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shooting. But the passion that exceeded all others was for his rod and line. I remember as a boy that, when the Farlows fishing catalogue arrived from London in early January, we would both spend hours poring over it together and deciding what flies and spinners and reels and tackle we would need for the season to come.In spring we would load up our battered Standard Ten car (my father was completely uninterested in material possessions, especially cars – this one, I recall, had a top speed of 58 miles per hour downhill with the wind behind us, and you could see the road through a rust hole in the floor by the back seat) and on atrocious roads thread our way south through Northern Ireland’s little towns for eighty miles to fish for salmon on Lough Melvin on the Fermanagh–Leitrim border. We always stayed in the same rather primitive fishing hotel, The Melvin Hotel in the little town of Garrison. There was a huge stuffed brown trout in a glass case above the bar, which they claimed had been caught in the Lough, and my boyhood dreams were all about catching one like it and of how proud my father would be.
    My memories of these trips are of being bitterly cold while telling my father I wasn’t; of long hours in the back of the boat trawling spinners or casting a wet fly on leaden water; of sardine sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, which we seemed to have to wait an eternity to eat, and of bars of Highland Toffee (my father had a very sweet tooth) and ginger beer in stone bottles. We always paid a second visit to the Lough in the summer, which I loved even more. Then we would fish for a trout special to Lough Melvin – the beautiful, golden gillaroo – by ‘dapping’ with a daddy longlegs. ‘Dapping’ involves using a very light line that you allow to blow in the wind so that you can then gently lower the daddy longlegs onto the surface of the water from five or six yards away. It worked best when the fish were lying in shallow, weedy water over a sandy bank on a hot August day. The other special Lough Melvin trout is the sonaghan, also found nowhere else in the world. They do not grow big, but are tremendous fighters.
    But it was the salmon we were chiefly there for, and I caught my first one, weighing ten-and-a-half pounds, at the age of eleven. Actually, I had caught one the year before, but our boatman, John Murphy, took one look at it, swore and, to my horror, threw it back. I was so furious I wanted to throw him after it, until my father explained that it was a ‘kelt’ or spent fish (i.e., a female which had just spawned), and so could not be taken and had to be returned.
    Besides fishing, we had a second and more clandestine excitement during our twice yearly trips to Lough Melvin – smuggling. For my father, though an ex-Indian Army Colonel and to all appearances a pillar of the community, was no great respecter of any law he regarded as irksome.
    The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland runs through the middle of Lough Melvin. Our boatman, John Murphy (to whom my father used to send Christmas cards every year – even after he himself had emigrated to Australia) came from the Irish side. No trip was ever made backwards and forwards across the Lough without carrying some contraband or other. It was my job to sit on top of the cartons of whatever it was most profitable to smuggle at the time. The favourite was butter, which was much cheaper in the south than the north, but I have sat long hours on Melvin, in rough weather and smooth, on crates containing everything from cigarettes to Irish whiskey, depending on what my father and John Murphy thought at the time would return the best profit. On one occasion we went on a rather larger smuggling trip, which we undertook in a dilapidated truck. I was positioned at the rear and equipped with a large sack of tin tacks. I asked what these were for and was told that if we were chased by the police or the customs I was to throw as many handfuls