He’d come home from work strangely disheartened one winter evening. We asked him what was wrong. ‘Did you see the sky today?’ he said. He’d been walking through a London park on his way back from a press-call. It was deserted but for a small boy playing by a frozen boating lake. ‘I said, “Look up, look at that. Remember you saw that. You’ll never see it again.”’ Above them both was a vast tracery of ice-rings and sun-dogs in a wintry, hazy sky. A 22° halo, a circumzenithal arc and an upper tangent arc, the sun’s light refracting and cutting the heavens into a complicated geometry of ice and air and fire. But the boy didn’t seem interested at all. Dad was baffled. ‘Maybe he thought you were one of those strange men,’ we sniggered, rolling our eyes, and he looked embarrassed and faintly cross. But he was so very sad about the boy who didn’t see.
Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again. The albums on my mother’s shelves are full of family photographs. But also other things. A starling with a crooked beak. A day of hoarfrost and smoke. A cherry tree thick with blossom. Thunderclouds, lightning strikes, comets and eclipses: celestial events terrifying in their blind distances but reassuring you, too, that the world is for ever, though you are only a blink in its course.
Henri Cartier-Bresson called the taking of a good photograph a decisive moment. ‘Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera,’2 he said. ‘The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone for ever.’ I thought of one of these moments as I sat there waiting for the hawk to eat from my hand. It was a black-and-white photograph my father had taken many years ago of an elderly street-cleaner with a white goatee beard, wrinkled socks and down-at-heel shoes. Crumpled work trousers, work gloves, a woollen beret. The camera is low, on the pavement: Dad must have crouched in the road to take it. The man is bending down, his besom of birch twigs propped against his side. He has taken off one of his gloves, and between the thumb and first finger of his bare right hand he is offering a crumb of bread to a sparrow on the kerbstone. The sparrow is caught mid-hop at exactly at the moment it takes the crumb from his fingers. And the expression on the man’s face is suffused with joy. He is wearing the face of an angel.
Time passed. Hawks gorge themselves in the wild and can spend days without food. I knew the hawk would not eat from my hand today. She was scared, she wasn’t hungry; the world was an insult. Both of us needed a break. I popped the hood back over her head. There. Fleeting panic, nerves afire, and then she relaxed because the day had turned to night and I had disappeared. The terror had gone. Hoodwinked. It was an ancient piece of trickery and an excusable one: the darkness would give her space to set her frayed nerves to rights. As would it mine. On her perch, she slept. I slept too, wrapped in a duvet dragged over the sofa. Later, when I picked her up again, the mood in the room had changed. She had done this before; was no longer entirely certain I was a monster. She bated, once, towards the floor, but it was a bate to the floor, not away from me in blind terror. I lifted her back onto the glove. We sat some more. Then, instead of fixing her gaze on me in horror, she began to examine her surroundings. New things. Shelves, walls, floor: she inspected them all carefully with small, sideways movements of her head. Hawk parallax, judging perfect distances. She observed the ceiling as far as it would go, the lines of the bookshelves beneath it, cocked her head to consider the strip of messy tassels along the edge of the rug. Then came a decisive moment. It was not the one I was hoping for, but it was thrilling all the same. Regarding the room with simple curiosity, she turned her head and saw me. And jumped. Jumped exactly like a human in surprise. I felt the scratch of her talons and her shock, too, cold and electric. That was the moment. Until a minute ago I was so terrifying I was all that existed. But then she had forgotten me. Only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The forgetting was delightful because it was a sign that the hawk was starting to accept me. But there was a deeper, darker thrill. It was that I had been forgotten.
8
The Rembrandt interior
WHITE LOOSED HIS young male goshawk in the barn that first night and in the early hours, at five minutes past three, it stepped onto his fist and fed. It was hungry, familiar with humans, willing already to come to the falconer for food. It was a state that my hawk had not yet reached and would not reach for days. If White had only known what he was doing, Gos could have been flying free in a week. But he didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t understand that a hawk in training must be kept a little hungry, for only through gifts of food will a wild bird begin to see you as a benevolent figure and not an affront to all existence.
White was petrified. On his hawk’s tail were strange pale transverse stripes, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across the quills. He knew what they were: hunger-traces caused by lack of food as the feathers grew; weaknesses that made them liable to break. Guilt and blame. He worried that it was his fault the hawk was damaged. He wanted to stop these hunger-traces, make up for whatever early lack had scarred his hawk and made its feathers weak. So he fed it. He fed it as much as he possibly could. He didn’t know that because those feathers were now full-grown there was no danger of making the traces worse. He gave the hawk so much food that the hawk couldn’t eat it, bear the sight of it, and here is White, the terrified austringer, stroking the hawk’s breast-feathers with a split rabbit skull showing all the rabbit’s spilled brains in desperate attempts to get it to eat, when the hawk doesn’t want to eat because it is full. Love me, he is saying. Please. I can make it up to you, make it better. Fix you. Please eat. But a fat, stuffed goshawk doesn’t want anything other than to be left alone, to disappear into that half-world of no-humans, replete and contented, eyes half-closed, one foot tucked up into soft feathers, to digest its food and sleep. Over the coming days and weeks, White tries different food, better food, trying to tempt the hawk to eat more that it can bear. He is wheedling, desperate, certain that his patience will triumph. And of course at some point the hawk becomes half-hungry enough to eat, and White stuffs it with food, convinced that all will now be well. And then the hawk hates him, and the strange cycle begins again. ‘Days of attack and counter-attack,’1 was how White described it; ‘a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields.’ There is a nightmarish logic to White’s time with the hawk: the logic of a sadist who half-hates his hawk because he hates himself, who wants to hurt it because he loves it, but will not, and insists that it eats so that it will love him. And these twisted logics were met with the simple logic of a wild, fat goshawk that considers this man the most inimical thing on earth.
‘I had only just escaped from humanity,’ White wrote, ‘and the poor gos had only just been caught by it.’2 But he hadn’t escaped, not quite. When you read The Goshawk you’re given to understand that his cottage was miles from anywhere, a remote outpost deep in a wood half a mile from the nearest road. But the cottage was on the Stowe estate; it had been built on one of the old roads laid out as carriage routes to the great house centuries before. They were called the Ridings, and one ran in a shifting river of grass straight past White’s cottage, over the crest of a sheep-cropped hill and down to the doors of the school. The house was rustic, yes: it had an earth-closet and a well, and when White stood with his hawk in the barn he could still see where a Victorian gamekeeper had written of vanished bags of game in pencil on the back of the door. Phesant, it said. Harn. But remote it was not. There was his house, not quite in a wood, sitting on the old and open road to Stowe, like a promise not quite kept, and White in it, like a dog who sits at the very end of his chain, or the sad divorcee who moves out of their partner’s house to live at the bottom of the road. For all his joy in freedom, the schoolmaster had not escaped the bounds of the school, and he’d not escaped schoolmastering either.
&nb
sp; In Blaine’s book White read that falconry was the art of control over the wildest and proudest of living creatures, and that to train them the falconer must battle their defiance and rebellious attitude. The training of a hawk mirrored the education of the public schoolboy. In both, a wild and unruly subject was shaped and moulded, made civilised; was taught good manners and obedience. But the methods were different, and this gave White much pleasure. ‘I had been a schoolmaster for so long,’3 he wrote, ‘in which profession the standard way of meeting a difficult situation was by punishment. It was nice after this to discover a profession of education where punishment was treated as ridiculous.’
It was the perfect kind of education, he decided, for him and for the hawk. He would call his book The Austringer, and in its pages he and his readers would take a ‘patient excursion into the fields and back into the past’.4 That excursion wasn’t just back into an imagined English past; it was also a journey back into his own. White had ‘dropped out of the curious adult heterosexual competition’, had become again ‘a monastic boy’.5 In those long hours of psychoanalysis with Bennet, White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power. Now he was going back in time with the hawk. He’d already empathised with the fledgling in the basket, had seen the hawk as himself. Now he was unconsciously re-enacting his childhood – with the hawk standing in for himself as a boy, and the grown-up White playing the role of an enlightened teacher who could not, would not, must not beat or hurt the child in his care.
He considers falconry the most glorious of mysteries. He has no one to teach him and two books to learn from, not counting the description in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he has almost by heart. There is Blaine’s Falconry, published the previous year, and Coursing and Falconry by Gerald Lascelles, from 1892. But the book White cleaves to is much older; it was published in 1619. Called An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, it is all about goshawks, and it was written by Edmund Bert, Gentleman. White didn’t yet possess a copy of his own, for it was a rare volume; but he’d read it. Perhaps he’d read the copy kept at the Cambridge University Library. Perhaps it was the very same copy I’d pored over as a student. As White was seduced by Bert’s book, so was I. It is bloody marvellous. Bert is the seventeenth-century counterpart of some of the blunter Yorkshire goshawkers of my acquaintance on whom something of the hawk’s character has rubbed off. Accomplished, cantankerous, with a bracing wit, he never fails to arrogate himself, tell us how perfectly his hawks behave: craning on tiptoe to pick marrow from his fingertips, they are happy to travel with him wherever he goes. When away from home, Bert boasts, he’d put his hawk on ‘a velvet stoole, in a dining-chamber or parlour, as the place was whereunto I went, for I would have my Hawke as much in my eye as could be. Perhaps I should see the Lady or Mistress of the house look discontentedly thereat,’6 he deadpans, ‘but so well have I been acquainted with my hawk’s good disposition that I have promised if my hawk should make a mute in the room, I would lick it up with my tongue.’
Edmund Bert haunted White as he trained his hawk, just as White haunted me. But it was a different kind of haunting. ‘I had a sort of schoolgirlish “pash” for that serious old man who lived three hundred years ago,’7 he privately confessed. He wanted to impress Bert. He was in love with him. Dizzied by medievalist imaginings, in love with a falconer three hundred years dead, he had decided to ignore the teachings of Blaine, for the most part, and train his hawk the old-fashioned way.
The old hawk masters had invented a means of taming them which offered no visible cruelty, and whose secret cruelty had to be born [sic] by the trainer as well as by the bird. They kept the bird awake. Not by nudging it or by any mechanical means, but by walking about with their pupil on their fist and staying awake themselves. The hawk was ‘watched’, was deprived of sleep by a sleepless man, for a space of two, three, or as much as nine nights together.8
White wilfully misunderstood Bert’s methods. The seventeenth-century austringer would have had any number of friends and attendants to take over while he slept. But White was desirous of a rite of passage. A proper knight’s vigil. And he needed to do it alone, man against man, as it were. Watching his hawk would be a privation, an ordeal, a test of his Word. He would not be cruel. But he would conquer both the hawk and himself in one fell swoop. ‘Man against bird,’9 he wrote, ‘with God as an umpire, they had sat each other out for three thousand years.’ In this long vigil – White had six hours’ sleep in six days – the effects of extreme tiredness took their toll. Again and again, delirious from lack of sleep, sitting in the kitchen or standing in the lamplit barn, he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist, reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello – ‘but the tragedy had to be kept out of the voice’10 – and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best.
When I was a student I took a paper on Tragedy as part of my English degree. This was not without irony, for I was comprehensively tragic. I wore black, smoked filterless Camels, skulked about the place with kohl-caked eyes and failed to write a single essay about Greek Tragedy, Jacobean Tragedy, Shakespearian Tragedy, or indeed do much at all. I’d like to write Miss Macdonald a glowing report, one of my supervisors noted drily, but as I’ve never seen her and have no idea what she looks like, this I cannot do. But I read all the same. I read a lot. And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.
It was the Tragedy paper that led me to read Freud, because he was still fashionable back then, and because psychoanalysts had their shot at explaining tragedy too. And after reading him I began to see all sorts of psychological transferences in my falconry books. I saw those nineteenth-century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the male qualities they thought threatened by modern life: wildness, power, virility, independence and strength. By identifying with their hawks as they trained them, they could introject, or repossess, those qualities. At the same time they could exercise their power by ‘civilising’ a wild and primitive creature. Masculinity and conquest: two imperial myths for the price of one. The Victorian falconer assumed the power and strength of the hawk. The hawk assumed the manners of the man.
For White, too, falconry involved strange projections, but of very different qualities. His young German goshawk was a living expression of all the dark, discreditable desires within himself he’d tried to repress for years: it was a thing fey, fairy, feral, ferocious and cruel. He had tried for so long to be a gentleman. Tried to fit in, to adhere to all the rules of civilised society, to be normal, to be like everyone else. But his years at Stowe and his analysis and the fear of war had brought him to breaking point. He had refused humanity in favour of hawks, but he could not escape himself. Once again White was engaged in a battle to civilise the perversity and unruliness within himself. Only now he had put those things in the hawk, and he was trying to civilise them there. He found himself in a strange, locked battle with a bird that was all the things he longed for, but had always fought against. It was a terrible paradox. A proper tragedy. No wonder living with Gos brought him nearly to madness.
He is lost. The barn is a dungeon. He is swimmingly, drunkenly tired. A chill summer wind blows through the walls. White owls hunt outside: powdery, reed-thin shrieks under a low orange moon. He is an executioner, he thinks, and he should be wearing a mask. A black one that conceals his face. He has been measuring time in the bates of the hawk, in the hundreds of times he’s lifted the screaming captive back onto the glove. The barn is the Bastille. The hawk is a prisoner. The falconer is a man in riding breeches and a checked coat. He stands in a Rembrandt interior. A pile of st
icks and empty jars on the brick floor; cobwebs on the walls. A broken grate. A barrel of Flowers beer. A pool of light from the oil-lamp, and the hawk. The hawk, the hawk, the hawk. It is on his fist, all the sepia arrowheads on its pale breast dishevelled and frayed from his hands. The man is swaying backwards and forwards like a man on a ship, as if the ground beneath him pitched and rolled like the sea. He is trying to stay awake. He is trying to keep the hawk awake. The hawk is trying to close its eyes and sleep but the swaying pulls it back. I am free, the man is telling himself. Free. He stares at the cobwebs behind the exhausted hawk. I am in purdah, he thinks happily. I must not look the hawk in the eye. I must not punish the hawk, though it bates, and beats, and my hand is raw with pecks and my face stings from the blows of its bating wings. Hawks cannot be punished. They would rather die than submit. Patience is my only weapon. Patience. Derived from patior. Meaning to suffer. It is an ordeal. I shall triumph. He sways on his feet and suffers and the hawk suffers too. The owls are silent now. They quarter the Ridings over turf drenched with dew.
9
The rite of passage
THE FEATHERS DOWN her front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. She looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her. As if everything that exists and is observed rolls off like drops of water from her oiled and close-packed feathers. And the more I sit with her, the more I marvel at how reptilian she is. The lucency of her pale, round eyes. The waxy yellow skin about her Bakelite-black beak. The way she snakes her small head from side to side to focus on distant objects. Half the time she seems as alien as a snake, a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass. But then I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities that turn her into something loveable and close. She scratches her fluffy chin with one awkward, taloned foot; sneezes when bits of errant down get up her nose. And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she’s not yet lived. Those long, barred tail-feathers and short, broad wings are perfectly shaped for sharp turns and brutal acceleration through a world of woodland obstacles; the patterns on her plumage will hide her in perfect, camouflaging drifts of light and shade. The tiny, hair-like feathers between her beak and eye – crines – are for catching blood so that it will dry, and flake, and fall away, and the frowning eyebrows that lend her face its hollow rapacious intensity are bony projections to protect her eyes when crashing into undergrowth after prey.
H Is for Hawk Page 8