“Please, Mr. Gravitt, y’got any gentles today?”

Generally he’d roar out: “What! Gentles! Gentles in my shop! Ain’t seen such a thing in years. Think I got blow-flies in my shop?”

He had, of course. They were everywhere. He used to deal with them with a strip of leather on the end of a stick, with which he could reach out to enormous distances and smack a fly into paste. Sometimes you had to go away without any gentles, but as a rule he’d shout after you just as you were going:

“‘Ere! Go round the backyard an’ ‘ave a look. P’raps you might find one or two if you looked careful.”

You used to find them in little clusters everywhere. Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a battlefield. Butchers didn’t have refrigerators in those days. Gentles live longer if you keep them in sawdust.

Wasp grubs are good, though it’s hard to make them stick on the hook, unless you bake them first. When someone found a wasps’ nest we’d go out at night and pour turpentine down it and plug up the hole with mud. Next day the wasps would all be dead and you could dig out the nest and take the grubs. Once something went wrong, the turps missed the hole or something, and when we took the plug out the wasps, which had been shut up all\ night, came out all together with a zoom. We weren’t very badly stung, but it was a pity there was no one standing by with a stop-watch. Grasshoppers are about the best bait there is, especially for chub. You stick them on the hook without any shot and just flick them to and fro on the surface—“dapping,” they call it. But you can never get more than two or three grasshoppers at a time. Greenbottle flies, which are also damned difficult to catch, are the best bait for dace, especially on clear days. You want to put them on the hook alive, so that they wriggle. A chub will even take a wasp, but it’s a ticklish job to put a live wasp on the hook.

God knows how many other baits there were. Bread paste you make by squeezing water through white bread in a rag. Then there are cheese paste and honey paste and paste with aniseed in it. Boiled wheat isn’t bad for roach. Redworms are good for gudgeon. You find them in very old manure heaps. And you also find another kind of worm called a brandling, which is striped and smells like an earwig, and which is very good bait for perch. Ordinary earthworms are good for perch. You have to put them in moss to keep them fresh and lively. If you try to keep them in earth they die. Those brown flies you find on cow-dung are pretty good for roach. You can take a chub on a cherry, so they say, and I’ve seen a roach taken with a currant out of a bun.