TWENTY-SEVEN
Sir Terence Falkiner . . . Lord Feversham . . . Lt-Col R. S. Ryan . . . T. H. White . . .
Members as at November 2nd, 1937
– The Falconer, the Journal of the British Falconers’ Club, 1937
As the weeks after Mother’s death ran into months, I stopped being so compulsively drawn to the countryside around the pit village. Even so, over the following years I continued to walk my old haunts, and although I’d abandoned falconry my eyes always scanned the skies hoping to see a hawk. There seemed these days to be more kestrels around, hovering over the fields and verges. Once I saw a kestrel hunting from a tree branch, but each time it swooped off its perch into the stubble it missed its prey and flew up grasping a few strands of straw. At Tankersley Old Hall the stones had fallen away around the nest hole from which my two Keses and Freeman had been taken. But to my delight the kestrels had adapted, using a new nest in an inside wall of the ruins.
It wasn’t only the kestrels whose numbers were improving. Something amazing began to happen. Goshawks had become extinct in Britain in the 1880s. Now they were back. One day, a mile or so across the fields from Tankersley Old Hall, I saw a pair of wild goshawks rising and tumbling through the sky. On another occasion I stopped dead on a field path behind the Hall, hardly believing my eyes. A dead wood pigeon lay on its back surrounded by a scattering of feathers, its white breast bone pecked clean of meat. It had definitely been killed by a hawk – a sparrowhawk, I presumed. After that, not far from the eighteenth-century dovecote where as a youth I’d gazed up at the spikes designed to impale marauding hawks, I saw the first sparrowhawk I’d seen in this country. The feeding pigeons were undisturbed by the lads riding past on mountain bikes, but a few moments later they exploded into flight and I instinctively looked up. One, two, three, glide – a sparrowhawk was flying overhead with its distinctive flying style. From then onwards I saw sparrowhawks on many occasions, one flying low along the middle of the road chased by a crow, and another crashing into a bush to flush out sparrows. One day I had to duck when a sparrowhawk shot through a gap in a hedge, then with a flick of its wings whipped back over the hedge and flew low over a field of wheat. Another time I watched in amazement as a male sparrowhawk, a musket, ran down the steep slope of the church roof and launched himself into flight to pursue prey I couldn’t see.
In 1998, when I was fifty-three, I was a lecturer in Film and Television Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. After making films for Channel 4 for a few years in the 1980s I’d moved to the BBC. I’d written, produced and directed fifteen documentary films for national television on Channel 4 and BBC2 on a range of topics. By now it had become more difficult to get commissioned to make the type of documentaries I wanted to make, in which characters told their own stories without a voiceover narrator. So when I’d been approached and offered a lecturer’s job at the university, I accepted it. To my surprise, my teaching qualifications and strong interest in education, along with my experiences and interest in film-making, and my love of films, combined to make teaching at university my new passion.
Jackie had become an art lecturer in the mid-1980s, teaching adult education classes in Sheffield. Just as meeting Phillip Glasier had made me realise falconry had been dominated by the upper classes, adding to her teaching qualifications by gaining a BA in Fine Art had brought home to Jackie how men had dominated art. In the library at Sheffield Polytechnic, where she’d studied, it had struck her that there was room after room packed with books about artists who were men, but that there was only a single shelf devoted to women artists. Intimidated by the maleness of it all, she’d looked into women’s art, both historical and contemporary, and this had provided her with the encouragement and inspiration for her own work, in which she tried to represent women differently from the way they had been historically portrayed by men. As well as doing commissions, Jackie had won both the South Yorkshire Open and the Derby Open art exhibitions. She’d had solo exhibitions of her work, and had work in group exhibitions. One of these, called Reclaiming the Madonna: Artists as Mothers, toured the country and we saw it in the Usher Gallery in Lincoln.
When the Sheffield Adult Education department was cut back, Jackie found a teaching job in an inner-city school in Sheffield. One evening in 1998 I drove past second-hand furniture shops, Asian grocers, a Chinese gift shop, and turned into the car park to pick her up from work. As I locked the car I sensed the presence of a hawk; its reflection in the car window probably registered on the edge of my vision. I turned quickly and there, flying towards me several feet above the tarmac, wild yellow eyes fixed firmly on my face, was a sparrowhawk. To my amazement I found myself remembering a line from a book I hadn’t read for over thirty years: ‘the horrible aerial toad, the silent feathered owl, the humped back aviating Richard the third, made toward me . . .’ That’s how T. H. White described his hawk flying towards him in The Goshawk. In the book T. H. White ducks. I didn’t. I stood in awe as the sparrowhawk flew a couple of inches over my head and away across the car park. I was twenty-three when I’d last trained a hawk. Now, aged fifty-three, I’d assumed I’d got hawks out of my system. It seemed not. There was something in that moment, the sudden closeness of a hawk in a dull urban setting, the sound of its wingbeats and rush of air on my face, the instant recalling of a line from a book that had stoked my love for hawks all those years ago. Whatever it was, thirty years after I’d abandoned falconry I suddenly felt a desperate need to have a hawk in my life.
Although I always scanned the skies looking for hawks, I’d completely lost contact with falconry. I didn’t know of any goshawk or sparrowhawk nests, or if it was even still possible to get a licence to take an eyas. I realised I needed help, and that the way to meet experienced practising falconers who could give me advice was to apply to join the British Falconers’ Club, which I’d read about in the 1960s. My last encounter with a falconer had intimidated me so much that it had led to me losing interest in hawking for three decades, but I was older now and I’d had experiences which made me feel less awkward in the company of upper-class people.
Barnsley and Sheffield United were the football teams I supported, and when I’d worked for the BBC I’d snapped up the opportunity to produce and direct two films in a BBC2 series which followed Sheffield United’s fight to win promotion back into the Premier League – they succeeded. The series received excellent reviews, and soon afterwards I’d found myself producing and directing two films for another BBC2 prime-time sports documentary series. This time the subject was horseracing. I’d read in the falconry books how King James I, while out hawking in 1605, had come across the small village of Newmarket in Suffolk and had established horseracing there. It was still an elite affair, and making these documentaries took me into a social world different from anything I’d experienced.
One day, as the cameraman set up an exterior shot of a stately home, its owner, who owned and bred racehorses, told me he knew this view would look impressive on the screen because he had an original J. M. W. Turner landscape of the very same view hanging on a wall in his house. Later we filmed this same lord in the Jockey Club Rooms in Newmarket next to a portrait of his father, who, like him, had also been a member of this exclusive private members’ club, with its eighteenth-century furniture and George Stubbs equestrian paintings.
I was struck by the fact that, although the racehorse owners I met had upper-class accents, they were less noticeable, less pronounced, and their way of speaking a great deal less intimidating and overbearing than Phillip Glasier’s had been thirty years earlier. Only once, when a usually courteous aristocrat let his manners slip, was I suddenly reminded of my class. On that occasion I had rung to tell him about changes to our filming schedule. Who knows, but he may never before have been phoned on his private line by someone with a working-class accent. Whatever, when I told him the reason for my call he said: ‘I know that. Why else would I be speaking to you?’
I was momentarily stunned by his stag
gering rudeness but I managed – just – to restrain myself and let it pass. I badly needed him to participate in my film.
Yet most people were friendly. At one stately home, I arrived on the butler’s day off and was made a cup of instant coffee by an apologetic Marchioness as I sat in a stately room with a high ceiling and paintings on the walls, waiting for her husband to return. Others I met were a little eccentric. I was interviewing Lord Carnarvon, the Queen’s racing manager, in the office of his stud farm when he suddenly shot to his feet bellowing ‘You’ll want lunch’ and marched out. Not sure if I’d been invited, I was following his car in my car when he pointed to a pub that served lunch and carried on driving towards Highclere Castle, his stately home.
On another day I did manage a pub lunch with one of the aristocrats. Lord Zetland, who we’d been filming that morning, talked about his schooling at Eton, and honestly told us how easy it had been for him with his privileged background to get a place at Cambridge. Interested, I asked what subject he had studied for his degree and to my amazement he said that he couldn’t remember.
In her book The Sport of Kings, anthropologist Dr Rebecca Cassidy tells us how some upper-class people in the horseracing world believe in the importance of pedigree, even for human beings, because this belief protects their elite position in society. I don’t know if Lord Zetland believed that, but in her research Cassidy had met upper-class people who felt contempt for intellectual and academic study. For them, lived knowledge is inherited through the right breeding. Perhaps it’s the belief they are well bred that makes some upper-class people seem so confident, when, despite their privileged education, they seem no cleverer than the rest of us.
Of course, I had neither the pedigree, nor good breeding, nor private school education, but, after working on those two horseracing programmes, I no longer felt overawed in the presence of the well-to-do. I decided to apply to become a member of the British Falconers’ Club. Although I was confident I wouldn’t feel intimidated, I feared the interview board might have seen Kes and would ask if I was related to the chap who’d written it. Perhaps they would complain that the film had begun a craze for stealing eyas kestrels from the nest and given falconry a bad name. I found myself preparing and rehearsing answers to imagined questions: Barry could have had no idea his book would become so popular and be filmed. Besides, lads like me would have needed to be in a falconry club to be granted a government licence to take a hawk legally, but the British Falconers’ Club wouldn’t have us as members. The only reason I’d been granted the three licences I’d needed to train the hawks for Kes was because the film company had swung it for me. But my application went in, and, as I waited to hear from the British Falconers’ Club, I took down and reread falconry books I hadn’t read for more than thirty years. To my surprise, when I went on the internet I discovered the first editions of the books by Jack Mavrogordato that I owned, A Hawk for the Bush and A Falcon in the Field, bought for 50 shillings (£2.50) and £3, were each now selling for hundreds of pounds.
A few days after I’d submitted my application a letter arrived. Sensing I’d been invited for an interview, as I opened the letter I imagined sitting on a leather sofa being sternly questioned by a committee of aristocrats and ex-army officers. To my surprise, though, there was no mention of an interview in the letter. Welcoming me to the club, it gave a contact number and address for the secretary of our local branch, a man called Paul, who lived a five-minute drive away from our house.
As I drove along the street of semi-detached houses I spotted the Range Rover Paul had told me to look out for parked in a drive. I pulled up in front of the house, and was about to knock on the door when a brown and white German Pointer ran around the corner of the house followed by a friendly man in his forties. As we walked into the garden, I told Paul that I’d been surprised by the ease with which I’d been accepted into what I’d thought was an elite falconry club. He told me that the previously exclusive British Falconers’ Club, while retaining its name and history, had merged with a far less exclusive hawking club in the 1970s. Now any falconer was welcome to join.
Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. I hadn’t seen a trained hawk since 1968 and there on the lawn in front of me, standing on block perches, were two large falcons. I had no idea what species they were. They had the look of peregrines, but were far too light in their colouring. And I was in part right, Paul told me, for they were hybrid offspring of a peregrine and a saker, the Arab falconers’ favourite falcon. I was amazed: I didn’t know hybrid falcons existed. For me, though, who had found falconry’s history as interesting as actually flying a hawk, I wanted to fly a pure-bred hawk, as falconers had done for centuries. After I’d explained I’d been away from falconry for thirty years, Paul told me that licences were no longer granted to take hawks from the wild. Hawks with the same nature as their wild cousins were now bred in aviaries by falconers, and if I wanted to get back into falconry I could now buy and fly any hawk I wanted.
Realising how out of date I was, I updated my falconry book collection and bought and read every back copy of the British Falconers’ Club magazine, The Falconer. My heart missed a beat when, among the lords, lieutenant colonels, captains and sirs who were listed as members in the 1937 edition, I spotted the writer who had sparked my boyhood obsession for hawks: T. H. White, Stowe Ridings, Buckinghamshire. Thirty-five years on from reading The Goshawk, that location still lived on in my memory: its gamekeeper’s cottage, where White lived; its barn, where he kept his goshawk, with its wooden slats nailed criss-cross on the windows and its brick floor.
A short drive from our house in Sheffield is a granite millstone which stands on its edge on a plinth of stones and has a plaque inscribed PEAK NATIONAL PARK. Beyond that, on either side of the road, are Burbidge Moor and Hallam Moor. These are the high heather moors I often walk, sometimes with Jackie, frequently alone. This wild, open landscape is the natural haunt of the peregrine and the merlin, the two falcons that have been flown by falconers for centuries. One day I watched as a wild peregrine soared high in the sky, maybe waiting for grazing sheep to flush a covey of grouse from the heather before closing its wings and stooping. Early one morning when out walking, for the first time in my life I saw a merlin. Slightly smaller than a kestrel, this was a male in adult plumage, its buff-coloured breast feathers dashed with black, its blue back shining in the sun as it perched on a rock, ready to pursue any small moorland bird unwise enough to take flight. One day, up there on the moor, I gazed into the distance at Hoober Stand near Tankersley Old Hall. Then I turned my mind back thirty-five years, to recall how, as an eighteen-year-old, I’d copied out sections of A Manual of Falconry in Barnsley Library, and discovered that the countryside around Tankersley and Hoyland Common was ‘shortwing’ country. This landscape was suitable for flying goshawks and sparrowhawks, which pursued their prey across the fields in a sprint, desperately trying to catch them before they escaped into the bordering hedgerows. Back then, I couldn’t have imagined that I’d live close to ‘longwing’ country, the open landscape needed to fly a soaring, stooping peregrine, or a merlin, that had evolved to outfly fast-flying prey over long distances.
Now I was a member of the British Falconers’ Club I met falconers who flew peregrines at game. I watched their hawks fly so high they became black specks in the sky, before stooping to strike a wild grouse whirring across the heather. This was truly spectacular hawking, and it appealed to me, but I did have a problem. I’d been a vegetarian for more than a decade.
I became a vegetarian in 1984, after I’d met a vegetarian miner while making the miners’ strike films. I loved meat and told him I disagreed with his views. Later, I began to think about his reasons for giving up meat and read a book by Peter Singer, the moral philosopher, in which he talks about the evolution of human concern and empathy. Initially, Singer writes, our species was concerned for family and tribe. Over the ages those boundaries of concern were enlarged to include other nations and races, and in societies whe
re we don’t need to eat meat to survive our boundaries of concern should now be extended to include other sentient creatures. To my dismay I found myself agreeing.
Had I not been a vegetarian I’d have flown a peregrine and eaten the game it caught. But I was and still am, so instead I chose to fly a merlin, which I would train to catch its natural prey of small moorland birds for its own supper. Although smaller than kestrels, merlins are feistier, faster flying. They have to be, otherwise they wouldn’t survive. Unlike kestrels, which hover and drop on to easily caught voles and insects, merlins have to pursue fast-flying, difficult-to-catch prey across open moorland.
TWENTY-EIGHT
. . . hawking . . . is . . . an extreme stirrer up of passions . . .
No Way But Gentlenesse Page 22