Cyril, river keeper, a chalk stream in Hampshire

I became fascinated with dendritic chalk streams when I first moved to Sussex and learned of their uniqueness. This fictional creative piece allows he voice of cyril to talk about similar streams in Hampshire in the context of 'shifting baseline syndrome'. It is the first in a series of 12 essays looking at different ecosystems and how they have become depleted in living memory. They are written in dialect where possible to acknowledge the language around nature that is being lost concurrently with nature itself.

Sixty year I kept this water, and my father afore me, and his afore him, so I know what a June evening on a chalk stream is meant to sound like, and I will tell you plain, it is not this. It is meant to sound like rain that never quite falls. That was the mayfly, see, the green drake we called it, coming up off the water in their thousands upon thousands, a great pale blizzard of them going up into the low sun, and the trout rising under them till the whole surface boiled with it. Duffers' fortnight, the anglers named that stretch at the end of May, when even a fool could take a fish, and they came from London and Tokyo and New York to stand on my banks and wait on it. Three year that fly spends down in the gravel afore it hatches, mind. Three year in the dark for a day or two in the light. And now, some Junes, it scarcely comes at all. On the Avon, the next valley over, they have counted the river flies down by better than four parts in five in ten year. I have stood on this bank of a June evening and not had a single dumbledore working the bankside flowers nor a green drake come past my face, and gone home and said nothing to nobody, for who is there left to say it to.

You want to understand what this water is. There is hardly the like of it anywhere on this earth. More than four in every five of the chalk streams in the whole world run in England, most of them here in the soft south country, and folk have taken to calling them our rainforests, they are that rare, and were that full of life. When I was a boy the crowfoot streamed out the whole length of the reach, green weed waving and flowering white across the top of the water like stars come down into it, and the gravel between lay clean and bright, and the wild brown trout stood over it thick as you like, and our own white-clawed crayfish were under every stone.

Now the crowfoot is patchy and furred over with silt. They draw too much water off the top of the chalk for the towns and the new houses, half of Hampshire drinks this one river, and what is left runs low and warm and soured with the farms and the sewage in it. The wild trout are thin. The great salmon that ran these Hampshire rivers hang on now by a thread you could break with a hard word. And the eels. Lord above, the eels. I sniggled for eels off this bank as a lad, the old way, a worm threaded on a length of worsted wool and poked down into their holes, and there is the very word for it, sniggling, wrote down in the old book of Hampshire words. I filled a bucket of a night and thought nothing of it. There is scarce an eel left now to sniggle. Better than nine in ten gone from our rivers, and them that still come have swum the whole width of the ocean to reach us, only to find the door half shut in their faces.

I mind the water meadows an' all, though they went afore most. My grandfather was a drowner, which was a proper trade in his day, a man who knew how to float the meadows, letting the river out over the grass through the carriers and the hatches in a thin bright sheet to keep the frost off it and fetch the early bite for the ewes. Drowning, they called it, and it was a skill and a craft, and it is clean gone. And with it went the wet meadows that came up purple in the spring with the fritillary, the snake's-head, nodding by the thousand where I ate my nammet as a boy. You will look a long while for a fritillary meadow now.

A young lad fishes here of a Saturday and thinks it a little corner of heaven, and so it is, to him, and I would not take that from him. But he never saw the blizzard. He never stood out in it with the fly in his hair and the churm of the water and the birds all round him near fit to deafen a man. You cannot grieve a snowstorm you have never seen. And that, when all is said and done, is the thing that keeps an old man from his sleep.

Not that it went.

Things go.

But that it went so quiet, and so slow, a little less every single June of my life, that there is not a soul left but me to swear to you it was ever here at all.