Ferox. Fairy. Free. Tim White sits at his kitchen table and fills his fountain pen from a bottle of green ink that stands on the oilskin tablecloth. The ink is a mischievous thing, a small, fierce thing. He is writing of his new life with a colour that is the ink of – what does Havelock Ellis call it? The favourite ink of inverts. The hawk arrives tomorrow. Soon there will be three souls in the house: himself, his dog, his hawk. The thought thrills him. He loves this house. He calls it his workman’s cottage, his badger’s sett, his refuge. Outside, light and leaf-shadows move on the high grey gables. It is not a grand house – the water comes from a well and there is an earth-closet in the garden – but he thinks it is a beautiful one. And yes, it is rented, costs him five shillings a week, but it is the first time he has ever lived in a place of his own. He is mak-ing it his. He’s varnished the ceilings, painted everything bright. Red glossy paint. Blue Robiallac. On the mantelpiece, birds’ wings. A spill-jar. Patterned wallpaper. A mirror. Books everywhere. He’s spent £66 on deep-pile carpets, bought a winged brocade armchair and laid in a stock of Madeira. Upstairs he’s transformed the guest bedroom into a fairy-tale room of secret, romantic exuberance: mirrors and gilt, blue bed-linen and a golden bedspread, surrounded by candles. Still, he can’t bring himself to sleep in it. The camp bed in the other room with the brown curtains will suffice. And the hawk will live in the barn outside, and they will both call this place home.
The Victorian terrace loomed and swayed in the summer dusk. I walked to my door, box in my arms. I don’t remember opening the box that night. What I remember is my bare feet treading on carpet and the weight of the hawk on my fist. Her shape, long and haunted, and the hitch of her nervous shoulders as she stepped backwards onto the shadow of the bowperch on my living-room floor. I remember thinking of the passage in The Sword in the Stone where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, ‘reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost’. Yes, holding the hawk for the first time felt like that. Exactly like that. Mutely I crawled up the stairs and fell into bed. The hawk was here, the journey was over.
That night I dreamed of my father. It wasn’t the usual dream of a family reunited. In the dream I’m searching for something in a house, an empty house with pale squares on the walls where pictures should be. I can’t find what I am looking for. I open an upstairs door onto a room that is not like the others. Three white walls run with water and the far wall is gone. No wall at all: just air, falling into the pale violet of a city evening. Below me is a bombsite. Tons of bricks and rubble, rosebay willowherb blooming in drifts between broken rafters and spars that are ruined chairs and the shadows between all these things are thickening to night. But they are not what I am looking at. Because standing on top of the tallest pile of bricks is a small boy with sandy hair. His face is turned away, but I recognise him immediately, and not just because he’s wearing the same short trousers and lumpy grey jacket in a photograph in our family album. It is my father.
As soon as I see him I know where I am. This is Shepherd’s Bush, where he’d run wild as a boy, clambering over bombsites with his friends, collecting things, salvaging them, hiding, watching. ‘We used to bomb bricks with bombs made of bricks,’ he’d told me once. ‘There wasn’t much else to play with.’ And then the boy turns, looks up at me standing in the ruined house, and I know he is going to say something. But there are no words. Instead, he points with one arm. Points up. I look. There’s an aeroplane up there, thousands of feet above us, so high its fuselage and wings are still lit by the setting sun. There’s no engine noise, no sound, nothing moving anywhere else. Just this small point of light crossing the sky until it passes over and is lost in the shadow of the world. And I look down again, and the boy that was my father is gone.
7
Invisibility
PRRT. PRRT. PRRT. One interrogatory note over and over again, like a telephone call from a bird deep in leaves. That’s what pulled me from sleep. The noise came from a chaffinch in the lime tree outside my window, and I lay watching the day grow bright listening to the sound move about in the tree behind the glass. It was a rain call, a beautiful name for a noise like an unanswered question. No one knows why chaffinches make it, but the name comes from an old tradition that it portends bad weather.
In the 1950s, in a small research station in Madingley a few miles north of where I lay, a scientist called Thorpe experimented on chaffinches to try to understand how they learned to sing. He reared young finches in total isolation in soundproofed cages, and listened, fascinated, to the rudimentary songs his broken birds produced. There was a short window of time, he found, in which the isolated chicks needed to hear the elaborate trills of adult song, and if that window was missed, they could never quite manage to produce it themselves. He tried exposing his isolated fledglings to looped tapes of the songs of other species: could they be persuaded to sing like tree pipits? It was a groundbreaking piece of research into developmental learning, but it was also a science soaked deep in Cold War anxieties. The questions Thorpe was asking were those of a post-war West obsessed with identity and frightened of brainwashing. How do you learn who you are? Can your allegiances be changed? Can you be trusted? What makes you a chaffinch? Where do you come from? Thorpe discovered that wild chaffinches from different places had different dialects. I listened carefully to the bird outside. Yes, its song was different from the song of Surrey chaffinches I’d learned as a child. It was thinner, less complicated; seemed to cut off before it was properly finished. I thought I would like to hear Surrey chaffinches again. I thought of sad birds in soundproofed cages, and how your earliest experiences teach you who you are. I thought of the house from my dream. I thought of home. And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realised that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. It was about to begin.
In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, café-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai. ‘Hello hawk,’ I whisper, and at the sound she draws her feathers tight in alarm. ‘Hush,’ I tell myself, and the hawk. Hush. Then I put on my falconer’s glove, step forward and take her up onto my fist, untying the falconer’s knot that secures her leash to the perch.
She bates. Bating. A ‘headlong dive of rage and terror, by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom’.1 That’s how White described it in The Goshawk. The falconer’s duty, he explained, ‘is to lift the hawk back to the fist with his other hand in gentleness and patience’. I lift her back onto my fist with gentleness and patience. Her feet grip the glove convulsively. This perch is moving. I feel her mind grappling with novelty. But still it is the only thing I understand. I shall hold it tight. I persuade her to step onto a perch on a modified set of scales. Hawks have a flying weight, just as boxers have a fighting weight. A hawk that’s too fat, or high, has little interest in flying, and won’t return to the falconer’s call. Hawks too low are awful things: spare, unhappy, lacking the energy to fly with fire and style. Taking the hawk back onto my fist I feel for her breastbone with the bare fingers of my other hand. She is plump, her skin hot under her feathers, and through my fingertips I feel the beating of her nervous heart. I shiver. Draw my hand back. Superstition. I can’t bear to feel that flickering sign of life, can’t help but suspect that my attention might somehow make it stop.
In the front room I sit, tuck a piece of raw steak into the glove under her scaly feet, and wait. One minute, two. Three. And I take the hood from her head.
Two wide, wild eyes stare at me for a fraction of a second, and then they are gone. Before the hawk can work out what the hell is happening she is trying to fly away as fast as possible. Brought up short by her jesses she twitters in high-pitched distr
ess as the realisation of her hateful circumstances strikes. She can’t get away. I lift her back onto the glove. Under her feathers is sinew, and bone, and that fast-beating heart. She bates again. And again. I hate this. In these first few minutes there’s nothing you can do but accept that you are terrifying the hawk when it is the very opposite of everything you desire. After three more bates my heart is beating like a fitting beast, but she’s back on the glove, beak open, eyes blazing. And then there is a long moment of extraordinary intensity.
The goshawk is staring at me in mortal terror, and I can feel the silences between both our heartbeats coincide. Her eyes are luminous, silver in the gloom. Her beak is open. She breathes hot hawk breath in my face. It smells of pepper and musk and burned stone. Her feathers are half-raised and her wings half-open, and her scaled yellow toes and curved black talons grip the glove tightly. It feels like I’m holding a flaming torch. I can feel the heat of her fear on my face. She stares. She stares and stares. Seconds slow and tick past. Her wings are dropped low; she crouches, ready for flight. I don’t look at her. I mustn’t. What I am doing is concentrating very hard on the process of not being there.
Here’s one thing I know from years of training hawks: one of the things you must learn to do is become invisible. It’s what you do when a fresh hawk sits on your left fist with food beneath her feet, in a state of savage, defensive fear. Hawks aren’t social animals like dogs or horses; they understand neither coercion nor punishment. The only way to tame them is through positive reinforcement with gifts of food. You want the hawk to eat the food you hold – it’s the first step in reclaiming her that will end with you being hunting partners. But the space between the fear and the food is a vast, vast gulf, and you have to cross it together. I thought, once, that you did it by being infinitely patient. But no: it is more than that. You must become invisible. Imagine: you’re in a darkened room. You are sitting with a hawk on your fist. She is as immobile, as tense and sprung as a catapult at full stretch. Underneath her huge, thorny feet is a chunk of raw steak. You’re trying to get her to look at the steak, not at you, because you know – though you haven’t looked – that her eyes are fixed in horror at your profile. All you can hear is the wet click, click, click of her blinking.
To cross this space between fear and food, and to somehow make possible an eventual concord between your currently paralysed, immobile minds, you need – very urgently – not to be there. You empty your mind and become very still. You think of exactly nothing at all. The hawk becomes a strange, hollow concept, as flat as a snapshot or a schematic drawing, but at the same time, as pertinent to your future as an angry high court judge. Your gloved fist squeezes the meat a fraction, and you feel the tiny imbalance of weight and you see out of the very corner of your vision that she’s looked down at it. And so, remaining invisible, you make the food the only thing in the room apart from the hawk; you’re not there at all. And what you hope is that she’ll start eating, and you can very, very slowly make yourself visible. Even if you don’t move a muscle, and just relax into a more normal frame of mind, the hawk knows. It’s extraordinary. It takes a long time to be yourself, in the presence of a new hawk.
But I didn’t have to learn how to do this. I was already an expert. It was a trick I’d learned early in my life; a small, slightly fearful girl, obsessed with birds, who loved to disappear. Like Jumbo in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I was a watcher. I had always been a watcher. When I was a child I’d climb the hill behind my house and crawl into my favourite den under a rhododendron bush, wriggling down on my tummy under overhanging leaves like a tiny sniper. And in this secret foxhole, nose an inch from the ground, breathing crushed bracken and acid soil, I’d look down on the world below, basking in the fierce calm that comes from being invisible but seeing everything. Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It’s a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn’t serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn’t. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in the world.
The confidence with which I sat there with the hawk was absolute. I know how to do this, I thought. I am good, at least, at this. I know all the steps to this dance. First the hawk will feed on my gloved fist. Then as the days pass she’ll grow tamer, partly because I am keeping her indoors and constantly in my presence, just as fifteenth-century falconers had done. Soon she will step to my fist for food, and later she will jump to it. We’ll go for long walks to accustom her to cars and dogs and people. And then she’ll fly to me when I call her, first on a line, the creance, and then free. And then.
And then. I’d instructed my friends to leave me alone. I’d filled the freezer with hawk food and unplugged the phone. Now I was a hermit with a hawk in a darkened room with books on three walls, a faded Afghan rug, and a sofa of stained yellow velvet. A mirror hung over the boarded-up fireplace, and a Shell poster from the 1930s on the wall above me was reflected backwards and watery in the old glass. YOU CAN BE SURE OF SHELL, it said, along with a scumble of stormclouds and a part of the Dorset coast. There was an old television, a mint-green vinyl cloth on the floor with the hawk’s perch on it, and a pair of deep green curtains printed with flowers that shut out the world. The goal was to be motionless, the mind empty, the heart full of hope. But as the minutes stretched I had to move, just slightly: angle my foot to stop it sleeping; wrinkle my nose if it itched, and each time I did so I felt the hawk flinch in fear. But I also saw from the corner of my eye that she was pulling herself up incrementally from that sprung-to-fly crouch. Her stance was more upright. There was a little less fear in the room.
The old falconers called the manning of a hawk like this watching. It was a reassuringly familiar state of mind, meditative and careful and grave. For the first time in months my life had a purpose. I was waiting for the moment from which all else follows: the hawk lowering her head and beginning to feed. That was all I wanted. That was all there was. Waiting. Watching. Sitting with the hawk felt as if I were holding my breath for hours with no effort. No rise, no fall, just my heart beating and I could feel it, in my fingertips, that little clipping throb of blood that – because it was the only thing I could sense moving – didn’t feel part of myself at all. As if it was another person’s heart, or something else living inside me. Something with a flat, reptilian head, two heavy, down-dropped wings. Shadowed, thrush-streaked sides. There was a greenish cast to the light in the room, dark and cool and faintly submarine. Outside life went on, hot and distant. Shadows passed behind the curtains that were shoppers and students and bicycles and dogs. Vague, person-shaped shades making sounds like tin-can telephones, burred and incomprehensible. The slap, slap of walking feet. The hissing buzz of another bicycle. Long minutes passed. A piece of down dislodged from the hawk’s covert-feathers drifted slowly to the carpet at my feet. A tiny star, barely any quill to it, just a muss of soft white plumes. I looked at it for a long time. I’d not looked at an object like this, with such searching attention with my mind elsewhere, since that reindeer moss, on the day the phone call came.
White-knuckle jobs, Dad used to call them: it was Fleet Street slang for the dangerous assignments. Leaning out of a helicopter with a camera in one hand and the other gripping the door-frame because the safety harness had snapped. Or looking through a fish-eye lens from the top of Salisbury Cathedral, standing on a frail iron rung hammered into stone four hundred feet in the sky. ‘White-knuckle jobs? I get through them by looking through the camera,’ he said. ‘I bring it up like this’ – and he mimed holding it to his eye. ‘Look through the viewfinder. Stops you being involved. Stops you being scared.’ You no longer possess a body to fall or fail: all that exists is a square of finely ground glass and the world seen through it, and a whole mass of technical decisions in your head about exposure and depth of field and getting the shot you hope for.
Sitting there with the hawk in that darkened
room I felt safer than I’d done for months. Partly because I had a purpose. But also because I’d closed the door on the world outside. Now I could think of my father. I began to consider how he had coped with difficulty. Putting a lens between himself and the world was a defence against more than physical danger: it shielded him from other things he had to photograph: awful things, tragic things; accidents, train crashes, the aftermath of city bombs. He’d worried that this survival strategy had become a habit. ‘I see the world through a lens,’ he said once, a little sadly, as if the camera were always there, stopping him getting involved, something between him and the life that other people had.
The chaffinch was calling again. How you learn what you are. Had I learned to be a watcher from my father? Was it a kind of childhood mimicking of his professional strategy for dealing with difficulty? I kicked the thought around for a while, and then I kicked it away. No, I thought. No. It was more I can’t think that than It’s not true. All those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Look, this happened. A thing happened, and now it will never unhappen. Here it is, in the photograph: a baby putting its tiny hand in the wrinkled palm of an octogenarian. A fox running across a woodland path and a man raising a gun to shoot it. A car wreck. A plane crash. A comet smeared across the morning sky. A prime minister wiping his brow. The Beatles, sitting at a café table on the Champs-Elysées on a cold January day in 1964, John Lennon’s pale face under the brim of his fisherman’s cap. All these things had happened, and my father had committed them to a memory that wasn’t just his own, but the world’s. My father’s life wasn’t about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it.
H Is for Hawk Page 7