A Kestrel for a Knave (23 page)

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