That empty chair at the dinner table

As my fishing started in earnest in the lower reaches, particularly the Groynes, I never really registered it, that big old Ash tree. It was the one tree in the landscape by the Brookthat seemed to be stood alone. I just accepted its presence.

The dogleg bend upstream from the Packhorse bridge, where the banks turned off into the long straightened canal-like channel and seemed to crook and sweep, gravitating around this large trunk with the creeping root fingers and knuckles, that searched out and kept grasped safe, the bankside rocks and soils.

That possibly was the act which also saved it from clearance and felling, it sat tucked upon and protecting the angle that was needed to create the neat geometry across this space. Space that once was wide chaotic meanders of an ancient stream bed, but now neat managed industrial farmland divided by our little oasis, its central drain. Still the same waters of the same stream searching for the sea, desperately wishing to curve again, uneasy in these banks.

With such air of permanence, it was hard not to imagine that landscape itself, forming around the Ash tree instead. More ancient than anything planted up in the Pheasant clucking coppice on the hill looking down upon it, of anything growing in the wild scruffy avenue that lined the route of the bridal path the brought you up to the bridge, possibly even older than any of the trees that obscured and sheltered  the farmbuildings up on the far hill.

Only some of the gnarly old Willows on the Bankside in other stretches of our stream, which gave this Brook its name, and the old Oak at the lower road bridge, could possibly share or exceed the Ashes vintage, oblivious to the history and eras they had lived through, in a time line marked not by Kings and Queens; revolutions and conflicts. But noticing only the harsh winters, hot summers and periods of drought written down in the rings. And later in life the pollution, spray drift from the tractors and the now warming climate and energetic atmosphere that taxed their peaceful old age.

I could never imagine my ancient granddad as a scabby knee’d kid in shorts, long before the world saw two great wars and when much of the Manchester he played in was still farmland. And neither now could I possibly imagine this ancient Ash as a little seedling of two tiny round leaf’s  on a fragile stalk, pushing up through the soil one spring day how many centuries ago, nor how the world it entered looked?

Staring down from the vantage of the Packhorse bridge before an evening fishing, often at the large Chub in the stream below. Looking for clues, observing what they were eatingand hoping the distant Trout where on the same menu tonight. Was it snaffling the rising bugs under the water or sucking down the hatching or drowned spinner flies off the surface?

My impatient vision would soon travel upstream, searching ahead, pausing maybe, marvelling at the clarity of the waters, the clean gravels and the wafting fronds of emerald weeds below its surface in that evenings light. Noticing the busy bustling and often chaotic fly life coming and going above its surface, some of which would hopefully interest the Trout and be suitably covered in my box of imitations stuffed in my pocket. Or drawn to the bigger Damsels and Dragonflies, either flirting with each other, or flitting up and downstream on the hunt. Our showy Banded Demoiselle’s, clusters of spotted flapping wings where they gathered on a stream side bush in their hundreds and conferred and conspired, clearly visible from this vantage point. Then impatient wanderingeyes drawn further upstream by the white smoke like flowers of a ribbon of Meadows Sweet blossom, seemingly starting from the haze of foliage almost back by the crop in the field, up through the strip of high wild vegetation across the track and up, before tumbling down the high banksides to the very water’s edge, before dripping at last into the current.

Leading my involuntary gaze further up the brook until it meets the Ash tree at last.

Here by the scrub around its roots, that sparkling surface of the waters pitch to the left and out of my view, and carries on in my minds eye to sparkling splashing riffles of red spotted,butter gold Parr, and those deep dark pools of larger, crimson spotted, olive backed, golden flanked Brown Trout.

While on that solitary tree my eyes remain and finally find a place of rest to balance the scene, to let my imagination take over, compose my thoughts, and slow down, readying for the evening ahead. 

Entering the stream down the banks immediately above the Packhorse gave you 40 yards of fishing or more, some practice on the Dace shoals to warm up your senses, maybe even a small Trout or two in the margins could be covered, especially in that bend tucked under the bank, (where Stuart Crofts casually caught 8 one evening) then as you swung around past the Ash tree, those Groynes stretched out before you like aquatic hurdles, and the real Trout fishing for the evening  started in earnest.

Some evenings I would skip this playtime and wander straight up and then wind down the gentle slope behind the Ash, entering the stream by the solid shelf of soil formed around the trees roots. knowing that ahead of me here, I would be straight into an area with three or four feeding Trout  stretched out in front of me, no mucking about, as the first set of flow deflectors approached.

When I decided to improve my casting, before fishing, I would stand in this short straight stretch in the midpoint below the high banks to cast.

Ahead under the high boughs of the Ash, blackberry scrub in summer tumbled to the water from either bank and out over the edge, leaving barely a yard or two of clear gap in the airand the waters. Behind in the distance was the Packhorse bridge elevated above the water and framed with Blackthornscrub. Not a huge cast by distance standards, but a 60 or 70 foot stretch in each direction for this duffer.

To cast straight ahead safely between the blackberries and under the boughs, required a back cast that rose above that distant bridge and avoided those terrible thorns. The tracking of the rod had to be unwavering or it ended in tears, while stopping me from the temptation to increase distance, it taught me to keep on the straight and narrow, at least in my fly casting.

When finishing fishing on an evening as I’d follow the path back through the wild nature strip, the tall growing, ‘set-aside’ between the crop and the stream. Looking above the long grasses and Willow scrub back to my destination, my car and the stone bridge it was parked by, were obscured from view. Then that tall sentinel in the landscape was my reference guide to meter my progress and lead me back in.

On the bridge top later, tackling down, watching that vista of the setting sun and the often dramatic  clouds, the skies reflection on the winding waters below. That tall Ash tree and the Pheasant Clucking coppice on the brow of the hill were the framing devices that centred the vision and it became both the fulcrum and the balance of this panorama. Etched clearlyin the permanence of these memorable scenes. 

But despite this I never really knowingly took that much attention of that particular tree, or got to know it. A tall scruffy scrub of branches. At little over head height, its trunkforked up into two major branches, like two slender trunks, both reaching skywards and confusing its outline. And a small hawthorn and blackthorn nestled aside its trunk and with the long grasses and blackberry scrub; all these confused its profile and outline even further. It was just a tall freak in a flat short landscape.

The first time I really noticed it was on a night when the weather turned foul and darkness with the cloud cover, swooped in earlier on a late spring evening driven on bysudden ferocious winds. The grasses still weren’t so high to wade back through with difficulty yet, but the rain was starting to drive relentlessly into my face and expertly find little vulnerable gaps, creeping icy cold damp patches were making it to my flesh and starting to make me shiver. Anyone who wears glasses will know there is a point in such weather when the eyewear becomes a hinderance, no longer a benefit, and just compounds the misery. With no convenient case available to stash the eyewear, the world becomes a collection of unfocused round blobs and confusion.

Still there was no mistaking the approaching Ash tree barely a stone’s throw distant. The Tree marked a further stone’s throwtrudge to shelter, the car heater, and the beginning of at last, a return to comfort and warmth from my miserable state at present.

Yet even this stone’s throw away from that tree in the howling wind and the sound of driving rain on the cheap Orvis rain jacket and wind whipped wet grasses slapping on my waders, I could hear clear fluid notes of a bird singing above it all, a bird unlike any I had heard before. 

There was no recognisable passage in the song, more like jazzy little skits and improvisations marked with dramatic pauses, no run of notes seemed to repeat for ages and remarkably the purity of that sound sliced through the surrounding din.  

A little warble, then a run of notes, a little chorus, then some repeated chirrps and insect like chatter, then a short fluid melody, pause, repeat a single note 8 or ten times, before off again on a delicious run. Mesmerising, like a little beacon of hope in the encroaching storm.

Logically there was only one bird it could be, which I never thought I would encounter, especially not in a lone tree on a wild stormy night, it was a bird of balmy summer evenings and Mediterranean warm groves. And for my younger birdwatching self when I cut my ornithological teeth, a species considered too exotic up in Lancashire to ever imagine being encountered in this life and possibly the next. But a small passage of those notes I recognised from a bazaarand famous radio broadcast I had heard a few times.

Theres famous recordings of a rather eccentric English lady who used to take a cello out into the garden in Foyle Rising in Sussex, south of London, in the late spring evenings of the 1920’s, she played to these birds and claimed they sung backand joined in.

The BBC sent a sound recordist, taped the exchange and over a million people listened in. The celloist Harrison received over 50,000 letters of fan mail.

The first recording actually didn’t work so they hired a music hall bird impersonator to imitate the call, but the following year they tried again and succeeded. Enormously popular at the time, his became a yearly outside broadcast. Even when that celloist left Foyle Rising, the annual custom continued of recording those birds for a live broadcast marking spring.

In 1942 the recording of the bird became one of the most dramatic sound recordings of the second world war. I’d heard it numerous times in documentaries.

As the bird is singing sweetly you can hear in the distance a low deep drone growing as bombers start their journeys on a mission to Dresden in Germany to destroy the armaments factories with the new technique of carpet bombing. So it was not the sound of sweet cello music, but the growing sound of 200 heavily laden Wellington and Lancaster bombers accompanying a chirping Nightingale that was captured that night on tape.

The live feed was pulled by a quick thinking sound engineer who realised that the broadcasting live over the airwaves of a huge movement of war planes heading east to the coast, in a country paranoid of the number of enemy spies hidden in its towns and villages, could have already alerted the enemy to this crucial mission in the war effort.  

That wasn’t the mission’s only failing, there was confusion over the targeting, and the bombs were dropped in the forest and on the local town. The only industrial damage they reeked was to a blanket factory, a mineral water bottling plant and they destroyed the local timber yard. 11 bombers were shot down and dozens of airmen lost their lives.

One passage of that song lodged in my brain and hearing this bird now in the storm I was convinced, but to be sure I needed to hear a recording again and compare. 

So I found myself on a miserable night under the shelter of this Ash tree, stood still, one arm aloft holding a mobile phone on record  for 3 or 4 interminable minutes with cold water running down my sleeve, shivering in the growing gloomfrom the creeping wet, taping the song of an unremarkablelooking, very dull brown, little bird. Who, unseen a few yards from me, was singing its little heart out, despite the weatherand this sodden lump of human kind loitering at the base of its lonely perch. 

 A quick google search in the warmth and dry of home confirmed it was the same song and my miserable evening now felt triumphant, after such a weird event my real affinity with this Ash tree began.

From successful nights of fishing worth savoring a moment or two, those remarkable sunsets worthy of a pause and a photograph, to those evenings tinged with melancholy, when I knew it was my last visit for a while, whatever was waiting at home could just hang. Before heading homeward, I’d lean my arms upon the wide stone parapet and look back over the stream and watch as the outline of the Ash turn to silhouette in that wide vista and the dark enveloped me and posted me home. Always the center of the scene as the twinkling stream lead your eye up to it and the almost indiscernible valley sides rolled down to meet it.

A tall vertical sentinel who gifted balance, scale and structure to the confusion of almost flat horizontal lines surrounding it. 

Earlier that year when I returned to the Brook, it lost one of the two huge branches that divided its lofty head. It then hinged over, crossing the  stream like a high bridge, Branches driven into the stream bed holding it aloft. It stopped my casting drill and I missed the practice.

I wanted to deal with it immediately, but the club was against it, too big and too dangerous it was thought, and for a while as the world procrastinated the waters had to plunge low under it, scouring out bed and throwing up new gravels downstream.It offended my eye and saddened me, looking like a tall old friend, now stooped and suffering on crutches, and though it would never be the same, I wanted it at least regain its dignityand get rid of that mess, kick away the crutches and let it stand alone again and maybe in time balance up the head with some new growth.

Then the Tornado took down the other branch and the blockage in the Brook was complete. A chance meeting with the farmer revealed he was down on man power and unable to clear it any time soon, so after that Christmas was passed, ignoring the club, I got a team in and cleared the blockage just leaving the main heavy branches bridging over the banks.

We came too late and the pool scoured out was now too deep to wade, the banks too steep to scale up and out of. Fishing that area was now a short stretch that you had to then back out of all the way, before then walking upstream on the bank  to climb back into the waters after the remaining stump of the Ash tree. The whole experience of fishing the Groynes changed; no longer the gentle easy warm up and the chance of a few easy juvenile trout to wipe out the dreaded blank early , before passing that Ash and heading up into the more exactingdemands and flightier fish upstream.

The worst for me though was at the end of and evening, or when a really dramatic sunset occurred, I’d grab the phone camera and try and compose a shot, or stand looking upstream to savour the moment, but always it was lacking that framing , that vertical that made sense of all the horizontals, always an uncomfortable gap, a missing presence, like an empty chair at the dinner table.

Hope your all having a great weekend

All best, Chris Avery