Jack Cudworth

Jack Cudworth was a great fisherman and used lead expeditions to the canal in Kildare, making friends with a family who lived there.  One of the bridges over the canal was called ‘Digby Bridge’ after a wealthy landowner in the 18th century. I was invited to join Jack and Simon on a weekend cycling fishing expedition and I was given permission to go. My Sarah, my sister, announced that the Naas dual carriageway was a death trap so my mother insisted that I have a pair of clean underpants for each day of the trip. But then my bike got a puncture and I missed the trip.

Jack built a pond in his back garden with a concrete sculpture of a nude which sat looking into the water. We used swim and fish in our pond in the Mill House garden. Simon was a great diver doing back somersaults off the green pipework at the deep end which kept the workers in Pye amused. Small hooks and worms were deadly for catching the small brown trout in the pond. We once caught a small trout in our pond in Mill House and put it in Jack’s pool, he never figured out how it got there.

We sometimes fished with Jack in the canal in the centre of town and we were there with him once on St. Patrick’s Day which was his birthday and I just couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been named Patrick.