J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

by Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr

I had not known my husband six months before I knew him for an enthusiastic fisherman. He tells in his Reminiscences of the first teaching he had from a reprobate old peasant in the Lake Country, and the passion for it never left him; the happiest of his summer days were spent in the pursuit of it and, from the time when I—set to watch a float while he threw a line further down the stream—allowed the fish to escape, to an evening towards the close of his life when I helped his unsteady steps to the bank of the Windrush at Burford, his characteristic grey felt hat stuck full of flies and the graceful gesture with which his long line was flung back and forward and then laid softly on the water of some quiet stream, are among the things which I often recall.

I can see him now, on that first holiday, stumbling with his swaying rod down the rocky bed of the Dove with the sunset behind him, while I sat waiting on a grassy bank eager to know what sport he had had as soon as he was within earshot. He was a most expert angler; and that was the beginning of many happy fishing trips—in Derbyshire and Westmoreland, on the Tweed at Peebles and the lochs and rivers of Perthshire, Argyllshire and Sutherland; but most notably on the stretch of a Hertfordshire stream which he rented for some years with other friends, and where he could best exercise his skill with the dry fly.

A tiny cottage, just big enough for three men or for me and the children, stood on the edge of the water, which was crossed by a plank bridge. Sometimes, when there was no one else, I would be allowed—most alarming of experiences!—to use the landing net, and I think any of his angling comrades—A. E. W. Mason, Seymour Hicks, Sam Sothern and others—would sympathise with my terror over the responsibility.

I think there were no happier days in my husband’s life than those spent in that Hertfordshire cot, and there is no frame into which his figure fits more familiarly than the sedgy bank of that sunlit river, hemmed by boldly contrasting forget-me-not and marshmallow, with the May-fly flitting over the sparkling ripples and the shaded pools.

And nothing so helped his periods of creative work as this rural recreation.

It was on the shores of Loch Rannoch that he wrote the first Acts of his King Arthur for Henry Irving, and on the banks of the Lea that he saw the barge bearing the body of the Fair Elaine. The Black Mount at the foot of the loch may have stood for the rugged rocks around Camelot, and the limpid stream dividing emerald meadows at eventide, for the river that circled Arthur’s Halls.

He was wont whimsically to declare that the “gaslights of Piccadilly” were more satisfying to him than a country life unless enhanced by the pleasure of sport; but no one saw the beauties of Nature in the intervals of sport more sympathetically than he did, as he tells for himself in Coasting Bohemia:

“I sometimes think,” he writes, “that those who haunt the country, without conscious sense of its many beauties, are apt to learn and love its beauties best. How often the memory of a day’s shooting is indissolubly linked with the pattern of a fading autumn sky, when we have stood at the edge of a stubble field wondering whether the growing twilight will suffice for the last drive. And if this is true of other forms of sport, it is everlastingly true of fishing. There is hardly a remembered day on a Scotch loch, or beside a southern stream, which has not stamped upon it some unfading image of landscape beauty. It was not for that we set forth in the morning, for then the changing lights in a dappled sky counted for no more than a promise of good sport; during those earlier hours there is no feeling but a feeling of impatience to be at work; and the splash of a rising trout, before the rod is joined and ready and the line run through its rings, is heard with a sense of half-resentment lest we should have missed the favourable moment of the day. But as the hours pass, the mind becomes more tranquilly attuned to its surroundings. The keenness of the pursuit is still there, but little by little the still spirit of the scene invades our thoughts, and as we tramp home at nightfall the landscape that was unregarded when we set forth upon our adventure now seems to wrap itself like a cloak around us with a spell that it is impossible to resist. A hundred such visions, born of an angler’s wanderings, come back to me across the space of many years. I can see the reeds etched against a sunset sky, as they spring out of a little loch in the hills above the inn at Tummel. And then, with a changing flash of memory, the broad waters of Rannoch are outspread, fringed by its purple hills. And then, again, in a homelier frame, I can see the willows that border the Lea, their yellow leaves turned to gold under the level rays of the evening sun; and I can hear the nightingale in the first notes of its song as I cross the plank bridge that leads me homeward to the cottage by the stream.”

By which it will also be seen that his “love of laziness” did not hinder him in the pursuit of sport.