The night of the elvers

Text 1: The Spring Tide, by Alan Whitlock

An original twentieth-century memoir.

My father woke me at midnight with a hand on my shoulder and a finger to his lips. It was April, the spring tide was due, and the elvers were running. I was nine years old and had never been allowed out after dark, and I remember the cold of the lane and the smell of the river long before I saw it, a smell of mud and weed and something older that I had no name for.

On the bank, lanterns were strung out for half a mile, each with a dark figure crouched beside it and a long net of muslin stretched on a frame. Nobody spoke above a murmur. The river slid past, black and swollen, carrying sticks and froth and once, horribly, a drowned sheep turning slowly over and over.

Then my father lowered his net into the shallows and lifted it, and in the lantern light it was full of glass. That is what I thought at first: that he had scooped up a mass of broken glass, writhing. Then I understood that they were alive. Thousands of them, each no longer than my finger and so transparent that I could see the dark thread of their spines and the tiny black pins of their eyes. They poured over one another like a liquid that had learned to move by itself.

He told me, as we filled the bucket, where they had come from. Across the whole width of the Atlantic, he said, from a sea of weed on the far side of the world, drifting for three years on currents no man had ever charted, to arrive here, tonight, at the bottom of our lane. I did not believe him. I am not sure I believe it now, though I have read the books.

We walked home at four with the bucket between us, the elvers ticking and whispering against the tin. In the east the sky was turning grey. My mother fried them for breakfast with an egg, and I could not eat a single one.

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