Interviews
Dexter Petley
Dexter Petley within the confines of angling literature has become somewhat of a personal hero of mine in recent times! Plain and simple; he dares to write about angling without masking out the real world, hes not a peddler of unobtainable dreams, and hes not trying to sell you something! So heres my attempt to see what makes DP tick!
1. What compelled you to start writing about angling in the first place?
The compulsion was to write fiction, that is the compulsion of the country boy turned urban existentialist-pillock re-discovering fishing in London E9 in the mid-80s and going back to childhood roots. Right from the start my fictional subjects were unfashionable, my characters normally voiceless outsiders stifled by class, family, poverty, lack of self-esteem and, above all, a deep sense of failure. That just about covered all the anglers I met while fishing all those shit-heaps I could get to on the bus from Hackney or by black-out painted 1940s woman's bicycle. So angling entered my fiction you see as any other subject because of the characters I met and the situations they put me in. Till Waterlog Magazine took me in 15 years later, there was nowhere for most of that writing to go except into unpublishable novels. Even now it has to be filtered through. Not just the dearth of outlets in the angling market for my kind of writing, but the steady objection and growing influence of readers who are uncomfortable with the idea that for most anglers the activity takes place in the real world, the public domain, and is thus subject to the playing out of society at the back of the swim. As an observer I cannot turn a blind eye to the human condition if fishing is one of its consituents. Just can't go wade up the friggin Tay and double-declutch my Hardy Crown Jewels and pretend that fishing is about fancy dress and the history of reel manufacture. And I'm not, of course, simply describing urban angling versus country. My experience of cities is limited to the few years I spent living in London in the mid-80s. Since moving to France I've found that angling is much more an integral component of rural social patterns than in Britain, simply because the urbanisation and class division of post-war Britain hasn't been so drastic here. There is no angling snobbery. And the human story is ever-present even if, as is usually the case, I encounter neither car nor angler wherever I fish these days.
2. Write whatever springs to mind!
I don't give interviews. This is the first and probably the last.
3. The last few angling books you read, and what you thought of them?
"Remi des Rauches" was the last, a French novel by Maurice Genevoix published in 1922. Set beside the River Loire in the 19th c., a brilliant example of how fish and fishing dominated the lives of those who lived beside it. Remi is an angler, spending most of his time fishing for chub and pike. He makes barrels for a living but due to poor grape harvests spends more and more time pike fishing. His young wife Bertille has to sell the furniture to make ends meet and there are ugly scenes whenever he comes in with his bucket of gudgeon live-bait which he carefully puts back in a barrel. Bertille gives him an ultimatum: move to the city and get a job or she quits. I'm making this book my next translation project. There are huge fishing chapters, both rod and line and by nets. The commercial fishermen are tough drunkards who get the bailiffs pissed and set up mid-river where they live in a floating shed for months on end, poaching salmon and drinking all day and night. An exceptional novel which illustrates my point about the strong historical social place that angling has in the lives of the French, simply because coarse fish are still an important food source.
4. Your cure for a raging hangover?
As I hate hangovers I make sure I avoid them. At six on the dot, unless I'm fishing, I get the chilled bottle of cheap white wine out of the cellar and empty it, one sip at a time in small doses over the next six hours. I drink a lot of water, you see, and also after about the third glass eat some supper, usually around ten at night. Wake up all clean and conscious next morning. My cure-all, and it worked in the days when there were hang-overs, usually induced by having to drink others peoples' rank moonshine at village suppers, is scrambled egg and a cup of strong tea. Any queeziness, works every time.
5. Your all time favourite item of fishing tackle?
Probably something I haven't got anymore, like those tiny split-shot tins you used to get in the 60s with the sliding lid. Or the dumpy perch float that truly bobs like no other float can. But pride of place probably has to go to the bite alarm I made myself out of a biscuit tin and a land rover dashboard for poaching the King George rezzie at night. It looked more like the bombay door mechanism from a Lancaster and sounded like a Stuka when you got a run, but I was proud of its lights and switches and the great innovation of making the sounder box out of an Old Holborn tin at the end of a 30 yard cable so I could hide in the scant undergrowth.
6. Does size matter?
It does when there's suddenly a forty in the net. It doesn't after you've put it back though and the f**king photo doesnt come out.
7. Your angling influences?
I was lucky enough, as a kid, to have "Teach Yourself Coarse Fishing" by Peter Stone. I tried applying everything he said, without fishing Blenheim or the Hampshire Avon of course, to my local farm ponds and Bodiam stretch of the River Rother. It was truly the only book I read until I was 16. I realised that angling was a highly tuned skill when watching float anglers fish the waggler against the far bank on the Hackney Canal. The unlikliest influence was this Hells Angel I used to fish with on the cliffs of Fairlight, a medieval pond with Chaucer's wildies. That biker taught me how you really fish a floating crust on a Mark IV.
8. Favourite drink whist fishing, and once back at home drink?
I never fish without a bottle of mineral water. Once home, white wine, every time. Current favourite a Reisling from Aldi at about a quid a bottle.
9. Your favourite angling quote or short piece of literature?
All the slight, longing glimpses of fish or fishing in devastated canals in Edmund Blunden's first world war memoir "Undertones of War" They are so slight, so remote, so unreal, that you never take fishing for granted again. More powerful than a gob full of angling poetics is the lack of it.
10. Your angling fantasy, your dream scenario, place, fish, women, you name it?
To one day build my solar powered-rainwater fed wooden cabin beside my own 5 acre pond. The rest is...obvious.
11. What do you do when you’re bored?
I'm never bored. Only people bore me, so I avoid them.
William and PurePiscator.com would like to thank Dexter for kindly agreeing to this interview.