A Kestrel for a Knave

by Barry Hines

  Teachers were similarly affected. I remember one secondary modern schoolteacher telling me that he had obtained a post in a grammar school and even though his salary would remain the same, he still regarded it as promotion. The eleven-plus system was ruinously divisive at all levels.

  In academic terms Billy Casper is a failure. He is in the bottom form of a rough secondary modern school. He has ‘a job to read and write’ as he tells the Employment Officer. Yet once he becomes interested in falconry, he acquires a book on the subject which is full of esoteric vocabulary and technical descriptions. He then goes on to successfully train a kestrel which requires both intelligence and sensitivity. If there had been GCSEs in Falconry, Billy Casper would have been awarded an A grade, which would have done wonders for his self confidence and given him a more positive self image.

  Readers seeking significance at every turn, ask me where I find the names of the characters in my books. The answer is disappointingly mundane. Sometimes I spot a name I fancy, in a newspaper or magazine and sometimes I make them up. The important point is – and this is just a question of intuition and feeling – that the name has to fit the character in my mind. The original Billy Casper was a famous American golfer whom I had read about in the sports pages. Later, after the book was published, I saw Billy Casper on television. He was a big, burly type, the exact opposite of my skinny little character. But it didn’t matter then, my Billy Casper had been born.

  Curiously, there was another American golfer, called Tom Kite, whose name I would have liked to use in a novel. He sounded like a straight arrow, a brave, upright sort of fellow, but unfortunately I had seen him playing on television so I was never able to use his name.

  During the bird nesting season, my pals and I would occasionally take a young magpie from a nest and try to rear it, feeding it on household scraps. Sometimes they survived, providing rich entertainment with their mischievous ways, before eventually flying back to the wild. But sometimes, the shock of being removed from the security of the nest proved too traumatic and they gave up the ghost and died. We were filled with remorse at the sight of the dead fledgling in the orange box when we opened the shed door in the morning, but after a guilty few minutes of grieving and a quick burial under a grass sod, it was soon forgotten.

  But we would never have taken a young kestrel from a nest in the same casual manner. We knew a kestrel’s nest, high up in the wall of a crumbling medieval hall. Generations of kestrels had nested in the same spot, and we used to stand out of sight at the edge of an adjacent wood watching the parents return with mice and small birds for the ravenous fledglings. It wasn’t just the fact that we had no idea how to raise a young kestrel and it might die, it was more to do with a feeling of awe and instinctive respect for such a beautiful creature. Or, as Billy Casper passionately describes it when he is discussing Kes with Mr Farthing, the sympathetic English teacher, ‘Is it heck tame, it’s trained that’s all. It’s fierce, an’ it’s wild, an’ it’s not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that’s why it’s great.’

  My interest in falconry was increased further by reading The Goshawk by T. H. White, a classic text about a battle of wills between a novice falconer and a young goshawk. Then, more importantly, watching my brother train a young kestrel which had been given to him by a friend. I should mention here to any aspiring falconer, that it is illegal to keep a falcon unless a licence has been granted by the Home Office. But Billy Casper wouldn’t have been aware of such legal niceties, and even if he had been, he would have instinctively steered clear of anything connected with officialdom.

  People have often asked me if Billy Casper was based on a real person. No, he wasn’t, but he’s not unusual, the lonely misfit who doesn’t belong to the gang. But even though Billy has a tough life and the odds are stacked against him, it was important not to make him a weak, blameless character whom everybody picks on. This would have weakened and sentimentalized the story. Billy is a survivor, a tough little character, more Artful Dodger than Oliver Twist. When he is foiled by the bureaucracy at the public library, he immediately goes out and steals a falconry book from a bookshop. When MacDowall tries to bully him in the playground, he gives as good as he gets in the ensuing fight. We gather during a conversation with Mr Farthing that he has already been in trouble with the law, and most dramatically, he keeps the money which his brother has left for him to place on a winning bet.

  A Kestrel for a Knave was published in 1968 and was shortly followed by Kes the filmed adaptation of the novel on which I worked closely with the director, Ken Loach and producer, Tony Garnett. What impressed me when I first met them was their determination to stick to the harsh reality of the novel and not turn it into a sentimental, ‘Walt Disney boy and his pet’ type story. Raising money for a film is always difficult, but for a film of this nature: low budget, no sex, no stars, no violence – proved particularly daunting. After listening to the pitch, one producer dismissed it with the brutal verdict, ‘Wrong kind of bird.’ Another explained that a few changes might be necessary to make it more commercial. For example, Jud, Billy’s bullying big brother, could become his mother’s lover rather than her son. After a fight between the couple, Billy comes home from school, discovers his mother dead and runs away. The following morning, when Billy does not turn up at school, Mr Farthing embarks on a long search, finds Billy roaming the streets of a distant town, then brings him home and finds him a job in a zoo. This scenario wasn’t too difficult to resist and eventually United Artists put up the money and the film was made in the spirit that we intended. What was especially gratifying for me, was that some of the locations in the film were the same ones that I had written about in the novel, and it gave me an extra thrill to see them on the screen.

  There were a few changes in the adaptation of the book to the film; there always are, however faithful the film makers remain to the original. Sometimes, scenes that work in a book don’t work on film and vice versa. For example, I found it much more thrilling watching Billy flying the hawk to the lure on the big screen in technicolour rather than in my head. Conversely, one of the key scenes in the novel, in which Mr Farthing asks the class to write ‘A Tall Story’ didn’t work at all when it was being filmed and had to be abandoned. It was tried with a hand-held camera shooting over Billy’s shoulder as he wrote his story, but it soon became apparent that it would have taken him too long to complete and an edited version would not have had the same emotional effect. In the novel, the reader is with him, sharing his difficulties as he struggles to express his pitiful hopes, ‘Billy dipped his nib right up to the metal holder, then, balancing on the front legs of his chair, book and head askew, he begins his story…’

  Another important change was the ending. In the novel, following the fight in the house after Jud has killed the hawk, Billy runs off and breaks into a derelict cinema which he used to visit with his father in happier times. He sits on a broken seat and projects onto the screen an imaginary scene of Kes attacking a fleeing Jud up on the moors. This wouldn’t have worked because it was pure fantasy taking place inside Billy’s head, and the style would have been out of context with everything that had happened previously. In the film, the downbeat ending of Billy burying the hawk after his emotional confrontation with Jud was much more appropriate.

  The film Kes was a huge success and it helped to popularize the novel which, although published as adult fiction, is widely read in schools and is now a set examination text. I often receive letters from children asking questions about the book; GCSE candidates I suspect seeking insider information. It’s a surreal experience. It’s like being back at school doing English Literature ‘O’ level, only this time I’m answering questions on my own text. I’ve sometimes considered sitting the examination under an assumed name to see how I would get on. Perhaps my interpretation of the book would differ from that of the examiner and I would fail. Who can tell?

  I sometimes think that people read too much into novels and seek hidden meani
ngs where none exist. I’ve received letters enquiring about the significance of the names of the two race horses in the bet that Billy failed to place for Jud. (I’ll let you into a secret here. I’d forgotten their names and I’ve just taken the novel down from the shelf to look them up.) Tell Him He’s Dead and Crackpot, that’s what they’re called. Weird names I must admit, but nothing significant in them as far as I remember. Writing a novel is hard enough without agonizing over the names of race horses, ‘… like a long debilitating illness’ as George Orwell describes it.

  I once wrote a nuclear war drama for the BBC called Threads. A few weeks after its transmission, I received a letter from a doctoral student in an American University requesting permission to quote from the script. His dissertation was entitled, ‘An Available Means: Manifestations of Aristotle’s Three Modes of Rhetorical Appeal in Anti-nuclear Fiction’. I would have awarded him a doctorate for the title!

  A Kestrel for a Knave started life as a novel and has subsequently been adapted into a film, a stage play, a musical and serialized on radio. ‘Kes on Ice’ hasn’t appeared yet, but don’t bet against it. Writing this afterword thirty years after the book was first published has given me the opportunity to reappraise it and consider how it would differ if I was writing it today.

  The main difference educationally is that Billy Casper would be attending a comprehensive school rather than a secondary modern, which is an advance of sorts, even though the principles of comprehensive education have only been pursued in a half-hearted way. Unfortunately his job prospects would be no better, in fact they would be worse. In the late sixties, when the novel was published, Billy would have got a job of sorts, however menial. He wouldn’t even get a job down the pit now, because in South Yorkshire where the book is set, most of the mines have closed down. He would probably go on a scheme of some description designed to keep him off the streets, but with few long term prospects.

  In retrospect, I think I made Jud and Mrs Casper too unsympathetic. Perhaps I should have given them more space; shown Jud hard at work in the darkness, shovelling coal on a three-foot face. This would have illustrated the importance of his lost winnings when Billy fails to place the bet. ‘I could have had a week off work wi’ that,’ he complains bitterly. A week of fresh air and open sky. And he didn’t mean to kill the hawk initially. ‘It wa’ its own stupid fault! I wa’ only goin’ to let it go, but it wouldn’t get out o’t’hut. An’ every time I tried to shift it, it kept lashing out wi’ its claws. Look at ’em they’re scratched to ribbons!’ I think I might have been tempted to wring its neck in the same circumstances.

  I could also have made Billy’s mother more caring. In the scene where she is getting ready to go out for the evening and Billy is reading his falconry book, she could have shown a little more affection, perhaps given him a kiss (I almost wrote ‘peck’) on the cheek as she goes out… But all this speculation is pointless really, changes in characterization would have produced a different book.

  If I was writing it today I wouldn’t use dialect. It can be irritating to the reader and whatever methods you try, you don’t capture the voice on the page. I think the best solution is to use dialect words to give the flavour of the region, but trying to reproduce northern working-class speech with the glottal stop as in ‘Going to t’cinema’ doesn’t work at all. The answer of course is to write about middle-class characters who are ‘Going to the cinema’. I didn’t have this problem when I was adapting the novel into the film script. I wrote it in standard English and the actors translated it back.

  It is both gratifying and puzzling what an effect A Kestrel for a Knave has had on readers over the years. Neither author or publisher are certain how a book will be received when it comes out. Sometimes, a quiet little book ignored by critics, but recommended by word of mouth, gains a currency amongst readers, while a much publicized ‘masterpiece’ flops. I bet they weren’t popping the champagne corks at Michael Joseph when the manuscript of A Kestrel for a Knave arrived in the post. A slim book about a no-hoper and a hawk. But somehow the chemistry works, and over the years I have received many rewarding letters from readers, saying how much they enjoyed the novel and in some cases how it has actually changed their lives.

  For example, a young man from Manchester uses A Kestrel for a Knave in his work with young offenders and is setting up an appreciation society for the novel. I received a letter from a man with a similar background to Billy Casper, who wrote that the book made him realize it was possible to achieve something in life however difficult the circumstances. He later went on to become a lecturer. He said that the question ‘What’s tha mean Germans bite?’ has became a catch phrase between him and his brother.

  I think the general appreciation of the book is best summed up by a man who wrote, ‘I read A Kestrel for a Knave when I was 12 or 13 and was haunted by it. I knew a few Billy Caspers – I was very nearly a Billy Casper myself. I found the love of music as my escape… ‘Kes’ mirrored some of the things that were going on around me. Billy’s hawk was my music’ He went on to say that he became a musician and enclosed with his letter his first CD entitled. For a Knave.

  While writing this introduction, I have often thought about my father, a coalminer who died before I had even started writing. He wasn’t interested in literature, and neither was I as a teenager, when he used to come and watch me play football and run at athletic meetings. He read the racing pages of the Daily Herald and an occasional cowboy book, but that was about the strength of it. I started writing just after he died and wish he could have lived to see how things turned out. I would love to have seen his face when I handed him a copy of this new edition of A Kestrel for a Knave. I can see him now, sitting by the fire turning the pages and shaking his head. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ he would have said. ‘Not me,’ I would have replied. And we would both have laughed at the improbability of it all.

  Barry Hines, 1999