By Cormac MacConnell

THERE has been a Sean Mulhern living in the farmhouse on the edge of the lake for more than a hundred Aprils. The first son of every generation is always a Sean. It is traditional since almost always.

Always by mid-April, old Sean Mulhern thought, sitting on the big boulder at the end of the causeway, the scene is exactly the same. Always there are two swans building an untidy big nest at one end of Mutton Island, 50 yards out in the flow, always there is a jack pike jumping in the green young reeds at the other end of the island, always a kestrel above the willows along the verges, hunting sparrows.

Always a long sun, just slightly warmed, skipping across the face of the lake, making brights here, deep shadows there. Always two or three white butterflies, newly awake after winter, dawdling around the first blackthorn blossoms.

Always a grandfather saying to the visiting grandson, “Come on and I’ll make you a fishing rod and you’ll catch your first perch down at the end of the causeway.”

He’d said that to his nine-year-old grandson Sean a half-hour ago, the family on a Sunday visit from the city. They had gone together to the orchard and he’d cut a long hazel rod for the lad.

Always the hazel rods in that corner were almost perfectly straight. And he’d rigged a line to the rod, and as always, a cork from a Christmas whiskey bottle for the float, a hook and a lead sinker from the tackle box.

Always a black feather from a rooster’s tail to mark the float. Always — and they were there again — blackhead worms from the flagstones near the biggest oldest apple tree.

And then, as always down to the little stone causeway at the bottom of the garden, jutting a few yards into the lake, the grandfather to sit on the big boulder at the landward end, the grandson called Sean to jump barefoot on to the squared stone at the other end.

He’d also already said the second thing that was always said to the young one just learning fishing, “Don’t hit a perch the first time you get a nibble and the feather bobs, let him drag it under the water and then hit him.”

Always, the old man thought lazily, there was something else that was said, but it would not come to him now.

As always, for a century of Aprils, the bobbing black feather on the line danced a jaunty dance. As always the young Sean’s concentration was intense.

The grandfather, looking at his tensed shoulders, the long white legs, the sturdy arms, thought this one was as big at nine as his uncle had been at 13. The boy’s father was not a Sean, he was the second son, and the uncle, thought the old man, did not live to see so many Aprils at all.

He’d been only 18 when he died on a building site in Birmingham. He put the thought out of his head and concentrated on the dancing feather, the run of the lake under the twitching hazel rod.

The boy was silently excited as always. The jack pike jumped again.

Sheepdogs, as always, barked far away. The rushes, as always, whispered secrets to each other. Again, relaxed in the sun, the grandfather tried idly to remember the third bit of advice the grandfathers always were supposed to give. It would still not come to him.

The black feather suddenly stopped dead in its tracks. Then, in a series of quickening dips and dodges, as if with a life of its own, it ran about a foot to the left, leaving a small wake behind it. And then it went under.

The grandson Sean let out a yip of high excitement and jerked the rod hard straight up over his head. At the end of the line was a fine kicking perch.

As always the back was grey-green, the belly snow white, the side fins almost blood red against the white belly, the dorsal spines, as always, extended sharply upwards. As always the perch’s tail slapped against its own head with the escape frenzy.

And, as always too, down all the Aprils, the grandfather remembered just too late the third bit of advice from one Sean to another.

“Hold your footing on the rock. Don’t slip off or you’ll skin your ankles!”

Too late. The grandson, with the excitement, slipped off the rock, forgetting his footing, still looking skywards at the swinging perch.

His legs slipped down either side of the standing stone, till he was sitting on it on his wet rump, shouting “Granda! Granda! I got one. I got one!”

That is what they always shout. The grandfather, as always, down all the Aprils, shouted, “Good man yourself,” and remembered exactly how the skinned ankles would not pain at all until how much later, going to bed.

And how they would be sorer, as always, tomorrow. And the young jack pike jumped again, as always, exactly on cue, and the reeds whispered timeless mysteries of life. Just like every April . . .