WALKING ON MUD

When the tide is out my boat, Poppy, lies on her side happily enough on the black mud at Lympstone. This Exe mud has a distinctive smell which I find not altogether unpleasant. Once it was even believed to be wholesome and beneficial and visitors came to the Exe to enthuse about the mud and to smell it for the sake of their health. But the wind of change has blown and these days visitors tend to say only rude things about our mud and the smell of it. When someone has been working on the mud, laying a mooring or checking a mooring or scraping off a few midseason barnacles, the smell follows him wherever he might go and, despite scrubbing, it hangs about for a few days.

To walk for any distance across this mud in long boots requires practicing a simple skill., a description of which is in danger of sounding like the truly odious Augustus Carp’s description of how, soon after he was sixteen, he learned how to descend from an omnibus in motion without the sacrifice of an erect position. Here, however, goes! The serious mudwalker must stride or slide confidently and flatfootedly forward and then withdraw his rear foot from the mud exaggerating the pointing of the toe of the foot downwards into the ooze before pulling the boot out in such a way that leg and foot are as near as possible aligned. Moreover the walker must walk somewhat bowlegged and so that he places his feet a goodly distance apart. Once this knack has been mastered it is there for life. The mudbanks of the kingdom become the healthy playground of the intrepid, bow legged mudwalker.

To stand still on the mud for more than a few seconds is to invite disaster. If stopping and staring is absolutely necessary then great care must be taken before moving off . It is at this point that many a man loses his balance much to the amusement of those that witness the fall. I might have written ‘man or woman’ except in all my years of mudwalking I have not yet met a woman walking on the mudbanks. There is, however, hardly a square foot of mud where a woman’s foot has never trod. A century ago these mudbanks were wandered over by an army of women and children who went down to the tide dressed fantastically and clutching rakes and baskets to collect the shellfish.


Coming soon: More mud.

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

By chance I met a charming woman last Friday who was ninety-nine years old and bright as a button. It was a brief encounter and somewhat surreal.

I was in Exmouth, in the Age Concern charity shop opposite the library, buying a couple of Victorian photo frames at two pounds apiece and she was at the counter beside me buying a book and a pen. She looked at my photo frames in one of which was still the likeness of a fine Victorian pater, all whiskers and waistcoats, and she smiled at me and said: “That could be your grandfather.” “It’s not!” said I, “but I might replace him with my great grandfather.”

And then out of the blue she said “My grandfather was a fisherman in Lympstone. I was born in his cottage in one of those lanes that go down to the beach.” “Quay Lane?” I asked. “Yes.” said she.

Well I was interested. Here was the granddaughter of one of the old Lympstone fishermen who had been born in that huddle of cottages in Edwardian times. In those days Lympstone had a proper fishing fleet and not a motor between them. This was the fleet that Eden Philpotts described in his 1922 book Redcliff aka Lympstone. Here he describes the local fishermen setting out at night:

“… not a few fishermen stood upon the little breakwater with their dingheys (sic) waiting below. The fishing fleet rode at anchor a quarter of a mile from land. They were set blackly on the still waters, and a boat or two from the haven had already started for them. Women and landsmen stood about among the departing fishers. Little groups talked, moved, mingled; lanterns twinkled and one by one the shore boats carried their crews to sea..”

I asked my chance encounter for her grandfather’s name: “Challis” she said. I asked her if she remembered much of Lympstone in those days. “Well no,” she said, “you see, my mother married a soldier and when I was about ten he was sent out to India, to Rawalpindi, and we went with him.” She grinned, “and I was taught at an army school - by a corporal – I think I knew more than him – because, you see, I was a reader – I’ve always been a reader. She held up the book she was buying to make her point.

I wanted to ask more but we were not alone and I was unsure what to ask and how to ask it and somehow I missed my moment. We went our separate ways and I was strangely stirred. I had learned nothing except that a fisherman called Challis had once lived in Quay Lane. I had done nothing more than chat for a half minute with one who had been a little girl shipped off to India at about the time Eden Phillpotts was writing his book about Lympstone. Nevertheless I felt that something significant had happened.

I had met a daughter of the old Estuary!

Perhaps I shall meet her again.



Tomorrow a sermon on the Spirit on the Waters

INTIMATIONS OF THE PREHISTORIC

In my own fishing days on the Estuary in the early seventies I sometimes had the feeling that I was working in a tradition that stretched back at least to include Stone Age humans. An instance being this: there were many times, when the night tides were ebbing away, that my skipper and neighbour, Dick Squire, the last of the full time fishermen in my village, would fetch me down from my sleep by throwing shingle to clatter against my bedroom window pane. A few yards from my door at the end of the slipway would be two or three men waiting silently in the dark. We were the crew, off in a group to walk across the mud, sometimes as much as a mile, to where, at the edge of the channel, we had left our salmon boat the tide before, anchored out and waiting for us. Those marches across the wet mudbanks, sometimes by moonlight, sometimes by starlight, sometimes under cloud, were wonderfully timeless. I had always the sense that just such expeditions had been part and parcel of man’s experience of the Estuary for ever.

At night almost every thing that was done by the salmon crew was done in silence. Dick, when we reached the channel’s edge, would bend down and plant a twig into the mud at the very edge of the tide and stand back and watch how the swirl of the tide lapped around it. From his observations of the little stick he judged the speed of the flood and divined when and where to make a haul, when and where to row the seine out into the channel. It seemed to me that he had sorcerous powers. He was intimate with the fishing god and by starlight he could see the fish deep beneath the water.

Nowadays, as far as I know, no one makes such night walks across the mud but still today I experience two circumstances when I, in my own small boat, Poppy, can feel that I am lost in time and experiencing the tides with these cave dwelling first comers and their prehistoric descendents. The first is again by night when, drifting aimlessly on a tide, I think to share the sense of blind adventure with these first humans. I can imagine them floating hereabouts, all senses, smelling with dilated nostrils, seeing with night eyes, listening with ears that twitch and move, trailing their fingers in the water, tasting the salt in the air.

My second prehistoric Estuary, even more so, is when there is mist on the river. Then the sense of a primitive past can be strong and every inch of the journey is a surprise, the fish that jump, the seabirds that fly out of the mist only to disappear again, the banks that loom out of the gloom at the last moment. We speak of the mists of time and it is a powerful metaphor for there seems something so transforming about mist that all our our senses including our sense of time can be warped by it. I once wrote some verses on this theme inspired by standing at the end of the boat shelter wall at Lympstone and gazing out across the Estuary into, well, into mist and kidding myself that I was gazing into time. I shall post them tomorrow.