Later that evening there was a knock on the back door. I assumed it was Lynn and opened the door smiling, keen to tell her I was all packed up and ready to go; but standing on the doorstep was John, holding something in his cupped hands. It took me a moment to realise it was a young kestrel. My mind was in turmoil. I’d been looking forward to going to Cornwall with Lynn for months. I’d dreamt of keeping a hawk for years. And now . . .
‘Does tha want it?’ John asked, surprised by my hesitancy.
‘Err . . . yeah . . .’ I said as I carefully took the young kestrel from him.
Later, after I’d put the hawk into a cardboard box, I trailed a piece of beef across her yellow feet. She grabbed the meat and held it in one foot, and as I slowly backed away she lowered her head, tore off a piece of meat and swallowed it. At last I had a hawk. I should have been delighted but I felt troubled. Soon I’d have to tell Lynn she would have to go on holiday without me. Then, as I watched my kestrel tear and swallow more meat with her curved beak, I recalled from reading my falconry books that a young hawk’s feathers wouldn’t be fully grown for at least two weeks after she’d been taken from the nest. I realised it wouldn’t be detrimental to her health if the cardboard box acted as a nest until I returned from my week’s holiday. Barry liked birds – he’d kept an injured crow as a lad when I was at infant school – and I decided to ask him if he would feed my young kestrel while I was on holiday.
Barry’s teenage Teddy-boy style of dressing hadn’t lasted long. Aged seventeen or eighteen, he’d been selected to attend the trials for the English Grammar Schools’ football team, which were held at Cambridge University. Barry made it into the England team, but while staying and dining in one of the older Cambridge colleges he’d not only met posh southern grammar school boys, but public school boys as well, and it had made him self-conscious. Or as he’d put it when he returned home, ‘I felt like an oik, dressed in my fingertip-length jacket and tight trousers.’ To my dismay, soon afterwards he stopped wearing his hair brushed back, and instead had it neatly parted, and he began to wear respectable-looking jackets and trousers.
After he’d left Loughborough College, and taught physical education in a London school for two years, Barry had returned home to teach the same subject in a secondary modern school in Barnsley. As a teenager Barry had called me ‘Our Nipper’, and had ignored me when we met while he was out with his friends. Now the six-year age gap between us no longer mattered. We were good friends, and each Monday and Thursday evening we met up and drank a few pints of Barnsley Bitter together in the Star. Now married, Barry lived on the edge of the village in a detached 1930s house with bay windows, and a long garden which backed on to fields. His house was about half a mile away from the family home, where I still lived with my mother. To get there, I could either go up Hoyland Road, past the church mission hall and a couple of farmhouses and old stone cottages, or through the fields. This evening it was sunny, so I walked through the fields, opened a gate into Barry’s back garden and walked up to the house. His wife Margaret said he was working and sent me upstairs.
As well as being a teacher, Barry was also a writer, the last thing I would have imagined him becoming. For as far as I knew, despite his grammar school education Barry had never read a novel in his life. Then, one wet day, when eighteen or nineteen years old and stuck in his lodgings at college, bored out of his mind, he’d asked his room-mate if he had anything to read. I think the book he was handed was George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Whatever the book, it sparked Barry’s interest and set him off reading every novel he could find, and finally led to his decision to become a writer. He’d already written radio plays for the BBC, and when I reached the top of the stairs I could see him through the open door of a small spare bedroom, biro in hand, sitting at his desk writing on a sheet of lined paper as he worked on his first novel. When he looked up and saw me in the doorway his striking blue eyes looked as if they were trying to focus, as he came out of the world of fiction that he was writing about and adjusted to the reality of me standing there. Barry was happy to help me out with my kestrel until I told him the harsh reality: beef was all right in an emergency, but the young kestrel would need to be fed wild prey, which was much more nutritious and would ensure healthy growth. Barry didn’t fancy stalking the hedgerows with an air rifle, and so later that evening I arranged for Towser’s younger brother Chris to shoot birds for Barry to feed to my young kestrel.
On the journey to Cornwall in the front seats of the car Lynn’s mother and dad sang:
Ramona, I hear the mission bells above
Ramona, they’re ringing out our song of love . . .
Sitting in the back of the car Lynn and I smiled at the sweet love song, written by Mabel Wayne and L. Wolfe Gilbert, for the 1928 film Ramona, but this was 1964, the Beach Boys were on the airwaves, and we were excited to be on our way to St Ives.
When we arrived at the seafront hotel I was stunned by the views, the golden beach, the turquoise sea, the harbour across the bay. As I sunbathed on the beach with Lynn I watched gulls soaring in the clear blue sky, dreaming of the time when my young kestrel would be flying across the field to my raised glove. Before we left I’d taken a last look at her crouched in her box. With her large brown eyes looking at me, flecks of down still on her head, she had looked so beautiful that I wished I’d cancelled my holiday. But as we lay on the beach together, and spent our evenings hand in hand, smiling and chatting, as we walked around the fishing village streets with their quaint shops, their white cottages and hanging baskets full of flowers, I was convinced I’d done the right thing. My young kestrel wouldn’t be ready to start training for at least a fortnight, Barry was looking after her and I’d be back home in a few days after the best holiday of my life.
It was a beautiful sunny evening when I arrived back home in the village. Desperate to see my kestrel, I hurried up to Barry’s house through meadows golden with buttercups. I opened the gate which led from the field into Barry’s garden, approached the corrugated-iron air raid shelter and carefully opened the door so as not to alarm the young kestrel. It wasn’t there. I hurried up the garden path and looked in the garage. The kestrel wasn’t there either. I knocked on Barry’s door and entered the kitchen, thinking that he must have brought the kestrel into the house in its box.
‘Hello,’ I called.
Barry walked in from the hall. He looked awful. Against his white face his pale blue eyes looked bluer than ever. I thought he was ill.
‘It’s dead.’
He told me he’d followed my instructions and cut up the sparrows Chris had shot and fed the hawk three times a day. He said it seemed all right but a couple of mornings ago when he’d gone into the air raid shelter he’d found it dead in its box. I guessed a sharp bit of bone must have perforated its crop – part of the gullet where food is stored before being digested – or it had swallowed some large feathers and died of inflammation of the crop. I tried to console Barry yet inside I was raging. I could hardly believe what I’d done. Unexpectedly I’d been given what I’d dreamed of, longed for, a hawk, but rather than take care of it myself I’d handed it over to someone else while I went on a week’s holiday. Now my chance to train a kestrel had gone. On my way back home I stopped and gazed at the patch of recently disturbed earth in the field where Barry had buried the young kestrel.
Two or three months after our return from holiday, Lynn borrowed her parents’ car. The plan had been to go for a drive together, but even before we’d got out of the village she suddenly pulled into the side of the road, turned off the car engine and stared through the windscreen.
‘What’s wrong?’
She continued to look straight ahead.
‘You want to dump me, don’t you?’
‘I think we should stop seeing each other,’ she said, turning to me.
She said I’d been her first boyfriend. Had we met when we were both a little older, she added, things would have probably worked out. She was kind and didn’t
want to hurt me, but she couldn’t soften what she said next: ‘I’ve been seeing Alan.’
‘Towser?’
She stared out of the windscreen again.
‘You’ve teamed up with Towser?’
Strange, isn’t it? How when we’ve been dumped, instead of accepting the other person has got fed up with us, we feel betrayed and rage against them for having the audacity to prefer someone else to us. I flung open the car door and climbed out.
‘Richard, I’m sorry,’ Lynn said with genuine feeling.
I swung the door shut and marched off into the village.
Towser and I had been friends at junior school, at secondary modern school, at Barnsley Tech, and then at Ecclesfield Grammar School. When I’d jacked in grammar school we’d remained best mates, going to the pub and theatre together and lending each other books. On occasions Towser and his girlfriend had joined Lynn and me for a night out. On that day, as I strode along Hoyland Road raging against Towser I saw him walking towards me with my brother. Of the two, Towser looked more like a writer, with his earnest way of talking and his interested, thoughtful way of listening. Barry, with his slim build and the sleeves of his V-neck sweater pushed up to his elbows, looked more like an athlete. As I approached them I could hear them discussing Dylan Thomas’s play Under Milk Wood. Towser and I loved that play, we both liked the character Organ Morgan and we were both amused by a description of the starless night in the play –‘bible-black’. My intention that day was only to tell Towser what I thought of him. Admittedly I suspected I might give weight to my thoughts by pinning him against a wall, but when I saw his ‘bible-black’ curly hair and handsome face I was surprised to feel my arm swing through the air and my fist smack into his nose.
Poor Barry, who seconds earlier had been discussing Dylan Thomas, was so surprised and shocked it seemed to affect his vocal cords. Speaking in a posh formal voice which sounded nothing like his usual speaking voice, Barry said: ‘You disgust me.’
Towser didn’t look disgusted or even the least bit surprised. Except for the blood pouring out of his nose he looked quite normal. Taking a white hankie from his pocket he held it on his nose, pinched his nostrils together with his finger and thumb, and in a nasal tone said: ‘I think we need to talk about this.’
Which we did. I don’t remember what we said, but we’d walked along field paths and past Tankersley Old Hall before Towser could stop pinching his nose with his bloody hankie and talk in a normal voice again.
NINE
There is, sir, an airey of children, little eyases, that cry out . . .
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1599
A few weeks after my twentieth birthday in 1965, on a warm June evening I set off on a walk to Tankersley Old Hall. When I reached the crossroads at the centre of the village, instead of going straight ahead up Tankersley Lane I turned left and walked down the turnpike. It was up this hill that, in 1843, the last horse-drawn stagecoach had travelled through Hoyland Common. I knew this piece of history from talking to Arthur Clayton, a miner at Rockingham Colliery, who later became a published local historian and who I often came across in the village or when out walking. Arthur had discovered a newspaper advertisement from 1843, offering for sale the four horses that had pulled the mail coaches along this stage of the turnpike. Often Arthur was so fired up by his subject, oblivious to the cold, biting wind or the crack of thunder, that he would keep me talking when I was impatient to be off. Yet when the weather was fine I loved to listen to him, and the local history he taught me added interest to my walks. For example, as I walked down this section of the turnpike called Parkside, which still had an eighteenth-century milestone, I knew I was walking along the boundary of the medieval deer park which had once surrounded Tankersley Old Hall. That June evening as I climbed over a stile and into the parish of Tankersley and the fields which had once been the deer park, it fascinated me to think that in 1727, on his tour of Britain, Daniel Defoe had visited here and written that he believed the red deer in Tankersley Park were the largest in this part of Europe – before going on to make the exaggerated claim that one of them had been even bigger than his horse.
The land here had been divided by a stone wall into two fields. Early in spring, in the field to my left, lapwings had nested in scrapes of earth between green wheat shoots, and had risen and tumbled in the sky above my head, calling ‘peewit . . . peewit . . .’ as I’d walked along the path beside the stone wall. Now, in June, the corn was knee-high and had already begun to turn golden, and tall flowers – pinkish-purple foxgloves, white ox-eye daisies, red poppies – grew beside the stone wall. In the field over the wall to my right, black and white cows grazed and swallows flew low over the grass catching insects.
Soon the path led into Bell Ground Wood, its name derived from the bell pits that had been dug here for ironstone mining in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Walking through the tall, mature trees of the wood, with shafts of sunlight pouring through the leaves of its green canopy, it was difficult to imagine that the ground under my feet had once been scarred by mining. Yet the evidence was there, a few yards off the path through the undergrowth. In the past miners had sunk a shaft into the seam of Tankersley ironstone, which was only a few yards deep, and mined ironstone within a five- or six-yard radius, which they had hauled to the surface using ropes on a pulley system. Now, well over a century later, as I stood on the edge of one of those collapsed shallow bell pits, it reminded me of a bomb crater. The magnificent trees which now grew in Bell Ground Wood, Arthur had told me, had been planted to conceal them.
Back on the path, I continued walking through the wood and as I came out on to a cart track opposite Tankersley Old Hall I saw John, the lad who’d brought me the young kestrel that had died. He had an air rifle tucked under his arm and was gazing across a field of buttercups at the ruins of Tankersley Old Hall. As I approached him he smiled, but his eyes didn’t look pleased to see me. Maybe somebody had told him the fate of the kestrel.
‘Getting a kestrel this year?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ he said.
‘Does tha know a nest? I want to get one.’
‘Wait here.’
Curious, I watched John walk down the track. After fifty yards or so he stopped, aimed his air rifle and fired at the ruined Old Hall. Moments later a kestrel flew out and disappeared over Bell Ground Wood. There was a nest somewhere in the ruins, and John had fired close to the nest hole to scare out the kestrel. He was obviously trying to keep the location a secret, and hadn’t wanted me to see the kestrel fly out. Yet by the time he’d walked back up the track to join me, it seemed to have dawned on him that even if I didn’t know exactly where the nest was, I could find it by watching the parents fly in and out of the ruined Hall. Eventually he told me he’d been watching the nest for weeks, then, as he nodded towards the stone farmhouse which stood only yards away from Tankersley Hall, he said he was going to get a young kestrel late one night, when the farmer had gone to bed, and that I could go with him and take a kestrel for myself.
A few nights later, around eleven thirty, John called at our house and I stepped out into the June night to join him. New council houses were being built on allotments at the edge of the village. Stepping over a pile of canes left from the previous year, the dead runner beans still attached to them, we spotted a ladder leaning against the scaffolding of a half-built house. Lowering the ladder to the ground, we carried it out of the building site. The moon was large and bright and the occasional trail of white cloud was visible against a dark blue sky. Black and white cows watched us as we walked through the fields carrying the borrowed ladder between us. When we entered Bell Ground Wood John let go of the ladder, cupped a hand around his mouth and struck up a conversation with a tawny owl. His every ‘Whoo ooo’ returned from within the dark wood like a ghostly echo. To our relief the lights were out in the farmhouse next to the Hall; the farmer’s dogs were silent. We clambered over the wall and headed across the field
towards the looming ruins.
The last tenant to live in Tankersley Old Hall in 1654 was Sir Richard Fanshawe, a Royalist in the English Civil War. In her memoirs his wife, Lady Anne Fanshawe, writes, ‘The house of Tankersley and Park are both very pleasant and good’, and while there she and Sir Richard ‘lived a harmless country life, minding only country sports’. Falconry was the rage back then. As an aristocrat Sir Richard would have been knowledgeable about the country sport of hawking. In her memoirs Lady Anne also says Sir Richard ‘spent his idle hours’ reading and that even when out walking he had ‘some book in his hand’. I’d read a vivid description of how to hood a hawk that had been taken from Edmund Bert’s 1619 book An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, and I was fascinated by the thought that, over three hundred years ago, Sir Richard would have probably read those selfsame words.
As John and I placed the ladder against the wall, extending it so as to reach the kestrels’ nest, I sensed a connection with Sir Richard across the centuries. He’d have known that hawks’ nests were ‘eyries’, young hawks ‘eyases’, and that the correct term for fully grown feathers was ‘hard penned’. I imagined that, rather than looking on us as trespassers, Sir Richard, despite holding kestrels in low regard, might have encouraged us to climb up to its eyrie, and told us how long it would be before the eyases’ feathers were fully grown, and they would be ready to train.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 7