Towards dusk we’d sometimes go fishing, but we never caught anything ourselves, though it was a pleasant way of spending an evening. As we leant back against the sandy banks and gazed peacefully at the rocky crags on the opposite bank, other people seemed to be yanking out fish all over the place; and in one evening a 38 pounder and a 10 pounder were caught by one man who sold them to the hospital cookhouse. The Thai methods of fishing were far more efficient than ours. When the river was up in spate, a Thai would tie his canoe up to the bank, and by using a small stick and about four feet of line, would lift out up to a hundredweight of fish in a couple of hours. Normally, when the river was low and slow flowing, you would see a Thai woman in a canoe moored to the bank near some reeds or bushes growing low in the water; in one hand she held a twig with about two feet of line on it and a hook which she lowered only just below the surface of the water; with the other hand she stirred and splashed the water just above the hook and near the canoe’s edge, having first smeared a little pork fat on the surface of the stream. Then, one of two things happened: either a fish was hooked and thrown into the boat, or else the fish, about eight inches long, jumped straight out of the water into the canoe! We used to watch this often at a range of about five yards but it still remained complete magic to us.

But by far the most picturesque method was with the cast-net, similar to the jala in Malaya. A Thai, usually very gracefully and strongly built, stood up in the bows of a little canoe paddled either by his wife or one of his children. In his hand he held his net, and as he arrived at the pool or fancied place, he flung the net onto the water, keeping the line attached to it in his hand. The net fell on the water in a perfect circle, and the weighted outer edge immediately started to sink. As the net went down, so it entangled any fish below it, and at the same time, the fisherman was hauling on the line that, because it was threaded round the outer edge of the net, drew the whole net into a sort of purse, which was then hauled on board and the fish emptied out of it. Sometimes the net caught on a bamboo or snag on the river bed, and while the child controlled and back-paddled the canoe, the Thai would slip over the side with hardly a ripple, perhaps staying under water for a minute, and then come up again with the net free in his hand. He then clambered delicately onto the canoe again and once more started to fish.