H Is for Hawk (15 page)

I choose my moment. When her head is up swallowing a mouthful of chick, I tug its remains through my palm and spirit it away. She looks down, then behind her, then at the floor.
Where did it go?
I persuade her to step back onto her perch. Then I hold the chick out once more, and further away. Instantly I feel that terrible blow. It is a killing blow, but there is something about the force of it that reminds me that I am alive.

I was alive, yes, but exhausted. I felt as if I were built of wool. Grey, loose-spun wool on an aching set of bones. My walks with the hawk were stressful, requiring endless vigilance, and they were wearing me away. As the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder. Fear was contagious: it rose unbidden in my heart as people approached us. I was no longer certain if the hawk bated because she was frightened of what she saw, or if the terror she felt was mine. And something else had happened on our walks. We had become invisible. The people passing by didn’t stop, didn’t look, sent not even a sideways glance in our direction. Some part of me began to believe that they didn’t see us at all; that we were walking in another dimension, as if we were ghosts, or they were. I thought of those goshawks I’d seen as a child staring out at a winter afternoon from the world I now inhabited. And at night, at home, I stood at the window watching the lights outside, pressing my forehead against the pane to feel the faint ticking of summer rain through glass and bone.

Everyone saw us. Of course they did. A woman stalking the park with a bloody great hawk on her fist and a baleful stare on her face is hardly inconspicuous. Everyone saw us; they just pretended they hadn’t. But some people were brave enough to look. The next morning, for example, standing in thin rain watching flotillas of umbrellas move across the park, I notice a man. He stands against a fence twenty feet away, hands resting equably on the wooden rail, watching us with a face as expressionless as if he were regarding horses in a field. I walk over and say hello. He is from Kazakhstan, he says, and we talk about my hawk, and about Kazakh falconers,
berkutchi
, who fly golden eagles from horseback as they have done for thousands of years. He has never seen the eagles, he says, because he lives in a city. In Almaty. He asks if my hawk has a hood. I give it to him. He turns it in his hands, nods at its workmanship, gives it back to me. Only then do we properly introduce ourselves. His name is Kanat. He asks where I will hunt with the hawk. ‘On farmland a few miles from here,’ I reply. He nods, looks searchingly at Mabel, and is silent for a long time. Then he spreads his fingers wide on the wooden rail and stares at the backs of his hands and at the cuffs of his brown leather jacket. ‘I miss my country,’ he says.

Soon after he leaves a cyclist skids to a halt and asks politely if he can look at the bird. He is absurdly handsome. He stands there with his Antonio Banderas hair, and his expensive technical jacket and titanium bike beaded with rain, and admires the hell out of her. ‘She is
beautiful
,’ he says. He is trying to find another word but it evades him. Beautiful will have to do. He says it again. Then he thanks me over and over again for the hawk. ‘So close!’ he says. ‘I have never seen a hawk so close.’ In Mexico he has only seen wild ones, and only far away. ‘I like to watch them because they are . . .’ And he makes a movement with one hand as if it were something lifting into the air. ‘Free,’ I say. He nods, and I do too, and in some wonder, because I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holiday. ‘We are outsiders now, Mabel,’ I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.

I’m in an expansive, celebratory mood. Today Mabel flew four feet to my fist from the back of a chair in my front room. ‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ I tell her. ‘Time for a walk. Let’s go and meet my friend’s kids. They’ll love you.’ A few minutes later I knock on a door and my friend’s husband opens it. My hawk flinches. So do I: this man was exceptionally rude to me once. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. Maybe he was having a bad day. Forgive, forget. My friend isn’t in. I stand before the door and tell him about the hawk. I tell him her age, her sex, her species, her name. I tell him that I’d thought her taming would be the kind of agonising battle I’d read about in
The Goshawk
. ‘But it’s been a total surprise,’ I say. ‘There’s been no battle at all. Which isn’t my doing, I’m sure. She’s a freakishly calm hawk.’ And the man inclines his head to one side, and smiles.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’ll be a gendered thing.’

‘Gendered?’

‘Yes. You’re a woman, and she’s female. Of
course
you get on,’ he says.

He seems deadly serious. I stare at his curled hand on the doorframe and heat rises in my face.
This is mockery
. For the first time in weeks, the hawk disappears from my mind as some part of me bunches up into one firm and unspoken sentence:
What an asshole.

He’s saying because I’m training a female hawk, there’s some bond of sisterhood between us?
What the hell?
We’re different
species
, for God’s sake. ‘I don’t think that’s a factor in my hawk’s behaviour,’ I say, and smile. It’s a thin smile. The smile of the placator. It is a smile that is a veneer on murder. I rage my way home, heart bating wildly. Back in the house, hawk on her perch, I collect myself. My anger has gone: now I am fascinated. I pull all the falconry books off the shelves and pile them up on the floor. Then I sit cross-legged next to the hawk. ‘Right, Mabel,’ I say, ‘Goshawks are boys’ birds, are they? Let’s see what the boys have said about you.’ I pick up Humphrey ap Evans’
Falconry for You
, and read. ‘She purrs and chirps to her master, rubbing her head against him. But she is proud and wild and beautiful: her anger is terrible to behold. She can be moody and sulky.’
¹

Hmm
.

Now I open Gilbert Blaine, and there I read of her ‘peculiar and somewhat sulky disposition’.
²
‘She will set her mind on making herself as disagreeable as she can,’ he explained; ‘will exasperate you to such a degree that you will long to wring her neck.’ Then to Frank Illingworth’s
Falcons and Falconry
: ‘Never was there a more contrary bird than the gos! Her sole purpose in life seems to be to aggravate her owner.’
³
‘Mabel, this is very dubious,’ I say. Then I start on the Victorian falconers. Charles Hawkins Fisher did ‘not like her or her kin’,
⁴
and Freeman and Salvin considered it ‘a thousand pities that the temper of this bird is so very far from amiable; it is, in fact, sulky’.
⁵

‘Sulky. Oh my God, Mabel. You know what you are? You’re a woman. You’re a hormonal woman!’ It made such ghastly sense. It was why these falconers never wondered if their own behaviour had anything to do with why their goshawks took stand in trees, or flew into fits of nerves, or rage, or attacked their dogs, or decided to fly away. It wasn’t their fault. Like women, Goshawks were inexplicable. Sulky. Flighty and hysterical. Their moods were pathological. They were beyond all reason.

But reading further back I find that in the seventeenth century goshawks weren’t vile at all. They were ‘sociable and familiar’, though by nature ‘altogether shye and fearfull’ wrote Simon Latham in 1615. They ‘take exception’ at ‘rough and harsh behaviour from the man’, but if treated with kindness and consideration, are ‘as loving and fond of her Keeper as any other Hawke whatsoever’. These hawks, too, were talked about as if they were women. They were things to win, to court, to love. But they were not hysterical monsters. They were real, contradictory, self-willed beings, ‘stately and brave’,
⁶
but also ‘shye and fearfull’. If they behaved in ways that irritated the falconer it was because he had not treated them well, had not demonstrated ‘continuall loving and curteous behaviour towards them’. The falconer’s role, wrote Edmund Bert, was to provide for all his hawk’s needs so that she might have ‘joye in her selfe’. ‘I am her friend,’ he wrote of his goshawk, ‘and shee my playfellow.’
⁷

A more cynical eye might have seen these Elizabethan and Jacobean men as boasting about their hawk-training skills; old-school pick-up artists in a bar talking up their seduction routines. But I wasn’t cynical. They had won me over, these long-dead men who loved their hawks. They were reconciled to their otherness, sought to please them and be their friends. I wasn’t under any illusion that women were better off in early-modern England, and assumed it was a fear of female emancipation that had made goshawks so terribly frightening to later falconers – but even so I knew which kind of relationship I preferred.

I look at Mabel. She looks at me. So much of what she means is made of people. For thousands of years hawks like her have been caught and trapped and brought into people’s houses. But unlike other animals that have lived in such close proximity to man, they have never been domesticated. It’s made them a powerful symbol of wildness in myriad cultures, and a symbol, too, of things that need to be mastered and tamed.

I close my copy of Bert’s
Treatise of Hawks and Hawking
with a snap, and as the cover falls my hawk makes a curious, bewitching movement. She twitches her head to one side then turns it upside down and continues to regard me with the tip of her beak pointing at the ceiling. I am astonished. I’ve seen this head-turning before. Baby falcons do it when they play. But goshawks?
Really?
I pull a sheet of paper towards me, tear a long strip from one side, scrunch it into a ball, and offer it to the hawk in my fingers. She grabs it with her beak. It crunches. She likes the sound. She crunches it again and then lets it drop, turning her head upside down as it hits the floor. I pick it up and offer it to her again. She grabs it and bites it very gently over and over again:
gnam gnam gnam
. She looks like a glove puppet, a Punch and Judy crocodile. Her eyes are narrowed in bird-laughter. I am laughing too. I roll a magazine into a tube and peer at her through it as if it were a telescope. She ducks her head to look at me through the hole. She pushes her beak into it as far as it will go, biting the empty air inside. Putting my mouth to my side of my paper telescope I boom into it: ‘Hello, Mabel.’ She pulls her beak free. All the feathers on her forehead are raised. She shakes her tail rapidly from side to side and shivers with happiness.

An obscure shame grips me. I had a fixed idea of what a goshawk was, just as those Victorian falconers had, and it was not big enough to hold what goshawks are. No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible. I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad.

In a letter to White, Gilbert Blaine explained that he didn’t like goshawks because their ‘crazy and suspicious temperament had alienated him from them, as it had most falconers’.
⁸
‘Perhaps for this reason,’ White wrote, years later, ‘I had loved Gos. I always loved the unteachable, the untouchable, the underdog.’ Gos was a queer thing, the opposite of civilised English hearts, and through him White could play many selves: the benevolent parent, the innocent child, the kindly teacher, the patient pupil. And other, stranger selves: through the hawk White could become a mother, a ‘man who for two months had made that bird, almost like a mother nourishing her child inside her, for the subconsciousness of the bird and the man became really linked by a mind’s cord: to the man who had created out of a part of his life’.
⁹
And in White’s notebooks, the ones written in green ink, he begins writing things late at night in a drunken, expansive hand that never make their way into his book because they are too revealing.

The thing he most hates is to have his head stroked, the thing he most likes is to have his tail feathers pulled, stroked, pruned & sorted out. In fact, Gos shows much interest in his backward parts. He is a coprophilite, if not a pansy. He can slice his mutes 3 yards and always turns proudly round to look at them. I, however, who can pee continually for several minutes (and this he supposes to be some form of slicing) excite his interest and envy.
¹⁰

There are many ways to read
The Goshawk
, and one of them is as a work of suppressed homosexual desire – not for flesh, but for blood, for kinship. You can sense it is the book of a lonely man who felt he was different, who was searching for others like him. Falconry wasn’t a particularly queer sport, though some of the falconers White corresponded with, like Jack Mavrogordato and Ronald Stevens, were gay. Perhaps Blaine, too: he never married. But falconers were a fellowship of men, a ‘monkish elite’, a ‘small, tenacious sect’,
¹¹
as Lord Tweedsmuir described them, who felt a love that other people did not understand. It was a love that was not considered normal, and it was not something they could help. Gilbert Blaine explained that ‘deeply rooted in the nature of certain individuals [exists] some quality which inspires a natural liking for hawks’. The ‘true falconer’, he wrote, ‘is born, not made’.
¹²
And in years to come White would write of how falconry gave him a comforting sense of unspoken fellowship with like-minded men: