But it was continuous murder for Gos. White walked because that was what the books said he should do, and so that was what he did, taking Gos outside even on the day he arrived. Forty-eight hours later he was walked to the Wheelers’ farmhouse to meet ‘all the family, barking dogs and all’, and the next day they were out on the road meeting cars and cyclists. ‘He bates repeatedly on these trips,’2 White noted in his day-book. On it went. He took Gos with him to the pub, took him fishing for carp, took him to Banbury in a motor car. ‘He had to learn to stand that bustle,’3 wrote White, ‘as we all have to do, however little we visit it.’ And he did. Just as the despairing soul will finally comprehend its helplessness in the face of continuing horror and bear it because there is no alternative, so with Gos. He had no alternative. There was no softness in his taming. He had to learn to bear things through being frightened all the time, just as White had learned there was no escape in his own education.
Down the small roads and grassy rides and across fields damp with standing hay, White walked himself into the landscape. Whole days went past on foot, the novice austringer sinking gratefully into the rhythm and weather of the land. Walking home in the evening along the high-hedged Buckinghamshire lanes he watched ‘the red moon perceptibly rising’, which he ‘had seen to sink as a yellow one at dawn’.4 At night the world became magical by virtue of its emptiness, and the Ridings a place of mists and stars and solitude. This was his patient excursion into the fields and back into the past.
Despite the eccentricity of a hawk on his fist, what White was doing was very much of his time. Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery trains to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people turned up. The people setting out on these walks weren’t seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour: to Merrie England, or to prehistoric England, pre-industrial visions that offered solace and safety to sorely troubled minds. For though railways and roads and a burgeoning market in countryside books had contributed to this movement, at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. The critic Jed Esty has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage5 in these years; it was a response to economic disaster, a contracting Empire and totalitarian threats from abroad. It was a movement that celebrated ancient sites and folk traditions. It delighted in Shakespeare and Chaucer, in Druids, in Arthurian legend. It believed that something essential about the nation had been lost and could be returned, if only in the imagination. White, caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent in the English sky, of all the imaginary lines men and time had drawn upon the landscape. By the fire, his hawk by his side, he brooded on the fate of nations.
The cloud-base is low today. It does not matter. He is not flying today. He is walking. He is walking with his hawk, and he and Gos have traversed five fields to get here. Now he stands by the ruins of the chapel of St Thomas the Martyr. Once it was a chapel, then it was a house, and now it is a ruin, a great, collapsing carcass of stained ironstone. The roof is a broken ribcage heaped with rotting thatch. Lintels sag over windows and doors blocked with laths and limestone rubble. Great banks of nettles grow here, rich and green. Ash trees rise in lacy fists and the fields fall away each side. It is very quiet. He hears the ticking of a robin somewhere, like falling water. This place is soundly cursed against man, he thinks. The stink of the dead sheep he found dumped in a drain is still caught in his nose, a sorry, sodden wreck of fleece pullulating with maggots. He does not mind the smell. It is a bracing stench. It is the smell of mortality. He looks down at the rabbit-cropped turf. Beneath him, the people that lived and died and were buried here are here still, he thinks; their old bones would be grateful to see a goshawk again. He walks around the chapel, imagining the earth beneath him turning and muttering as it senses the familiar hawk above, as the bones of farm labourers mutter when agricultural machinery passes over their forgotten tombs.
I thought of the small race now underground, strangers of a vanished species safe from comprehension, almost from imagination: monks, nuns, and the eternal villein. I was as close to them as anybody now, close even to Chaucer, ‘with grey goshawk in hond’. They would understand my hawk with their eyes, as a farmer understood an elevator. We loved each other.6
White’s visit to Chapel Green was my favourite part of The Goshawk when I was young. It was a communion with something lost and forgotten, and somehow a hawk was at the heart of it. It always gave me a sense of kinship with White – although I couldn’t imagine why farmers should have special knowledge of elevators. That made no sense at all. Maybe he meant to write ‘tractor’, I thought, for I didn’t know then what a bale elevator was, nor that White had been lately watching the Wheelers, who farmed the land around him, using one. But I could imagine the chapel quite clearly when I was small, and now it was clearer than ever. If I shut my eyes I saw White lifting Gos on his fist and shutting his own eyes very tight, as if it were possible for the whole mess of the twentieth century to slip aside, and the world of centuries before be resurrected, a lost community with him at its heart. He would have been loved. He would have been understood.
Looking back, and all for love. There was a telescope on my bookshelf at the far end of the room. A spotting scope in a green Cordura cover. I’d borrowed it from my father to go birdwatching and it had not been returned. I’d forgotten to bring it with me on that last visit. ‘Next time,’ he said, shaking his head with good-natured exasperation. There was no next time. I could not give it back. I could not apologise to him either. There was a time, perhaps the day after his death, or perhaps the day after that, when I sat on a train with my mother and brother. We were on our way to look for his car. It was a desperate journey. My hands clutched the coarse upholstery of the seat until my knuckles turned white. I remember buddleia, and trackside clinker, and a green gasometer, and Battersea Power Station as the train slowed. And it wasn’t until we were standing on Queenstown Road station, on an unfamiliar platform under a white wooden canopy, wasn’t until we were walking towards the exit, that I realised, for the first time, that I would never see my father again.
Ever. I stopped dead. And I shouted. I called out loud for him. Dad. And then the word No came out in one long, collapsing howl. My brother and mother put their arms around me, and I them. Brute fact. I would never speak to him again. I would never see him again. We clung to each other, crying for Dad, the man we loved, the quiet man in a suit with a camera on his shoulder, who had set out each day in search of things that were new, who had captured the courses of stars and storms and streets and politicians, who had stopped time by making pictures of the movings of the world. My father, who had gone out to photograph storm-damaged buildings in Battersea, on that night when the world had visited him with damage and his heart had given way.
The photographs he’d taken were still on the camera they handed to my mother at the hospital. The last photograph I saw only once. I never want to see it again. But I can never stop seeing it. Blurred, taken from a low angle, far too low; an empty London street. Sodium lights, dusk, a wall tipped sideways from the vertical and running into the distance; a vanishing point of sallow, stormy sky.
12
Outlaws
‘COME ON, MABEL!’ I’m kneeling on the carpet and holding out a dead day-old cockerel chick. My freezer is packed with their sad, fluffy corpses, by-products of industrial egg production. Mabel loves them. She stares longingly at the one in my glove. I hold it just out of reach and whistle. ‘You can do i
t!’ I say. ‘Jump!’ But she is doing everything she can to avoid jumping. It is comical. She leans. She leans further. She stretches her neck as far as it will go and opens her beak hopefully. The food is just there. She can’t reach it. She overbalances, scrambles upright. A change in tactics is required. She makes a cobra-strike grab for the meat with one great, grasping foot. Her reach is astonishing; her legs are almost as long as she is. One feathered shin flashes out, tawny as a lion’s, and her talons very nearly catch on the glove. But not quite.
Now she is cross. She paces up and down. She stamps and grips her perch. Her black-feathered moustaches harden into frown-lines down her jaw, and I can feel her bristling. She snakes her head from side to side, reckoning distances. Something is changing in her. I sense it with a shiver. It is as if the room is darkening, contracting to a point. Then something happens. My hand is hit, hard, with a blow so unexpectedly powerful the shock is carried down my spine to the tips of my toes. Hitting someone’s hand with a baseball bat would have a similar effect. She is on the glove, mantling her great, barred wings over it, gripping it fiercely and tearing at the meat. Disarticulated pieces of chicken disappear fast down her throat. I am delighted. She has crossed a great psychological gulf, one far wider than the ten inches of air between her perch and the glove she’s landed upon. Not that she’s landed on it: she’s killed it. There is no mercy in that ratcheting, numbing grip. Mabel can keep up this pressure with no effort whatsoever. It is an effort for her to let go.
I choose my moment. When her head is up swallowing a mouthful of chick, I tug its remains through my palm and spirit it away. She looks down, then behind her, then at the floor. Where did it go? I persuade her to step back onto her perch. Then I hold the chick out once more, and further away. Instantly I feel that terrible blow. It is a killing blow, but there is something about the force of it that reminds me that I am alive.
I was alive, yes, but exhausted. I felt as if I were built of wool. Grey, loose-spun wool on an aching set of bones. My walks with the hawk were stressful, requiring endless vigilance, and they were wearing me away. As the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder. Fear was contagious: it rose unbidden in my heart as people approached us. I was no longer certain if the hawk bated because she was frightened of what she saw, or if the terror she felt was mine. And something else had happened on our walks. We had become invisible. The people passing by didn’t stop, didn’t look, sent not even a sideways glance in our direction. Some part of me began to believe that they didn’t see us at all; that we were walking in another dimension, as if we were ghosts, or they were. I thought of those goshawks I’d seen as a child staring out at a winter afternoon from the world I now inhabited. And at night, at home, I stood at the window watching the lights outside, pressing my forehead against the pane to feel the faint ticking of summer rain through glass and bone.
Everyone saw us. Of course they did. A woman stalking the park with a bloody great hawk on her fist and a baleful stare on her face is hardly inconspicuous. Everyone saw us; they just pretended they hadn’t. But some people were brave enough to look. The next morning, for example, standing in thin rain watching flotillas of umbrellas move across the park, I notice a man. He stands against a fence twenty feet away, hands resting equably on the wooden rail, watching us with a face as expressionless as if he were regarding horses in a field. I walk over and say hello. He is from Kazakhstan, he says, and we talk about my hawk, and about Kazakh falconers, berkutchi, who fly golden eagles from horseback as they have done for thousands of years. He has never seen the eagles, he says, because he lives in a city. In Almaty. He asks if my hawk has a hood. I give it to him. He turns it in his hands, nods at its workmanship, gives it back to me. Only then do we properly introduce ourselves. His name is Kanat. He asks where I will hunt with the hawk. ‘On farmland a few miles from here,’ I reply. He nods, looks searchingly at Mabel, and is silent for a long time. Then he spreads his fingers wide on the wooden rail and stares at the backs of his hands and at the cuffs of his brown leather jacket. ‘I miss my country,’ he says.
Soon after he leaves a cyclist skids to a halt and asks politely if he can look at the bird. He is absurdly handsome. He stands there with his Antonio Banderas hair, and his expensive technical jacket and titanium bike beaded with rain, and admires the hell out of her. ‘She is beautiful,’ he says. He is trying to find another word but it evades him. Beautiful will have to do. He says it again. Then he thanks me over and over again for the hawk. ‘So close!’ he says. ‘I have never seen a hawk so close.’ In Mexico he has only seen wild ones, and only far away. ‘I like to watch them because they are . . .’ And he makes a movement with one hand as if it were something lifting into the air. ‘Free,’ I say. He nods, and I do too, and in some wonder, because I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday. ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel,’ I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.
I’m in an expansive, celebratory mood. Today Mabel flew four feet to my fist from the back of a chair in my front room. ‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ I tell her. ‘Time for a walk. Let’s go and meet my friend’s kids. They’ll love you.’ A few minutes later I knock on a door and my friend’s husband opens it. My hawk flinches. So do I: this man was exceptionally rude to me once. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. Maybe he was having a bad day. Forgive, forget. My friend isn’t in. I stand before the door and tell him about the hawk. I tell him her age, her sex, her species, her name. I tell him that I’d thought her taming would be the kind of agonising battle I’d read about in The Goshawk. ‘But it’s been a total surprise,’ I say. ‘There’s been no battle at all. Which isn’t my doing, I’m sure. She’s a freakishly calm hawk.’ And the man inclines his head to one side, and smiles.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’ll be a gendered thing.’
‘Gendered?’
‘Yes. You’re a woman, and she’s female. Of course you get on,’ he says.
He seems deadly serious. I stare at his curled hand on the doorframe and heat rises in my face. This is mockery. For the first time in weeks, the hawk disappears from my mind as some part of me bunches up into one firm and unspoken sentence: What an asshole.
He’s saying because I’m training a female hawk, there’s some bond of sisterhood between us? What the hell? We’re different species, for God’s sake. ‘I don’t think that’s a factor in my hawk’s behaviour,’ I say, and smile. It’s a thin smile. The smile of the placator. It is a smile that is a veneer on murder. I rage my way home, heart bating wildly. Back in the house, hawk on her perch, I collect myself. My anger has gone: now I am fascinated. I pull all the falconry books off the shelves and pile them up on the floor. Then I sit cross-legged next to the hawk. ‘Right, Mabel,’ I say, ‘Goshawks are boys’ birds, are they? Let’s see what the boys have said about you.’ I pick up Humphrey ap Evans’ Falconry for You, and read. ‘She purrs and chirps to her master, rubbing her head against him. But she is proud and wild and beautiful: her anger is terrible to behold. She can be moody and sulky.’1
Hmm.
Now I open Gilbert Blaine, and there I read of her ‘peculiar and somewhat sulky disposition’.2 ‘She will set her mind on making herself as disagreeable as she can,’ he explained; ‘will exasperate you to such a degree that you will long to wring her neck.’ Then to Frank Illingworth’s Falcons and Falconry: ‘Never was there a more contrary bird than the gos! Her sole purpose in life seems to be to aggravate her owner.’3 ‘Mabel, this is very dubious,’ I say. Then I sta
rt on the Victorian falconers. Charles Hawkins Fisher did ‘not like her or her kin’,4 and Freeman and Salvin considered it ‘a thousand pities that the temper of this bird is so very far from amiable; it is, in fact, sulky’.5
‘Sulky. Oh my God, Mabel. You know what you are? You’re a woman. You’re a hormonal woman!’ It made such ghastly sense. It was why these falconers never wondered if their own behaviour had anything to do with why their goshawks took stand in trees, or flew into fits of nerves, or rage, or attacked their dogs, or decided to fly away. It wasn’t their fault. Like women, Goshawks were inexplicable. Sulky. Flighty and hysterical. Their moods were pathological. They were beyond all reason.
But reading further back I find that in the seventeenth century goshawks weren’t vile at all. They were ‘sociable and familiar’, though by nature ‘altogether shye and fearfull’ wrote Simon Latham in 1615. They ‘take exception’ at ‘rough and harsh behaviour from the man’, but if treated with kindness and consideration, are ‘as loving and fond of her Keeper as any other Hawke whatsoever’. These hawks, too, were talked about as if they were women. They were things to win, to court, to love. But they were not hysterical monsters. They were real, contradictory, self-willed beings, ‘stately and brave’,6 but also ‘shye and fearfull’. If they behaved in ways that irritated the falconer it was because he had not treated them well, had not demonstrated ‘continuall loving and curteous behaviour towards them’. The falconer’s role, wrote Edmund Bert, was to provide for all his hawk’s needs so that she might have ‘joye in her selfe’. ‘I am her friend,’ he wrote of his goshawk, ‘and shee my playfellow.’7
H Is for Hawk Page 11
