the dark, aint I?”

Tom laughs, Dav joins in too. Edward feels relieved that he’s swatted away the first barb of the night. Mut grins, nicely this time. They pick up the gear and move along.

Tom has the most equipment; several rods and reels, a seatbox, nets. Unlike the others, fishing is a family affair – as well as his brother, Mikey, his father also fishes, allowing Tom access to a terrific amount of kit, including the bivvy that will shelter the boys through the night.

Also stashed among Tom’s gear is a cache of bacon sandwiches – his mother regularly provides these. They are wrapped them in tin foil, congealing the butter and bacon fat which soak through the bread. It’s a longstanding group agreement: even when eaten cold, bacon with congealed butter and fat sandwiches taste delicious.

Mut’s gear reflects its owner – understated. He wields a simple, all-purpose rod with a sleek, silent reel already married to it. The line is threaded; a fishhook snags the line in place. Where Tom and Edward were teetering with old-aged, outsized rucksacks, a mis-shapen sports holdall is slung around his waist, a few snacks and a sleeping bag within.

Dav has brought himself and a carrier bag containing a bottle of Sprite, crisps, chocolate. His weed is stashed in a jacket pocket.

For Mut, fishing/sharing Dav’s drugs were even aspirations.

For Dav, the drugs would do just fine – fishing was very much a sideshow.

The boys pass the WELCOME TO LOUDWICK MILL sign, each thinking how different it seemed amidst the swirling darkness.

2020 Author’s note (!)

Everyone was so sympathetic when I returned to school; girls who had never so much as flashed a glance at me would keep telling me I shouldn’t blame myself. That what happened (and, what had happened? Tell us everything! – was the subtext) was a freak accident. A small faction doubted this, of course. I heard the whispers. Ignore them, Mum said. They don’t know. Ignore the girls and all the attention too, she added. They don’t care about you.

Thanks, Mum!

The bodies were never found. Just the odd swatch of an article of clothing: I recall a the black-and-white photo of a piece of Tom’s favoured fishing shirt appearing on the cover of the Loudwick Gazette underneath the headline: LOUDWICK MILL NIGHTFISHING HORROR : BOY’S CLOTHING FOUND.

Dav’s left shoe was the other piece that turned up in this little period, hooked onto the upturned wheel of a long-abandoned trolley in the dark, foaming water disgorged by the weir.

Dav’s shoe was the only item that contained any evidence of one of the bodies.

His big toe, the nail of which had been stamped on in a football game in the first year of big school. The nail had grown back rather grotesquely, as if his body’s repair shop had authorised several, increasingly macabre attempts at regrowth.

The gazette did not show pictures of this lone toe. It was disturbing enough to have seen it when its prepubescent owner had waggled it around in the changing room before PE.

As I would grow to learn, Shakespeare always left a toe behind.

Odd, hey.

1992

The boys tread noisily through the gravel as they approach The Miller’s Arms. the pub is quiet; a lone, dishevelled, smoker sat on a bench outside nods at them from behind his glowing cigarette tip. The four issue “alrights,” and troop on, pass the marina office. A crashing noise abounds from the marina, startling the four. It sounds like something is being smashed against one of the clumps of bulrushes that line the edge of the water. A few seconds later, a jagged shadow rises above the pub and pumps through the air, its movements prehistoric, like old stop-motion animation.

"Heron!" claims Tom.

"Fucking big one," says Dav.

The four continue on, away from the pub, from the marina, into the night.

To reach the Backtraps necessitates crossing a bridge over the main river. The bridge, positioned directly above the weir, comes into view as the boys pass – and mock – an incredibly filthy, once-white van parked in an expanse of gravel adjacent to the river that passes as a fisherman’s car park.

From the water, two men talk in low voices above the hiss of the weir. The boys quieten. This sudden confirmation of the presence of fully-grown adults is emasculating. There is a slope that leads down to the water’s edge and it has hidden the men. They see them now, one in a woolly hat, one flat-capped, backlit by a plastic lamp. They each are sat on a camper chair, a large bivvy envelops them.

“Any joy?” calls out Mut, with natural confidence.

Woolly Hat turns to face the boys. He sports a thick, dark, curly beard.

“Jack pike. Couple hours ago. That’s all.”

Flatcap continued to peer out at the foaming water, as if unaware of the new presence.

“Going just for pike?” asked Mut.

“I am. Deadbaiting. He’s after barbel.” Woolly shrugged towards Flatcap.

This piqued Tom and Edward, the two would-be barbel catchers. Tom speaks for them both.

“Ah, cool. Us too. Gonna try the Backtraps.”

Woolly turns to the boys. Smirks.

“Dark over that way, lads. You got lights?”

Tom did, of course, somewhere among his kit. Tom and Edward swap tidbits about pike and barbel with Woolly before the conversation dies out. Dav and Mut, wary of being caught with the weed, continue onto the bridge and, giggling, look out into the cold mist creeping across the water through dope-addled lenses. Edward and Tom join the others on the bridge. The four make its rusted metal slats reverberate as they clang their way over the water.

Edward is last in the line, and turns his head to look at back at their behatted nightfishing counterparts. Woolly is murmuring something, while Flatcap continues to stare straight ahead.

2020

With the advent of the Internet, I’ve learnt a lot about Shakespeare’s feeding pattern. I started to tentatively search for stories like mine around the millenium, and we all know how sophisticated the search engines have gotten since then, I reckon.

Notifications for NIGHT FISHERMAN MEN BOYS SMALLTOWN DISAPPEARING WITHOUT A TRACE (and several permutations thereof!) have turned up on my computers, laptops, my phone over the last 20 years, mostly these are archived articles from 1993 onwards, once media folk realised the way the Internet was heading (world domination and all that!). I transcribed them all to a jotter, from which I am now transcribing once again to you! Haha.

One of the first ones was:

1988. Wenatchee River – Washington State, USA. Two brothers, Mike and Bernard Collins, aged 24 and 29, were declared missing on December 21st. The brothers had been on a weekend steelhead fishing trip on the Wenatchee River near the neighbouring town of Cashmere, but failed to return home.

Their truck and all their equipment - several thousand dollars’ worth – was left untouched. A single hiking boot was found a couple of miles downstream, within which was a hunk of toe/toenail. DNA tests confirmed the nail indeed belonged to one of the brothers, most likely Bernard. (His wife claimed to recognise it!!!)

Bareilly - Uttarahand, India. 1997. A small fishing vessel carrying three local kids (never names) aged 13, 14, 18, out fishing for mahseer on the Ramganga river at dusk was found wrecked on rocks minus its young anglers. The only trace of the boys was a single sandal lodged on vegetation on a riverbank a couple of miles downstream from the boys favoured fishing hole; and a couple of scraps of clothing that fitted the bill. The unenclosed nature of sandals prohibited the chance of finding a toenail.

1992

Once over the bridge the path to the Backtraps is barely discernible in the failing light. It twists away from the main river, between groves of bowing, leafless trees. It is wet and muddy year-round. Tom and Edward lead the way, Dav and Mut traipse along in their slipstream, less jittery now that their marijuana fug is sufficiently far enough from the adults.

After a few minutes of stumbling over tree roots and (especially those tarnished by the weed) struggling to accustom to the sparse moonlight that has fought its way through the trees, the four arrive at the swim. Here, the stream widens and a little beach has formed. They dump the gear. Dav wanders to the stream’s edge, squeals as it penetrates through his right trainer and thin black sock, drenching his foot.

“Get your light out, Tommy,” says Mut. “Not all of us were born with common sense.”

The boys giggle. Tom pulls out the lamp, flicks on the light, illuminates the dull sand of the swim. Mut is all ready to fish. He begs a piece of luncheon meat, impales it on his hook, and casts out towards the far bank, over the backs of a cluster of rocks that resemble huge toads in the low light.

Edward is struggling to set up. His circulation is lacklustre in the cold, his fingers are numb, near useless, like his unhappy struggles with shirt buttons in the school pavillion’s unheated changing rooms after miserable games of rugby and football in the winter.

Tom chucks a handful of hemp to the margins of the far bank.

“That’s where Mikey caught his,” he says.

Dav busies himself arranging the bivvy and arranging a workable blanket of groundsheets for the four. Tom has cast out a hook loaded with a sweetcorn kernel and a slither of luncheon meat, which tumbles around the riverbed a few feet downstream of Mut’s hook. A couple of eels poke their noses at each set of bait but think better of wolfing it down.

Edward has finally tied his hook. He copies Tom and casts a cocktail of corn and meat well away from the others, stares in this direction. Dav is holding back from fishing and is squatting in the nest of groundsheets and available clothing, his legs tucked inside his coat, as he rolls his next joint.

After a couple of biteless hours, the boys have eaten all the bacon sandwiches and licked the buttery bacon liquor from the foil. But the spirits are high; they talk of girls and football. Edward’s paranoia has receded a little and he joins in with the banter, even laughing unselfconsciously at several points.

As the laughter grows and the fishing becomes an afterthought, no one is more surprised than Tom when his quivertip rod bends wickedly; a barbel has taken the bait. Impaled its upper lip on the hook . . .

_______________________________________________

I hope you've enjoyed part one of my little story! I'll be back with part two later in the week, once I've double-checked a few details, and sorted out some of Mum's belongings!

- Edward.

Part Two is now available right here . . . https://vocal.media/fiction/the-backtraps-part-ii

JS Harding is a novelist and humour writer who has written for BBC Comedy and NewsThump. His psychological thriller, Under Rand Farm, written under the pen name LJ Denholm is available via Amazon, while his forthcoming humour novel, The Good Dr Grevaday? is slated for release in early 2022.