David was a hundred yards or so away in the middle of the field, but perhaps he’d heard my ranting and this had upset him, for he called a halt, saying that he wanted a break and that he had blisters on his fingers from the lure line. Plasters were found, but, ashamed of myself and fearing my bad mood and anxiety might put him off even more, I stood at a distance from the group clustered around David. Barry and Ken were in that group and later, as I was heading back across the field to cast off Hardy for another take, Barry joined me. He told me that as David was having the plasters put on his fingers, Ken had said ‘Three nil to Hardy’. David hadn’t looked best pleased.
Poor David. Even if I’d been in a better frame of mind, I don’t think I’d have been able to give him advice on how to respond to Hardy’s tactics. He had done well. Earlier he’d flown Freeman marvellously but he hadn’t had enough practice to fly Hardy when she was in this mood. If Hardy continued curving upwards into an awkward position directly above his head, and then plunging on to the lure in a vertical stoop, all her training would have come to nothing. It was beginning to look as if only the shots of Freeman would be useable for this scene.
Throughout the summer I’d imagined her brilliant flying would provide the most spectacular falconry scene in the film. I raised my arm and cast Hardy off the glove for the fourth time. Miserable, frustrated, and anticipating what would happen next, I watched gloomily as David threw out the lure to the fast-approaching Hardy. To my surprise, she didn’t curve upwards; instead she carried on in level flight and tried to strike the lure. This time David managed to twitch it away from her, and keeping the lure just out of her reach he swept it downwards then upwards, and her momentum as she chased it sent her arcing high into the air, which gave him time to pull in the lure line and twirl the lure a couple of times by his side, before throwing it up into her path and sweeping it down in front of her. Wings pumping furiously, she descended in a vertical stoop, then, just as it looked as if she was about to crash head first into the grass, she pulled out of the stoop and followed the arcing lure skywards. Her momentum carried her so high David had plenty of time to pull in the lure line, twirl the lure by his side a few times and once again throw it up and keep it just out of the young kestrel’s reach as she hurtled earthwards, before curving upwards to begin another stoop.
Later, each with a half-finished pint of Barnsley Bitter in front of us, Barry and I stood at the bar of our local pub, The Star.
‘Is it the beer, or are you glowing with pride?’ Barry asked, pointing at my face.
‘Must be relief.’
Delighted for me, Barry said, ‘David and the hawks did your work justice.’
‘Eventually,’ I replied, smiling, before adding, ‘Just the hawks to hack back now.’
Looking back to that summer of 1968 I can recall one sunny day when it suddenly struck me how my love of hawks had changed my life. That morning, the crew had been filming a scene where Billy Casper discovers the kestrels’ nest at Tankersley Old Hall. Leaving the hawks in the mews, I had walked through Bell Ground Wood to join the film crew and actors for lunch at one of the trestle tables which had been set up on the cart track opposite the ruined Hall. It was at this very spot, three summers earlier, when I was twenty, that I’d come across my friend John and discovered that kestrels nested here. I can remember thinking how, had I not met John that evening and got my first Kes, I wouldn’t have become so obsessed with hawks and wouldn’t have applied for the Environmental Studies course. I wouldn’t have travelled to Africa and I wouldn’t have been sitting here eating lunch with a film crew, nor working as a falconer on a film. As I watched the swallows fly low over the buttercups in the field and around the Old Hall, I could hardly believe that my fascination for hawks had led to all this.
Two years later, in the spring of 1970, home from college for the weekend, I walked into the house to be greeted by my agitated mother.
‘Have you seen it?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘The poster. I daren’t show my face in the village.’
When I’d worked out what she was on about I walked up to the main road, and there on a large hoarding was the source of her embarrassment: a massive film poster advertising KES. On it David Bradley as Billy Casper glared defiantly out while giving a V sign to all passers-by, including local churchgoers and members of the Women’s Institute.
I know the date on which I saw the film: Wednesday, 25 March 1970. I even know that the film was shown at 8 p.m. I’ve found my invitation from United Artists Corporation, which requested ‘the pleasure of the company of Mr. Richard Hines & Guest at the World Premier of “KES” at the “ABC” Cinema in Doncaster’. The invitation is printed on white card in fancy looping writing. Although this is the first time I’ve looked at it in over forty years, I can recall being concerned when I read the words ‘Black Tie’ printed in the bottom right-hand corner. It seemed strange to me telling people what colour tie to wear, so, suspecting there might be more to it, I checked the dictionary and discovered it meant formal evening dress. The nearest thing I had to formal clothes was a tweed jacket which had spent a year hanging in wardrobes in Africa, and had never been worn since. As I tried on the jacket and smoothed it down I felt a lump in the lining. Using her sewing scissors, mother cut a small hole in the corner of the inside pocket, then put her fingers through it while I worked whatever it was in the lining up towards them.
‘Got it,’ she said, and raised her hand in triumph.
Then her face turned to disgust as she threw on to the carpet a dead lizard that had found its way into my jacket lining in Nigeria. The bone-dry lizard was odourless and didn’t put me off, but the jacket didn’t feel right for a film premiere and so I wore a leather one with an open-neck shirt. I didn’t feel out of place, for the only bloke wearing a black bow tie and dinner jacket was a man from United Artists who shook everyone’s hand – film crew, actors, guests – as we walked into the cinema.
Sitting in the dark that night, Jackie by my side, I feared Ken, who didn’t know the first thing about hawks, would have made errors in editing the falconry scenes which would lead experts to deride the film’s falconer. Waiting for the first flying sequence, where Billy Casper calls Kes across the field on the creance, was agony, but the scene worked well and contained a surprise. I’d assumed only Freeman and Hardy would appear but to my amusement and delight, there on the big screen, racked with indecision, was nervous wreck Willis, walking along a fence. She’d made it into the film after all.
In the lure-flying sequence, Hardy’s first stoop sent her curving upwards and out of view at the top of the screen before she reappeared in another vertical stoop. David was flying her beautifully, keeping the lure just out of her reach as she plummeted downwards and then arced back into the sky to begin another stoop. I was thrilled, for this was what I’d worked and hoped for. I felt a sense of satisfaction that, despite all the setbacks throughout that cold, rainy summer, I’d succeeded. I’d done the job I’d been paid to do as the film’s falconer, training the kestrels and working with David to make Billy a convincing falconer.
I was surprised how stirred my emotions were on seeing our village of Hoyland Common and its surroundings on the cinema screen. There was the slag heap of our local colliery where my dad had nearly broken his back and where my grandad had been killed. When Billy stooped his hawk to the lure beyond the fields I could see Tinker Lane, where Dad had led the way as we’d carried furniture from the terraced cottage we had rented to our new stone house further up the road. The familiar locations up on the screen acted as a vivid backdrop against which the significant events in my life had been played out: the Barnsley Library where, after being refused permission to borrow A Manual of Falconry, I’d copied parts of it out by hand; Bell Ground Wood where John and I carried the ladder in the moonlight; Tankersley Old Hall and the nest hole where my first kestrel, Kes, had come from; David as Billy raising his glove and calling ‘Come on, Kes’, using the very words I�
�d called to my first kestrel in the very fields in which I’d trained her, flown her to the lure and hacked her back to the wild five years earlier.
PART THREE
TWENTY-THREE
. . . Faulconrie or Hauking. For the onely delight and pleasure of all Noblemen and Gentlemen. . .
– George Turbervile, The Booke of Faulconrie or Hauking, 1575
In 1970, the year of the film premiere, I was in my third and final year at Leicester Teachers’ Training College. I was now working hard to finish my Environmental Studies dissertation about how hawks had fallen from grace over the centuries. Before coming to college I’d read J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, his dramatic account of how peregrines might not survive as they died, ‘withered and burnt away by the filthy insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. On my college course, a key book was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, which told the same story, but more scientifically. By now it was well known that organo-chlorine pesticides, such as DDT, passed through the food chain and accumulated in hawks, causing death or reproduction problems, such as thin egg shells which broke when parents sat on the eggs. I’d done lots of research on this aspect of my dissertation, as well as gathering evidence and photographs of the poisoning, trapping and shooting of hawks by gamekeepers. I already knew a lot about falconry history but I’d read about the recently opened Falconry Centre in Gloucestershire, which had a falconry museum, and in the autumn term of 1969 I decided to visit.
Hawks were on the verge of extinction in Britain, but the Falconry Centre had a collection of imported hawks. When I saw a falcon on a block perch my heart raced. A peregrine! Eventually I stopped gazing and went into the small museum of falconry. I was reading information displayed on the wall and making notes when someone walked in. Having seen a photograph of him, I recognised Phillip Glasier, the falconer who had set up the Falconry Centre. Although I had no chance of flying a peregrine I wanted to impress him with my knowledge of game hawking, and so I asked him if he agreed with Jack Mavrogordato’s view that stooping a falcon to the lure does not lower the falcon’s ‘pitch’ – the highest point at which a falcon circles above the falconer before stooping on its prey.
Even before he opened his mouth I could tell from Glasier’s face that he disagreed.
‘If you are going to fly at grouse or partridge, you should never stoop your falcon to the lure,’ he told me. He went on to explain that if you do, when out hunting, instead of climbing to a good high ‘pitch’ the falcon will most likely go up only a short distance, before circling around, as it waits for the falconer to take out the lure. What he said made perfect sense, and today his view is that of all falconers, but the way he said it, in his posh, loud voice, intimidated me so much I could hardly take in what he was saying.
Looking back over more than forty years, it seems incredible that the way someone spoke could have had such a profound effect on me.
My mother had recently told me how, before they were married, Dad had cycled over to visit her when she worked in service. She said he hadn’t known that servants’ visitors weren’t allowed to go to the front door, and was curtly sent to the back door. Later, she’d overheard her employers mocking his accent. My only contact with the upper classes to date had been through my falconry books. Their poshness made me smile – ‘When hawking in India one needs a horse’ – and I enjoyed descriptions of their eccentric antics, such as the aristocratic falconer who flew his goshawk along a corridor past Ming vases and priceless paintings. Yet, to me, all that stuff about social division belonged in the past. So when Mother told me that story, I’d reminded her it was the 1960s, and that working-class blokes were now stars in films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and that Beatles songs and northern voices were on the airwaves. Accents and social class didn’t matter any more.
I’m not criticising Phillip Glasier, for he can no more help the background that he was born into than I can, but back then upper-class accents were much more strikingly posh. This is apparent to anyone who goes online to watch documentary films made for the British Council in the 1930s and 1940s, the era in which Glasier was raised. Although it was now the 1960s, Glasier spoke in the manner of those times and his accent was far posher than that of today’s royal family.
As I stood that day in his falconry museum, listening to him explain why he thought stooping a falcon to the lure does lower its pitch, and makes it a less effective hunter, I was astonished by the gulf between our classes. It wasn’t just his accent that intimidated me, but his confidence, that sense of effortless superiority instilled by a public school education, and his lack of inhibition and booming voice as if he assumed what he was saying would be of interest to everyone within fifty yards. I didn’t say a word, except to thank him, when he said that later he’d be flying a hawk if I wanted to watch, and then marched out.
Not long afterwards, when I was home from college for the weekend, a lad who’d kept a kestrel told me of the experience of a Yorkshire miner he knew. The miner had let it be known to a group of middle-class falconers that he was interested in joining their ranks, only to be mocked and snubbed by them. Later I read of an upper-class army officer falconer, who in the late 1880s abandoned flying his peregrine on Salisbury Plain to join his regiment to break a strike of half-starved Yorkshire miners like my great-grandad. It was only then that it dawned on me that the Royalist Sir Richard Fanshawe would most likely have seen me as an ill-bred plebeian. Rather than indulge my boyhood passion for hawks, he’d probably have set his dogs on me had I gone anywhere near Tankersley Old Hall to take a young kestrel.
It took meeting Phillip Glasier for me to realise how I’d been obsessed with an upper-class history and a world in which I wouldn’t be welcome. It was a revelation which made me see things differently. For the first time I began to value my own heritage. In our village, as in many other working-class communities, the history of the community was passed down through stories from one generation to the next. I liked it when my mother told me about my grandad Westerman, who’d worn a pink dog rose in his lapel, and who’d later been killed in the mine. His hobby was racing pigeons over a distance of a mile. He had two champion ‘milers’, one called Semolina, the other Something Hot, and as a girl, mother told me, she liked to watch him rattling a tin of pigeon peas as he encouraged them back into the loft at the end of a race. Dad used to make me laugh with his stories of life in Hoyland Common in the 1920s and 1930s. I particularly enjoyed his tales of rent avoidance by men who’d blown their wages on drink, or were out of work through injury, or needed the money to pay a doctor’s bill, or just didn’t earn enough money to pay the household bills. On rent collection day one man would put the rent book and rent money on the windowsill, then hide upstairs. The rent collector could see the rent book and rent money through the window. But after knocking on the door and getting no reply he’d move on to the next house muttering: ‘The man’s willing to pay – but he’s never in.’ I also liked to hear tales of our village’s past from other miners. One night in the pub a miner told me how, at the age of five or six, during the 1926 miners’ strike his mother would send him to sing outside a strike breaker’s house. Then, to the tune of ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’, in a surprisingly beautiful voice, he sang the song his mother had taught him as a child over forty years ago: ‘Let me call you blackleg, I’ve no love for you. You have been working, this whole strike through.’
Both my mother and dad and other miners had told their tales of past pit village life with amused affection, but all of them seemed glad things had moved on from those harsh, poverty-stricken times. Although I enjoyed these tales, I saw them as the experiences of earlier generations, which had nothing to do with my life.
Yet after meeting Glasier, and realising things hadn’t changed as much as I’d imagined, I developed a passionate interest in the history of my own social class; its humour, and the inequalities and hardships faced by people from my background. More crucially for my future teaching career, I
became much more aware of how this legacy of disadvantage could still affect children’s life chances. Back at college, alongside writing up my dissertation, I studied the influence of social class on children’s educational achievement, as part of my other main subject, Education.
In the summer of 1970, both the Environmental Studies lecturer and the external examiner admired my dissertation about the decline of hawks, and I was awarded top marks. I’d also done well in the other subjects I’d taken. All I needed now was to pass my exam in Education. Everything was going perfectly. I was proud of the job I’d done as falconer on Kes, and I was looking forward to becoming a qualified teacher. Then I did something stupid.
It was the night before my exam. I’d been revising all evening in my room in the hall of residence, and, satisfied I’d done enough work, I decided to nip downstairs to see if the student bar was still open. It was in darkness; the shutters were closed but light was leaking out around the edges and I could hear voices. I tried the bar door. It was locked and the voices fell silent. I knocked.
‘Who is it?’
‘Richard.’
The door opened and I was invited in. Inside, seven or eight students were crushed behind the bar holding glasses of beer or whisky. One of the lads had sneaked into the room of the student who ran the bar and taken the key to the bar out of his pocket. Now they were all helping themselves to drinks to celebrate the end of their exams. I decided I’d only have one drink, but I was enjoying myself so much that I stayed for another pint, and then another, and another . . . By the time I staggered up to my room sunlight was streaming through windows on the stairs. It was dawn. Somehow I managed to set the alarm and clambered into bed.
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