I’m standing on the far side of my familiar hedge, looking at this terra incognita that is the grand twentieth-century conjuration of our mythical English past. I walk out of the cover crop to where the thin, stony soil is exposed, so thick with chalk it’s like white paste; hair roots and flints, spotted with rain; tiny buttons of stone in impasto. The land falls away at my feet into a dry valley; a basin the size of a village, one beech copse hanging grey from its left-hand slope. It is a field of a million tiny tillers – little shoots of wheat. They give the chalky earth a furry tint, like algae on a cliff-face. Even in this dark, watery light, the valley shines palely. And I see what Mabel had seen. About a hundred yards in front of us, crouched in its form, is a big brown hare, black-tipped ears laid to its ginger back. But there’s more, much more here: down at the bottom of the valley, where the river would be were there water, is a herd of thirty fallow deer. They are the colour of moleskin on their backs, shading to pale grey underneath. They’re tight-clustered, quivering with indecision. They’re watching me. Thirty upraised heads. The herd is delicate and powerful, and it is waiting to see what I will do.
I can’t resist the urge that takes hold of me then. I hold on to Mabel, who is watching them too, and like a woman possessed, walk towards them, with that strange disconnect between head and feet you feel when walking downhill. I’m technically trespassing, but I can’t help it. I want to interact with them in some way. I want to get closer. And as I do, the pressure of my impending arrival pushes single deer off to the right, and they walk, then canter, in a long line, along the bottom of the valley and up to the wood at the far edge of the field, a good half-mile away. They are bewitching. Mabel watches them. She is ignoring the hare. The deer in procession resemble charcoal cave paintings rendered manifest. Art’s magic working backwards. The chalk behind them, bone. And now the hare runs, too. The hare runs in the opposite direction to the deer. The animals run, and the landscape seems then to be parting in front of me. Deer one way, hare the other. And now they are quite gone: the hare to the field-margin at the top of the hill to my left, the deer into the wood at the top of the hill to my right. There is nothing before me now but wind and chalk and wheat.
Nothing. The hawk rouses again and begins to preen her covert feathers. The running deer and the running hare. Legacies of trade and invasion, farming, hunting, settlement. Hares were introduced, it is thought, by the Romans. Fallow deer certainly were. Pheasants, too, brought in their burnished hordes from Asia Minor. The partridges possessing this ground were originally from France, and the ones I see here were hatched in game-farm forced-air incubators. The squirrel on the sweet chestnut? North America. Rabbits? Medieval introductions. Felt, meat, fur, feather, from all corners. But possessing the ground, all the same.
We set off, again, homeward this time. But now the rain in the air is harder, and the rabbits are so close to their holes that Mabel’s not able to get a foot to them before they disappear. After one hair’s-breadth miss in a rocky quarryhole by a bank of wild rose stems, I call her back and feed her up. She is tired. Beads of water spot her head and tiny eyelash feathers. We stroll back to the car park. I’m tired too, and glad to see people walking towards us. I’ve met them before: a retired couple from my mother’s village, walking their white-muzzled terrier on a long lead. They’re all wrapped up with scarves and snap-fastened country jackets and their shoulders are set a little against the cold and wet. I meet them here quite often. I’ve always been delighted to see them. I don’t know their names, and they don’t know mine, though they know my hawk’s called Mabel. I wave, and they stop and wave back.
‘Hello’, I say.
‘Hello! How’s the hawk?’ they ask.
‘She’s good,’ I say happily. ‘But tired. She’s been flying all over the place. It’s beautiful out here today. I saw the deer!’ I went on, glad to have someone to tell. ‘A big herd of them, dark-coated, down in the bottom of the valley.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The deer. Special, aren’t they, those ones. Rare. We see them quite often.’ He is smiling; we’re all enjoying our shared secrets of a place. She’s nodding too. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she says. ‘We counted them once, didn’t we?’
He nods. ‘There’re usually between twenty-five and thirty.’
‘Thirty exactly!’ I say.
‘They’re a lovely sight.’
I agree. She tucks her scarf more tightly around her as a squall begins. Her husband nods vigorously, rain darkening his shoulders. ‘A herd of deer,’ he says, beaming, then his expression folds into something I don’t recognise.
‘Doesn’t it gives you hope?’ he says suddenly.
‘Hope?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?’
I don’t know what to say. His words hang and all the awkwardness is silence. The leaves rattle in the hazel stems. And I nod a goodbye, sad as hell, and my hawk and I trudge home through the rain.
It is a miserable walk. I should have said something. But embarrassment had stopped my tongue. Stomping along, I start pulling on the thread of darkness they’d handed me. I think of the chalk-cult countryside and all its myths of blood-belonging, and that hateful bronze falcon, of Göring’s plans to exclude Jews from German forests. I think of the Finnish goshawks that made the Brecklands home, and of my grandfather, born on the Western Isles, who spoke nothing but Gaelic until he was ten. And the Lithuanian builder I’d met collecting mushrooms in a wood who asked me, bewildered, why no one he’d met in England knew which were edible, and which were not. I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.
They are only safe for us. The fields where I fly Mabel back in Cambridge are farmed organically, and they are teeming with life. These are not. The big animals are here, it is true: the deer, the foxes, the rabbits; the fields look the same, and the trees, too, but look more carefully and this land is empty. There are few plants other than crops, and few bees, or butterflies, for the soil is dressed and sprayed with chemicals that kill. Ten years ago there were turtle doves on this land. Thirty years ago there were corn buntings and enormous flocks of lapwings. Seventy years ago there were red-backed shrikes, wrynecks and snipe. Two hundred years ago, ravens and black grouse. All of them are gone.
Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.
History, and life too. It might resemble Old England here but it is not anything like the country of four hundred years ago, of one hundred years ago. I am nearly home, now, and I’m sad, and angry, and fired up as hell. I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness. And I am guilty too. I’d wanted to escape history by running to the hawk. Forget the darkness, forget Göring’s hawks, forget death, forget all the things that had been before. But my flight was wrong. Worse than wrong. It was dangerous. I must fight, always, against forgetting, I thought. And I wish I had run after that couple and explained about the deer. I wish I had stood there in the mud in the rain, waving one hand with a hawk on the other, shouting about history and blood.
Later that night I find my father’s plane-spotting diaries at the bottom of his bookshelves: six hardbacked, cloth-spined exercise books. I pull one out at random. 1956
. He was sixteen. The pages are divided into columns, headed with careful, inked capitals: TIME. NUMBER OF PLANES. TYPE OF PLANE. REMARKS. REGISTRATION NUMBER. I look at the first column. On the twenty-fifth of April he starts watching at 9.40 a.m. and leaves at 7 p.m. On the twenty-sixth he starts at 9 and ends at 9 p.m. Twelve hours of looking up at the sky. Good God. There are hundreds of pages and thousands upon thousands of aircraft here. Vickers V70 Viscounts, F-86 Sabres, Airspeed Ambassadors, Lockheed Super Constellations, Gloster Meteors.
Here’s his report of a visit to Croydon Airport at the end of May. ‘Eight de Havilland Tiger Moths. Two Auster Aiglet trainers. Two Taylorcraft Plus Ds. One Auster 5. Three De Havilland 104 Doves.’ I have no idea what these planes are. I find a glued-in snapshot of a Tupolev Tu 104. He has written a few lines underneath: ‘This aircraft is undoubtedly a civil conversion of the Type 39 Badger but the Russians said it was a completely new aircraft.’ It has all the burning pedantry I remember from my childhood obsession with hawks. Suddenly my father seems very close. Another photograph falls out. I pick it up. De Havilland 104 Dove, Croydon Airport, 2–4–56. I cross-check the registration number against the list. G–AMYO. Morton Air Services. The edge of the runway is lost in mist. I can see a tiny profile inside the cockpit, the suggestion of a man leaning forward to wipe the canopy before the plane climbs into the grey April sky.
It is then that the knowledge of why my father watched planes drops into my head. When he and his friends had been small boys running feral across London bombsites, he’d told me, they collected things. Collected anything: shrapnel, cigarette packets, coins; mostly things that came in series. Things that could be matched and swapped; sets that could be completed. Collecting things like this, I realised, must have stitched together their broken world of rubble, made sense of a world disordered by war. And my father’s aeroplanes were just as much of a set to collect: a series of beautiful, moving things with names and numbers, all deeply concerned with danger and survival. But there was more. Aeroplanes had wings. They took flight, and if you knew them, watched them, understood their movements, you could somehow take flight too; you could watch that Tupolev 104 take off and know it will cross borders you cannot cross except in your imagination. In a few hours it will be on a snowy Soviet airfield. Or any one of a thousand else. In watching the planes, you fly with them and escape. They enlarge your little world and spread it across the seas.
The notebooks are full of a fierce attention to things I do not know. But now I know what they are for. These are records of ordered transcendence. A watcher’s diary. My father’s talk of patience had held within it all the magic that is waiting and looking up at the moving sky.
I put the notebook back and as I do I see there’s a piece of brown cardboard between the next two notebooks on the shelves. Puzzled, I pull it out. It is a blank piece of thick card cut roughly along one edge. I turn it over. My heart misses a beat, because stuck to the other side is a silver doorkey under three inches of clear tape. And five words written in pencil.
Key to flat.
Love, Dad
Dad had posted it to me last year so I could stay at his flat in London when he was away. I’d lost it, of course. ‘My daughter the absent-minded professor,’ he’d said, rolling his eyes. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get another one cut.’ But he’d never got round to it, and I’d not thought of it since. I don’t know what it is doing here. I read the words again and think of his hand writing them. And I think of Dad holding my own tiny hand as I put the other one flat against the sarsens at Stonehenge, back when I was very small and there were no fences to stop you walking among the stones. I looked up at the thing that was like a door but had no walls behind it.
‘Is it a house, Daddy?’ I asked him.
‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘It’s very, very old.’
I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love. I tucked the card back into the bookshelf. ‘Love you too, Dad,’ I whispered.
29
Enter spring
MANDY OPENS HER door, takes one look at my face, and mirrors it with a horrified expression of her own. ‘What’s happened, Helen?’
‘Mabel!’ I say weakly.
‘Did you lose her?’
‘No!’ shaking my head. ‘She’s in the car.’ And then three requests: ‘Mandy, can you help? I cut my thumb. Can I use your phone? I need a cigarette.’
Bless her for ever. I collapse into a kitchen chair. My knees hurt. Brambles? I have no idea. My thumb is still bleeding. Mandy hands me iodine wash, fixes the tear with steri-strips and bandages, makes me a coffee, pushes a packet of tobacco and cigarette papers across the table. Then she waits while I call the College where I should, right now, be teaching, and stammer out apologies. Then I tell my sorry story.
I’d seen signs over the last week or so. The season was turning. A bluebottle in the garden; torpid purple crocuses on the lawn. Dots of cherry blossom falling outside the walls of St John’s. And one evening last week, a host of blackbirds carrolling into the deepening sky from perches all over the city’s gable ends and Gothic spires. Spring was coming. And usually I’d rejoice at the curious bluish tint to the air and the lengthening days. But spring will mean no more Mabel. She’ll be moulting in an aviary. I shan’t see her for months. My heart hurts thinking of it. So I wasn’t thinking of it; I’d ignored the flowers and the flies. And that was part of the problem. For something was stirring in Mabel’s accipitrine heart, and perhaps it was spring.
I had an hour to fly her today. I’d some freelance teaching in town that afternoon, and I knew I was cutting it fine. So I decided to head back to the old field where the rabbits are. We’ll catch a rabbit, I thought, then I’ll drop her back at the house, pick up the teaching material, and run down the road to teach it. What could possibly go wrong?
Everything. She flies a rabbit half-heartedly, lights upon a hedge-line and looks about. When I call her back she takes a while to return. The warning signs are there already, but I’m ignoring them. One more flight, I tell myself. But what Mabel is doing is revelling in the weight of the sun on her back, and in the little intimations that warm air is rising into this steady, grey-blue sky. She courses another rabbit, and sails onward, away from me, pitching high up in chestnut trees, and now I realise she’s losing all interest in me. I kick myself. After the last debacle here, I swore I’d be more careful. The trees are above a road; there’s an unsettling proximity of moving cars and trucks and tractors: she doesn’t want to be here any more. She crosses the road into a belt of trees and gravelled drives. I follow her. Rabbits break all around me and the PRIVATE: KEEP OUT signs. She ignores them. And me. She’s taken stand in a tree a good twenty-five feet above me, and looks out at the prospect all around. I’m waving my glove and whistling, but this is a lost cause. She fluffs her tummy and shakes her tail: a goshawk’s signs of happiness and contentment. But on an inaccessible branch, with the seconds ticking past, these lovely signs of relaxation and calm bring a sinking feeling. And I realise I failed to bring my telephone. Or my cigarettes. And the radiotracking receiver is in the car.
After a minute or so, she slips away, out the back of the wood and away into land I know nothing about. It turns out there’s a lovely, soft field of burnt-butter coloured grasses here, and a thick grey wood about three hundred yards distant. And no goshawk anywhere. Back to the car I go, unpack the radio telemetry and spend ages tracking her down. The signal is all over the place. Beep. Beep. Beep. In this direction, the signal strength is 5. Here, 7.5. But t
hen – 2? What? Triangulate! Triangulate! I angle the antenna and spin in circles. Is she moving? She must be. And over the distant wood I see her on the soar. She’s letting the rising air carry her, spilling over the wood in rich circles of sun-warmed flight. Another hawk comes up, and the two slip and rival each other for a while. I run, of course. By the time I reach the wood, there’s no sign of either of them, though I hear a buzzard mewing some way off. Then, suddenly, bells. Somewhere in there. I dive into the wood. The signs aren’t good. It’s not a thick wood. It’s not a wild wood. It’s a habited wood. It’s a pheasant release wood, to be sure. Oh lord, this goshawk is making me a criminal again.
I spot her. She’s poised on a low branch of an ivy-covered oak, staring fascinated into a tangle of old feed sacks and bins in an inch of water. I walk closer. She’s making those snaky-necked prospecting parallax movements of her head that mean she’s locked onto something. She’s going to ignore me until she’s established to her satisfaction that it’s gone. Perhaps it has. I edge my way to where she’s looking, and before I know what is happening, a wet cock pheasant breaks from my feet, showering me with water. In slow motion, I see the sun through his primaries, splintering into bars and abrupt shadows, and watch Mabel do a smart wingover and her left foot flash out, but its two-and-a-half-inch back talons and crayon-yellow hand just miss him. He rises over – oh horror, I hadn’t seen it – a ten-foot chickenwire fence – and buries himself in a huge stand of laurel and yew on the other side. She dives in after him. I can’t get to them. They’re in a bloody pheasant release pen! Shit! This is like taking a ferret into a fancy rabbit show. Not good. Not good. I can hear wings beating, bells ringing, the sounds of a struggle. I run like a rat around the perimeter of the pen, trying to find a way in. This is not what I had wanted to happen. Oh God. Oh God.
H Is for Hawk Page 26
