No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  One day my brother Barry told me of a family member who hadn’t been so lucky. It had happened when I was still a baby, and Barry was seven years old. It was 1946 and Barry was playing in some prefabricated bungalows that were being built after the Second World War, when scores of miners came walking up the road hours before the shift was due to end. As women came to their doors to see why the men were returning home from work early, some of the miners called to them, telling them the news: ‘Doug Westerman’s been killed.’ Being only seven, and only knowing him as Grandad, Barry hadn’t realised that it was Mother’s dad, our grandad, whose name was being called along the village streets. Until, that is, he returned home and saw Mother crying, and our dad standing awkwardly beside her. After Barry told me that, I feared that one day Dad might not return home from the colliery alive.

  TWO

  The origin of the word ‘kestrel’ is somewhat uncertain. By some it is derived from ‘coystril,’ a knave or peasant, from being the hawk formerly used [trained] by persons of inferior rank . . .

  – J. E. Harting, The Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1864

  One early Monday morning in September 1956, I lay in my bed in the dark listening to Dad cleaning out the ashes and laying the coal fire for my mother to light when she got up. Moments later, I heard him close the door and leave the house to join other miners heading for the colliery. Later still came the mournful wail of a siren, the ‘pit buzzer’ as we called it, signalling to everyone in the village the start of the 6 a.m. shift at the mine. Trying to calm the anxiety that had awoken me so early, I attempted to go back to sleep.

  Later that morning, around eight o’clock, I called for Budgie and then at Towser’s house, but both of my friends from junior school had already set off. Turning left at the top of Towser’s street I walked along Sheffield Road, the old turnpike road, then turned left at Allott’s Corner, which was named after the grocer’s shop there, and along Hoyland Road. In those few hundred yards I’d walked past some of the nineteenth-century stone buildings in the village that had been built to sustain the growing population of miners and their families: the Hare and Hounds pub where the Rockingham Colliery Brass Band practised in an upstairs room, a bank, an infant and a junior school, which in my parents’ and grandparents’ day had been a boys’ and a girls’ school, a post office, two doctors’ surgeries, a chemist and lots of shops. Through a gap between a cobbler’s and a greengrocer’s, where a track led to a farm, I could see meadows and fields of golden stubble, and beyond them the dump truck at Rockingham Colliery making its way up the slag heap to tip its black dusty load.

  I was on my way to begin my first day at Kirk Balk Boys’ Secondary Modern School on the edge of the village. The system in those days was for all eleven-year-olds to sit an exam, the eleven plus, the results of which dictated whether you were one of the few who went on to grammar school or among the vast majority of kids who were sent to secondary modern school. I don’t remember taking that exam myself, but I do remember after the exam one lad had run around the playground shouting it was easy, his arms raised like aeroplane wings. He hadn’t done as well as he thought. He failed the exam and didn’t get into grammar school, but his dad owned the local bakery and he was sent to a private school in Sheffield.

  The playground was full of new boys standing in lines, and when I saw Budgie and Towser I joined their line. Standing in front of us that morning was my new headmaster, Ben, as the older boys called him. He was small and plump with a bald head and round gold-rimmed glasses. As he organised us into our new classes he frequently checked the time on a gold pocket watch which he took out of his waistcoat pocket. Ben called out Budgie’s name and he joined the line of boys who had been put in 1C. When the headmaster called out my name I could feel my heart thumping and the blood rising to my face, but when he said what form I’d been put in, my embarrassment was overridden by disappointment. I hesitated, wondering whether I dare tell Ben in front of all those lads lined up in the playground that he’d made a mistake and that I should be in 1A, the top-ability stream.

  ‘Get a move on, boy,’ Ben roared, and I quickly joined the line of lads who’d been told they were in 1B. Soon afterwards I was joined by Towser.

  Later, as we lined up outside the classroom a big man wearing a tweed jacket marched down the corridor. This was Idle Jack, our new form teacher. He slapped the first boy in the line across the face. Then, after he’d walked along and slapped each one of us across the face, he warned us that’s what we got for doing nothing wrong, then asked us to imagine the beating we’d get if we did do something wrong.

  By the time I got home Idle Jack’s red finger marks had worn off my face and I didn’t tell my mother about the slap, but I did tell her of my disappointment at discovering I’d been put in 1B, rather than 1A. Next day the classroom door opened and in walked Ben.

  ‘Where’s Hines?’ the headmaster asked.

  Blushing, I raised my hand.

  ‘Your mummy says you’re a clever little boy,’ he said in a whining voice while moving his head from side to side.

  For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about, then I realised that after I’d complained to Mother about being put into 1B, she’d come up to school to try and persuade the headmaster to move me up into the A stream.

  ‘Come with me,’ Ben ordered.

  Humiliated and burning with shame, I rose to my feet. Some of the lads in our class wore their older brothers’ tattered handed-down clothes and boots with steel studs in the soles. As I followed Ben out of the classroom under their sneering gaze I was uncomfortably aware of my tie, my neatly pressed short trousers, knee-length stockings and new Clark’s shoes. If only my mother had let me come to school in my jeans and sneakers.

  I followed Ben to his office and he told me to wait outside with an older boy called Herb, who I knew by reputation. He was a wild, rough lad with jet-black hair, the kind of lad you dreaded coming across when out walking in the countryside. Once I’d seen him throwing stones at a man cycling to work. So my heart raced when he turned to me and asked: ‘Was that thi mother who’s just been to see Ben?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, blushing.

  Mother was a good-looking woman who was interested in fashion. She travelled on the bus to Sheffield to buy her clothes, and when she dressed up and put on make-up, as I knew she would have before coming up to school, she looked so glamorous she embarrassed me. As Herb stood facing me in his scruffy, tattered clothes I was expecting him to insult my mother. Instead he smiled and said: ‘She’s nice, her.’

  Mother could weigh up a situation in an instant. When she’d seen Herb standing outside the headmaster’s office, she would have guessed he wasn’t the type of lad to have been sent on an errand by a teacher, and, realising he was waiting to be caned, she would have smiled and spoken to him kindly.

  Moments later Ben called me into his office, and I noticed three or four canes on the top shelf of the bookcase as he irritably searched the shelves. Ben found a book, handed it to me and told me to read from it. I stood there fumbling to find the first page.

  ‘Any page will do,’ he said.

  I let the book fall open and looked at the page in front of me. The print was tiny, the lines close together. I started to read, but when I discovered that the passage I was reading contained words I’d never come across I faltered. Ben muttered and on the edge of my vision I could see him shaking his head. After I’d read three or four sentences he took the book away from me.

  ‘1B? You’re lucky you’re not in 1C, boy,’ he said. ‘Now get back to your class.’

  On that first morning when Idle Jack had slapped all the class across the face, I’d feared that, as our form teacher, he would teach us every subject, like the class teachers did in junior school. So I was relieved to discover Idle Jack only marked the register each morning and afternoon, and taught us art, and that we had different teachers for different subjects. Ronnie, our friendly first-year history teacher, wore a blue tracksuit. In
our first lesson he smiled and asked us to take our seats when we entered the classroom. He began telling us about the Spartans in ancient Greece, about their habit of throwing unhealthy babies off a mountain to their deaths, and about how Spartan boys aged eleven – the age we were – would already have had four years’ military training. If we had been Spartans, he told us, we would only have been allowed to have a gravestone with our name on it if we had been killed in battle. I was engrossed. Then, about ten minutes into the hour-long lesson, one of the lads homed in on the football coaching badge on Ronnie’s tracksuit and asked him if he’d seen our local team Barnsley’s match at the weekend. That was the end of the Spartans, and Ronnie talked about football until the bell rang to signal the end of the lesson. As we left the classroom delighted boys congratulated the lad who’d got the history teacher talking about football. I liked football but I didn’t want to hear the teacher talk about it in a history lesson. I had only left junior school a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t thought much about school before, but that wasted lesson brought home to me the fact that I’d been dumped in a school where my education didn’t matter.

  One evening, soon after my parents had heard I’d failed my eleven plus exam, and that I wouldn’t be going to grammar school, I’d overheard a snippet of an argument they were having. Dad said if I’d passed the exam it would have reflected well on Mother, and would have been a feather in her cap, just as Barry gaining a place at grammar school had been, and that was the main reason she was upset that I’d failed. Mother responded that she had been proud of Barry. Then she furiously demanded to know if Dad really believed she hadn’t just wanted what was best for me. In the end Dad had apologised. The previous year, while still at junior school, I’d seen Mother standing at the garden gate hardly able to contain her pride. When Barry had finally come down the lane dressed in his dark red grammar school blazer, and she’d told him the results of his GCE O level exams, he’d vaulted over the gate and run into the house to check the good news for himself. Back then, I’d wondered what all the fuss was about. Now, each evening, when I walked home from school and past lads in red blazers who’d got off the bus from grammar school, I longed to be like them, part of their world.

  One evening when I arrived home from school I opened the gate and walked down the path beside our house. Perched on top of the shed in our backyard was my magpie, Maggie, a beautiful bird with her black head and white breast, her blue-green wing feathers and her long tail shining in the late afternoon sun. She had been special to me ever since I’d carried her home that May evening nearly five months ago, my hands, arms and face covered in scratches from the thorns of a hawthorn tree that I’d had to climb, so I could reach into the large bundle of sticks that was her nest and take her.

  ‘Not be long, Maggie,’ I called to her as I opened the door and went into the house.

  There was no one home as I changed into jeans and sneakers before boiling a couple of eggs and mashing them up on a saucer to feed to Maggie. If there was a joint of meat in the pantry I’d usually cut off a few pieces and mix them in with the boiled egg. Sometimes I’d also break off bits of vegetables and add them to the saucer but this evening I could only find a few radishes. I’d never fed her radish before but I thought I’d see if she liked it and chopped one into Maggie’s boiled egg.

  As I carried Maggie’s saucer of food out of the back door my mother walked down the path carrying a shopping bag in each hand. She looked furious. Nodding towards Maggie, who was still perched on the shed roof, she said that after I’d gone to school in the morning ‘that blasted magpie’ had landed on the flowers and berries decorating an old lady’s hat, and that the old lady’s screams had brought out the neighbours who then had to sit her down on a wall where her nerves were calmed with a sip of water.

  When I laughed I sensed that my mother was so angry that for once in her life she might have hit me, and that only the shopping bags she held restrained her. Only yesterday, she reminded me, a neighbour had complained after Maggie flew inches above her dog’s head, chasing it up the street, her dog ‘yelping as if it had been shot’. Then she went on to recall how, a week earlier, a furious woman had banged on the door complaining how ‘that damned magpie’ had terrified her two boys by looking through the window as they ate their breakfast. She was ‘sick of it’, Mother told me, and said I had to get rid of her. As I walked behind the shed carrying Maggie’s saucer of food, she called: ‘And I mean it.’

  Placing the saucer of food on the ground behind the shed, I sat on the compacted earth beside Maggie. She seemed to be enjoying the radish, holding the small chopped pieces in the tip of her beak, then tilting her head back to swallow them. This wasn’t the first time Mother had insisted that I get rid of Maggie. Once was after a neighbour had complained that my magpie had flown in through the open window of her bedroom and at that moment was perched on top of the dressing-table mirror.

  I’d always been drawn to wild creatures. There was a newt pond with overhanging trees beside the colliery railway line, and holding a fishing net I’d dip it into the clear water of the pond and scoop out great crested newts, then carry them home in a jam jar of water and tip them into a fish tank on an old chest of drawers in the shed. Four or five inches long, jagged crests along their backs and orange and black spots on their bellies, the great crested newts swam around like little lizards, fascinating me for a few days before I returned them to the pond. Yet the newts I’d caught, the frogs I’d reared from tadpoles or the hedgehogs I’d kept didn’t have the same appeal as Maggie. I looked at her lovely long blue-green tail as she pecked at her food and remembered how short and stumpy it had been when I’d carried her home.

  Leaning back against the shed, I watched Maggie as she pecked and swallowed the last pieces of mashed-up egg from her saucer. To my horror she suddenly seemed to be struggling for breath, then began to vomit the chopped-up chunks of radish. She looked so ill, so vulnerable, as she retched and retched. How could I have been so unthinking as to feed her such hard food? I’d reared her from a stubby-tailed fledgling, kept her fit and alive until she’d become a healthy, beautiful juvenile, and now I was convinced she was dying in front of my eyes. I began to cry but moments later Maggie recovered miraculously and was up to her old mischief, pulling the laces on my sneakers with her beak, pecking at the turn-ups of my jeans. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop crying.

  Later that warm September evening I sat on the back doorstep, knowing Maggie would fly down from wherever she was perched. As she took one of my shoelaces in her beak and pulled it, I clamped my hand across her back then stuffed her into an old shopping bag and zipped it up. Carrying the bag, I walked through the village, through Bell Ground Wood, past Tankersley Old Hall and through fields enclosed by hedges and drystone walls; farmland which in the past had been the Old Hall’s deer park. When I reached the field with the hawthorn tree and the now deserted bundle of twigs that had been Maggie’s nest, I unzipped the shopping bag and Maggie flew out. I walked away, repeatedly glancing over my shoulder to watch her fly and land on stone walls as she followed me along the field paths. Occasionally walking backwards, I watched as she flew between trees as I made my way up the track that led to Tankersley Old Hall. If Maggie kept this up, and followed me back home, I would be able to tell Mother I had done my best to release her but that she wouldn’t go. However, when we got to Tankersley Old Hall farm, which stood in the grounds of the Old Hall, Maggie landed on the roof of a stable and reached down to peck insects from between the stones of the wall. When I called her she flew away across the farmyard, over a stone barn and out of sight, her blue-green wings and long tail shining in the evening sun.

  It was unlikely I’d see Maggie again and my heart ached. I’d thought of her as my pet, but the way she had ignored me and flown off made me realise I was nothing to her. At first I was upset but as I walked along the lane I began to feel differently. I was only eleven, and probably couldn’t explain it at the time, but there was something abou
t my magpie never having truly lost her wildness that had a strange appeal. Mixed in with my sadness was a feeling of pride; I’d been honoured to have reared and kept a wild bird like Maggie.

  A couple of evenings later, still missing Maggie, I decided to wander around Tankersley Old Hall farm, hoping to see her. I didn’t, but as I made my way home I stopped in my tracks to gaze up at a male kestrel hovering a few yards away beyond a drystone wall. Caught in the evening sun, the underside of its outstretched flickering wings and fanned tail shone a brilliant white. I’d never been so close to a kestrel. I could clearly see its blue head, large brown eyes, curved beak and the black talons at the end of its yellow clasped feet. I’d never found a kestrel’s nest, and I didn’t know if it was possible to rear one, but as I stood gazing up at that beautiful hovering kestrel, so aloof, so wild, I knew that I’d love to bring one into my life.

  THREE

  . . . it is no kindnesse, but violence and churlish usage, which must never be offered to a Hawke . . .

  – Edmund Bert, An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, 1619

  Smithy glanced around the classroom and called my name.

  ‘Hines?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He stared at me for a few moments then ticked off my name in the register. He called out another boy’s name, gazed at him for a while and then marked him present. After coming second in the end-of-term exam in 1B, I’d been moved up into the A stream. Now aged fourteen, I was in my fourth year at secondary modern school and it was my first morning in 4A, where Smithy, my new form teacher, was trying to match the names in the register with the faces of the boys in his new class.