Unlike twigs, or vases, or the clock on the mantelpiece, my young kestrel would be flying quickly towards me a few feet above the ground. The worry was that I might accidentally hit her with the lure. Following the instructions in my book on how to make a lure, I’d poured one and a half ounces of sand into it before sewing it up. It needed at least this amount to give the lure enough weight to enable me to swing it out to her as she approached. One and a half ounces seemed light but the weight of the lure wasn’t far short of a fifth of my kestrel’s body weight, and I worked out that if I accidentally hit her with it as she flew towards me this was the equivalent of me being hit with a bag of sand weighing around thirty pounds while running full-tilt. I also feared ensnaring her in the lure line and damaging her feathers as she chased the lure through the air.
It was an evening in July when I first put what I had learned into practice. The white clouds which minutes earlier had been sailing over the Pennine hills continued their eastward journey across the blue sky. Hawk on my glove, I stopped gazing at the clouds and with the wind at my back walked eastwards across the stubble to the edge of the field. There, Kes hopped from my glove on to the fence. Occasionally glancing back over my shoulder in case she set off before I called her, I walked into the middle of the field a hundred yards or so from the fence where she was perched. Taking the lure from my falconry bag, I unwound a length of lure line, leaving some wrapped around the lure stick. Then, gripping the stick in my gloved hand and holding the line in my other hand, I swung the lure in vertical circles, the attached sparrow’s wings whirring.
‘Kes . . . Come on, Kes.’
Now that she’d been ‘introduced’ to the lure she knew that her reward for catching it was a tasty snack of meat. So with her jesses trailing freely, she gained height as she flew towards me into the wind. Approaching fast she was almost upon me, a few feet higher than my head. Not yet. Not yet. Now! Then, after one last twirl of the lure, following the lure’s ascending arc I threw my arm upwards, letting the lure line slip through my fingers as its weight and momentum propelled the lure up to the hawk. She tried to grab the lure with her talons. I twitched it away, pulled down hard on the lure line, and kept it just out of her reach. To my delight she stooped – that is, dived head first through the air, before levelling out and curving upwards and into the sky.
Having failed to grasp the lure and take her prize of beef she looked confused, unsure what to do.
‘Come on, Kes . . . Come on, girl.’
Holding the lure stick in my gloved hand and pulling, I shortened the lure line, pulling it through the fingers of my lure-swinging hand, making it taut enough to swing the lure for a few twirls by my side, before throwing out my arm again and letting the lure line slip through my fingers as the lure’s momentum carried it up to within a fraction of an inch of her talons. Again she stooped, flying in a headlong dive as I pulled down hard on the lure line. Then, as she followed its rising arc, her momentum propelled her into the sky. She was panting now, beak open. After twirling the lure by my side a couple more times I lobbed it up to her slowly, allowing her to catch it in her claws. Keeping the lure stick in my hand I kept hold of the line as she fluttered down into the stubble. As she took her reward of beef from the lure I pushed the pointed end of the lure stick into the ground, in case she tried to fly off with the lure. Then I knelt beside her and offered her meat from the glove. When she hopped on I was delighted with my young kestrel’s performance. I fed her up on the glove as I walked across the stubble field and back to the mews.
Each evening I increased the number of stoops before letting Kes catch the lure and take her reward of beef. She became fitter, more cunning, varying her approach. Sometimes she flew in high, sometimes low. When she hit the lure with her outstretched talons, I’d reward my young hawk by letting the lure fall into the stubble for her to stand on and devour the attached beef, before flying her again. My lure swinging improved. When she flew in low over the stubble I became adept at throwing out the lure to her, then sweeping it in front of her before making it rise steeply, sending her shooting up into the sky, where she’d deftly flick her wings, turn over and stoop in a headlong dive. Evening after summer evening her pumping wings powered her downwards then upwards as she tried to get close enough to strike the arcing lure, which I kept tantalisingly just out of reach, until her momentum propelled her high into the air to begin another stoop. After a couple of weeks or so, she was on the wing and flying hard for up to fifteen minutes each evening before I let her strike the lure and take her reward. And so it went on throughout the summer and into autumn, my kestrel Kes hurtling downwards, before at the last moment arcing upwards from the golden stubble field and into the sky.
TWELVE
Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings, I’d whistle her off, and let her down the wind, To prey at fortune . . .
– William Shakespeare, Othello, 1603
It was late September, and, as I had done each evening for weeks over the summer and early autumn, I pressed the back of Kes’s legs against the wooden perch I’d fastened on to the top of the baking scales and persuaded her to step backwards on to them. Satisfied with her weight I took her up on the glove, walked out of the mews, through the gate at the bottom of Barry’s garden and into the field, where I raised my glove. Her large brown eyes surveyed the landscape, the stubble fields, the cows in the meadows, and beyond these the colliery slag heap. After I’d tilted my hand she flew off the glove and I walked into the middle of the stubble field. Taking the lure out of my falconry bag I unwound the lure line and looked up at the sky. I can remember the lovely evening skies of that summer of 1965, ribbed, high white clouds like seaside sand over which a retreating tide has rippled. But to my eyes the sky this evening was empty. I had been expecting to see Kes’s flickering wings and shallow wingbeats, interspersed with glides as she circled above me, waiting for me to begin swinging the lure. She was nowhere to be seen. Had she disappeared over the hedges or the horizon, never to be seen again? Heart racing, I looked around.
Eventually I spotted her perched on a fence post near the gate at the bottom of my brother’s garden, back where I’d entered the field and cast her off the glove. Confused, I thought back to her previous evening’s meal. Sparrow meat is more nutritious than beef, and when I’d first started to train her I occasionally gave her too much of it and would find that she was over her flying weight next day. When I’d weighed her this evening, though, her flying weight was spot on and her droppings, which falconers call mutes, looked healthy. I’d no idea why she was sitting on a fence post instead of flying above me looking forward to flying to the lure. Then I held a piece of meat on my glove and raised my arm to see if she’d fly to me, and she rocketed across the field and smacked on to my glove at what seemed to be twice her usual flying speed. She ate the meat so hungrily she looked as if she intended to go on to eat the glove once she had devoured the meat. Then, within seconds, her appetite had gone. She pecked at the meat very slowly; it seemed as if eating had suddenly become too much of an effort for her.
As I trudged back across the field my heart seemed acutely aware of how much the kestrel on my glove meant to me, and my brain flicked through the pages of my falconry books desperately searching for a diagnosis of her behaviour. Croaks? No. I would have heard wheezing. Aspergillosis? The hawk looked bright except for a shortness of breath. Could be that? No. The hawk refuses food or flicks it away with her beak. Suddenly I was overcome by dread. Just as T. H. White’s inexperience had caused the death of his first hawk, so I feared my own inexperience as a falconer was about to bring about the death of Kes. I realised that I hadn’t taken into account how her daily lure exercises would have built up her muscles over the weeks, and the weight she flew at when I started to train her, around eight and a quarter ounces, would now be too low. I should have increased her flying weight over the summer. It suddenly seemed so obvious.
Now I know that if a wild bird looks ill, its chances of survi
ving are poor because birds have evolved a way of concealing illness until they are almost dead, to avoid attention from other predators on the lookout for weaknesses. Back then I didn’t know why, but through my experience of finding wild birds I knew that any bird showing signs of illness would struggle to survive. Searching for such signs as I put Kes on her perch in the mews, I convinced myself that her usually round, bright eyes had become dull and oval-shaped. I began desperately to hope that I’d misremembered what I’d read, but I feared she might have used up all her fat reserves and would now be converting her muscle into energy. If that was the case her weight might suddenly drop and despite my frantic efforts to feed her up it would be too late. Kes would die.
That evening I fed her up on small pieces of meat offered in my fingers. Next morning I was up at dawn, jeans drenched with dew as I walked quickly through the fields. I looked through the slatted window of the mews fearing she’d be dead beneath her perch.
Two or three minutes later, she was standing on my glove tearing at the meat with her usual enthusiasm. I gave her three meals a day for the next few days. Once I’d raised her weight I fastened the creance to her jesses and began to test her keenness by swinging the lure a couple of times, before throwing it on to the lawn. If she refused to fly to it, at her next meal I slightly reduced the amount I fed her, until I found the highest weight at which she would fly. I don’t recall the precise weight but it was only fractionally more than her previous flying weight. Above this, in the words of the falconer Symon Latham: ‘her stomacke [appetite] be colde and dull’ and she would ‘flie wilde and carelessly . . . stooping here and there without care and respect for her keeper’.
A few weeks later, on a Friday morning in October 1965, I found myself standing in the foyer of Sheffield station waiting to meet Pat, my girlfriend from Wrexham, who I had met in Wales in the summer. The announcement of the arrival of her train echoed around the station and when I saw her innocently handing in her ticket to the ticket collector I felt awful. My timing was terrible. Just two days earlier I’d met another girl, Jackie, in Barnsley town centre, where, recognising me from the village, she’d said hello then blushed when I asked her if we knew each other. We travelled back to the village on the bus together. It was the day after her eighteenth birthday. She was a student at Barnsley Art School, was a fan of Howlin’ Wolf’s blues and had been wearing a purple dress that she’d designed and made herself. Then, last night, we’d been to the pub together, got on well and discovered our shared interests in literature, cinema, animals and birds. Mobile phones didn’t exist back then and as neither Pat, my Welsh girlfriend, nor I had a telephone at home, it had been too late to write and tell her to cancel her trip and now here she was, with her short black hair and lovely, trusting face smiling as she ran across the station foyer to greet me. On the bus to our village, as she talked excitedly, I decided the only fair thing to do was to make sure that she had a nice weekend and then write to tell her when she’d gone home that it was over.
Soon after we arrived at our house, looking for something to eat she took a paper bag out of the fridge and opened it before I could warn her. Screaming, she threw it down. Inside was a dead sparrow I’d shot. It was a beautiful warm autumn day and robins were singing in the hedgerows as we walked to the mews. Pat didn’t seem interested when I showed her Kes, and she looked bored as she stood in the field of stubble watching me fly my kestrel to the lure. Her earlier excitement had deserted her. Maybe she was disgusted by the thought that, after I’d flown her, my kestrel would eat the sparrow she’d discovered in the fridge, but I suspected that she’d sensed something was wrong.
The train began to move as I walked along the platform beside it. The plan had been that Pat would return home on Monday, but I couldn’t keep up my act for long and, with genuine sorrow, I’d apologised and called it off between us. So here we were back at Sheffield station on the Saturday morning, only a day after she’d arrived. My heart ached as she looked at me through the carriage window, tears rolling down her cheeks. For a moment I thought about opening the carriage door and asking her to jump off the moving train and continue her stay. For weeks she’d been telling family and friends she was going to visit her boyfriend in England. Now she faced the humiliation of explaining why she’d returned home early, why her hopes had come to nothing.
I was upset when the train left taking the poor lass back to Wales, but my sorrow didn’t last long. When I got back to the village I hopped off the bus and went to see Jackie. She was small, with short, straight dark brown hair and brown eyes. On our first date in the pub I’d been struck by how shy she was, how softly spoken, how hesitant her speech was as she weighed her words. Yet when she began to talk about art, she suddenly became eloquent. Passing garden borders full of pink and yellow autumn flowers – Michaelmas daisies, chrysanthemums – I hurried up the path of Jackie’s parents’ council house. Jackie blushed when she answered the door but seemed pleased to see me and invited me in. She’d been making a new dress and as she cleared away her sewing I looked at the beautiful pencil drawings in her sketchbook, moving from a nude model sitting on a chair, to an architectural detail from an ancient church, and then brambles in a hedgerow. She had her own bird, a budgerigar, which earlier she’d let out for a fly around the room. Later, after she’d carried her budgie on her finger and put him in his cage, she came with me to the mews. There she watched fascinated as I weighed Kes on the baking scales, then flew her to the lure in the stubble field.
After I’d flown the hawk we walked through the fields to my home, where I persuaded Jackie to test my knowledge of hawking terminology. Book open, she searched for questions to ask me from the glossary of Harting’s Bibliotheca Accipitraria.
‘What’s jouketh mean?’
‘Sleep.’ Not content, I made Jackie laugh by adding a quotation and a source: ‘Your hauke jouketh and not slepith – the Boke of St Albans, 1486.’
Smiling, Jackie looked down at the book and found another question to ask: ‘Cadge? What’s that?’
‘The wooden oblong square frame, on which hawks are carried hooded to the field,’ I told her.
‘What’s a cadger?’
‘The person who carries the cadge: hence the abbreviated form “cad”, a person fit for no other occupation.’
The next day, Sunday, when I called at Jackie’s house I discovered I’d already met her parents. Her dad, a bricklayer, had once stopped to ask me about Kes when he’d seen me ‘manning’ her. And her mother worked in a local fish and chip shop and had served me many times over the years. That day was warm despite the sun being a ghostly white disc through high mist, and later, as we walked hand in hand through Hoyland Common, Jackie and I passed the stone-built infant school we’d both attended. When we reached Calvert Street, three streets away from where I lived, Jackie pointed out the small brick terraced cottage in which she’d been born and had lived until the age of eleven, when she’d moved with her parents into their council house. Moments later, we passed the junior school where we’d both been pupils. I’d been in a class two years above Jackie; even so we’d have sat in the same assemblies, played in the same playgrounds. Yet we didn’t remember ever having seen each other. As we headed up Tankersley Lane, and along a path that led to Tankersley church, I asked Jackie about her life.
She’d been confined to bed with rheumatic fever and hadn’t attended junior school for the whole year before sitting her eleven plus. The result of her exam wasn’t straightforward. She’d been a ‘borderline case’ and had to wait weeks for the final decision as to whether or not she’d passed. The decision went against her, and Jackie ended up at Kirk Balk Girls’ Secondary Modern School, which was on the same site as the boys’ school I’d attended, but was segregated from it and had a different head teacher. In her final year there, at the age of fifteen, and when it was time to think about finding a job, she’d been taken on a school visit to a ‘typing pool’ in a Sheffield factory. Row after row after row of women sat al
l day tapping away on typewriters. She didn’t fancy that. In fact she’d no idea what she wanted to do. Then art came to her rescue. Curiously, Jackie’s mother hadn’t noticed her daughter had an aptitude for art, but when a friend of Jackie’s pointed this out to her, her mother went up to school to see the art teacher. Soon afterwards, carrying a folio of her work, Jackie was on her way for an interview at Barnsley Art School. She was accepted. She’d already taken Art and Craft O levels, as well as other O levels which had been taught in classes at Barnsley Tech. Now she was working on her A levels at the art school.
By now, as I listened to her story, Jackie and I had passed Tankersley church and were walking down the lane which led to Tankersley Old Hall. When we got there, I pointed out the nest in the ruined wall from which Kes had come.
After that Sunday walk, Jackie and I spent our evenings and weekends together. On some evenings, as Jackie sat at a table doing her work for art school, I’d sit on her bed listening to pop songs on pirate Radio 270, which was broadcast from a ship moored off the coast of Scarborough. One evening I asked about an old black and white photograph on a chest of drawers, which showed an old man sitting in a field with a sheepdog lying beside him. This was her grandad, her mother’s dad, with his dog, Fly, Jackie told me, then went on to explain that he had been a tenant farmer in nearby Wentworth, where her mother was born. I was intrigued, so the following Sunday afternoon we walked the couple of miles or so to Wentworth village, and through the fields in which, as a girl in the 1920s, Jackie’s mother had taken beer and sandwiches to her dad for his lunch at harvest time. And where, later in autumn, Jackie’s mother, along with her own mother, Jackie’s grandma, had gleaned wheat seeds from the stubble to make bread over the winter, and where, in spring, Jackie’s grandad had walked behind his shire horses, holding and guiding the plough they were pulling as it turned the earth into long, straight furrows.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 10