One evening as Jackie worked on her art, I found myself sitting on her bed looking through her four Flower Fairies children’s books. She’d had these books since infant school, and each illustration showed a fairy with a pair of butterfly’s wings, dressed in clothes the colour of the wildflower the fairy was holding. As a child, she had used these books to teach herself to identify wildflowers. I discovered that not only did Jackie know the names of most wildflowers, she also knew where they grew. She had a particular fondness for spring wildflowers, and on our next walk together she pointed out the places where some of her favourites would flower next spring: yellow cowslips in the uncultivated field beside the old turnpike road; dog violets the other side of a stile leading into Bell Ground Wood; pink purslane just off the path opposite Tankersley church.
We visited the pubs in our village but on some evenings we walked through the countryside to the Rockingham Arms in Wentworth. We loved sitting in that country pub with its stone-flagged floor and blazing fire, Jackie with half a pint of beer, me with a pint, as we tucked into a cold roast beef sandwich and talked. Maybe it was because of our shared pit village background, or perhaps because of our shared love of nature and the countryside. It could have been because we’d both been scarred by our experiences of being dumped in a secondary modern school at the age of eleven, which had resulted in shared feelings of awkwardness and low self-esteem. Whatever the reason, almost from the moment we’d met we’d both felt an affinity. We just seemed to like each other, both of us accepting the other as they were, and not expecting or wanting them to be something they were not.
It was the end of October, when the hedges and cobwebs glistened with dew.
Kes had been born in the wild, and I believed it was now time to release her back to where she belonged. Or, to use the falconry term, I’d decided to ‘hack her back’ to the wild. After she’d eaten her fill of meat on my glove I cut off her jesses and raised my arm. I was struck by her beauty, her curved beak, her large brown eyes calmly looking around the stubble fields and meadows, her buff-coloured breast feathers with dark streaks, her yellow legs and toes with their black talons gripping my glove. I imagined when offered her freedom she might fly straight to a fence post, or land unsurely in a hedge, but she flew off my glove and powered into the sky.
That wasn’t the last time I saw Kes, for the next day at the same time I was back in the field swinging the lure. She must have flown low across the field behind me because I was only aware of her presence when she seemed to appear out of nowhere and snatch the lure. I let the lure fall to the ground and she devoured the meat fastened to it. When ‘making in’ – approaching her when she was eating on the lure – I always took great care, offering her titbits of meat, and crouching down so I didn’t seem like a threat by looming over her. I was proud she had never ‘carried’, flown off with the lure grasped in her talons, but today, after only twenty-four hours of living in the wild, instead of hopping on to my glove to eat the meat I offered her, as she had all summer and autumn, she tried to fly off with the lure. I held on to the line, but she wouldn’t let go, and for a few moments it must have looked as if I was flying a fluttering bird-shaped kite at the end of a string. Finally, I threw the meat I’d been holding to the ground and she dropped the lure, grabbed the meat and carried it to a fence post to eat. I was struck by how quickly she’d forgotten the lessons I’d taught her, how wild she’d become.
Witnessing how quickly Kes had reverted to the wild brought home to me the appeal of hawks, why I was obsessed with them. They have no understanding of hierarchy, of social subservience; it’s not in their make-up to be herded and controlled. Shouting or bullying or using physical force won’t make a hawk submissive. I love their wildness, how they can’t be domesticated, how their will can’t be broken by cruelty or violence. One of my favourite quotes came from The Goshawk: ‘The mishandled raptor chose to die.’ Yet over my summer flying Kes, I’d shown how a hawk’s intractable nature can be won over. I loved the advice given by Nicholas Cox in his 1674 The Gentlemen’s Recreation: ‘You must by kindness make her gentle and familiar with you.’ I think it was this wisdom, passed down the centuries, which made hawks so appealing to me, this insight that an intransigent hawk, whose wildness is never lost and always resides just beneath the surface, can be reached, not by force, but by gentleness and kindness. It intrigued and delighted me that by treating Kes kindly while keeping my side of the bargain to provide her with food and fly her free in the fields, I’d been allowed to spend a summer and autumn in her presence.
Each day, at the same time, I returned to the field and swung the lure. Some days she would turn up to grab the meat I threw out for her and eat it on a fence post a couple of fields away, and on other occasions she would disappear over the hedges carrying it in her talons. Increasingly there were days when she didn’t show up until, finally, after she hadn’t returned for over a week, I stopped going into the field to swing the lure. Kes had been ‘hacked back’.
For the rest of autumn and over the following winter and spring I keenly watched any wild kestrel that I came across when out walking. Maybe it was because I was worried how Kes would survive in the wild, but for the first time I noticed how many times kestrels miss when hunting. I’d watch them hover, drop into the grass, and more often than not, fly up clutching a clump of grass or a twig, rather than the vole at which they’d presumably aimed. I knew that even if the wild kestrel I was watching was the one I’d trained, there would be no sign of recognition. Even so, after glancing around to make sure no one was working the land or walking the field paths nearby, I’d look up at the wild kestrel hovering or flying overhead and call: ‘Kes . . . Come on, Kes.’
THIRTEEN
Alas! . . . That we should live to see our noble falcons gibbeted, like thieves, upon ‘the keeper’s tree’ . . .
– J. E. Harting, The Ornithology of Shakespeare, 1864
I’d hacked Kes back to the wild, but my passion for hawks remained undiminished. Flying my kestrel was only half of it, for I delighted in the ancient language of the books. There seemed to be a term for every movement my kestrel had made:
FEAKE . . . said of a hawk when she wipes her beak on the perch after feeding (J. E. Harting, Bibliotheca Accipitraria, 1891).
MANTLE, said of a hawk when she stretcheth one of her wings after her leg . . . (Nicholas Cox, The Gentleman’s Recreation, 1674).
WARBLE . . . when she . . . bryngith booth her wynges togeder ouer hir backe, ye shall say youre hawk ‘warbellith hir wynges’ (Juliana Berners, Boke of St Albans, 1486).
Falconry history fascinated me, and at work, as I wrote down a property repair requested by a tenant, or handed someone a form to fill in to get on the council house waiting list, I’d tell them stories from falconry’s past. Such as how the Bishop of Ely threatened a medieval thief with excommunication for stealing a monk’s sparrowhawk from the cloisters of Bermondsey Abbey. I must have driven my Town Hall colleagues crackers. I’d walk into the finance department, forget my errand and keep them from their work by telling them about the medieval nuns who were reprimanded by the bishop for taking their hunting hawks into church. Or I’d tell them how a woman farm labourer on Salisbury Plain in the late 1880s had refused to kowtow to the toffs of the Old Hawking Club when a crow, being pursued by their trained falcon, dropped out of the sky and took refuge under her long skirt. Despite threats to push her over if she didn’t drive the crow out, the woman had only hitched up her skirt and let the crafty crow fly free after the falconers had called their peregrine down to the lure and ridden off.
Even out on my work visits I’d steer the conversation around to hawks. One day I visited a woman whose name was nearing the top of the council house waiting list, who lived in a tiny brick terraced cottage. I found it embarrassing having to look through the rent books of tenants living in rented private property, to check if they were in arrears with their rent. Once when a woman who hadn’t been able to pay her rent for the last c
ouple of weeks clung to me, crying and begging me not to report this to the council and ruin her chance to escape her awful damp rented property, I perjured myself by noting her rent book was all paid up. That day’s private tenant didn’t mind when I flicked through her rent book, and she smiled as I glanced around the room checking the house was clean and tidy, before writing my findings in a notebook. Put at ease by her friendliness I told her how my kestrel had come from a nest, but how in the past falconers preferred to fly ‘passage hawks’, which were trapped as they followed flocks of migrating birds in the autumn. As I spoke, the woman, who was about twice my age, stood looking at me smiling.
‘You remind me of my brother when he was young,’ she said.
Encouraged by her interest I told her how generations of the Mollen family, who lived in Valkenswaard in Holland, used to trap hawks for falconers by hiding in a turf-covered hut from which they pulled several lines to trigger a trap. I was about to explain how they tethered a grey shrike to a perch so that its alarm call would alert the trapper to an approaching falcon, when I realised that although looking up at me fondly, the woman wasn’t listening to a word I was saying. Before I could get back to talking about her prospects of getting a council house she said: ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kiss me.’
Taken aback and embarrassed, I gave the woman a quick kiss on her cheek, gave her an idea of how long she and her family would have to wait for their council house, then hurried out of the door.
Working in the council housing department was a worthwhile job, for we were helping provide a decent home for people who couldn’t afford to buy their own. I also found meeting people interesting. Once a woman mysteriously shouted ‘Stop wiping your feet’ at me as I wiped them on the doormat. Then she began to sob, and continued to sob and sob and sob as she told me her partner, before going to work, had forced her to have unprotected sex with him. When I returned late to the office and explained how the poor woman, desperate for someone to talk to, had delayed me, the housing manager forcefully told me I wasn’t paid to be a social worker. Yet, talking to council house tenants and people on the waiting list was what I liked best about my job: telling them my falconry tales, hearing their stories and sorrows. Unfortunately the bulk of what I was paid to do didn’t interest me, particularly the office work. I seemed to spend hours pulling out drawers and then sliding them back into filing cabinets, as I filed repair work cards or other information into the file of each individual council property. I also had to update a ledger called the rental register. Council house tenants could request improvements to their house and pay extra for them on their rent – a new fireplace, say, for a shilling and six pence a week – and I had to write these rent increases into the rental register and make sure the various columns of numbers added up. I dreaded the audit at the end of the financial year.
Bored with office work I took to pranks to liven up my days. One day, for instance, I was working in an upstairs office that was once a bedroom in the converted cottage. From downstairs I heard a woman from the finance department asking a colleague if she knew where I was, as she wanted to ask me a work-related question. My colleague told her I was upstairs. The woman asked if she was sure and said somebody had said they thought they’d seen me go out, perhaps across to another department in the Town Hall. My colleague must have been irritated that her word was being doubted.
‘He’s upstairs,’ she said in a sharp, bossy voice.
Annoyed by her manner, I hurried across to the upstairs window, opened it and climbed down a drainpipe. When I came in through the front door my colleague was amazed, and apologised to the woman who’d been looking for me, who was now coming back down the stairs after finding the upstairs office empty.
Another day I went into the public health department and handed the chief public health officer a jar of Colman’s mustard. I’d just bought it, I told him, but there was something wrong with it. Sitting at his desk, he held it up and examined it.
‘It looks as if the vinegar’s run,’ he said.
‘I don’t think that’s the problem,’ I said. ‘It smells awful.’
Looking puzzled, he unscrewed the lid. A green snake rose out of the mustard jar emitting a shrill scream. Horror-struck, he leapt backwards, his glasses slipping down his nose, his chair scraping on the floor as he threw the mustard jar and snake on to the desk in front of him. I laughed as I concertinaed the green paper and wire snake back inside the jar, and screwed on the lid, but the public health officer was understandably furious.
That evening after work, as my mother prepared my tea, I told her about the prank. I thought she’d laugh, or at least smile, but she was terribly angry. Raging at me as she put my favourite meal of chips and egg on the table, she said, ‘You’re not right in the head, Richard’, then went on to tell me that I’d not only ‘shown up’ myself with my stupid behaviour, but that I’d ‘shown her up’ as well. Finally, she told me that I’d end up getting sacked from my job.
Maybe I was subconsciously trying to get myself sacked. In a few months, in May 1966, I’d be twenty-one and I still had no more idea of what I wanted to do with my life than I had when I’d left secondary modern school. One thing I did know. I didn’t want to study for the professional qualifications I needed if I was ever going to be promoted to assistant housing manager, or even a housing manager. So, one day, while working on the rental register, I decided to jack in my job. I’d had summer holiday jobs while at Barnsley Tech and grammar school, working as a labourer for the council housing maintenance department. I’d quite enjoyed that work, so unsure of what else to do I had a chat with the housing manager, who was surprised, but after I’d persuaded him this was what I wanted to do, he rang the foreman at the building repairs yard, who took me on as a labourer. Sometimes I worked as a plumber’s mate, other times as a bricklayer’s labourer. Each morning, wearing a pair of recently bought workmen’s boots, I rode into the council yard on my bike at about quarter past seven, and waited for the foreman to tell me which tradesman I was working with that day.
Then, one night in the pub, a teacher friend of Barry’s told me a teacher training college was starting a new course in Environmental Studies. It suddenly struck me that if I studied that subject, I could use my obsession with hawks, along with my anger that they’d been trapped, shot and hung on gamekeepers’ gibbets for centuries, and were now being wiped out by agricultural pesticides, to land myself an interesting job as a teacher.
It was a warm spring day when I went for my interview, and, shielding his eyes from the sun as he looked up at me, the student pointed across the campus of Leicester Teachers’ Training College. I walked on past other students sitting or lying on the grass, chatting or reading. One group sat around a table outside the bar, as elsewhere music drifted out of the open windows of a hall of residence: Dusty Springfield, the Rolling Stones. I liked the feel of this place. When I’d applied for my job at the Town Hall I’d been interviewed by a panel of officials and councillors, but in this interview a woman admissions officer simply called me into her small office and invited me to sit down. My passion for my subject must have shown because after we’d shaken hands and I was opening the office door to leave, she suddenly decided to tell me there and then that I’d been accepted, and she was looking forward to seeing me in the autumn.
My fascination with hawking had sparked a voracious appetite for reading and knowledge. Like Sir Richard Fanshawe, the last tenant of Tankersley Old Hall, I always had ‘some book in hand’. I’d read late into the night, I’d stop to read while out walking and sometimes I’d sit reading on the bench beside Tankersley church. On one occasion as I sat in a meadow of buttercups I looked up from my book to see a kestrel hovering nearby; as Jackie drew landscapes in her sketch book, I lay in the grass beside her reading a book.
The bell tinkled as I entered the Barnsley bookshop, where, three years earlier, I’d ordered my copy of M. H. Woodford’s A Manual of Falconry,
which had arrived a couple of weeks later. Today, I’d rung from a telephone box to order the book I’d come to collect. It was the newly published 1966 edition of A Falcon in the Field by J. G. Mavrogordato, a famous falconer known as Jack by falconers. Mother was house-proud and our house was spotless; yet when I got home I wiped the table down with a clean tea towel, just in case, before unwrapping A Falcon in the Field and carefully placing it on the table. It was one of the most beautiful books I’d ever seen. On the cream cover was a magnificent pencil drawing of a gyr falcon’s head. Opening the book I carefully lifted the protective cellophane inserts to view the illustrations: an eyas peregrine on a block perch, a lanner falcon perched on a desert rock, to name but two of them.
Mavrogordato had trapped and flown desert falcons in Sudan, and his book, with its references to desert falcons and Arab falconry, led me to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence’s account of his experiences when he led the Arab revolt forces against the Turks in the First World War. Lawrence fascinated me, not least for his anti-establishment ways. Robert Graves and Lawrence were friends. In Graves’s First World War memoir, Goodbye to All That, he describes how once, when visiting Lawrence in his room at All Souls College, Oxford, Lawrence opened a window on to the quadrangle and rang a large bell that he’d commandeered from a railway station in Arabia. When Graves told him he’d wake the whole college, Lawrence replied that it needed waking up.
Lawrence was also responsible for an event that had never happened before in Oxford University’s centuries-old history: organising a strike of the College servants and winning them better pay and hours. When I saw the film Lawrence of Arabia I loved the scene in which Lawrence, much to the disgust of his snobbish fellow British officers, takes an Arab friend into the officers’ mess to report that he and the Arabs have taken Aqaba.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 11