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as I could onto the road behind us to puncture the tyres of our pursuers.
    Smuggling across the border was a regular business at the time, and many were the stories of near escapes told in the bar of The Melvin Hotel. My favourite was of a local man who was big in smuggling and well known for it to the local police and customs. On one occasion he was observed cycling backwards and forwards past the customs post many times a day, for several days. The customs knew he was smuggling something, but, however many times they stopped and searched him, they could find nothing. Some time later, at a local bar, they bearded him with their suspicions:
    ‘You were smuggling weren’t you?’
    ‘I was.’
    ‘But we searched your bicycle and never found anything. What were you smuggling?’
    ‘Bicycles.’
    In the spring of 2008, while researching for this book, my wife Jane and I paid a visit to Melvin and found old John Murphy, then well into his nineties, in his little house in Garrison. His gnarled old hands, still calloused and rough from a lifetime of rowing, were arthritic and bent, and his hearing was almost totally gone. But he still had a fund of stories of these times and of my father, of the smuggling and of the fish we had caught together. Sadly, he died a few months after our visit.
    Among the laws my father omitted to respect was the law giving the well-to-do (as my father saw it) the ownership of fish. Or to be more precise, the ownership of pieces of water in which one could fish. He used to say, ‘Fish are wild. Catching them should depend on skill, not on how rich you are. I accept that people can own a piece of water, but how can you own the fish in it, for they could have come from anywhere?’ This unconvincing logic (which he never applied to anything else – pheasants, for instance) gave him, in his own eyes, all the justification he needed to poach. This he did with relish, his Ulster friends and me, whenever I was home from school.
    We had two favourite poaching spots, the Hollywood Reservoir, which is in the hills above Belfast, and Lough Island Reavy, nestling under the Mourne Mountains. The fishing rights to both were owned at that time by the Belfast Anglers Association, who employed ghillies to guard their water and its fish. So we fished at night, especially during the moonless period, starting around midnight (when, we reasoned, all self-respecting ghillies would be tucked up in bed) and continuing till the dawn. Afterwards we called in for a monster breakfast at one of the workmen’s cafés on the way back home – or, better still, went onto the mudflats on Strangford or the Whitewater estuary in Dundrum Bay, near Newcastle, County Down, for a feast of raw cockles, dug up and consumed on the spot.
    Normally, people do not fish at night. But we used a technique which my father’s cattle-dealer friend, Billy Thompson, taught him and which I have never used or heard of being used since. It depended on the fact that trout come into shallow water to feed at night and, once you had learned the technique, it proved highly successful. It involved using a fly rod with a worm as bait and casting as far out as possible with a very stiff arm (so as not to lose the worm) and then drawing the line in very slowly. You could feel the trout picking up the bait and the trick was to let him run with it a bit and then strike when you judged the worm to be fully taken. We caught some magnificent fish using this method. But we ourselves were nearly caught several times, too.
    Our method for escaping ghillies was simple, effective and, again, taught us by Billy Thompson. Part One was avoidance. We would nearly always be able to hear the ghillies coming some time before they heard or saw us. Then, if we thought they hadn’t actually seen us, we would simply lie down in the dark, pull our overcoats over us and make like a stone. Ten times out of ten, the ghillies, not knowingwe were there, walked past unseeing, leaving us