No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  One day I found myself tramping across fields up to an area that until very recently had been farmland. Now it had been turned into a new, recently seeded playing field for the secondary school where I had been a pupil. It was only a few fields up the hill from the field in which I flew the hawks, but from here I could see the village below, and, beyond the village, Tankersley church with its square tower. Barry would be teaching kids games on this field in a few weeks’ time as he was about to start a new job at my old school. His reasoning for leaving his job in Barnsley was that this new job, only a short walk from his house, would allow him more time for writing in the evenings. In A Kestrel for a Knave, Barry fictionalised a story I’d told him about how my eccentric headmaster, Ben, had mistakenly caned a boy who’d done nothing wrong and had only come to Ben’s office with a message from a teacher. Although entertained by my tales of Ben, Barry wouldn’t have applied for the job had he still been headmaster of the school. But things had moved on since 1960. Now, eight years later, the school had a female head teacher who frowned on corporal punishment, and it would later become a successful mixed boys’ and girls’ comprehensive. The kind of school I would love to have attended, where every child walked through the same school gates full of hope, having not been led to believe they were already failures at the age of eleven, and where we all had the opportunity to take exams and even apply to college or university.

  This July morning in 1968 I was on my old school’s new playing field for educational reasons. Freeman had taken to landing on fence posts after one stoop to the lure, and I was looking for a new flying ground without fence posts. The playing field looked promising. First of all it was the summer holidays and it wouldn’t be used for sport until autumn. It was also well away from the school – a five-minute walk – in a quiet location hidden from the road by a row of bungalows. On another side was the old graveyard of Law Hill church, and on the other two sides were a field of barley and a potato field. As I stood looking around the distant perimeter I was unable to see any tempting perches, and I decided this was going to be the new flying ground.

  Barry wasn’t meeting up with the film crew until later, so, rather than taking the hawks to the flying ground one at a time, as I usually did, I asked him to help me carry Freeman and Hardy to the school field along with their block perches. We walked down the garden to pick up the hawks, which were on their perches on the lawn, but when I offered Hardy my glove she refused to hop on to it from her block perch. To my horror I noticed that her normally round eyes were oval-shaped and that her nictitating membranes had moved across each eye and given them an ominous grey colour. Crouching on her perch, she looked half dead, her wings drooping by her sides, her eyes half shut. Unsure what to do, I decided to leave her on her perch in the morning sun, fly Freeman, and then consult my falconry books. If I couldn’t find a cause for Hardy’s symptoms I’d ring a vet immediately.

  With Freeman on my glove and Barry beside me, we trudged through the fields up to the new flying ground on the school playing field in silence. Barry’s face was white with anxiety. The problem was that Willis was still refusing to chase the swung lure, hovering above me and only landing on the lure when I threw it to the ground. This meant that if Hardy was dying, which seemed very likely, the film’s success would depend on Freeman, who was currently stooping to the lure only once before flying off in search of a fence post to land on. If I couldn’t get her flying to the lure properly, the film would have to be called off. Finding another kestrel to train this late in the year would be impossible.

  Standing in the middle of the school field I took the lure out of my falconry bag and began to swing it in circles by my side.

  ‘Kes . . . Come on, Kes.’

  Standing at the edge of the field, Barry raised his arm and cast off Freeman. Eyes fixed on me, she flew low and silently over the grass. I increased the speed of the swinging lure then threw out my arm, letting the lure’s weight and momentum carry it into the kestrel’s path. When she tried to grab it, I twitched it away and swept it in front of me. Instead of following its rising arc into the sky she flew straight on, looking for somewhere to land – but all she could see were distant crops and back gardens.

  ‘Kes . . . Come on, Kes.’

  As she turned back and flew in low, I threw out the lure and swept it in front of me again. Again she pursued it, then flew on as if looking for somewhere to perch before returning and flying in to try and grab the lure. By now Freeman seemed to be thinking that the only way she’d get a rest was by catching the lure. Her circuits around the field were less far-ranging and she was flying with more determination. When she flew in for the fifth time I lobbed the lure out for her to catch. Beak open, panting hard, she stood with her prize on the newly sown grass.

  Relieved, I decided to fly her again. Barry cast her off from the edge of the field. By the time she reached me she was panting hard and flying so low that she was almost brushing the grass. Realising she was exhausted, I threw out the lure for her to take. She had flown so close to the ground and so slowly Barry said it was almost as if she’d been walking.

  Twenty minutes later, with Freeman still feeding up on my glove, Barry and I returned to his garden. I’d feared finding Hardy dead on the lawn beside her block perch, but, to our delight, her eyes were now round and bright again and she was ready to fly.

  ‘Kes . . . Come on, Kes.’

  Stepping forward with my right foot, I threw the lure into Hardy’s path as she approached fast and low across the playing field. But instead of trying to grab it, wings pumping she curved up into the sky. Shortening the lure line by pulling it through my fingers, I swung the lure in circles by my side while looking up at the kestrel above me. She flicked over. I threw the lure up to her. Head first, wings beating furiously, she pursued it, twisting two or three times in the air as she hurtled downwards. Then, as she levelled out at the last moment, she tried to strike the lure with her talons, missed, and curved back up into the sky, flicking over to begin another corkscrewing vertical stoop, or cancelleer.

  Just over half an hour earlier Hardy had seemed on the edge of death. Now she performed stoop after stoop, some with two or three twists, as she descended head first out of the sky. I leaned backwards, almost falling over as I threw up the lure and swept it downwards and upwards. Soon I was panting, and I felt relieved when she flew off on a circuit around the field. When she returned this time she flew in high and descended in a vertical stoop the moment she was above my head. I just about managed to throw out the lure and get the line tight enough to keep it tantalisingly out of her clutches as she plummeted downwards and then broke her descent by curving upwards to begin yet another stoop. When at last I let her catch the lure, Barry approached with a smile as I fed up Hardy on the glove. She had been flying for ten minutes, he told me, and had done ten consecutive stoops before her first circuit of the field. Overall she’d stooped to the lure an astonishing sixty or seventy times.

  Next morning an awful thought crossed my mind as I walked through the fields to put the hawks on their perches on the lawn. Had I made the same mistake with Freeman as I had with my first kestrel, Kes, and flown her at too low a weight? Was that why she was so exhausted? Leaving Hardy and Willis on their perches in the mews, I put Freeman on the scales – she weighed six ounces – then took her into the field and called her to the glove from a fence post. She rocketed across the field and on to the glove, where she began to devour the meat hungrily. But suddenly she lost her appetite: tearing and swallowing the meat seemed to have become too much of an effort. She was dangerously underweight. I hadn’t flown her to the glove for a while, only the lure, and stupidly assumed her slow eating after flying to the lure was because she was unfit and exhausted, rather than a symptom of being underweight. Berating myself for my stupidity, I increased her daily food ration.

  Three or four days later, Freeman weighed six and a quarter ounces, an increase of a quarter of an ounce on her earlier flying weight. Up on the s
chool field at this new flying weight she had much more energy and had developed her own flying style. With shallow wingbeats, she flew in fast and low over the grass. I threw the lure into her path, and keeping it just out of her grasp swept it in front me as she pursued it, sending her curving up into the air, where, continuing to gain height, she flew out towards the potato field at the edge of the playing field. When she’d reached thirty feet or so she turned and flew back towards me, gradually losing height until she was once again skimming just above the grass, her eyes focused on the swinging lure.

  TWENTY

  The falconer’s primary aspiration should be to possess hunting birds that he has trained through his own ingenuity . . .

  – Emperor Fredrick II, Emperor of the Romans, King of

  Jerusalem and Sicily, The Book of the Divine Augustus,

  circa 1250, translated by Casey Wood, 1943

  One day at lunch at the catering van, Ken Loach approached me and asked: ‘Know any tough lads, Richard? I’m looking for somebody to fight Jud in a pub scene?’

  ‘I’ve got a mate I could ask,’ I replied.

  So that evening I found myself walking along a street of 1930s brick council houses on my way to see a childhood friend.

  The last time I’d seen Budgie was in the pub with Towser, five years earlier, when he’d bought us hot dogs and made us laugh when he told us he’d been sacked from the colliery for threatening to throw his boss down the pit shaft. All three of us had been in the same class at junior school. There was never any doubt that Budgie was cleverer than either Towser or me, but he seemed to get fed up with school and began to mess about. When we had all moved up to secondary modern school he was put in the next-to-lowest ability stream. After that we hardly saw him any more.

  A sharp bark brought me out of my thoughts. A black Labrador was trotting up the path towards me, wagging her tail. There in the garden was Budgie, kneeling to feed his ferrets in a hutch, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows revealing tattooed forearms. When we’d run into him five years ago he had shoulder-length bleached blond hair. Now it was short and its original natural sandy colour.

  ‘Hey up . . . What tha doing here?’ Budgie said, smiling. Standing up, he looked at his Labrador and said: ‘Fetch mi cigs.’

  Wagging her tail the dog trotted into the house.

  ‘Does tha fancy a part in the film of our kid’s book?’ I asked.

  ‘Me?’ he said laughing. ‘The last part I played was a clown in that play in junior school, when tha was Father Christmas.’

  ‘And tha got thrown out of that, didn’t tha?’ I said, grinning.

  ‘I did – replaced by that lass who went to ballet classes.’

  When the dog trotted up, Budgie gently took the packet of cigarettes from her mouth then said: ‘Matches.’

  By the time his Labrador was trotting back down the garden with the matches, I’d explained he’d play a character who fought Billy Casper’s bullying brother, Jud, and that he didn’t need to act, just be himself, and as Budgie bent to gently remove the box of matches from her mouth he said he’d give it a go.

  So, a few days later, I found myself standing with Budgie as the crew prepared to film a fight scene in a Barnsley pub. Tony Garnett walked up to us, and, nodding across the room towards Freddie Fletcher, who played Billy’s bullying brother, Jud, he leaned in towards Budgie and said: ‘That big-headed bastard has it coming to him . . .’ and went on to tell Budgie that Freddie needed a good hiding. Of course Tony was only psyching up Budgie, and his tactics perhaps worked too well. For when the sound and camera rolled and Ken Loach said ‘OK, lads’, Budgie attacked Freddie with such ferocity that Ken had to rush in and pull him away, and remind him that he was only meant to be pretending. Sadly the scene didn’t make the final cut, but a few years later Budgie got another small part, this time as a miner arguing with a journalist in the television film The Price of Coal, written by Barry and directed by Ken.

  Tony Garnett always looked cool, with his black-framed glasses, black polo-neck sweater and black raincoat. He had produced critically acclaimed drama films, such as Cathy Come Home, yet he was a modest man who made everyone feel valued. Once, for instance, he introduced me to someone by saying, ‘This is Richard – a friend of mine’, which surprised and moved me. Yet, although Tony was friendly he had presence and honesty; nor did he hang back from telling you what he thought.

  One morning, for example, I’d been standing on the lawn in Barry’s garden with my gloved hand raised high above my head. Hardy flew up vertically from the lawn, landed on my glove and took a small piece of meat, a ‘bechin’. I then placed the hawk back on the grass, put another bechin into my gloved fingers, raised my arm as high as I could, and, once again, her wings flapping, the kestrel rocketed vertically up to my glove and ate the small piece of meat. It was at that point that Tony came walking down the garden path with a couple of visitors. When he asked what I was doing, I told him I used these ‘high jumps’ to exercise the hawks in addition to flying them to the lure, and I went on to explain I’d got the idea from the book A Falcon in the Field and that its author, Jack Mavrogordato, had been taught this technique by a well-known Pakistani falconer called Sheik S. M. Nasiruddin . . .

  ‘Too esoteric, Richard, too esoteric,’ Tony said, cutting me off in mid-flow.

  Tony’s response to my geeky reply amused me but a comment he made on another occasion took me aback. I was standing outside the mews with Tony and Barry, while someone was peering in at the hawks through the laths on the window in the mews door – I think it was a BBC drama producer friend of Tony’s. It was then that Tony said: ‘Barry’s training the kestrels – and Richard’s helping him.’

  Amazed, I looked at Barry. I had expected him to put Tony right. Instead, looking ashamed, Barry raised his finger to his lips.

  Later, I asked Barry about it. Looking embarrassed, he admitted, thinking only one hawk would be needed for the film he’d rashly told Tony he’d be able to train the kestrel. I was astounded. Barry had read T. H. White’s The Goshawk, and he’d watched me train my kestrels and had borrowed my copy of A Manual of Falconry while writing his novel. But he’d never trained a kestrel; he hadn’t even held a hawk on his glove until filming began. How he could have believed he’d be capable of training even one hawk for the film, while at the same time teaching himself and David Bradley how to do it, was beyond me. My reaction went deeper than not being recognised for the work I was doing. Tony’s misapprehension had somehow unearthed feelings that I didn’t even know I had. Barry had always been good at athletics and football, he’d always been my hero. I used to drive other kids crackers, forever telling them about his achievements. When I played sport or did athletics at school, the comments were always ‘You’re not as good as your kid’. I didn’t mind, and was proud of him becoming a successful writer. The only thing in my life I’d done reasonably well, after lots of research and effort, was to train kestrels. Not much of an achievement compared to Barry’s, but even so I was proud of what I’d learnt and done. Training hawks was my thing, my passion, but it seemed I still couldn’t escape Barry’s shadow. Now it seemed that whenever Tony was around I would be expected to keep quiet about the only thing I’d done in life of which I was proud.

  It felt as if Barry had stolen my identity. That hurt must have turned to resentment, because one morning when he came to watch me fly Hardy, rather than carry her on the glove to the flying ground as I usually did, I cast her off as soon as we’d passed through the garden gate into the fields. As we walked through the stubble Barry looked up at the kestrel soaring high above my head and worriedly said: ‘You’ll lose her.’

  ‘She’ll be right,’ I said, ignoring his pleas to call her down to the lure.

  Looking back across the forty or so intervening years, I don’t know if I was subconsciously trying to sabotage the film, or just demonstrating to Barry how much he depended on me. Later, recalling Barry’s anxious, pale face as he looked up at the kestrel ci
rcling above, I felt guilty for deliberately upsetting him.

  It seemed that Barry hadn’t only told Tony he would train the kestrels, it turned out he had also been commissioned to write a book proposal about the hawk training for the film. He suggested we both make notes, he as an observer and helper, me as the falconer. I liked the idea of a joint book and in his first notes he often mentioned how I was progressing with the training. But as his notes advanced, I became irritated at the way he increasingly included himself in my falconry decisions and actions by writing ‘we’. When I asked him about it, he said it wouldn’t work as a book if he kept writing ‘Richard did this’. I knew he’d landed himself in the embarrassing position of being commissioned to write a book proposal which the publishers thought was about him training the hawks for the film. I understood his problem, although I became furious when, at one point, a few lines of his notes gave the impression that Barry alone was the hawk trainer. It turned out my anger was unnecessary, for the proposal was turned down.

  In Barry’s defence I discovered he’d been using his book proposal fee to pay me to train the hawks, and later, after he’d seen how upset I was by Tony Garnett’s misunderstanding, he told me he’d spoken to Tony and made sure I’d get a credit on the film as falconer, and had arranged for me to be on the film company’s pay roll. From that point onwards, he went out of his way to tell everyone working on the film what a good job I was doing, and I was grateful to him for that.