There’s a door. It’s open. I dump the receiver on a blue feeder bin and run in. She’s no longer in the laurel. She’s on top of it. She turns away from me, and before I can take another breath, she is off again through the sun-filtered branches, fast and determined. Shit! Shit! I start running, over branches, past little corrugated shelters, over earth compacted by hundreds of pheasanty toes. Any minute now, I think, I am going to hear the ‘Oi!’ of an incredibly angry keeper. Perhaps he will have a shotgun, I think, as I watch Mabel pile into a hen pheasant at the far corner of the pen in a leafy explosion of buff and cappuccino feathers and beating wings. When I get to her she is sitting in a black puddle of acid woodland water, mantling over the body of a hen pheasant. And as I walk up, another hen pheasant emerges from under her wing, and she grabs that too. She has a pheasant in each foot. Oh my God. Carnage. Her tail is spread into the puddle, her feet are buried in feathers, and her whole being seems to be vibrating at some unlikely, scary frequency.
The pheasants are dead. One is in my waistcoat pocket, and the other is being plumed by my errant goshawk in lifting puffs of soft contour feathers that float and catch in the wire behind her. We need to get out of here fast before I have explaining to do. Shaking with worry, I take Mabel from her quarry. And then I injure myself horribly. Cutting through pheasant sinew, I take a wide, shallow strip of skin from my thumb. And as soon as I get Mabel back on the glove and stow her illicit prize in my waistcoat pocket, I start to worry about the amount of blood I’m losing. It’s not just that my hand is completely red; I can hear the drips falling to the woodland floor. I press the wound hard into the fabric of my hawking jacket. It’s covered in germs, I know, but I must stop the bleeding. Must. Stop. The. Blood. And blood pours from me all the long way back to the car, and all the way to Stuart’s house. I can never go back there, I think. Never, ever again.
In March 1949, the publisher Wren Howard of Jonathan Cape travelled to the Channel Islands to stay at White’s new home. White had moved to the island of Alderney: it was a perfect refuge from the taxman and the world. He’d bought a white three-storeyed house in St Anne’s with magnolia wainscoted walls. He’d filled it with new things: his own surrealist paintings, a boudoir grand piano, silver candlesticks and a statuette of the Emperor Hadrian. There were dark curtains printed with bouquets of ghostly silver roses, jazz records, Jacobean chairs, and a sofa, towards which White ushered Howard to sit. Howard sat. It was wildly uncomfortable. He got up and examined the seat. There was something beneath the cushion. He reached under it and pulled out a thick pile of papers. He asked White what it was. White looked worried. It was the manuscript to a book he had written about hawks, he explained. He did not want it published because after it was written he became a good falconer, an authority on the subject, and there were things in it that were embarrassing to remember. Besides, the hawk had been lost.
Howard leafed through the first few pages and was intrigued. He took it upstairs and read it overnight. In the morning he insisted on taking it back to London, for he was sure it should be published. White balked at the idea, but as the weeks went by, Howard and his friends persuaded him, and he consented to its publication on one condition: that he could write a postscript explaining how he ought to have trained the hawk, in the light of his later experience.
When The Goshawk was published in 1951 it was not a bestseller, but it brought an extraordinary number of letters from readers. Some were congratulatory, others strange: one offered White an eagle. Some disliked the book greatly. And one of these letters White never forgot. It touched a very raw nerve. It was from a man who said that he had for thirty years lectured on birds and watched them all his life. ‘How you can talk of love for a bird after subjecting our wonderful predatory birds to such torture is beyond a normal mind,’1 the letter ran. ‘Is there not enough cruelty in the world without adding to it for one’s amusement or hobby?’
‘This letter put me off food for three days,’ White later confessed, ‘though I answered it with several pages of affection, apology and explanation.’ He waited for a reply. When it came, White wrote, the letter-writer ‘used the word “normal” five times, concluding with the pronouncement that he did not wish to hear from me again. It seemed polite to leave it at that.’
I’ve moved back to the city, to a little rented house in a street near the river with a small sunny garden that ends in a tangle of briars. Cats stalk the pavement outside, there are pigeons all over the roof, and it’s good to be in a house that I can call my own for a while. Today I’m unpacking boxes and stacking books on shelves. Three boxes down, five to go. I open the next box. Inside, on top of the other books, is The Goshawk.
Oh, I think, as I pick it up. It is strange to see it again, because I’ve not thought of White for a while. As I grew happier his presence receded, his world more and more distant from mine. I look at the scuffed spine, open it, and flip to the very end. I want to read the very last page, where White lists all the things Gos was: a Prussian officer, Attila, an Egyptian hieroglyph, a winged Assyrian bull, ‘one of the lunatic dukes or cardinals in the Elizabethan plays of Webster’.2 A litany of human things in stone and armour, in marks on pages and dints in sun-baked clay. I peer out of the dusty window at Mabel in the garden. She has bathed and preened and now she’s leaning backwards to the oil-gland above her tail, nibbling it gently, then pulling each tail feather through her beak to make it waterproof. I know she is content: the half-closed, happy eye, the rattling of her feathers: these are signs of raw good humour. I cannot know what she is thinking, but she is very alive.
I think of White’s list of things and what a strange, sad ending it is. I swear to myself, standing there with the book open in my hand, that I will not ever reduce my hawk to a hieroglyph, an historical figure or a misremembered villain. Of course I won’t. I can’t. Because she is not human. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.
I put White’s book on the shelves, make myself a cup of tea. I’m in a contemplative mood. I’d brought the hawk into my world and then I pretended I lived in hers. Now it feels different: we share our lives happily in all their separation. I look down at my hands. There are scars on them now. Thin white lines. One is from her talons when she’d been fractious with hunger; it feels like a warning made flesh. Another is a blackthorn rip from the time I’d pushed through a hedge to find the hawk I’d thought I’d lost. And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she’d helped mend, not make.
30
The moving earth
IT IS 27 February, and I’m feeling distinctly wobbly. Tomorrow I’ll be driving Mabel to my friend Tony’s house. He’s a very old friend of mine, a gifted falconer and a deeply generous man. He lives with his family in a little lemon-coloured house in the flat lands of south Suffolk half an hour from the sea. I’m looking forward to seeing him but am wobbly all the same, because this will not be a flying visit for Mabel. Tony’s giving Mabel a spare aviary for the moulting season. Tomorrow I’ll be driving back here and leaving her behind.
I have to do it. It’s time for her to drop all her feathers, one by one, and grow new ones. She needs to be fat and full of food to grow her new plumage, so all week I’ve been giving her as much quail and pheasant as she can eat. She’s round as a turkey now, and part of me has been wai
ting for her to get wild. A fat goshawk is a wild goshawk, say the books. They are wrong. Of course they are. Mabel’s less willing to tolerate strangers in this fed-up state, but she’s still as tame as a kitten with me. This morning we played throw and catch with paper balls, and for the last hour she’s been snoozing on my fist while I watch bad TV. ‘Right, Mabel,’ I say. ‘Bedtime.’ I put her on her perch in the other room, switch off the light and go upstairs to bed.
Some things are too terrifying to comprehend. Seconds can pass in disbelief as the world you live in turns into a lie. At just past one in the morning I’m having one of the worst nightmares of my life. My dreams lately have been small and full of light, but in this one, someone – something, for it cannot be human – has taken hold of the end of my bed and is shaking it, shaking it hard, trying to pitch me to the floor. It is the feeling in the dream that terrifies me most of all. It is not like a nightmare. It is worse. I wake with a start.
Something is still shaking my bed. I can see it move, hear it creaking. There is no one in the room.
Every inch of my skin crawls with terror. I am shaking and unable to move. The wrongness is indescribable. The fear is falling through a thousand feet of air. The bed is still shaking, senselessly, violently, horribly, impossibly.
Then it stops.
For a few seconds I lie there, stricken. I have not been breathing, I realise. I take a vast gulp of shuddering air. The lampshade above me is swinging in circles still.
Then a flash of understanding.
An earthquake. It was an earthquake. Here, in England. They hardly ever happen here, do they? Was it definitely an earthquake? It must have been. Yes. I still can’t quite believe it. I jump out of bed and peer through the curtains. Lights are on in all the houses. People in the street are wandering fearfully in pyjamas. The phone rings, and I pick it up, and it is Christina.
‘Earthquake!’ she yells. ‘Did you feel it?’
I swear. She curses. Ordinary words fail us: we mouth obscenities in the cause of reassurance. But they are not enough. When I put the phone down I cannot calm myself. I put my hands out flat in front of me, palms down. They are still shaking. Stop freaking out, Helen, I tell myself. It’s OK. Nothing is broken. Everything is fine. But it is not. The earthquake has brought back all those childhood fears of apocalypse: all the expectation that the world would burn and boil. It is a very old, deep terror and it feels now that it has never gone away. The fabric of the world has torn. I cannot stitch it back together. And then I remember Mabel. I’ve heard all the stories about animals fleeing from earthquakes. Oh God. She must be terrified. I race downstairs, three steps at a time, burst through the door and turn on the light in her room. She is asleep. She wakes, pulls her head from her mantle-feathers and looks at me with clear eyes. She’s surprised to see me. She yawns, showing her pink mouth like a cat’s and its arrowhead tongue with its black tip. Her creamy underparts are draped right down over her feet, so only one lemony toe and one carbon-black talon are exposed. Her other foot is drawn high up at her chest. She felt the tremors. And then she went back to sleep, entirely unmoved by the moving earth. The quake brought no panic, no fear, no sense of wrongness to her at all. She’s at home in the world. She’s here. She ducks her head upside down, pleased to see me, shakes her feathers into a fluffy mop of contentment, and then, as I sit with her, she slowly closes her eyes, tucks her head back into her feathers, and sleeps. She is not a duke, a cardinal, a hieroglyph or a mythological beast, but right now Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a protecting spirit. My little household god. Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them. I had thought the world was ending, but my hawk had saved me again, and all the terror was gone.
She sleeps all the way to Suffolk in my car. Tony’s house is tucked behind trees on a road between two fields and lines of hedgerow elms. I pull into the drive, take Mabel onto my glove and walk across the lawn. He comes out to greet me. We walk together to the high, white-walled aviary behind his mews. He unlocks the door and I step through. Her new home is huge. There are bark-covered branches, and perches upholstered in astroturf to massage her feet. There is a bath, a chute through which Tony will drop her food; weedy undergrowth, gravel, a nest-ledge to lie on, a patch of warming sun. Above the wire-mesh roof the Suffolk sky. ‘Well, Mabes,’ I say, unhooding her, ‘This is your home for the next few months.’ She looks down at my hand as it pulls each jess free from her anklets: now she stands on my fist wearing none at all. She cocks an eye up to the moving clouds, then examines her surroundings. She follows the line of the roof to the corners, peers at the cinderblock foundation walls. For a moment we are back in the darkened room on that first day of our meeting. I remember that moment when the hawk first forgot me and flinch inwardly at the knowledge that now she will forget me again.
‘I’ll see you after the summer’s over,’ I say. Forgetting. Remembering. I put my hand out, drag the tips of my fingers down her teardrop-splashed front. The new feathers she will grow will be barred stone-grey and white. The tones of earth and ochre will disappear. Her eyes, when I see her next, will be the deep orange of glowing coals. Everything changes. Everything moves. I lift my hand, cast her towards the nearest perch. She flies, lands, shakes her tail, sees a branch above her and leaps upon it. She’s facing away from me. ‘I’ll miss you,’ I say. No answer can come, and there is nothing to explain. I turn and walk out of the door, leaving the hawk behind. Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘Come inside the house,’ he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm.
Postscript
I needed to find out more about White to write this book. So I spent a week in the Harry Ransom Center, the Texas archive where T. H. White’s papers and journals are kept. Reading about muddy English winters while sitting in an air-conditioned library was a very strange experience; outside, vultures soared on tilted wings through ninety-degree heat and grackles hopped on the burning sidewalks. I turned pages, sifted through manuscripts, read through the books he had owned, returned home with stacks of notes and thoughts. But they did not seem enough. There was something else to be done. So one hot July day I drove across England to Stowe. It’s still a school, but its grounds are open to the public. I parked my car in the National Trust car park, paid my entrance fee, clutched a map, and walked up the long lane to the gate. ‘Turn left for the best views,’ the man at the sentry box said. I turned right out of sheer contrariness and set off on my quest, the vast Palladian palace bright on the horizon, everything under metallic sunlight that made the lime-leaves black and the lake-water a deep, painful blue. Water lilies glowed on it in thick constellations. Ink-black shadows underpinned the parkland trees. Swifts pushed through air so thick they hardly beat their wings against the breeze. These were the grounds of the school where White had taught, landscape gardens that had drawn tourists for hundreds of years.
After an hour of walking past temples with fluted columns and painted doors, cupolas, obelisks, porticoes and follies, I started to freak out. Nothing made any sense. Greek Temples, Roman Temples, Saxon gods on runic plinths starred with orange lichen. A vast Gothic Temple in rouged ironstone. Palladian bridges, tufa grottoes and Doric arches. Nothing here seemed solid or understandable but the trees. The buildings littered the landscape as if they had been dropped by some crazed time machine, and all of them, I realised, were there to teach me a lesson. This was a landscape of aristocratic moral certainty, designed and built to lecture visitors of the dangers of modern vice and the ways of ancient virtue. It might have been the sun, it might have been incipient heatstroke, but I started to hate it. Here is the temple of British Worthies. Look at them all. Ugh. I turned round and began to walk back to the car. I was feeling extremely sorry for White. This was a very beautiful place, and a marvel
lous lesson in the exercise of power, but I would have felt unreal here, yes; I would have fled from it too. And I did. I fled from the school grounds. I got back in my car and drove, and parked, and then walked to the place where I had to go.
There it was, White’s cottage, Merlyn’s cottage, quiet on the Ridings over the hill. It looked so ordinary; not a magical place at all. Black leaf-shadows moved on its high gables. A grey horse grazed outside. Electric wires chased fenceposts down the grassy slopes. The forest behind the house was still there. But not all of it: the dark wood where the hobbies had been had gone; now it was Silverstone racing circuit, and the chapel where White had walked with Gos was long demolished; as Chapel Corner it is just a curve on the track under which the long-dead sleep. But as I stood there in the hot sunlight there was a buzzing in my ears. It was the strangest sound, as if on that windless day I could hear the marine roar of wind in all the oaks. It was winter history. Time’s receding. Or possibly heatstroke. I wished I had brought some water.
I stood for a long while and looked at the house. It was a private place. I did not want to get closer; I didn’t want to intrude on the person who lived there. But I saw that the trees had grown, that the barn was now a garage. The well would still be there. And then I heard a chipping, scraping noise, and froze. Behind a bush in the garden was a flash of white; a shirt. There was a man kneeling in the garden, bowed over the ground. Was he planting something? Weeding? Praying? I was far away. I could see his shoulders, but not his face, nor anything of him but his concentration. I shivered, because for a moment the man had been White, planting out his beloved geraniums. The feeling that White was haunting me had returned. I wondered if I should go and speak to this man. I could. I could talk to him. He wasn’t White, I knew, but there were people here who had known him still, and I could talk to them. The farmhouse was still there, and behind it the ponds where Gos had bathed and White had fished. Perhaps the same carp swam in them. I could find out more about him, make him alive again, chase down the memories here. For a moment that old desire to cross over and bring someone back flared up as bright as flame.
H Is for Hawk Page 27
