The Lightning Thread

Subtitled Fishological Moments and The Pursuit of Paradise, this rich memoir celebrates the unique tranquility that can be found in fishing

- DAVID PROFUMO

The Lodge was a Victorian shooting box of minimal architectural distinction, belonging perhaps to the psychiatric baronial school. Its heavy, irregular exterior was set off by monkey puzzle trees, a mossy lawn and an embattled garden. The household was run by Mr White. Neat, ubiquitous, kindly and redolent of Vitalis hair oil, he was a master of innuendo, immaculate, handsome and loyal, with an abiding fondness for the twin Grant brothers who owned the village store.

He had two friends — also both butlers and, like him, called George — who took their holidays to join him at the Lodge, so the hill picnics were always colourful. At the time, I did not quite appreciate what a period piece we made, but I rather suspected not every boy spent his summer like this.

On arrival, my first thrill was to unload the Vauxhall shooting brake and arrange my outdoor equipment on the shelf assigned to me in the gun room — a place spectacularly caparisoned with sporting apparatus, including a glass-fronted cabinet housing Purdeys — my uncle was a director of the firm — horizontal racks of Palakona cane rods rigged and ready, and wooden winders for drying silk lines. A cupboard contained a squadron of pre-war Hardy Perfects with serried ranks of oxblood Neroda fly boxes, and a framed photograph of Uncle Harold with a vast, 185lb tarpon, which he had killed trolling off the coast of Sierra Leone.

There was also a brace of cartridge bags fashioned from the skin of a rogue lion he had been obliged to shoot when he was resident minister in West Africa in 1944.