An Audience with an Elephant Read Online Free

the fish, but the fish moved and this straightened the thing. Then the great tail flicked up and caught Lewis, and threw him into the air on to the bank. Just one flick, but it nearly broke the man’s leg. There was a large rock on the bank. Allen dropped the rod (it had been a freak catch, the hook snagging in the fish’s head, a sturgeon having no mouth) and tugged at the rock. With it in his hands he waded out and dropped it on the head, lifting it again and pounding at it. The creature began to die, watched by two men who had no idea as to what it was.
    But in death it provided them with an even greater problem: how were they to get it out of the river? Allen ran to a nearby farm, and there occurred one of those rare moments that are pure comedy. Allen asked could he borrow a horse and cart, and the farmer, naturally, asked why. Allen said he had caught a fish. It ended with the farmer, farmer’s friends, dogs, horse, cart and all going back to the bank.
    ‘I can remember it now,’ said Alderman Price. ‘Alec came running to my house. I had never seen him so excited. All he would say was, “Well, I’ve caught something this time that you’ll never beat.” I went back with him. They’d pulled it up on to the trestle you see in the photographs, and the news had got round. People were coming in cars and in carts. They were ferrying children across the river.
    ‘It had these big scales, I remember that. And it was very slimy. It was a sort of black and white in colour. No, I wasn’t frightened.’ He was in the habit of pausing at that point. ‘It was dead.’
    As the anglers gathered it was determined that the thing out of the river was a sturgeon. Vague memories stirred. Was it not the law that a landed sturgeon was the King’s prerogative? A telegram was sent to Buckingham Palace inquiring after the King the next day, and a stiff little reply came the same day that the King was not in residence. Such trivia did not deter a man who had hooked the biggest river fish in recorded angling history. Allen sold the sturgeon to a fishmonger from Swansea for two pounds ten shillings, which worked out at something like a penny ha’penny a pound, this at a time when Scotch salmon at Billingsgate was fetching two and six a pound. More than 40 years later Allen’s friends, who had helped him load the thing on to the train, were still bitter about the deal. There had been so much caviar in the sturgeon some of this had fallen on to the farmyard where it was eaten by the farmer’s pigs. But selling it did get rid of one problem. There were no refrigerators in the valley, and 388 pounds of sturgeon was a lot of fish.
    Allen fished on until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. In photographs the lean figure became stocky. Spectacles were added. Catches got held up regularly to the camera, something he could never have done that wild July night when he was content just to pose beside his fish. So had he considered the rest of his fishing life a sort of epilogue?
    Brian Rudge, who ran the fishing tackle firm on whose behalf Allen meandered through West Wales, knew him well. ‘I think he saw the incident as more of a joke than anything, he wasn’t a man who was easily impressed. I think, you know, that as far as he was concerned it was a bit of a nuisance. He was out salmon fishing. The sturgeon had got in his way.’ Alderman Price heard Allen talk about it a few times. ‘It was usually when he heard anglers going on about their catches. He wasn’t a boasting man but sometimes he couldn’t resist saying, “Well, I suppose this would be the biggest fish I ever caught.” And then of course they’d say, “Good God.”’
    Yet outside the valley and angling circles it was a small fame. There was no mention of it in the national press that July, and it was a small item even in the Carmarthen Journal. The august organ rose to its greatest heights of sensationalism. ‘Two anglers had an exciting time while fishing in the