– J. A. Baker, The Peregrine, 1967
It was the beginning of July 1967. Up early, and delighted to be home again, I was once again walking my old haunts, walking through green fields with grazing cows, through woods, the trees heavy with green leaves.
I walked past Tankersley church, with its square Norman tower, and down the lane to Tankersley Old Hall, where I stopped dead in my tracks. Side by side and all facing the same way, five beautiful young kestrels were perched on the roof of a hen hut in the field in front of the ruined Hall. They had hatched from their reddish-brown mottled eggs on the same crumbling nest ledge as the two Keses I’d trained over the previous two summers. Had I not gone to Africa, one of those kestrels would most likely have been in the mews, and later today would be flying across the meadow to my glove, a creance trailing behind it.
The young kestrels took flight from their perch. One landed on a telegraph pole across the field, the others found perches on the crumbling sandstone ledges and the ruined walls of Tankersley Old Hall. After I’d watched them for a few minutes I turned into Bell Ground Wood and headed for home. Two summers ago, when John and I had walked this path with a ladder on our shoulders, the moonlight hadn’t penetrated the foliage and underfoot the path had been pitch black. This morning as I walked through the wood strong sunlight threw shadows and speckled the path with dark leaf patterns.
One morning I returned from a walk and found a blue airmail letter on the table. It had two Nigerian stamps, three pence and six pence, and a postmark which read: 2pm, 26th July, 1967, Zaria. I still have the letter. Turning it over, I read the back and saw it was from Aliyu A Sani, the lad who’d thought it strange that we say ‘in a bed’, rather than ‘on a bed’, who had returned to his home town for the school holidays. I carried the letter outside and sat on the doorstep in the backyard to read it, my heart racing. To my surprise his letter began: ‘You left us with heavy hearts of loosing such a very good teacher . . . thank you for your kindness and the hard work you did . . . Nigeria is very greatfull for your help . . .’
Aliyu went on to say: ‘We shall never forget you, especially I, the writer of this letter.’
Aliyu’s kind words brought home to me how irresponsible I’d been. While in Nigeria I’d done my best for Aliyu and the other lads I’d taught. Even so I was a secondary modern school write-off and grammar school dropout, and I’d kidded my way into VSO under false pretences for no better reasons than that I wanted to experience life beyond the pit village, and fly a falcon I couldn’t fly at home. As I sat on the doorstep with the blue airmail letter in my hand I felt I’d let down Aliyu, and all the other multilingual, clever, well-mannered lads I’d taught in Nigeria.
A week or so after I’d flown home from Nigeria, I’d been sad to read that civil war had broken out after the Eastern Region split from the Northern and Western Regions to become Biafra. Learning that a murderous machete-carrying mob were on their way to the rest house where I was sleeping, or being glared at by four men carrying machetes and a club, weren’t the only terrifying experiences I’d had in Nigeria. On my way to Kano to begin my teaching job, the Land Rover I was travelling in was stopped at a bridge, where a soldier with bloodshot eyes and sweat running down his face held a rifle to my chest through the open window, then demanded I open my suitcase so he could search it for ammunition and explosives. Yet, except for those awful moments, I hadn’t had experiences that suggested war had been brewing. Aliyu’s blue airmail letter ended: ‘Please, sir, pray for the returning peace and unity for my beloved country NIGERIA.’
Before signing off: ‘Your obedient student, ALIYU A SANI.’
When I’d returned home, Jackie had travelled to London overnight to meet me off the plane at Heathrow airport. As we travelled in a taxi to the railway station, holding hands, smiling, talking, it was as if we’d never been apart. I’d bought her a present from a street trader in Kano. Later, at home, when I rummaged around in the suitcase and handed it to her, she ran her finger over the bands of tiny metal studs beaten into the golden brown-coloured bone bangle. Then she noticed the parts worn smooth over the years, maybe over the centuries, by brushing against other bangles worn on the wrist. As Jackie examined the bangle then slipped it on her wrist, we thought about the generations of women in colourful wraparound dresses who’d worn it, carrying water from the well, pounding grain with a large pestle, pounding clothes on a rock beside the river.
Over the summer of 1967, while waiting for my Environmental Studies course to begin, I worked as a building labourer, and in the evenings Jackie and I walked the countryside surrounding the village, then called in at the pub, where Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ played repeatedly on the juke box. It was good to be home, and when the robins sang in September and the grass and the bushes sparkled with dew I didn’t want to leave. But then I read J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, which had been published that year. I was gripped by this beautifully written elegy to what at the time seemed a lost species of falcon. Baker also mentions sparrowhawks, writing that they ‘were hard to find . . . being so few and so wary’. Somehow, having seen a sparrowhawk flying across scrubland in Africa seemed to emphasise its absence back here, and brought home to me that I might never again see one of that ‘banished race of beautiful barbarians’, which were virtually extinct in Britain. As for the peregrines’ plight, it seemed they were doomed, on the verge of being wiped out by poisonous agricultural chemicals, and that I’d never see the ‘Fawken gentill’ and ‘Tercell gentill’ of the Boke of St Albans fly over our moorlands and cliffs. My enthusiasm reignited by Baker’s book, I couldn’t wait to go to college to begin my research. I had decided to write my dissertation on the fall from grace of hawks and their destruction by pesticides.
EIGHTEEN
Whosoever hee bee that can flye his Hawke every day, shall have every day a good and perfect Hawke.
– Symon Latham, Latham’s Faulconry, or The Faulcon’s Lure and Cure, 1615
At college in Leicester I lived in halls of residence in term time. Some weekends Jackie visited me, and on others I came home to see her. In the spring of 1968, one Friday evening when home for the weekend, on my way to see Jackie I called in at Barry’s house to see if he fancied an early morning walk next day. He was in the garden, sitting on a kitchen chair and reading. When I approached, he looked up, smiling.
‘Hey up.’
‘How do,’ I replied, nodding at the buff-coloured book. ‘What tha reading?’
He turned the title towards me: A Kestrel for a Knave. It was a proof of his soon-to-be published novel. Turning the pages, he found what he was looking for near the front and held it up. On an otherwise blank page, I read:
To
RICHARD
I realised that he’d dedicated the novel to me.
On Saturday I finished reading the novel in one sitting, delighted by the way that my hawking experiences had helped Barry’s fiction: Billy Casper being refused permission to take a falconry book out of the library; Billy conversing with a tawny owl in the wood, just as my friend John had on that night we’d carried the ladder to climb up to the kestrel’s nest; Billy taking his young kestrel from a nest in a ruined Hall at night to avoid being caught by the farmer. Like me, this Billy was a school write-off who taught himself falconry from a book and trained a kestrel called Kes, but there the similarity ended. I found myself engrossed. As I read on I was carried along by the way that Barry had told this powerful story of the fifteen-year-old; a boy neglected by his single mother and bullied by his older brother, a miner. His brother’s name was Jud. When he discovered Billy hadn’t placed what would have been a winning horseracing bet, as he had been asked to, and instead had spent the stake money on fish and chips, Jud killed Billy’s kestrel and dumped it in a dustbin.
One weekend, when I called around for him to go on a pre-arranged walk, Barry was sitting outside on the step putting on his boots. As a youth, when he’d jived to rock ’n’ roll in his fingertip-length ja
cket and narrow-legged trousers, Barry looked flamboyant. In fact he was the opposite: reserved, quite shy really, and he spoke in an understated way and disliked exaggeration. So that morning, when I excitedly told him about a newspaper review of his newly published novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, in which the reviewer had called his book a masterpiece, he looked up from tying his bootlaces and said: ‘That’s a bit of a hyperbole.’
On another weekend, as I passed Barry’s house on my way to see Jackie, I saw him brushing his black and white collie, Bess, outside the kitchen door.
‘All right?’ I asked, as I walked up the drive.
‘Not too bad.’
As we stood talking, in his low-key manner and without a hint of excitement Barry said: ‘A producer wants to make A Kestrel for a Knave into a film.’
‘Wow. That’s brilliant,’ I said, delighted for him.
‘I’ll believe it when it happens,’ he replied.
A few months later, on a sunny morning in late June, home from college for the summer holidays, I was carrying an empty cardboard box as I walked through meadows full of buttercups on my way to Barry’s house. It seemed the film was about to happen, and what was wonderful for me was that Barry had asked me to be the film’s falconer. But for that we needed kestrels, and the plan this morning was for Barry to hold the ladder while I took the young hawks I would need to train for the film, before carrying them home in the cardboard box.
When I opened the door and stepped into the kitchen, Barry’s collie dog, Bess, ran up to me wagging her tail. Bending to stroke her, I called: ‘Anybody in?’
‘Hang on,’ Barry replied, before coming through the door looking pale-faced and ill.
‘What’s up?’
‘Film’s off,’ he said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Let’s go in there,’ he said, pointing into the lounge.
The Hollywood company that had agreed to fund the film had pulled out. I was devastated. It wasn’t just that I would now have to spend my summer holiday from college working as a building labourer, rather than training kestrels for a cinema film; it was much more. I’d been a school write-off, I’d jacked in my office job at the Town Hall and I’d kidded my way into a voluntary job in Nigeria. But this summer, finally, I’d been offered a job I was passionate about, which required skills I’d taught myself. Finally I’d landed a job I could be proud of.
‘I don’t know what to do about the kestrels,’ Barry said.
I looked at him.
‘How’s tha mean? We won’t need any kestrels now.’
‘We probably won’t. But there’s a slight chance it might not happen – Tony’s still trying to raise the money to make it,’ Barry told me.
I understood Barry’s worry. The kestrels would soon fledge their nest at Tankersley Old Hall, and even if Tony Garnett, the producer, did raise the money to make the film it would only have to be cancelled again because Billy Casper wouldn’t have a kestrel to train. Back then, hawks had to be taken from the wild, unlike today, when they are bred by falconers and can be bought. I told Barry I’d take the kestrels anyway, and if the film wasn’t made I’d fly them in the evenings when I came home from my labouring job, and hack them back to the wild in the autumn, before I returned to college. Still feeling ill with worry, Barry went to bed to recover and carrying the cardboard box I went to find Jackie.
To prove what I was about to do was legal, I’d brought the government licence I’d been granted to show the farmer at Old Hall Farm. As we walked through Bell Ground Wood together, I took it from my pocket and gave it to Jackie to read. She was surprised when she saw it authorised me to take three kestrels ‘for the purpose of falconry’. Having read A Kestrel for a Knave, Jackie assumed I would only need to take one kestrel. But it had dawned on me that one hawk might become ill or lost, and that by taking three I’d be able to prepare them to fly at different times. This would allow filming to go on longer and make filming them easier, assuming, that is, that different hawks could be cut into a sequence of shots to give the impression that just one hawk was being trained. Two kestrels would be too few, I reasoned, and four difficult to find enough food for, and too time-consuming to train. So I’d applied for a licence to take three.
In 1965, when my friend John and I had leaned a ladder against the moonlit ruins of Tankersley Old Hall, we were trespassing. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we didn’t have a licence. This sunny morning three summers later, Jackie and I carried a ladder across the field of buttercups and leaned it against the Old Hall with the permission of the farmer; in fact it was his ladder we’d borrowed.
When I reached into the kestrels’ nest hole I looked down at Jackie in dismay.
‘What’s wrong?’ she called up from the foot of the ladder.
‘It’s empty.’
Reaching in up to my shoulder, I felt around the crumbling sandstone ledge. I heard a gasp from inside the nest then something sharp raked across the back of my hand. Talons! Relief surged through me as I reached into a crevice, put my hand around the young kestrel’s back, pinned its wings down to its side and gently eased it out.
Jackie held the cardboard box while I put in the young hawk. Its large brown eyes were bright and clear, a sign of good health. It still had a few specks of down on its head, and its black-barred reddish-brown tail feathers were almost fully grown. It was at the perfect age to take. I closed the lid, and Jackie and I walked through Bell Ground Wood without saying a word. My mind was racing. Last summer five kestrels had hatched in the nest. I’d been expecting there to be four or five young in the nest this year, but someone must have got there before me. One kestrel wasn’t enough. As we walked I racked my brains desperately, wondering where I could get two more kestrels. Keith, I suddenly thought. Keith, who had lived in the village before becoming a gamekeeper in Wentworth.
A few days later, as I was kneeling on the lawn cutting up hawk food on the chopping board, Keith walked down Barry’s garden with a box. He was telling me how he’d taken the two young kestrels in the box from an old crows’ nest their parents had taken over, when Barry’s sheepdog, Bess, ran down the garden followed by Barry. Bess was usually friendly, but today she barked wildly at Keith, and when he reached out his hand to befriend her she raised her top lip and snarled; she’d caught the scent of the fox Keith had sat up all night to shoot after it had killed his pheasants. Holding her by the collar, Barry led Bess back into the house while I carried the box containing the two young kestrels down to the mews, then eased my way sideways through the door and closed it behind me. The two new young kestrels gasped as I took them out of the box and put them on a perch. One had an exceptionally bright yellow cere – the bare patch above its beak – and I named it Yellow Cere.
For the purposes of the film, all three kestrels would need to respond to the name Kes when called to the glove and lure. Yet they also needed individual names. One day when out with my airgun searching for hawk food, the sight of the colliery slag heap reminded me of a story Dad had told me. He said three miners at his pit were best mates, inseparable, and that one day when they’d walked into the canteen a fellow miner had shouted, ‘Here they come, Freeman, Hardy and Willis’, the name of a chain of shoe shops. I liked the names. So the kestrel I’d taken from the Old Hall became Freeman. Yellow Cere became Hardy and the other hawk which gamekeeper Keith had brought became Willis.
Just a few days later, in early July, holding Freeman firmly in my hands, I found myself on the platform of a hydraulic crane as it was slowly raised up the ruined wall of Tankersley Old Hall. The film, which would later be called Kes, was going ahead. Barry had told me that Tony Richardson, the legendary producer/director who’d made one of my favourite films, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, had rung United Artists in Los Angeles and raised the money on behalf of Tony Garnett and Ken Loach. So here we were, about to film. In Barry’s novel Billy Casper discovers a nest when he sees a kestrel fly out. After being refused permission to take out a falconry b
ook from the library, he steals one from a bookshop, then takes a young kestrel from the nest in a ruined hall. Today, I was helping in the filming of the scene where Billy Casper, played by fourteen-year-old David Bradley, takes his young kestrel from the nest.
As the platform of the hydraulic crane was slowly raised up to the nest hole, standing beside me was Ken Loach, the film’s director. Ken, who was slim and wore glasses, a leather jacket and jeans, seemed too polite and reserved to be a director. Yet he was friendly and had a quiet authority. Also on the platform, holding the film camera, was Chris Menges, who had dark hair and a beard, and who, like Ken, was polite and reserved. When we reached the nest hole I carefully put Freeman into the nest I’d taken her from a few days earlier. Chris then filmed David as he climbed the wall and reached into the nest and took the young kestrel out again. I knew that Freeman should have been in the mews for at least another week, for her feathers were ‘in the blood’, which is to say still soft and blue at the bases of their shafts, and they could easily be damaged. Yet if we’d waited until her feathers were ‘hard penned’, moments after I’d put her in the nest hole she would most likely have flown out again and disappeared over Bell Ground Wood. I was relieved after David had taken the kestrel from the nest hole without mishap, then dismayed to discover that it was just the first take; and so it went on, with me putting the young hawk back into the nest hole, David climbing up and taking her out again, Ken Loach calling ‘cut’, and David passing the hawk to me to replace in the nest yet again. Eventually Ken was satisfied with what had been filmed, and we were lowered back down in the hydraulic crane.
Stress can cause ‘fret marks’ on feathers still ‘in the blood’, which, like hunger traces, manifest as razor-like cuts which weaken the feathers. So after the young kestrel had been put in and taken out of the nest time after time, and been raised and lowered in the hydraulic crane, I was keen to get Freeman back into the cardboard box so that the darkness would calm her. Just as I was about to do this, I was approached by the sound recordist who told me he needed ‘wild track’ – non-synchronised sound – to be used over the shots of David taking the hawk from the nest.
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 15