One
A Mother’s Bream
Like so many places in nature, rivers are fun to play in, but they can only become known by hunting, through the careful grasping for plunder. And the River Stour had plunder: pike, bream and roach to begin with, and plenty else for afters. My mother, Connie Noakes, knew a widow who lived further up the river at the end of . . . Stone Lane, I think. Yes, that was her lane. She had lost her husband in the First World War and I would walk to her house often with my mother. Sometimes my father, Clive, would come with us, and those days must have been Sundays because you couldn’t force my father into anything on the other days of the week if he didn’t want to do it. Anyway, on those Sundays that he came with us, he began to teach me how to fish off the end of the dear wi
