The conversation of death. The sentence kept coming to mind. I’d think of it at odd moments – while taking a bath, scratching my nose, leaning to grab a mug of hot tea. My subconscious was trying to tell me something and though it was shouting very loudly indeed, I didn’t hear what it was saying. Things were going wrong. Very wrong. One afternoon Mabel leapt up from her perch to my fist, lashed out with one foot and buried four talons in my bare right arm. I froze. Blood was dripping on the kitchen floor. I could do nothing. Her grip was too powerful. I had to wait until she decided to let go. The pressure was immense, but the pain, though agonising, was happening to someone else. Why has she footed me? I thought wildly, after she released her grip and continued as if nothing had happened at all. She has never been aggressive before. I was sure I’d done nothing to provoke her. Is she overkeen? Is the weighing machine broken? I spent a good quarter of an hour fussing about with piles of tuppences, trying to calibrate it. There was nothing wrong with it at all. But something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just a hawk-inflicted injury. I was becoming vastly anxious. I jumped in panic when the postman knocked on the door; recoiled from the ringing phone. I stopped seeing people. Cancelled my gallery talk. Deadlocked the front door. Out on the hill I fled from walkers, dodged behind hedges when farm vehicles drove up the track. Some days I lay in bed in so much mysterious pain I began to believe the only explanation was a terminal disease.
You could explain what it was like by running to books and papers. You could read Freud, you could read Klein. You could read any number of theories about attachment and loss and grief. But those kinds of explanations come from a world the hawk wasn’t in. They aren’t any help. They are like explaining how it feels to be in love by waving an MRI scan of a lovestruck brain. You have to look in different places.
The anthropologist Rane Willerslev once lived for a year in a Yukaghir community in north-eastern Siberia and became fascinated by how their hunters saw the relationship between humans and animals. The hunters, he wrote, think ‘humans and animals can turn into each other by temporarily taking on one another’s bodies’.1 If you want to hunt elk, you dress in elkskins, walk like an elk, take on an elk’s alien consciousness. If you do this, elk will recognise you as one of their own and walk towards you. But, Willerslev explained, Yukaghir hunters consider these transformations very dangerous, because they can make you lose sight of your ‘original species identity and undergo an invisible metamorphosis’. Turning into an animal can imperil the human soul. Willerslev included the story of a hunter who’d been tracking reindeer for many hours and ended up in an unfamiliar camp, where women he did not know gave him lichen to eat and he started forgetting things. He remembered his wife but could not remember her name. Confused, he fell asleep, and it was only when he dreamed he was surrounded by reindeer urging him to leave that he saw what he had done.
That story made me shiver when I read it, because that was what it was like. I’d turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own. I was nervous, highly strung, paranoid, prone to fits of terror and rage; I ate greedily or didn’t eat at all; I fled from society, hid from everything; found myself drifting into strange states where I wasn’t certain who or what I was. In hunting with Mabel, day after day, I had assumed – in my imagination, of course, but that was all it could ever be – her alien perspective, her inhuman understanding of the world. It brought something akin to madness, and I did not understand what I had done. When I was small I’d thought turning into a hawk would be a magical thing. What I’d read in The Sword in the Stone encouraged me to think it, too, as a good and instructive thing; a lesson in life for the child who would be king. But now the lesson was killing me. It was not at all the same.
Two days before the service something very strange happened on the hill. We’d been walking up a hedgerow running down the edge of a field of undersown stubble. There was a pheasant in the hedge; I’d heard it cluck and run, rat-wise, along the damp and nettly ditch, and Mabel had heard it too. She’d crashed over the hedge and perched out of sight at the top, facing away from me. Her blood was up and mine too. I shouldered my way into the hedge, knowing that any second now the pheasant would rocket out in front of me in a burnished clatter of feathers. I pushed my head through the hedge. Heard a whoosh of air and felt a staggering blow. I reeled. Coshed by a goshawk! First only blackness, then a field of stars. Then a weird proprioceptive sense that I was wearing a crown of thorns; a complicated halo of pain around my head. She’d bounced off me, left eight talon incisions behind, and was back at the top of the tree, craning to see the pheasant, which had done what all pheasants do best: escape. I shook my head dully. She thought I was the pheasant. She didn’t know it was me. A strange buzzing in my ears, and then a muffled calm as the endorphins kicked in. I held my hand out and whistled her down to my fist, then mechanically started working the rest of the hedge-line. We were walking into the sun at this point, and I started taking a warm, distinct pleasure in the fuzzy gold aura that bathed us. Light-headed, slightly unsure of my footing, I finally wondered, Why is my vision strange, and why do my eyes sting? Then, Why is the goshawk bating at my face?
It took me a while to work out why both. I rubbed my eyes and my hand came away soaked, dramatically and Shakespearianly, in blood. I pulled off my glasses. They were covered in it. Blood was running in streams down my forehead, into my left eye, and was now attracting the attention of a hungry goshawk.
Christ, I thought, this is a bit Edgar Allan Poe.
I used my sleeve and some wet grass to get the worst off. Luckily this was sufficient to make the goshawk uninterested in eating me. I felt for the talon incision: a half-inch long, deep slash right between my eyes. Ah, yes, the sixth chakra, the seat of concealed wisdom, now rouged with an austringer’s bindi. I pressed the place hard with my fingers until it stopped bleeding.
And then I kept on hawking, stumbling across the fields in a haze of pained euphoria. The sun had descended behind sheets of cinereal stratus to become a luminous disc glowing through talc-filled air, and it was exactly the same colour as Mabel’s eye. I held her up, comparing sun with goshawk eye and marvelled at their correspondence. By the time we’d reached the top of the hill my legs rebelled. Enough, they said. Enough walking. Sit down. Have a nap.
So I sat in the stubble, woozily glorying at the beauty of it all. The mist rising in the hollows. Flocks of golden plover pouring over in sheaves. The way the bluish new rapeseed leaves contrasted with the vertical straw of the stubble at my feet. The glow of the lost sun beneath the ridge. Crickets beginning to sing. Rooks on their way to roost passing over us in moving constellations of small black stars. And perhaps that cosh to the head had knocked some human sense back into me, because when I got home I sat on the sofa and wrote my father’s eulogy, straight out, in twenty minutes, with a small round plaster stuck on my injured forehead.
23
Memorial
I SAT ON the train clutching the folder with the speech inside, ankles burning from the heater on the floor. Outside, winter breathed in. Papery skies. Glittering trees. A wash of backlit fields that folded and shrank as the city grew. Then I was at the church, folder in hand, staring at hundreds of feet on the black and white floor, hundreds of shoulders and ties and points of collars, hems of skirts, clicks and echoes of tiny black heels. I worried I hadn’t dressed smartly enough. I was wearing a black cotton dress from Debenhams. Maybe it was the wrong thing? Why hadn’t I gone and bought a proper outfit? Something expensive, and smart, and sharp around the edges? It took a few seconds before it struck me that my panic might not be about clothes at all. I sat down in the stalls between my mother and my brother, took their hands, light-headed with love and sorrow. My aunt was here, my brother’s partner and her parents too. We were a family. We were. I looked around for the other speakers: Ron Morgans and Alastair Campbell, who’d worked with Dad for years, and Jeremy Selwyn, another photographer, biting his lip and watching th
e crowds pour in.
I walked up to the lectern with the paper in my hand. I had given so many lectures, so many talks, that I’d thought this would be easy. But it was not. I was terrified. I grabbed the lectern’s wooden edges to stop me from swaying. How can I do this? Don’t look at the audience, said a voice inside me. Pretend they’re not there.
And then another voice inside said: Look at the audience.
I looked. Hundreds of faces. Dad’s colleagues, Dad’s friends. The fear vanished in an instant. I couldn’t be scared any more. And I started speaking. I told them about my father. I told them a little about his early life. I told them he had been a wonderful father. I reminded them, too, of his ridiculous inability to wear anything other than a suit – although he did make concessions on holiday, and occasionally removed his tie. I told them that on our trip to Cornwall to photograph the total eclipse we’d been standing on the beach before the skies darkened when a man who said he was the reincarnation of King Arthur, a man wearing a silver diadem and long white robes, came up to Dad, and said, bewildered, Why are you wearing that suit?
Well, said Dad. You never know who you’re going to meet.
And then I told the story I hoped they would understand.
He’s a boy, standing by a fence and staring up at the sky. He’s at an aerodrome, Biggin Hill, spotting RAF planes. He is nine? Ten? He’s been photographing each aircraft that takes off or lands with the Box Brownie camera that hangs on a string around his neck, and putting their numbers down in a spiral-bound notebook. It is getting late. He ought to leave. Then he hears a sound he cannot place, an unfamiliar engine note, and yes, there, this is it, this is the moment he has dreamed of. He stares into the sky. He sees the landing lights of . . . he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know what it is. It is not in any of the books. He takes its picture. He copies its registration number onto the page. It is a visitation from the future: a new American Air Force plane. To the boy plane-spotter of the 1950s, it is like seeing the Holy Grail.
When I was writing the speech, still a little concussed, I reached for the phone to call my father and ask what type of plane it was, and for a moment the world went very black.
A hand fell on his shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Come with me, laddie.’ They frogmarched him to the guardhouse, pushed him through the door, and there, behind a desk, a sergeant-major type with a moustache and a frown stood up, barked at him, ripped the page out of his notebook, screwed it into a ball and threw it in the bin, shouted some more, took the back off the camera, exposed the roll of film, pulled it out in loops of falling acetate and dumped that in the bin too. I was crying my eyes out, Dad said. They said, ‘Go home. You didn’t see anything. Forget you were here.’ And they dumped me back at the perimeter and I stood there with my notebook and the Brownie, sobbing away. But then I stopped crying, because I’d thought of something. Something out of Dick Barton or the Eagle. Maybe I’d written hard enough. Using his pencil, he shaded the page of his notebook with graphite, and there, white on grey, impressed on the paper from the missing page above, was the registration number of the secret plane. He stopped crying, he said, and cycled home in triumph.
I sat down, dazed. Sun through windows. Things, one after another. The achingly beautiful singing of the choir. The canon’s prayers. Eulogies praising my father’s photographic skills. When Alastair Campbell walked to the lectern he read Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ and prefaced it with a short speech in which he said, with decided emphasis, that my father was a Good Man. This broke me. I hadn’t expected this. Or not this much this. Everyone sang ‘Jerusalem’ and I forced my mouth to move, but nothing came out but whispered fragments. And afterwards, out in the shaded churchyard under the trees, a young guy with misted glasses and a purple knitted cardigan walked up, shying nervously, and said, ‘You don’t know me. I don’t know anyone in there. They’re all the big guns. But I wanted to say that . . . well. I’m a photographer now. I’m making a living out of it. I moved to London to try and make it, and I didn’t know what I was doing. And I met your dad out on a job once and he talked to me. He gave me lots of advice. He helped me. He didn’t have to, but he did. He saved my life. He was amazing . . .’ And he tailed off, and looked embarrassed, and I stepped forward and gave him a hug, because I didn’t know what to say. And more and more people came up and talked about Dad; and all the old guard were there, snappers from back in the 1960s, and I finally got to put names to the bylines I’d seen so many times. They told me they liked the story. They said it was nice to know that my father was a born journalist. That the boy in short trousers was already the man they’d known, the man who had always got the picture, had always pulled the story from the jaws of defeat.
Down in the Press Club after the service the drinks were poured. And poured. And poured some more. Everyone became increasingly expansive, rushed up to tell me stories about my father. The stories got more slurred as the drinking went on, and the hugs and cheek-kisses increasingly off-target. ‘Another drink?’ said one pressman. ‘Just a soft drink,’ I said, and back he came with a vast glass of wine. ‘Um, is there any soft drink?’ I said, embarrassed. He frowned. ‘That’s what I brought you. This is a soft drink.’
I left with a song in my heart. I felt my family had expanded by about two hundred people, and everything was going to be fine. Bless you, Dad, I thought. I always thought you were a legend, and it turns out you really, really were.
All the way home on the train I thought of Dad and the terrible mistake I had made. I’d thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I’d read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others closer to home. ‘Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions,’1 wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’2
Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.
And by the time I got home I’d worked out, too, why Mabel had been behaving so strangely. She’d grown heavy with muscle over our weeks on the hill, and though she was flying at a higher weight than before, over this last week she’d got too low. She was hungry. Hunger had made her aggressive.
I was furious with myself when I realised that first great error on the train. But this second realisation brought self-hatred. I’d been so blind, so miserable, I’d not seen my hawk was miserable too. I’d not seen her at all. I remembered the man I’d fallen for after my father died. I’d hardly known him, but it didn’t matter. I’d recruited him to serve my loss, made him everything I needed. No wonder he had run away. And now I’d made the same mistake again. I’d fled to become a hawk, but in my misery all I had done was turn the hawk into a mirror of me.
The next evening, weak with relief and the sense that something huge, something tectonic, had shifted in my world, I gave Mabel a whole dead pigeon to eat in the grey, cool evening. We sat on a chair under the apple tree, listening to blackbirds chinking in the hedge. The house didn’t seem unfriendly any more. The kitchen window threw a soft square of light into the garden. Huge frosty piles of pigeon feathers accumulated on the lawn. And then she ate. Every last scrap. When it was finished her crop was so full she could hardly stand.
With the plucking of the pigeon came more revelations, as if with its uncovering other things were uncovered. I thought of the dreams I’d had that spring of the hawk slipping away into air. I’d wanted to follow it, fly with it, and disappear. I had thought for a long while that I was the hawk – one of th
ose sulky goshawks able to vanish into another world, sitting high in the winter trees. But I was not the hawk, no matter how much I pared myself away, no matter how many times I lost myself in blood and leaves and fields. I was the figure standing underneath the tree at nightfall, collar upturned against the damp, waiting patiently for the hawk to return.
Mabel was cutting through the crisp ribcage of the pigeon now. She was pulling at the thin intercostal membrane. Snap. I thought of my father shading a pencil over ghostly impressions on the page. Snap. I thought of White and the reasons why his book had haunted me all this time. Snap. Another breaking rib. It wasn’t just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of all the books I read as a child, his was the only one I remembered where the animal didn’t die.
Gos never died. He was only lost. For all White’s certainty that his hawk was dead, there was always a chance, even to the very end of the book, even further, that the hawk might return. In the childish depths of my mind the hawk was out there, still in the wood, his yellow toes clutching rough bark and his pale eyes watching me from a dark tangle of branches somewhere in the multitudinous sea of hundred thousand trees.
Melanie Klein3 wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived whenever grief is experienced in later life. She thought that adults try to manage newer losses the way they managed older ones. I thought of that drawing of a kestrel, its carefully worked jesses pencilled over and over again by my six-year-old hand with all its desperate insistence on the safety of knots and lines.
H Is for Hawk Page 21
