The Fish Ladder
Authors: Katharine Norbury
To Jean Norbury and in memory of Fred Norbury
with boundless love
Fish ladder
(noun):
A structure that allows the natural migration of fish around an obstacle, such as a dam. Most fish ladders consist of a series of pools, arranged in low steps (hence the term
ladder
) that the fish swim and leap up to reach the open waters on the other side. The velocity of water falling over the steps has to be great enough to attract fish to the ladder, but it cannot be so great that it washes them back downstream, or exhausts them to the point of inability to continue their journey upriver.
Contents
It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are.
Would it not be a sign of great ignorance, my daughters, if a person were asked who he was, and could not say, and had no idea who his father or his mother was, or from what country he came?
Teresa of Avila
‘The theme for the summer is following watercourses from the sea to the source.’
It was the first day of the holiday and my nine-year-old daughter Evie reached for her journal. She transcribed my statement, and then underlined it, and in doing so turned it into a title. Beyond her a dozen crows, visible as sooty flecks, spiralled above Garn Fadryn’s summit cone.
‘What’s a watercourse?’ she asked.
‘A watercourse is the path that water follows. It can be anything from a trickling stream to a mighty river.’
‘What about the source?’
‘The source is where it comes from.’
‘Like a spring?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘It might be a pool, or a spring, or a crack in a rock. I’ve never really thought about it.’ Evie looked at me, then put down her pencil.
‘How shall we begin?’
This is the story of how I set out, often in the company of Evie, on a series of walks, or journeys. Our pastime began as a coping mechanism, a device that would get us through an otherwise blighted summer. Coping, because I had been pregnant the previous winter, but had lost my baby in the spring.
There had been tension in our household from the day a pink line appeared on the plastic wand of the tester kit. I was delighted, excited, and felt blessed. My husband, Rupert, was anxious. We had been living in Barcelona because the euro was weak against the pound, although that was already changing. Evie was thrilled, and wrote a poem called ‘My New Brother’, that was put up on the wall at school, but Rupert and I argued most days. I was nauseous, often sick, which I welcomed as a happy sign. Statistically, because of my age, I had a fifty per cent likelihood of miscarrying. But I was sure it would be all right.
When I felt the fizz of life slow down I stayed in bed, put my feet up, convinced myself the child was growing, although everything felt different from how it had with Evie. It was as though I carried a somnambulist, a sleeper, even now, when sleep was the natural state. Yet this rest was deeper, profound, dreamless. And then, one day, the baby’s heart just stopped. My doctor tried to persuade me to have the miscarriage induced. But I loved him – I was sure the baby was a little boy – and I didn’t want him to leave me. So I decided to let him rest as long as he would.
Most days I walked on Tibidabo, the rumpled mountain at the back of the city. One morning, after dropping our children at school, my friend Olga and I picked our way up one of the many narrow paths to join the track along the ridge – the Carretera de les Aigües – Olga swearing under her breath, and vowing to give up smoking, tucking her long hair behind her ear. Tibidabo was covered in pines, figs and prickly pears, populated with wild boar and herds of lost sheep and, occasionally, FC Barcelona footballers, training on the unpaved road above Camp Nou, as well as scores of joggers and morning walkers, some with dogs or baby strollers, and Lycra-clad cyclists wearing bug-eyed goggles. Swallows whispered in pulsing clouds. Cicadas creaked and buzzed. Despite the forest, the hill was bright, because the Mediterranean Sea, which was tacked like a veil to the hem of the city, acted as a vast reflector, and bounced light into all but the darkest gullies, driving out the shadows. At this time of year the mountain was dense with desert flowers, century cactus, scrubby pink roses, flat yellow poppies, the blue fluff of rosemary. Olga pointed out the places where, later in the year, mushrooms might be found, and wild asparagus in its season, bitter and thin as samphire.
At Tibidabo’s southernmost ridge there was a freshwater spring, the Font del Mont, or spring of the mountain. It could be accessed by a road up the back of the hill, and every day a line of elderly Catalan men wearing wide braces and orthopaedic shoes, and leaning on gnarled sticks – for digging mushrooms – formed a line at the spring with their plastic water carriers. A stone cairn had been built over the spring and the water directed through a steel pipe where it spilled into a polythene ice-cream carton before running, profligate, onto the ground. Dogs that had run ahead of their owners formed a shifting community about the carton, tails wagging dust. The men waved us to the front of the queue to come and refill our water bottles, eyes darting to the smooth bump of my belly. We asked them if there was anything special about the water, if it contained healing properties. The old men looked at us as though we were mad, and laughed. ‘It’s water,’ they said, ‘and it’s free!’
When we got back to Olga’s house her mother was waiting with a casserole of veal, eggs and peas. She spoke to me in Catalan, which Olga translated: ‘Darling, you must keep up your protein. And replace your fluids.’ At home, I stocked the fridge with isotonic drinks, enough to run a marathon.
The baby left my body in his own good time, almost a month after his heart stopped beating. We were at home when it happened, Evie asleep, Olga’s number propped by the telephone. Rupert was in London for the premiere of a film, an adaptation of one of his books. There had been no way of knowing when it was going to happen; life couldn’t and shouldn’t stand still.
When summer came, and brought with it the realisation that our baby should have been with us, have been in my arms, warm and cuddly and smelling of sunshine, I found that I was struggling. It wasn’t the first time that, grieving, I had found things hard; not the first time that the world had closed around me in a tight, hard sphere. I had been so afraid when it happened the first time that I declared, on my recovery, that I was more afraid of madness than of death. Although it turned out, in the end, that this was a luxurious boast, a terrible falsehood, and I would have the opportunity to revise my view entirely. So, because I had a daughter, and I had to be strong for Evie, I searched for something that would keep the air breathable, the sound of the wind audible, the smell of a bonfire or the smart tang of sea salt sharp on my lips and tongue. That might shut out the possibility of – depression is such a vague word – stasis. That would shut out the possibility of everything standing still, as it had stood still once before, when I was sad, and I never wanted to go back there, ever again.
So I came up with the idea of following a river from the sea to its source. The idea came to me in a roundabout way, which I will share with you, and for a long time I failed to achieve it. Indeed, the plan unravelled so fast that it very soon came to include anything with a watery theme. But I found, as the summer progressed, that I had accidentally embarked on a journey to the source of life itself. Not an abstract journey, or a metaphorical one, about who we are and what we’re doing here. A literal one: a journey to the source of this, particular, life. Because, although my childhood had been a happy one, and my adult life fulfilling, if not particularly exceptional, or notable from the point of view of achievement, there had been a slight unorthodoxy about my beginning.
I had been adopted as a baby, brought into our family because my parents wanted to have a second child, and my mother had been unable to carry one after giving birth to my brother. I hadn’t stopped to think about this in many, many years, although, at one level, I had always been aware of it. But for some reason, perhaps connected with, or triggered by, this new lost baby, I started to dwell upon this mystery. Of who I was, and where I’d actually come from. Of whom we speak when we talk about
our family
. And it turned out, as the weeks rolled by, and became months, and then years, that I discovered that there were places, empty spaces,
places in the heart
, that I simply hadn’t imagined could exist.
On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go
John Donne
The idea, of following a river from the sea to its source, had its origin between the pages of a novel –
The Well at the World’s End
– by the Scottish writer, Neil M. Gunn. Unfortunately I no longer had this book, because I had given it to my friend Sofia, in Barcelona, just a few days before we returned to Wales for the long summer holiday.
At Evie’s international primary school Sofia was, without doubt, the richest mother, being married to one of the wealthiest men in the world. We met when she overheard me complaining to Evie’s teacher about an apparently armed man who had followed the children’s bus to the swimming pool. Miss Linda had looked thoughtful. Bodyguards were the new black. One of the Russian families had one. Also one of the Bulgarian families, though theirs was more like a footman and doubled up as a chauffeur. A gentle-looking woman in a tracksuit then stepped forward and said that it was she who employed the guard, and she apologised for the fuss. A diamond the size of a penny glittered on her finger. The woman insisted that she thought it was better for all the children that there was a bodyguard outside the school, and I had been unable to think of a response.
In spring the knots of security already looped around Sofia pulled tighter. Her father-in-law stepped down from control of their family business, which was a bank, and Sofia’s husband, with a minimum of fuss, slipped into his father’s shoes. The daily walk to the school gates was accompanied by a huddle of walkie-talkied ex-marines and black-clad secret policemen. While the arrangement was clearly unsatisfactory, it was also short-lived, for during the course of the summer Sofia and her family would leave Barcelona for their own country, where the net of security could better enfold them, and the children would go to school in a four-wheel drive.