Again I find myself on the rivers bank. Between the known and the unknown. The persistent rain finding its crafty way into my clothes ignores completely my scrunched up attempts to keep it out and makes tiny rivers of its own that sneak their way down the back of my neck. It could annoy me but I tolerate it. The earthy smell of bread compressed into a tight ball, watered down into a sticky paste and wrapped in a segment of old bed sheet. The dangerously sharp lipped tin can filled with moist grass sods ripped from the garden earlier that morning and wriggling with a life of its own with burrowing earthworms. The bait. This then is me the hunter, with the thrill of the hunt in my blood. And then more. I look at my line and envy what it knew I did not. The unknown. From the float down it disappeared into a world I could never. And then I could. All of a sudden I could. Hold your breath and I promise to take you with me.................. Enter the world of the river....meet the fish - Delair the roach, wonderful Thump the ever-eating Chub - learn of their lives, their fight to save the rite 'The Calling of the Scales' learn how the spirit of the Eel Esmelda helps the fish and the tiny Dace Tenfra in their fight against the evil pike Shank.
About the Author: Born 60 years ago in Reading Berks, currently living on a narrowboat in deepest Yorkshire. I was one of six. My mother was from St.Helena. She left the beautiful island in the South Atlantic and made her way to England where she married my father in Reading......something I could never quite bring myself to forgive her for. I went to a boys only school and made my money for the tuck shop by writing love letters for my fellow testosteronics {I am sure that word does not exist and if it does not, it should}. I left school with 8 R.C.E. passes and a complex that other people actually understood algebra and trigonometry. I was brought up on a council estate so I know how to swear, spit, and make a bloody good clay wanger. I bred mice, kept newts, fished with a bent pin as a hook and rode my bike home with grass stuffed in its tyres due to a puncture. I was always ready to help the local milk man on........clay wanger? You need a nice bit of green willow twig about two feet.....metres did not exist then...long. A glob of well kneaded red soggy clay stuck on the end. Bring your arm back and a violent wang sent your glob heaven wise. I am sure you get the picture. I started work as an apprentice engineer, and soon realised I was never going to be an apprentice or an engineer. Living on a council estate meant being a labourer, a painter and decorator or joining the army, so I delivered telegrams for the post office. Now things are a bit of a blur so please bear with me. I then worked with explosives, radioactivity, and small rubber seals that were paramount in holding swing fire missiles together. Twelve years with the Ministry of Defence, enough said. Whilst all this happened so did marriage. I discovered reading, writing, English mustard and that white wine goes with fish. We bought a shop in Somerset and were pivotal in rural life, ran a social club and were subjected to an unsociable life. Then we sold fish from a van, all stories in their own right. I dished out human organs for transplant, was no stranger to the mortuary, put up TV satellite systems, and delivered and collected rich people's cars. Stir all this around for half a century sitting by the river bank and the result... 'Return to the Broadwaters' the 'The Calling of the Scales' and 'Anguilla's Retribution' - The Broadwaters Trilogy.