No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  Later that day I visited a woman who lived in a rented caravan, whose name was nearing the top of the council house waiting list. The caravan site, which had a dozen or so caravans, was in a field behind a farm, on high ground. As I searched for the caravan, below I could see fields and woods, and in the distance our village of Hoyland Common. To qualify for a council house, people who lived in rented private properties needed to have kept their home clean and tidy and have paid their rent regularly. After I’d noted that the woman’s cosy caravan was immaculate, and flicked through her rent book and seen the payments were up to date, I was able to give her an idea of how long it would be before she and her husband could move into their council house. She chatted as I sipped the tea she had made, but I wasn’t listening. Gazing out of the caravan window at the surrounding fields and woods, my mind drifted back into that world of ‘mists, wet boots . . . solitude’ where T. H. White lived as a ‘deluded and imaginative recluse’ in a gamekeeper’s cottage and kept his goshawk in a barn with a brick floor and criss-crossed laths across its windows.

  Sunlight poured in through the high windows above the rows and rows of bookcases. Nearby a newspaper rustled as a man sitting at a large wooden table turned a page. It was a Saturday, my first day off work since I’d read The Goshawk. Still enthralled by White’s book, I’d caught the bus into Barnsley to search the bookshelves at the library there for books about hawks. Suddenly my heart raced. On a high shelf I’d seen the spine of a hardback book which read FALCONRY. Reaching up, I took down the book and flicked through the pages to a photograph of three falcons on a long perch, and another of a falcon perched on weighing scales. There were also drawings, with one showing how to tie the falconer’s knot, and another of falcon hoods with feather plumes.

  I put the book on the desk in front of the librarian.

  ‘I’d like to take this out, please.’

  ‘You can’t borrow that one, love,’ she said.

  ‘Can’t I join the library?’

  ‘You can join, love, and take other books out. But that’s a reference book – you can only read it in the library.’

  So I left the library and headed straight for a bookshop a couple of streets away, where a bell tinkled as I burst through the door. Usually I’d have wandered around looking at the books on the shelves but today I was too fired up and waited impatiently by the counter until a male assistant appeared from a backroom.

  ‘Have you got A Manual of Falconry by M. H. Woodford, please?’

  They didn’t have the book in stock, but he said he could order it and it would arrive in a couple of weeks. I ordered the book. I’d hoped it would be in stock and I was bitterly disappointed that I’d have to wait so long to read it. Then, as the bookshop assistant copied the book’s details from the piece of paper on which the librarian had written them, I had an idea. I didn’t need to wait two weeks or more. This was the early 1960s, before photocopiers, but I could copy out the reference book in the library by hand and read my own notes, while I looked forward to the arrival of the book itself with its illustrations and photographs.

  I hurried back to the library with a pen and large notepad, bought from a nearby stationery shop. Sitting at a library table I began copying sections of M. H. Woodford’s book by hand: the equipment needed for falconry; how to train falcons such as the peregrine. I copied out passages taken from medieval falconry books, as well as a glossary of ancient falconry terms. I felt like a scholar who had come across an ancient manuscript, as words from a long-lost age came to life:

  BATE, BATING . . . fluttering or flying off the fist.

  FULL-SUMMED . . . when a hawk has got all her new feathers after moulting.

  Everyday words took on a vivid history:

  PERCH . . . is that whereon you set down your hawk when you put her off your fist.

  – J. Ray, Summary of Falconry, 1678.

  I was amused to learn ‘booze’ originates from the falconry word for drink: ‘BOWSE . . . to drink; variously spelt “bouse”, “boose”, “bouze”, and “booze”.’ Above all, I loved the line from a book written by Edmund Bert in 1619: ‘There is no way but gentlenesse to redeeme a Hawke.’ I found this quote fascinating and strangely moving, just as I had when I’d read in The Goshawk of T. H. White’s knowledge, that only ‘gentleness’ could win over his crazy wild hawk, Gos.

  Items of falconry equipment, called ‘hawk furniture’, are of ‘supreme importance’ to the falconer, M. H. Woodford says, and it ‘behoves him to take great care they are of the best materials obtainable’. Returning from the library, still fired up, I went straight upstairs and into my parents’ bedroom and rummaged around until I found what I was looking for. Feeling the soft thin leather of my mother’s best gloves I worked out how I could cut them up to make a pair of ‘jesses’, the leather straps which fit around a hawk’s legs. The cobblers in the village had closed for the weekend, but on Monday lunchtime I called in and walked over to a display of dog leads. Picking up the different sized leads, I carefully examined the metal figure-of-eight-shaped swivel which holds the fastener that clips on to the dog’s collar. If I ever managed to get a hawk I could cut one of these swivels from the dog lead, and it would make a swivel to which I could fasten the jesses. Next I moved on to a stand displaying leather bootlaces and picked out the longest lace. With a knot tied at one end so it didn’t slip through the swivel, I could use a leather bootlace like this one for a hawk’s leash.

  In copying out sections of A Manual of Falconry and reading The Goshawk, I had discovered that both hawks and falcons were referred to by falconers as ‘hawks’ and distinguished by the different shape of their wings. So peregrines, for instance, were known as ‘longwings’, for these falcons of the open moors and cliffs have evolved long pointed wings to minimise air resistance, when with deep pumping wingbeats they come hurtling out of the sky in pursuit of their quarry. Goshawks and sparrowhawks, by contrast, were ‘shortwings’. Their broad, rounder wings have evolved for acceleration, allowing them to reach full speed within a second, or suddenly to change direction or height with a flick of their wings as they swerve around tree trunks, flashing through a wood or over a hedge like a grey shadow as they pursue their prey.

  On my walks I often went along Hoyland Road to the crossroads at the centre of the village, crossed the turnpike, then headed west along Tankersley Lane, where, after a couple of hundred yards or so, I entered the parish of Tankersley. To me the woods and fields there had previously been just that, woods and fields, but now I found myself walking through ‘shortwing’ country. Historically, those who flew ‘shortwings’ were divided into ‘austringers’, who flew goshawks, and ‘sperviters’, who flew sparrowhawks. Out walking one morning I accidentally flushed a covey of partridge from under my boots. Rather than watch them whirr away on their swept-back wings, as I had in the past, I now imagined a goshawk powering off the glove of an austringer of old, flying a few feet above the meadow in a desperate sprint to catch one of the partridges before it made it to the hedge bottom and escaped.

  Passing a cornfield of golden wheat stubble, I continued my walk and called into Tankersley church with its square Norman tower. As sunlight flooded through the stained-glass windows and threw patches of colour on to the stone-flagged floor, I stood gazing into a glass display case at the cannonballs that had been fired in the 1643 Battle of Tankersley during the English Civil War. What excited me was where they had been found, for the sign said Tankersley Moor. Around here used to be moorland: ‘longwing’ country. Tankersley church is located in fields, half a mile or more from Tankersley village, and, as I walked out of the church and past the rectory, I visualised the moorland which would have stretched out in front of me three centuries earlier. Again I imagined a falconer, this one casting off his peregrine to circle up to a thousand feet into the sky, before it plummeted to earth in pursuit of a covey of grouse flying across the purple heather.

  Not far from the church I paused at a stone dovecote and read a plaqu
e which said the dovecote had been built in 1735. Above this was an entrance where the pigeons flew in and out, and, in an attempt to try to make sure that all the pigeons provided eggs or ended up on the owner’s dinner table, it had been surrounded by iron spikes designed to impale marauding wild hawks. Although disgusted at that thought, as I gazed up at the iron spikes I was fascinated by the fact that the moors and cultivated land around Tankersley church would have once been the haunt of peregrines, goshawks and sparrowhawks. Yet, had I lived in those times, I wouldn’t have been allowed to fly a peregrine on the moor. I knew from reading Woodford and White, that, in 1486, when the Abbess Juliana Berners wrote about Tudor etiquette in her Boke of St Albans, she allocated particular hawks to different classes of people. She assigned the female and male peregrine – the ‘falcon gentle’ and ‘tiercel gentle’ – to a prince: ‘Ther is a Fawken gentill. And a Tercell gentill. And theys be for a prynce.’

  And, according to the Abbess, I wouldn’t have been able to fly a goshawk: ‘Ther is a Goshawke. and that hauke is for a yemen.’ Or a sparrowhawk: ‘Ther is a Spare hawke. and he is an hawke for a prest.’

  The kestrel is a falcon, a ‘longwing’ like the peregrine, but because it hunts voles and insects and the occasional small bird it was derided by falconers in the Middle Ages. So much so, that the Abbess Juliana thought it unworthy of inclusion in the Boke of St Albans. It does get a mention in a medieval Harleian manuscript where it is assigned to the knave.

  I’d never even seen a peregrine, or a goshawk, or a sparrowhawk, and in 1963, almost five hundred years after the Boke of St Albans had been published, I still hadn’t a hope of flying one. I’d read enough to know that after shotguns had improved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and shooting game birds had become popular, hawks had lost the esteem they had enjoyed in earlier centuries. And that gamekeepers, who were paid by their employers to rear game birds and to protect them from predators, had poisoned, trapped and shot goshawks into extinction in Britain by the 1880s. Although they hadn’t been similarly wiped out, sparrowhawks had often ended up swinging in the wind on a gamekeeper’s gibbet. Now in the 1960s news stories were reporting that sparrowhawks and peregrines were also on the verge of being poisoned into extinction by the overuse of dangerous agricultural pesticides.

  The only hawks I’d ever seen were the kestrels hovering over the meadows and verges beside the country lanes around Hoyland Common and Tankersley. Had I been able to choose one of the hawks listed in the medieval texts I would have chosen a goshawk. T. H. White had written to a German falconer and arranged for his goshawk to be transported to Britain in an aeroplane. I didn’t know any falconers, German or British, so if I was going to fly a hawk it would have to be a kestrel.

  EIGHT

  When all the feathers are hard at the base the hawk is said to be ‘hard penned’ and is ready to be taken up for training.

  – M. H. Woodford, A Manual of Falconry, 1960

  In the spring of 1964 I was still working in the housing department at the Town Hall. Towser was in the final year of his A levels and had been provisionally accepted at drama college. Unlike Towser, who’d discovered his talent for acting at grammar school, I still had no idea what I wanted to do in life. Things weren’t all bad, though. I’d met Lynn at a local dance. She was good-natured, had brown eyes, black hair, a lovely smile and worked as a secretary. On one of our first dates she invited me to sneak into the house of friends of her parents, whom she was babysitting for, to keep her company. Watching from a bus shelter I saw her parents’ friends, the local chemist and his wife, come out of their house wearing formal evening dress and climb into Lynn’s parents’ car. As soon as the car rounded a bend I hurried up the pavement and rang the doorbell. We’d only been sitting on the sofa a few minutes when we heard the front door being unlocked.

  ‘Hello,’ her dad called from the hall.

  Lynn jumped to her feet and her beautiful brown eyes desperately looked around the room, almost as if she expected to discover a previously hidden door she might bundle me through. She then started jabbing her finger at the sofa.

  ‘What?’ I silently mouthed.

  ‘Behind it,’ she mouthed back. ‘Get behind it.’

  I leapt from my sitting position and dived behind the sofa. To make sure my legs didn’t stick out I pulled myself into a crouching position as Lynn’s dad entered the room.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  The sofa moved as Lynn sat down.

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  The sofa sank as her dad sat down beside her.

  ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I seemed to be crouched behind the sofa for a long time before he left.

  Lynn’s fear that her dad would find out she had a boyfriend lasted for months, and when we walked through the village together she would suddenly let go of my hand and anxiously check out any car resembling her dad’s. So I was amazed when one day I was invited to a meal with family and friends. I was nervous walking up the drive to their new bungalow, and after I’d rung the doorbell I was disappointed to see Lynn’s dad’s shape through the glass door rather than hers, but when he opened the door he smiled as he invited me in. Lynn’s lovely mother made me feel welcome, and her investment banker brother and the family friends were all friendly. So much so that when we were all seated around the table eating, and one of the older male guests started talking about his schooldays, I joined in the conversation.

  Everyone listened as I told them that at junior school, when I was eight or nine years old and all the boys wore short trousers, our headmaster was renowned for slapping misbehaving boys hard on the backs of their legs. Continuing my tale I told them how one day a lad who’d been sent to the headmaster’s office for misbehaving was told to come back the following morning for his punishment, and how next day after hearing the headmaster had died in the night, the lad danced a jig in the playground to celebrate his unexpected escape from having his legs slapped. I laughed at my own story, but before anyone else could respond Lynn’s dad looked at me angrily and said: ‘I don’t think that’s funny.’

  Everyone ate on in embarrassed silence.

  I thought I’d lost my chance to make a good impression on Lynn’s dad but later, after Lynn had told him of an incident in which I’d gone to the aid of an old man and carried his flaming chip pan out of his council bungalow, he seemed to warm to me, and to my surprise invited me to accompany them on their family holiday in Cornwall.

  It was June. Pink wild dog roses were blooming in the overgrown cottage garden when I walked out of the housing department office. Earlier that day a council workman had told me he’d just finished working at a house where a teenager called John kept a kestrel. I could hardly believe it. The council were trying to cut their repair bill, and part of my job was to check if the repairs requested by tenants were really necessary. By chance my grandma Westerman, whose husband, my grandad, had been killed at the pit all those years ago, lived on the same council estate as the teenager and had requested a new set of kitchen taps. After hurriedly putting her work card in my folder, along with several other work cards requesting repairs I needed to check, I was now heading to John’s house hoping to see his kestrel. As I walked along the street of 1930s council houses where he lived, I passed dogs barking so crazily at the end of their chains I feared one might break loose. As I approached John’s house his grandma came out of the kitchen door and threw something in the dustbin. She told me John wasn’t in. I asked if I could see his kestrel and she led me into the living room. Pointing to a cardboard box on the floor beside the television, John’s grandma said: ‘She’s in there.’

  I couldn’t tell if the young kestrel crouched inside was a he or a she. In their first-year plumage male and female kestrels are identical but ‘she’ sounded appropriate. Taken by her beauty, her large brown eyes, her buff-coloured breast streaked with black, and forgetting what I’d read about the wildness of yet-to-be-trained hawks, I reached in
to the box to touch her. Suddenly animated and gasping with fear, the young kestrel struck out at my hand with her talons.

  John was a nice friendly lad, with jet-black collar-length hair, and was always smiling. We knew each other from secondary modern school, but later, when I saw him walking down the street and told him his grandma had shown me his kestrel, he wouldn’t tell me where he’d got his hawk from, or whether there were other young ones still in the nest. When I asked if he thought I could get a kestrel this year he said I’d no chance, and when I asked him if he could get me a kestrel next year he refused to commit himself. Even so I told him I lived down Tinker Lane if he needed to find me.

  I was about to have a week off work, and delighted with myself that I was packing to go on holiday with Lynn and her family. When I was younger our family holidays were taken during the local colliery’s annual week-long summer break, when most people from the village went to the seaside, and often stopped to chat together on the seafront. We travelled by coach to either Blackpool or Scarborough. I can remember how at Blackpool Tower zoo a monkey reached through the bars and grabbed my brother Barry’s hair; and also a single-propeller aeroplane flying a banner over Scarborough beach, the numbers under its wings suddenly becoming big and clear through the new plastic binoculars Dad had just bought me. I also remember drab 1950s backstreet guest houses with overbearing landladies, their strict rules forbidding guests to return until evening, and days spent wandering around aimlessly in drizzle and rain. This year, however, I would be staying in a seafront hotel. It was all exciting and new. I’d never been on holiday in a car, I’d never been to Cornwall, and for the first time I was going on holiday with a girlfriend.