No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  Other trapping methods included the ‘Arab net’ and Indian ‘do gazza’, which use a caged decoy bird such as a pigeon to lure a falcon into a net, where it becomes entangled and is then picked up by the falconer. The method that appealed to me most, because of its historic origin and simplicity, was that described by Abbess Juliana Berners: ‘Looke where an hawke perchith for all nyght . . . And softely and layserly clymbe to her with a . . . lanterne in . . . yowre hande and let the light be towarde the hawke so that she se not yowre face and ye may take her by the leggys . . .’

  It was early September 1966 and the dew glistened on the hedges. When my second Kes had eaten her fill on the glove I cut off her jesses and raised my arm. After looking around for a few moments she launched into flight, and, as I watched her shallow wingbeats take her high above the golden stubble fields, meadows and hawthorn hedges, I wondered if next year I’d be releasing a luggur or maybe a lanner, or even a saker, into a very different landscape.

  When I learned the details of my posting, though, it wasn’t quite what I expected.

  PART TWO

  FIFTEEN

  And kites

  Fly o’er our heads, and downward look on us,

  As we were sickly prey . . .

  – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1599

  Clouds of red dust billowed up behind us as we travelled in a Land Rover along a road through a landscape of reddish-brown earth, straw-coloured scrub and the occasional green thorn tree. On the front seat, between the driver and me, were a couple of women wearing colourful wraparound dresses and headscarves. In the back seat were another two women along with two men wearing white kaftans and white caps, and a child or two. We journeyed through villages and towns with markets and flat-roofed mud houses, passing bleating goats and braying donkeys. At one point I watched transfixed as, kneeling beside a river, a group of women pounded their washing on rocks, all of them keeping the same rhythmic beat as they sang.

  I’d hoped to follow the journey that my hero T. E. Lawrence had made to the Middle East, but following Jack Mavrogordato to Sudan would have been equally exciting. Both these places had a history of falconry. India, where Colonel Delmé Radcliffe’s goshawk had sought him out in the moonlight, and where you could buy a luggur falcon for a few rupees, would also have been wonderful. Instead, VSO had posted me to Nigeria in West Africa, a former British colony, which as far as I knew had no history of falconry. At first I’d been disappointed, until I took out a map and looked up my destination in the north of the country. To my delight I saw it was semi-desert not far south of the Sahara, the type of open landscape suitable for flying a falcon.

  The Land Rover was taking me to Potiskum, a town where I was to work as a volunteer for the Ministry of Agriculture in the ‘tsetse fly eradication unit’. Although I was relieved VSO hadn’t found me a building project and discovered I was a fake, I hadn’t received any information as to what the job would involve. From my reading I knew that the tsetse fly looked like a housefly, fed on the blood of humans and animals and passed on disease. The illness it caused, called ‘sleeping sickness’ in humans, attacked the nervous system and brain of both humans and animals, and caused lethargy and weakness and often resulted in death. Of course I’d no idea of what to expect, but that didn’t stop me imagining what I hoped the job would be.

  From childhood I’d watched benign images of the British Empire on cinema newsreels, on television and in films: the Queen waving to smiling natives; white expats in khaki shirts and shorts working on African game reserves helped by smiling black men. Earlier this year in a cinema in Barnsley, Jackie and I had watched the film Born Free, the story of a white couple who released a lioness back into the wild. My mind fuelled with images from film and television, I imagined the job which awaited me in Potiskum. My dream would have been to assist an expat vet, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, as we visited farmers. Sometimes we’d travel in a Land Rover, other times fly in a small plane, as we helped reduce the devastating effects of disease. I was brought out of my thoughts by a loud noise coming from the Land Rover’s engine.

  A little later, as I stood beside the driver as he worked on the engine of our broken-down Land Rover, another one pulled up beside us in a cloud of red dust. Inside were a white couple in their fifties dressed in khaki, precisely how I’d imagined such people would look. The woman lowered the window. I thought she was going to ask if they could help, or perhaps offer a lift to the women and children who had climbed out of our Land Rover to sit beside the road. Instead she asked where I was going. When I told her, she said they would take me to Potiskum. I’d enjoyed my journey so far, laughing and talking with my Nigerian travelling companions, who spoke good English even though it was their second language. So I thanked the woman and politely turned down her offer. To my amazement, after glancing disdainfully at the Nigerian families sitting beside the road, she said, in a strikingly posh English accent, ‘These people shit in the bush’. Then they drove off before I could think up a reply.

  The driver eventually fixed the engine and we all clambered back into the Land Rover. I don’t recall where all the people packed in there were going, but they had a little more room when the driver dropped me off at the ‘Government Rest House’, which was located in scrubland a mile or so outside the town of Potiskum. In the days of Empire, Government Rest Houses existed throughout the British colonies. In this one, from 1900 until 1960, when Nigeria gained independence from Britain, government employees would stay for a night or two, breaking their journey across this vast country. The rest house included a single-storey building, with a large room which served as both a bar and a restaurant. Behind the bar, which was also the reception desk, was a door which led to the kitchen. There were no bedrooms in this part; guests slept in chalets, which surrounded a reddish-brown sandy square. What had struck me most as I’d walked into the bar/restaurant were the small green lizards, at least four or five of them, scuttling across the floor and along table tops, running a short distance, stopping dead, running again. After signing in I was served a meal of chips, eggs and chicken, and, as I sat at a table eating, I watched the lizards and at one point was delighted by the sight of a large green frog, which had hopped in from outside through an open door.

  In Northern Nigeria the sun rose around 6 a.m. and set around 6 p.m. By the time I’d finished my meal it was dark, so, holding a paraffin lamp, I walked out of the restaurant into the warm starlit night and made my way across the sandy square. The lamp cast shadows around the single room, which had a bed curtained by a white mosquito net. After placing the lamp on a chest of drawers, I clicked open the locks on my suitcase and opened the lid. Lying on top of my folded clothes was my falconry equipment: the glove Jackie had made; the pairs of jesses I’d made; sheets of tracing paper on which I’d copied hood patterns so I could make a hood for whichever hawk I managed to trap. Back home, when I’d dreamed of living overseas and flying a falcon, it had never crossed my mind that VSO would put me up permanently in a hotel room where I wouldn’t be allowed to keep a hawk. Flying a hawk had motivated me to come overseas, and perhaps it was this overpowering disappointment that suddenly drained me of all the excitement I’d felt up to this point on my travels. For, as I put the falconry glove Jackie had made into a drawer, I remembered it was Saturday. I imagined how Jackie would have spent her afternoon in her bedroom, painting or drawing, and I desperately wished I was home with her, sitting on her bed, listening to pop songs. Jackie’s mother had told me how upset Jackie was that I was going away, but Jackie hadn’t said this to me. Instead, she’d encouraged me to go overseas, and when I suddenly wished I wasn’t leaving, as we said goodbye, fighting back tears, she had said a year would soon pass. But, as I glanced around that drab chalet room with its mosquito net, in the dim light of a paraffin lamp, the thought of spending a year here on my own, without even the chance of making a telephone call, was awfully daunting.

  Still. No one had made me come here. It was my choice. So, ne
xt morning, after a breakfast of chips, eggs, baked beans and fried bread, I forced myself to cheer up, and sat in a chair on the porch of my chalet watching six or seven black kites, which, with their broad wings and long tails, looked like hawks, as they soared in the sky. Later, still sitting on the porch of my chalet, I wrote to Jackie, telling her what I’d seen on my 170-mile journey by Land Rover from Kano airport. Cloudless blue skies; women with babies tied on their backs; people on bicycles and on foot balancing things on their heads – large bowls, trays of bread, rolls of cloth. I told Jackie how I’d seen men with long sticks walking beside their herds of white cattle through the scrub, how each time we’d driven past a river I’d spotted white long-legged egrets wading in the reeds, and that the starlings were a metallic blue. I didn’t mention the bad news, that where I was accommodated meant I couldn’t keep a hawk, but I did tell her about the awful woman who’d insulted my Nigerian travelling companions. Had I not already sealed the envelope, the following day I could have told Jackie of another incident involving a white expat.

  On Sunday I was eating my lunch of chicken and chips when I was joined in the restaurant by an Englishman in his sixties, who’d stayed overnight in one of the guest house chalets. After lunch we had a drink together, and as he talked nostalgically about his time in India during the British Raj, a Nigerian waiter put a drink he’d ordered down on the table. Holding up a shilling ‘dash’ – as the Nigerians called a tip – the man said: ‘Kiss my feet.’

  To my amazement, the waiter did just that, lowering himself on to his knees and kissing the man’s shoe. He was given the shilling. Disgusted by the man’s behaviour, and annoyed that the waiter hadn’t thrown the drink in his face, I left. I’d only met three white British expats, but my expectations of them being khaki-clad, smiling, good-natured sorts were already unravelling.

  My boss at the tsetse fly eradication unit was Ian, an Englishman in his early fifties with a small moustache, dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts. On Monday he picked me up from the Government Rest House in his Land Rover and drove me to work. On the way I asked what my job would involve and he said I’d be working in an office. Trying to conceal my dismay, and to keep the conversation going, I asked what method was used to eradicate tsetse fly. The answer shocked me. ‘We spray them with chemicals, mostly DDT,’ Ian told me. The dreadful irony of it! I couldn’t believe how gormless I’d been; reading my falconry books back home and dreaming romantically of flying a falcon in an unspoilt, pesticide-free country. It hadn’t occurred to me that the chemicals used here to spray insect pests like the tsetse fly might be the very same that had virtually wiped out hawks in Britain. The poisoning of my beloved hawks by agricultural chemicals was a scandal to me. I’d secured myself a place at teacher training college by my informed rage against the practice. Yet here I was, about to start work for a department of the Ministry of Agriculture which poisoned the African soil with the very same chemicals. But what could I do? Ask to go home?

  Stunned into silence, I gazed out of the Land Rover window. Noting the number of kites soaring in the clear blue sky I tried to cheer myself up. I reminded myself that kites eat carrion, and then reasoned that if their prey had been poisoned they wouldn’t be so numerous. So, I told myself, things here might not be as bad as they were back home. There still might be hawks around.

  Ian drove the Land Rover through two open gates into the tsetse fly eradication unit, which looked like a works depot. A high wire fence surrounded a large square in which were parked a few Land Rovers. At one end of the square was a sizeable corrugated-iron shed, into which Ian took me to show me the offices and stores. My first job was to do a ‘stock check’, and I grumbled to myself as I noted every item on row after row of shelves in the stores: spray guns, face masks, Land Rover parts. I told myself if I’d wanted to work in an office I would have stayed at Hoyland Town Hall, where the work was much more interesting than this. I was so bored that, had I not been opposed to it, I’d have asked to go out in the Land Rovers with the DDT sprayers.

  Occasionally, my boss Ian took me in his Land Rover on work-related trips to other towns. One night as we crossed a bridge over a river, thousands of fireflies lit up the night. Then there was the day when we drove around a bend in the road and there, perched in a tree, its yellow eyes staring wildly at me, was a goshawk. Almost as exciting was the sight, another time, of a sparrowhawk flying from one boulder to another across the scrub. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any falcons on my journeys in the Land Rover. A falcon, such as a saker or a lanner, is what I’d dreamed of training in Nigeria. Yet the African species of goshawk or a sparrowhawk would have been fine, if only I’d somewhere to keep one.

  One day, amid the colour and bustle of Potiskum market, beside the live hens and ducks for sale, I spotted something I could use as a decoy, or ‘barak’, to trap a falcon. It was a black kite, imprisoned in a small wire cage. Kites evolved to hunt small prey, such as lizards, and to feed on carrion, and for this reason they are unsuitable for falconry. Instead, Arab and Indian trappers used them to trap falcons. The way they did this was to attach a bundle of feathers covered in small nooses to the legs of a kite and then release it. Wild falcons often attempted to steal prey off other raptors. So, if things went to plan, a wild falcon would think the kite was carrying prey, but when it tried to steal it, the falcon’s talons would become entangled in the nooses, bringing both it and the kite tumbling to earth. The trapper would then untangle them, release the kite unharmed and keep the falcon to sell to a falconer.

  I didn’t need the kite to trap a falcon, but, feeling sorry for the poor thing, I decided to buy it and release it into the wild. The market trader took it out of its cramped wire cage and passed it to me. With my thumbs across its back and my fingers pinning its wings by its sides, I examined it. It was bigger than a kestrel, had brown eyes, a curved beak, and, although called a black kite, its feathers were mostly dark brown with streaks of pale brown, and it had black on its wings. I noticed that some of its breast feathers were soiled with white droppings. Seeing a chance to barter down the price, I pointed this out to the market trader. To my fury he grabbed the soiled feathers and yanked them from the kite’s breast, then told me that the bird looked in good condition now. I paid up.

  When I released the black kite I discovered it would have been useless as a decoy. It couldn’t fly. Instead of powering upwards to soar in the cloudless African sky as I’d imagined, it hopped and fluttered along the ground, disappearing into the parched scrubland. When I’d examined it I couldn’t see anything which suggested it might not be able to fly, and now I could only console myself with the faint hope that the kite might manage to avoid predators and live off carrion and lizards.

  A few days later Ian picked me up from my chalet at the guest house in the Land Rover as usual, except today he took a different route to work.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he replied, driving up a sandy track until we stopped outside a lovely thatched bungalow. In a day or two, he told me, when it had been cleaned up, I was to move out of my chalet at the Government Rest House and into this bungalow. I was delighted. I’d have a place of my own where I could keep a hawk in a spare bedroom.

  The thatched cottage had been built in the days of the Empire, and that first evening, as I sat with a glass of beer in an armchair on the veranda, I imagined that the army officers who’d flown hawks in the British colonies would have spent their evenings like this. All I needed to complete the scene was a hawk or falcon on a perch in the light of the setting sun. Although they catch their prey almost exclusively by flying fast and low, hawks do occasionally soar or fly high, just as falcons do. With this in mind I often glanced up, hoping I’d see a circling falcon or a soaring hawk in the clear blue sky. I’d only seen kites. Yet, the fact that kites hadn’t as yet been poisoned by pesticides convinced me that there must be hawks and falcons in the vicinity, too. That weekend, I’d look for the distinctive splashes of white
mutes and regurgitated pellets of feathers and bones that indicated a roost in a tree. If successful in my search, holding a torch to dazzle it, I would climb up one night and grab the hawk by the legs. Although he’d used a long pole with a torch and a noose attached to the end, rather than climbing the tree, Jack Mavrogordato’s falconer friend William Ruttledge had trapped five sparrowhawks on their night roost in Sudan in the 1940s. If I couldn’t find a roost, I’d search for scattered feathers from earlier kills, which would alert me to the haunt of a hawk, where I could set up a ‘do gazza’ net trap. That night as I fell asleep my mind was full of hawks.

  I awoke suddenly in the early hours of the morning. Through the mesh of the mosquito net I saw a black shape about the size of my hand flicker across the dark room, then another, and another. The almost pitch-black room was alive with flickering shapes. I reached for the torch beside my pillow and clambered out from under the mosquito net. As my torch beam swept around the walls and ceiling I stood there transfixed. Dozens and dozens of bats poured out of the open bedroom door, into another room, then back into the bedroom again, flying in front of me, above me, behind me, past my legs, flickering away at the last moment when it seemed they were about to crash into my head or body. Whoever had cleaned the house before I moved in must have cleared up the bat droppings because next morning the bedroom was covered in them. The bats roosted in the thatched roof and it was too unhygienic to live in the bungalow. I’d hoped to move back in, after the bats had been cleared out and the place had been done up properly. Unfortunately, Ian told me it was cheaper for me to go back into a chalet at the Government Rest House.

  One evening a Nigerian waiter brought a paraffin lamp to my chalet and told me I was the only guest staying in the chalets at the Government Rest House. So early next morning I was surprised to hear English voices and occasionally an African woman’s voice talking earnestly as I walked across for breakfast. Sitting around a table in the restaurant were Ian, my boss, and another Englishman I didn’t know, who to my surprise had a Nigerian wife. Wondering what had prompted them to leave their homes and meet up here so early I walked across to join them. As I sat down, the man I hadn’t met before said in pidgin English: ‘Plenty palaver.’