No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  The next evening, my dread that Fanshawe would get lost and die of starvation before he could fend for himself subsided a little. He still hadn’t caught anything, but I began to think it wouldn’t be too long. I began to recognise when I needed to hang on to the jesses and when I needed to let them go. Fanshawe was more settled and seemed to be honing his evolved survival instinct. Each time he pursued a pipit, after about twenty or thirty yards he seemed to spot something about its flight which told him whether it was worth carrying on. If he sensed he had little chance of catching his quarry he circled around and flew back to the glove. If he felt there was a chance, however, he pursued his fleeing prey in deadly earnest. One such chase led him into a field beside the moor. When I arrived at the stone wall I saw him chasing a pipit through a herd of cows, flying over their backs and under their bellies, brushing past their legs as the cows deftly tried to back-heel him with kicks that would have killed had they connected.

  Outflown by this particular pipit, Fanshawe had returned to the swinging lure and I was once again walking the moor with him on my glove. I must have almost trodden on the pipit before it sprung up from grass near a boulder. Fanshawe shot off my glove and was after it. I’d read how, instinctively fearing a night with an empty stomach and possible starvation, falcons pursued their quarry with more determination as the sun sank lower in the sky. Perhaps it was this fear, or the anger and frustration of continually being outflown by his quarry, but Fanshawe refused to give up. On and on they flew, prey and predator, across a moor now turned the colour of copper in the rays of the setting sun, and on over the green fields beyond until, with dismay, I watched through my binoculars as they disappeared beyond a distant hill.

  After stopping to raise the telemetry receiver to check I could still hear the faint BEEP-BEEP-BEEP, I ran on, recklessly clambering over walls and dislodging stones, climbing fences, running across fields, until I came to one in which a bull with massive shoulders and a ring in his nose was throwing back his head and bellowing. Skirting the large field took ages, and the telemetry receiver had gone silent by the time I reached the other side. No longer running, I wandered on, holding the receiver above my head at arm’s length, standing on the third bar of a five-bar gate to get more height as I swept the transmitter in every direction. Still there was no signal. Back at the car, my heart ached when, through the open door of his travelling box, I saw his little Astroturf-covered perch. It was awful driving home without him, the car headlights lighting up the narrow lanes and the road across the moor where I’d trained him to fly free.

  I hardly slept that night, worried that I’d never see my young falcon again. Fanshawe wouldn’t be able to fend for himself, and he might starve to death. I was up before dawn, driving back over the moors to a narrow lane near where I’d searched for him the previous evening. Again, there was no signal from the transmitter. Stopping in another lane near a cement factory with a tall chimney, I got out and clambered up to the top of a pile of rocks and rubble and held up the telemetry receiver. Still no signal. Thinking that the transmitter battery might have gone flat, I took the whistle from my pocket and blew it. Fanshawe didn’t appear, but a couple of night watchmen did and stood in a doorway in the cement factory, obviously wondering what kind of idiot would repeatedly blast a whistle at sunrise. I then drove to the moor, where I should have gone first, and the moment that I turned on the receiver it beeped. Loudly. I could see a bird perched on the large boulder near where Fanshawe had begun his desperate chase last evening. It was him. When I blew the whistle, he launched himself off the boulder and flew low over the straw-coloured grass and swooped up to land on my raised glove.

  That evening, with Fanshawe in his travelling box, we were once more driving past Burbage Moor on our way to his flying ground on Bradwell Moor. Once again Fanshawe hurtled off my fist each time a pipit flew up out of the grass, either turning back if he sensed he’d no chance of catching it, or pursuing it relentlessly until, closing its wings, the pipit would escape by dropping into long grass beside a wall, or into a patch of thistles, or a bed of nettles, and out of Fanshawe’s reach. On each occasion, raging with frustration after yet another failed flight, the young hawk flew back over the moor and on to my raised glove.

  Since coming up here, I’d been surprised how tramping Bradwell Moor with my merlin had affected my emotions. Earlier in the day, Jackie and I had driven for half an hour or so from our house to visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. While there, to my surprise I’d smoothed my hands over the stone sculptures, eager to touch the earth’s raw materials they’d been hewn from. I’d held up Jackie’s wrist to examine the bangle I’d brought her from Nigeria, touching the bands of tiny metal studs which had been mined from the African earth, rubbing my finger on the smooth golden brown bone which had once been part of a living animal. That evening, as I walked on, with Fanshawe gripping my glove – alert, ready to power off my fist at the slightest movement in the grass – I was reminded of those prehistoric hunters who made handprints on cave walls. This process, some archaeologists speculate, could have given these ancient people the sensation of reaching through the cave wall into an animal world beyond. Each evening, when we’d arrived on Bradwell Moor and I’d pulled on my falconry glove, I’d had a similarly strange sensation of reaching into the wild. Walking this moor with Fanshawe on my glove made me keenly aware of being in nature. Never before had I felt so vividly aware that all of us, all species, share an evolutionary origin and live fragile transient lives, in which chance and the tiniest inherited advantage or the wrong decision can mean the difference between life and death.

  It was a fatal decision made by his prey that finally led to Fanshawe catching his own supper. After he had chased it across the moor, the pipit found sanctuary in the long grass surrounding a derelict barn, but instead of staying in the safety of the grass, the pipit inexplicably flew out. With a tilt of his wings Fanshawe was on it in an instant. When he delivered a swift peck to the back of the pipit’s neck, the notch on Fanshawe’s beak, evolved for this purpose, killed the pipit instantly.

  Fanshawe was already plucking and flicking away the pipit’s breast feathers when I knelt down beside him. I held his jesses between gloved finger and thumb, wrapped my other three fingers around the pipit and stood up. After he’d plucked its breast feathers, Fanshawe delicately ate the warm dark red meat of the pipit’s breast, occasionally stopping to wipe his bloodied beak on the fingers of my glove. Some falconers raise their hip flasks and take a sip of sloe gin in a respectful toast to the quarry their hawk has caught, but the practice of the Kalahari hunter-gatherers, of tenderly stroking the dead quarry, while singing a prayer for it, seemed to catch how I felt towards the beautiful pipit Fanshawe was eating on my glove.

  I flew Fanshawe each evening for the following few weeks of autumn until the nights drew in and the pipits had left the moors to winter on lower ground. Fanshawe became a skilful hunter, knowing when to circle around and fly back to the glove, knowing when to pursue his prey. Sometimes he stopped flapping his wings and glided, as if he’d given up the chase, only suddenly to begin his pursuit again and nail his prey. Very occasionally he ‘flew cunning’, which is considered a vice in trained merlins and annoys the falconer. On one occasion, for instance, instead of flying back to my raised glove he landed on a boulder, where, fluffed up and appearing harmless, he looked across the moor. Moments later a pipit, seemingly taken in by his posture, took flight nearby. His feathers immediately sleeking to his body, Fanshawe was off the boulder like a shot and caught the poor pipit before it had flown ten yards. On another occasion he hid a pipit he had caught under a rock. I discreetly removed it and fed it to him later for his supper, but the next evening on his first flight he flew across the moor and peeped under the rock, looking for the pipit he’d cached there the previous evening.

  I was pleased Fanshawe had become a successful hunter. To a limited degree, he was living the life that he’d evolved to live, and it was a relief to know that
if I lost him he would most likely be able to fend for himself. Letting him hunt and eat his natural quarry was the right thing to do, I was convinced, and I hoped my heart would harden to the sight of him catching his supper. It never did.

  The following summer he moulted and the brown feathers on his head, back and wings were replaced by slate-blue feathers, and once again I flew him to the lure on the heather moor to get him fit for an autumn of flying quarry on the grass moor. But after an unexpected phone call I changed my plans. A falconer-conservationist contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in Fanshawe becoming part of his merlin-breeding programme. In Britain in the 1950s wild merlin numbers had declined to as few as 550 pairs. Now that number had risen to around 1,300 pairs, but the loss of their nesting sites, as moorland was overgrazed by sheep and planted with conifers, could prevent any further rise in their numbers. If there was another fall in the wild merlin population, I liked the thought of Fanshawe’s descendants helping to repopulate the wild, as falconers’ peregrines had already done in North America. So, in the autumn of 2000, I took Fanshawe to Lincolnshire and released him into a large aviary, to join a fine-looking female merlin.

  I knew I wouldn’t fly another hawk.

  EPILOGUE

  It was late April 2012, a warm and sunny morning after days of heavy rain. Now aged sixty-six, I walked along a muddy farm track and sat on a bench opposite Tankersley Old Hall. Almost twelve years had passed since I’d flown Fanshawe, but I still loved hawks. I knew kestrels roosted in the ruined Hall, but today I was curious to see if they were nesting. Earlier, as I’d driven along the boundary of the Old Hall’s medieval deer hunting park, I’d seen a kestrel hovering, but I had yet to see a kestrel flying into the Old Hall.

  I had recently attended an event in Oxford at which writers, artists and scientists who love the natural world gave presentations of their work. There I met a writer named Conor Jameson who shared my love of T. H. White’s book The Goshawk. I told him the address of the cottage where White had trained Gos – Stowe Ridings, Buckinghamshire – and of my excitement when I’d discovered it alongside his name in the 1937 edition of The Falconer. Then writing a book on goshawks, Conor had managed to find White’s remote cottage and he kindly offered to take me.

  So, two months later, on a cold winter day with a clear blue sky, I drove down to Buckinghamshire. There, I met up with Conor in a car park near what had been a stately home called Stowe House, until it had become Stowe School in 1922. This was the public school in which T. H. White had taught English, before abandoning teaching to rent the cottage on the Stowe estate, where he’d written The Goshawk. We’d walked through the parkland of Stowe estate, through a wood, and were now walking down a narrow road, when I felt my heart quicken. Across a field, beyond two grazing horses, I’d seen the gamekeeper’s cottage and barn where, over seventy years ago, T. H. White had lived and trained Gos.

  The image from the book of the barn, Gos’s mews, with its wooden slats nailed criss-cross on the windows, had been etched on my mind for almost half a century, but as we approached I saw it had been rebuilt and given a new roof. Conor walked past the cottage, but this place had been in my imagination for decades, and I stopped at the garden gate to gaze at the stone cottage with its red-tiled roof. And there in front of me was the garden in which Gos would have arrived in the basket covered in sacking, ‘bumping against it from underneath: bump, bump, bump, incessantly, with more than a hint of lunacy’, before T. H. White picked it up ‘in a gingerly way and carried it to the barn’. There in front of me was the door that T. H. White was about to paint when disaster struck. Carrying a tin of blue paint he discovered Gos had gone, the twine securing him to his outdoor perch snapped. As I walked back through the fields and ridings which White had walked with Gos on his fist, I guessed that this was the stream in which Gos took a bath, and these the very woods where poor Gos had come to his end, his jesses entangled in a tree. There I’d experienced a sense of reverence, a strange palpable connection with T. H. White, the lonely, obsessive, brilliant writer, whose book had fired my passion for hawks.

  Back at Tankersley, along the cart track, a few yards from where I was sitting on the bench, was where, forty-seven years ago, on one sunny evening in June 1965, I’d come across my friend John, who’d eventually agreed that we could go together to take a kestrel each from the nest in the ruined wall of Tankersley Old Hall. Three summers later, on the very spot of the cart track where I’d come across John, I’d sat at a trestle table eating lunch with a film crew, and for the first time reflected on the unexpected turn of events my hawk obsession had brought about. It had led me to become a volunteer overseas, a falconer on a film of my brother’s book, and to study Environmental Studies. I still found it extraordinary how my love of hawks had made me see the world differently. It was the posh, booming voice of a falconer that had led me to realise I was obsessed with a history that was not my own. This had ignited a passion for the history of my own class. That in turn had prompted me to study for a Master’s degree, and become a deputy head teacher, then a television producer and director, and finally a university lecturer. Jobs I would have thought were beyond me when I was a secondary modern school write-off.

  A childhood friend, after he’d passed his eleven plus exam and won a place at grammar school, had taken every opportunity to tell me that he was in the top percentage of the most intelligent people in the country. At college, I remember one student who’d attended grammar school proudly claiming he was part of the ‘intelligentsia’, and thinking to myself, ‘God help the rest of us’. Yet both those grammar school boys became successful in their chosen fields, so perhaps they were right to be so confident. Having been branded a failure at the age of eleven, and sent to a secondary modern school where I was no cleverer than the other lads there, I see things differently. My own experiences, along with working as a teacher and a lecturer, and making television programmes with working-class people, have convinced me that all of us have something of worth; a hidden potential, a talent or aptitude, which, if, through our home circumstances, our education, or by chance, we are fortunate enough to unearth it, this talent can inspire us to do things in life we might have thought impossible.

  At Tankersley Old Hall there was still no sign of a kestrel. Looking around I noticed the gap through which, almost fifty years ago, I’d emerged from Bell Ground Wood into the moonlight, heart racing with excitement. Getting up from the bench, I crossed the muddy cart track, clambered over the stone wall and walked across the field towards the ruins. Suddenly, out of the blue, a kestrel flew directly towards me at head height. Fleetingly, I relived what it feels like to train and fly a hawk: being close to a creature that never loses its wildness, but which through gentleness can be trained. Then, when the kestrel was only a few wingbeats away, its lovely brown eyes focused on my face, it suddenly curved upwards over my head, flew up and over Tankersley Old Hall, and was soon out of sight.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my wife Jackie for her encouragement in the early stages of writing. Also, thank you to Alan Payne, Frances Byrnes, Conor Jameson, Miriam Darlington, David Llewelyn and Will Atkins, who all read various edits of the manuscript and made insightful suggestions. I am grateful to Andrew McNeillie for publishing an early piece I wrote about training hawks in Archipelago. I would like to say a special thank you to Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury for his belief in my book, and also to my agent Patrick Walsh, who took a chance on me and encouraged and helped me throughout the writing of this memoir. Thank you too to everyone at Bloomsbury: the design team, Anna Simpson, Rachel Nicholson and Marigold Atkey for their help and support; to Richard Collins for a meticulous copyedit and Catherine Best for reading the proofs.

  The author and publisher would like to thank Mal Finch for permission to reproduce lyrics from ‘We are women. We are strong.’

  A Note on the Author

  Richard Hines has worked as a building labourer, in an office, and he was Deputy Hea
d in a school but has spent most of his career as a documentary filmmaker, starting his own production company and working for the BBC and Channel 4, before becoming a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. He lives in Sheffield and frequently walks on the nearby moors.

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  First published in Great Britain 2016

  © Richard Hines, 2016

  Richard Hines has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

  Extracts from the works of Jack Mavrogordato are reproduced by kind permission of Western Sporting. Extracts from The Goshawk and The Godstone and the Blackymor by T. H. White, published respectively by New York Review of Books and Jonathan Cape, are reproduced by kind permission of David Higham Associates Limited. Extracts from The Peregrine © 1967 by J. A. Baker, are reproduced by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.