Digging worms

We demolished our air raid shelter in 1956 and this gave us space to grow vegetables, but my parents more or less gave up on gardening after I sunk a bath in the plot and stocked it with fish. The area around it became my worm digging patch, so from June 16th until the lakes froze, it looked like The Somme: Bombed to bits.

During all our school years, my brother Alex and I would climb trees, build dens and fish local ponds. Bait was mostly white bread or a dough made simply with flour and water. Maggots were available from a tackle shop but that was a long cycle-ride away. If we had them we shared them out and made them last for a week and if they all pupated we would use the pupae too. Worms were not very popular because small perch tended to inhale them.

We spent most of the school holidays with our grandmother in the Yorkshire Dales. That was when you really needed worms and fortunately she had a dry-stone-walled garden that kept us well supplied. It had probably held chickens or even a pig at one time so the soil was surprisingly fertile. Gran used to grow red, black and white currants there as well as gooseberries. Hens still managed to lay eggs under the thorny bushes but the pig was kept indoors a few yards away. My uncle John's white ferrets were kept in a hutch alongside.

That garden was systematically dug-over from one end to the other, leaving lines of holes and humps that we were finally made to flatten out in September, just before going home to our parents (and school).

The worms we found there were proper lob-worms with hard, purple heads, grey bodies and flattened tails. They were just what we needed for up-stream worming and for fishing under the bank in a flood. We often caught several trout using the same worm so a small cocoa tin would easily hold a day's supply.

If we ever ran out of worms while we were on the river, we would simply turn over the abundant rocks that are to be found everywhere in the Dales, and then pounce on anything we found undreneath. We soon learned that damp places with soil rather than gravel were better than dry places and that the peaty, acid ground at the head of the dale or up the becks was hopeless. However, moorland trout still knew what a worm was and would throw themselves almost onto the bank for them.

Today, I still have a small lob-worm patch in the garden and three compost bins provide the small-red "brandlings" that fish seem to like around here. I use them for tench and sometimes chub, but probably only twice a year.

I guess that these days worms are either a bait for children to catch tiddlers and perch with, or for specialist, specimen hunters. I certainly wouldn't use them for trout any more; they work too well.