No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  One day, when I was working in a council house with a plumber called Jimmy, I watched as he removed the S-shaped waste pipe from under the kitchen sink, showed me where it had been leaking, and then said: ‘It’s had it. Ride up to the council yard on thi bike and ask Mick in the stores to give thi a new S-bend.’

  As I stood at the counter in the stores, and Mick the storekeeper searched among the shelves stacked with plumbing and building materials, I told him that I was reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Mick didn’t answer and I thought he wasn’t interested, until he plonked a new S-bend on the counter and said: ‘I knew Lawrence.’

  It turned out that Mick had been in the Royal Air Force as a young man, and he told me he’d met T. E. Lawrence when Lawrence joined the RAF. He said although he’d changed his name to Shaw everyone knew he was Lawrence of Arabia. Mick said he was a ‘surly bugger’ and had one close mate, and that he would talk to Mick and the other airmen only about technical things – motorbikes, aeroplanes, things like that – and would never speak about his experiences in Arabia. I was in the stores listening and asking questions for at least half an hour. Carrying the S-bend, I climbed on to my bike, rode back to the council house where we were working and hurried into the kitchen where Jimmy was standing waiting, a spanner in his hand.

  ‘Where’s tha been all this time?’ he asked.

  ‘Talking to Mick in the stores . . . he knew Lawrence of Arabia.’

  ‘Bugger Lawrence of Arabia. Give me that S-bend,’ said Jimmy.

  On my bookshelves I still have the 700-page Penguin Modern Classics edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I read all those years ago. It cost me ten shillings and sixpence. Even now I can remember the thrill of coming across a sentence in which T. E. Lawrence described an Arab carrying a saker falcon. Later I flicked through Mavrogordato’s A Falcon in the Field and found his assessment of its qualities: ‘The saker’s character is complex; intelligent, even cunning, suspicious until her confidence is gained.’

  In FALCONRY. Notes on the Falconidae used in India in Falconry, published in 1871, the author, Lieutenant Colonel Delmé Radcliffe, tells how in the heat of India the army marched at night. On one particular moonlit night the bugles had been sounded and the camp was being dismantled. Tents, cooking equipment, all the baggage of camp life was being loaded on to the backs of bellowing bullocks, grumbling camels and trumpeting elephants, to be transported to a new camp. Amid this din, added to by men talking and calling to each other, Colonel Radcliffe shouted an order to someone. A few seconds later he heard the cry of a hawk, looked up and saw his goshawk flying around him. He raised his hand but the goshawk ‘blundered in the moonlight’ and landed on the baggage piled high on a nearby camel’s back. After telling the camel driver ‘to make the beast kneel’ he took up his goshawk on his fist. On hearing and recognising Colonel Radcliffe’s voice the goshawk had ‘bolted away from the man who was carrying him’, and finding itself free, after its jesses had slipped through the hawk carrier’s fingers, had flown to seek its trainer.

  This story’s location also fascinated me. Except for Jack Mavrogordato, who was a barrister when he’d trapped and flown falcons in Sudan, most writers on falconry seemed to have been army officers who’d served in foreign lands, in India, the Middle East or Africa, in the days of the British Empire. I remember thinking how remarkably fortunate these army officer falconers were, to live overseas in exotic places where they could trap and fly hawks. Such experiences were beyond my reach, utterly unattainable.

  Or that’s how it had seemed, until one day I read in a newspaper about an organisation called Voluntary Service Overseas – VSO – a London-based charity which sent volunteers overseas, on one- or two-year contracts, to work in developing countries. The newspaper article said they were looking for volunteers with ‘professional expertise’. My problem was I wasn’t professional, having abandoned my office job and a chance of studying for professional qualifications, and as a building labourer I hadn’t any expertise. Even so I became taken up with the idea of living abroad in a country where, unlike Britain, hawks were still common. Realising that I could defer my teacher training course for a year, I sent in an application form, expressing a particular interest in the Middle East and, I’m ashamed to say, exaggerating my ‘expertise’ in building.

  Each day at lunchtime I cycled home from work to make myself a sandwich. One day I leaned my bike against the wall, unlocked the door and was beside myself with excitement to discover a letter which told me that the VSO had invited me to attend a ‘board’ in London. I’d never heard ‘board’ used in this context before but it seemed that I’d been asked to come for an interview. The tradesmen that I worked with were now surprised by my sudden interest in building as I asked them one question after another. Most of these men had only ever worked on building repairs, but Jackie’s dad was a bricklayer who had built houses and office buildings for years, and I now bombarded him, too, with questions, and borrowed his building books and manuals.

  The foreman gave me the day off work and it was pleasant travelling to London on the train, looking out at the passing woods and fields, searching the sky for hovering kestrels. I’d stayed with Barry in his flat in Hampstead when he’d taught in London, so I found my way around easily on the Tube. As I sat waiting in the VSO headquarters, through a partially open door I could see five or six men and women taking their places around a table. After looking at the papers in front of them, one of them got up, opened the door and invited me in. To my relief it seemed no one on the interview board knew much about building and I was answering their questions well until one man, for no apparent reason, suddenly seemed to become angry. Had they brought in a building specialist after all?

  ‘Come off it, Richard,’ he said.

  My heart raced, fearing he was going to out me as a fraud, and he did, but not in the way I was expecting.

  ‘You’re not interested in being a volunteer, are you? You just want an all-expenses-paid adventure, don’t you?’ he said, glaring.

  Taken aback, I was about to confess that what he said was true, as well as admit my lack of building experience. Perhaps, I thought, I should also admit the only reason I’d expressed an interest in the Middle East was because of my fascination with Lawrence of Arabia and Arab falconry. Controlling my panic, however, and telling myself this would be my only chance to live overseas and to fly a hawk like the army officer falconers did in the days of the British Empire, I tried to convince the interview board that I had something to offer as a volunteer. At the end of the interview they all smiled and thanked me, and I them, but my heart was aching. Convinced that they’d found me out, I headed home to my job as a building labourer, consoling myself that at least I’d be starting at teacher training college in September.

  FOURTEEN

  As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells . . .

  – William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1623

  In the summer of 1966 I trained another kestrel, which I also named Kes, and like my first she came from the nest at Tankersley Old Hall. In May, on my twenty-first birthday, I unwrapped a present from Jackie to find she’d made me a falconry gauntlet of leather so thick an eagle’s talons wouldn’t have pierced it, never mind a kestrel’s. I’m still in possession of that gauntlet, and I also have a photograph of me wearing it in 1966 while holding my second Kes by her jesses. Within a couple of weeks of being ‘hard penned’ this new young kestrel was flying to the lure each evening, performing stoop after spectacular stoop.

  On my way to work each morning I would call in at Barry’s garden and open the mews door to see my second Kes standing on one leg on her perch, the other leg tucked into her breast feathers. While there I checked for signs of illness. Nictitating membranes are translucent third eyelids which clean the hawk’s eyes and protect them from sharp stems of grass, thorns or claws, as they catch their prey. If the third eyelids are permanently visible, say half covering the eyes’ surface, this is a ba
d sign, signalling the hawk could be dangerously ill. So on each morning my first job was to check that Kes’s eyes were round and bright. The next thing to examine was her mutes. I much preferred the falconry term ‘mutes’ to droppings, and on occasions I’d find myself quoting from the 1486 Boke of St Albans, ‘And ye shall say that your hauke mutith’, as I checked Kes’s mutes were a healthy white with a clot of black. Hawks can’t digest bones and feathers, so these are regurgitated in a pellet. If Kes had been fed wild prey the previous evening, I would pick up the pellet from beneath her perch and check it was firm, dry and oval-shaped. If the weather was fine I put her on her block perch on the lawn to ‘weather’ and stayed with her a while, before returning her to the mews and heading off to work. Then, in the early evening, calling ‘Come on, Kes’, I stooped her to the lure, keeping her on the wing for fifteen minutes or so, only letting her strike the lure when she had her beak open, panting.

  One evening after I’d flown my kestrel and put her away, I came out of the mews to see Barry walking down the garden path towards me, the sleeves of his V-neck sweater pushed up to his elbows.

  ‘Hey up,’ I said.

  To my surprise, as I locked the mews door Barry told me his next novel, his second one, was going to be about a kid who trains a hawk. I didn’t think that sounded a promising story, but rather than say so I asked: ‘What kind of hawk?’

  ‘A kestrel,’ Barry replied.

  To me, having the lad fly a hawk despised by the medieval falconers seemed like a bad idea, and I told him: ‘I wouldn’t give him a kestrel if I was thee, I’d let him find an escaped imported goshawk to train.’

  Barry wasn’t impressed. He’d already decided on a title for his novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, the name of the lad, Billy Casper, and the name of the kestrel he was going to train, Kes.

  I’d usually been on my own when weighing, flying and feeding Kes but now Barry came out to watch. Some evenings he made notes as I flew her to the lure. On another occasion I recall he stood beside me with his notepad as he watched my hawk eating a sparrow on my glove. All the time he scribbled notes on how she plucked and scattered the feathers, pecked the skin on the sparrow’s head to reveal its fragile skull, gulped down its intestines, and, grasping the sparrow’s leg in her claw, pecked the meat off its tiny thigh.

  On Saturday mornings it was our practice to meet up soon after dawn to walk together through the fields and woods around the village. Barry had seen me flying my kestrels, but on our walks he now asked me about my falconry experiences more generally. I told him how I was refused permission to take out Woodford’s A Manual of Falconry from Barnsley Library, and had then gone to the bookshop to try and buy a copy. On another early morning walk we traced the route on which John and I had carried the ladder on that June night the year before, and I described how the cows lying in the grass were clearly visible in the bright moonlight, and how in Bell Ground Wood John had cupped his hand around his mouth and called to a tawny owl. Later, as we stood together gazing up at the nest hole in the ruins of Tankersley Old Hall, I explained how we’d come at night to avoid being caught trespassing by the farmer, and how we’d clambered over the wall and hurried across the field to climb up to the nest.

  A Kestrel for a Knave had scenes set in the countryside, and during that summer, as he prepared to write those scenes, our usual fast walking pace was often slowed as we waded through tall grasses in meadows full of ox-eye daises, yarrow and purple vetch. When we came across anything that we didn’t recognise, Barry would pick a single flower or a stalk of grass and carefully put it in his pocket for identification when he got home.

  Barry’s first novel, The Blinder, was about a boy who, like him, was a good footballer. I wondered why Barry hadn’t once again used his own school experiences, and had instead chosen to have Billy Casper attend secondary modern school. He told me that while he’d been teaching in secondary modern schools in London and Barnsley, he’d come across lots of clever kids who’d failed the eleven plus exam, and that he wanted to produce a book that was critical of an education system which wrote off the majority of children when they were eleven years old. I was surprised. I’d never heard him fuming about the iniquities of secondary moderns when I was a pupil in one. Still, he was younger then. He summed up the idea of his new novel: ‘I want to give the education system some stick.’ I was all in favour of that.

  One day that summer I visited the annual Game Fair at Chatsworth Park in Derbyshire. For today my falconry hero Jack Mavrogordato, whose books I loved, was scheduled to give a falconry display. I’d got to the display area early and I was now in the front row of a crowd of people surrounding a large area of grass. I saw the crowd moving apart but couldn’t see Jack until he appeared in the flying area. I’d never seen a falcon other than a kestrel before, but, instead of focusing on the lanner falcon on his glove, I couldn’t take my eyes off Jack himself. A man of around sixty with a neatly trimmed beard, he was much smaller and slighter than I’d imagined. He cast off the falcon, which then flew, with shallow wingbeats, within a few yards of me on its circuit around the flying area. What struck me forcibly was the sound of its bells. I’d read about bells and ‘bewits’, the strips of leather used to attach bells to a hawk’s legs. According to M. H. Woodford the best bells were made by ‘some ancient process’ in the Lahore region of Pakistan, but I’d never guessed what a beautiful sound they made.

  I’d never seen anyone stoop a falcon to the lure, and the unclear instructions in Woodford’s A Manual of Falconry made it hard to picture. I’d done my best to work it out, but until now it hadn’t really mattered whether it was correct or not. The fact that Barry was now writing about falconry and using my technique as a model changed that. I didn’t want Barry to be made to look foolish by getting his description of stooping wrong.

  I was apprehensive when the lanner flew in fast towards Mavrogordato as he swung the lure by his side. ‘Now,’ I whispered, and as if he’d heard me Jack threw out the lure to the lanner, twitched it away at the last moment, and then somehow brought the lure behind his back. Looking for the lure the lanner rose into the air, then stooped as Jack once again swung the lure by his side and then threw it out for the hawk to pursue. My heart was racing, for this wasn’t how I flew Kes: my technique was to sweep the lure in front of me in a downwards then an upwards arc to send her shooting high into the sky to begin another vertical stoop. I blamed M. H. Woodford’s indecipherable instructions. I reckoned I’d let Barry down. I watched the lanner put in two or three stoops, circle around the display area, then fly in again to Jack’s swinging lure to stoop a few more times. As I watched I began to think perhaps things weren’t as disastrous as I’d first thought. Reasoning that I’d taught myself lure flying from a book, I told myself it was feasible that Billy Casper would fly a hawk to the lure the way I did. After all, in Barry’s novel Billy teaches himself falconry from a book.

  Early one morning I wheeled my bike up the path beside the house and mounted it in Tinker Lane. Wearing my work clothes and workman’s boots, I was about to ride off to work when the postman handed me a letter. It had a London postmark. Standing astride my bike I tore open the envelope. It couldn’t be. I’d written that off. But it was; the VSO had written to tell me I was to go overseas for a year in the autumn. Later that morning, with my hands smudged with soot from carrying a fireplace from a council house, I rang from a telephone box and arranged for my college place to be delayed for a year.

  That evening, sitting at home, I flicked through the pages of A Manual of Falconry and stopped at a photograph of a saker falcon. It had white breast feathers speckled with dark brown, and had its head turned to one side showing a large dark eye and a ferocious-looking curved beak. Turning over a few more pages I found a photograph of a lanner falcon. It had more splashes of dark brown on its breast feathers than the saker, and had a dark vertical stripe under each eye. The history of those two falcons fascinated me. They had probably been introduced into Britain in the Middle
Ages by knights returning from the Crusades in the Middle East. In Abbess Juliana Berners’ 1486 Boke of St Albans the saker was allocated to a knight: ‘Ther is a Sacre and a Sacret [the female]. And theis be for a knyght.’ The lanner was held in less esteem, and in her book the Abbess allocated it to a knight’s attendant, the squire: ‘Ther is a Lanare and a Lanrell [the female]. And they’s belong to a Squyer.’

  I’d first gazed at the photographs of those two falcons in Barnsley Library, when copying out Woodford’s book. Back then I couldn’t have imagined that three years later I would be hoping I might have the chance to fly a saker or a lanner in the Middle East or Sudan. If I was posted to India or Pakistan the falcon I’d fly there would probably be a luggur. I hadn’t seen a picture of one, but, according to Jack Mavrogordato in A Falcon in the Field, although it resembled a lanner in ‘size and build, though not colour’ it was an ‘inferior alternative to the lanner’ because of its lack of ‘courage and drive’, and was held in such low esteem it could be bought from a hawk trapper for a few rupees. I’d prefer to train a saker or a lanner, but, despite the disparaging remarks, Mavrogordato made a comment about the lugger, ‘Tame and placid . . . it is a . . . falcon for the inexperienced falconer’, which suggested it could be the most suitable hawk for me.

  Wherever I landed in September, the young hawks would have fledged the nest. I’d no idea if I’d be able to buy a hawk from a trapper, and that evening I continued to look through my falconry books, searching for information that would help me trap a hawk myself. The most dramatic and surprising method used in the desert was to drive a falcon off its prey, then bury yourself in sand with your hand below the falcon’s prey and just your nostrils showing. When you felt the falcon return to continue its meal, you grabbed its legs, then rose out of the desert, spitting sand with the flapping falcon in your hand.