Casting a line into the glorious river life of
A moving memoir of one man’s passion for angling... and how the Tweed reflected 70 years of joys and sorrows
BOOK OF THE WEEK A RIVER RUNS THROUGH ME: A LIFE OF SALMON FISHING IN SCOTLAND by Andrew Douglas-Home (Elliott & Thompson, £14.99)
IN his teens, when love was new, its waters made him giddy with excitement. The allure of the River Tweed was irresistible, and Andrew Douglas-Home came to know ‘every stone, every ripple and eddy’ of his salmon fishing haunts.
At 39, on losing his son Freddie to cot death, the waters were his companion through mourning. It may be no coincidence that it was around then the fly fisher began returning his catch to the river. In grief, the survival of the species whose population had plummeted during his lifetime took on a new primacy.
Now, at 71, he has written of his lifelong relationship with the Tweed. Though he is a devoted husband, A River Runs Through Me tells the story of a parallel marriage, of stolen hours by the water’s edge indulging a passion not shared by his wife.
It is a love letter not just to the river, but also to the rhythms of family life by its banks. Warm, witty and, in parts, deeply moving, it is an uplifting tale in spite of the two tragedies at its core – the sudden death of an infant son and the slow demise over half a century of a magnificent species. As a young man, the writer viewed Atlantic salmon as quarry; in his 70s they are the most pressing of conservation cases.
The book is also a reflection on privilege. Mr Douglas-Home is Eton-educated and blessed with a home and generous grounds near the Berwickshire town of Coldstream, a stone’s throw from the choicest spots on the UK’s best salmon fishing river; he regularly checks his good fortune.
The Tweed is a 100-yard stroll across the garden from his front door on the Lees Estate. He walks by its banks with his dogs or rod in hand every day.
The author’s father Edward was a younger brother of Sir Alec Douglas
Home – Prime Minister for a year in 1963-64 – and himself a keen fisherman.
AFTER an abortive degree at Oxford University – he was ‘thrown out’ after a year – Mr DouglasHome became a chartered accountant, and started his own firm in Kelso, Roxburghshire.
He married wife Jane in 1980 and they had two children, Richard and Nick.
Their third, Freddie, was born in December 1989 after a difficult pregnancy. At the time, work was near all-consuming for him and it was clear to both that his wife wanted a third child much more than he. That made their grief harder to share and their loss all the more painful.
Ultimately. the two attended therapy sessions together.
Mr Douglas-Home describes his son’s death at six weeks as ‘a tragedy of such indescribable proportions that I can still recall every tiny detail of what happened before and after’.
He writes: ‘It was 32 years ago now, on Saturday 27 January 1990 at 12am. I still have in my wallet the paper I was writing, for work, of course, when I heard Jane. I later wrote the heading “Freddie Douglas-Home” and on the other side: “I stopped writing here when Freddie died”, with a note of the date and the precise time of Jane’s screams.
‘I don’t know how Jane bore it; she became very ill.
‘I am sure she remembers it as if it were yesterday. She thinks of Freddie every day.’
All those years later, they still struggle for an answer when asked how many children they have.
‘Two is somehow a denial of Freddie. We try to say three. If we are not that keen on the person asking the questions, we deliberately say two because somehow, silly though it is, we want to protect Freddie, to keep him to ourselves.’
He reflects that the tragedy is now so far in the past that the lettering is fading on their son’s headstone: ‘He has lain all alone there for 32 years. Jane and I have booked the plots on either side of his grave.’
Inevitably, the loss cast a shadow over his fishing – even as, over the years, the waters offered a balm for his melancholy. Even at the scene of his greatest fishing triumph, landing a huge salmon on the Tweed and, at the age of 51, joining the exclusive ‘over-30-poundsclub’, thoughts of his little boy were never far away.
‘Maybe he would have liked fishing, maybe he would not. No matter, he should at the very least have had the chance.’ There was joy, however, in sharing his passion with his surviving sons.
At the age of six, little Nick landed a nine-pounder in 1992 on the River Stinchar in Ayrshire.
Mr Douglas-Home recalls the Duke of Wellington coming to lunch the next day after fishing in the same river and catching nothing in ‘hopeless’ conditions.
‘I caught one,’ piped up little Nick. ‘Expert fisherman duke, or six-year-old novice,’ reflects the author, ‘we are all the same to the fish. That is as it should be.’
BY then, he says, he was returning almost all his own catch to the water. The ‘days of plenty’ he had known in his youth were drawing to a close.
He adds: ‘I have seen estimates that Atlantic salmon numbers have dropped from ten million to 1.5million over the whole North Atlantic, and from 1.5million returning to Scotland in 1971 to 250,000 in 2020.’
Hence the tension between his great love of fishing and the dread that now haunts him – of jeopardising the salmon’s chances of getting to their spawning beds.
Mr Douglas-Home writes: ‘I never kill them, but occasionally one dies from being fatally hooked down its throat. When it does, I scream and howl with anguish.
‘They are beautiful, noble and strong fish. I know my attitude is full of contradictions, so don’t bother telling me.’
This is, of course, a book full of fishing stories. But more accurately stories about life, about growing older, and dealing both with change and constancy.
The most important constant in these pages, perhaps, is not the Tweed but Jane, the ‘remarkable woman’ who has no interest in fishing it.
‘Like any couple, we have had our moments, not least when Freddie died,’ says Mr DouglasHome. ‘However, at no point did either of us give any ground on total loyalty and underlying respect for each other. ‘She is amazing.’ And so, counting many blessings, he repairs to the river and casts another fly.