H Is for Hawk (24 page)

I stare at the hawk as she grips the dead pheasant, and her mad eyes stare right back at me. I’m amazed. I don’t know what I expected to feel. Bloodlust? Brutality? No. Nothing like that. There are thorn-scratches all over me from where I dived through the hedge, and an ache in my heart I can’t place. There’s a sheeny fog in the air. Dry. Like talc. I look at the hawk, the pheasant, the hawk. And everything changes. The hawk stops being a thing of violent death. She becomes a child. It shakes me to the core. She is a child. A baby hawk that’s just worked out who she is. What she’s for. I reach down and start, unconsciously as a mother helping a child with her dinner, plucking the pheasant with the hawk. For the hawk. And when she starts eating, I sit on my heels and watch, watch her eat. Feathers lift, blow down the hedge, and catch in spiders’ webs and thorn branches. The bright blood on her toes coagulates and dries. Time passes. Benison of sunlight. A wind shifts the thistle stalks and is gone. And I start crying, soundlessly. Tears roll down my face. For the pheasant, for the hawk, for Dad and for all his patience, for that little girl who stood by a fence and waited for the hawks to come.

20

Hiding

WHITE RUSHES FROM
the house. The postman brought him news of agitated rooks in nearby woods. Breathless, he runs to the trees. Gos is not there. Of course he is not. He cannot find the sparrowhawks either. He thinks he hears them sometimes, but perhaps the calls are owls. He exists, now, in a landscape of hearsay; there are rumours of hawks like rumours of war. He stares at the sky. He litters the country with traps. He sits for days on end in the woods, from dawn until dark, cramped and shivering in his hide. Nothing. He buys a gamekeeper’s pole trap with jagged metal jaws. He files away the teeth designed to break hawks’ legs and pads its spring-shut jaws with felt. Then he makes another trap, a falconer’s trap from a description in a book: a noose of running twine around a ring of upturned feathers, and in the centre of the ring a tethered blackbird. He’ll hide with one end of the twine in his hand, and when the hawk takes the bird, he’ll pull, so the twine slips over the feathers and catches the hawk by its legs. It might work, if he can trap a blackbird to use as bait. He cannot trap a blackbird. He despairs. He starts a letter.
Dear Herr Waller
, it begins. He writes in English because his German is poor. He asks the man who’d sent him Gos for another hawk. He knows it might be too late in the year to get a young one, and passage hawks – those trapped when already on the wing – are few and far between. But he ends the letter with hope, takes it to Buckingham and posts it to Berlin. He waits for a reply, he waits for the hawks, he waits in penance and suffers for his sins. Nothing comes and there is no answer.

My job was over. It was time to move. I was already an emotional mess, but the stress of the move pushed my dysfunction to spectacular proportions. The new house in the suburbs was nothing like the old house in the city: it was huge and modern, with a vast front room for the hawk to sleep in and lawns to sun herself upon. I filled the freezer with hawk food and a stack of frozen pizzas. Dragged my clothes upstairs in their plastic sacks, dumped them in a pile by the bedroom door. The rain came again, thin and sour, and I spent my first day there sprawled on the sofa with a notepad on my knees, failing to write my father’s memorial address.
I have five minutes
, I kept thinking, dully.
Five minutes to speak of my father’s life
.

The house was full of toys: alphabet blocks and jigsaws, plush animals in boxes, pictures in felt-tip pen and glitter pinned to the kitchen walls. It was a family house and there was no family in it. The emptiness I felt was my own, but in my madness I began to feel the house didn’t want me, that it missed its family and was mourning their loss. I stayed out longer with Mabel, found it harder and harder to return, because out with the hawk I didn’t need a home. Out there I forgot I was human at all. Everything the hawk saw was raw and real and drawn hair-fine, and everything else was dampened to nothing. The landscape built meanings in my head that felt like pressures, like light, like gifts: sensations impossible to put into words, like the apprehension of danger, or someone reading over your shoulder. Everything became more complicated but strangely simple too. The hedgerows that were once hawthorn, blackthorn, maple and ash were now all of a piece and nameless, wrought of the same stuff as me; they felt like inanimate people, no more or less important than the hawk, than me, or anything else on the hill. Sometimes my phone rang and I’d answer it. The effort to drag myself out of the bright nimbus of land cut with lines of strategy and hawkish desire was terrible. It was usually my mother. She had to say everything twice, to begin with, as if she were coaching me in how to return from this strange hedgerow ontology to more ordinary humanity.

‘Hello!’ she’d say.

Silence.

‘Hello?’

And Mabel would be on my fist, tail fanned, shoulders dropped, staring through me and the phone, and her attention catching on everything serially.
Fieldfence-fieldfare-wingflick-pheasant-feather-on-path-sun-on-wire-twelve-woodpigeons-half-a-mile-distant-tick-tick-tick
and Mum’s saying:

‘How are you?’

‘Fine, Mum. How are you?’

‘I’m OK. Have you heard from James?’

Her voice was slow and deep compared to the constant indexical chatter of things and I couldn’t hear what she was really saying because there were twelve woodpigeons half a mile away and the hawk was looking at them and so was I. I could not hear my mother’s pain. I could not feel my own.

We’d come to a different place today, a field on the other side of town overrun with rabbits. It took less than a minute for Mabel to grab one deep in a drift of nettles. Hawks don’t retrieve their prey: you must run to them, let them eat a while, then take them back onto your fist for a reward of food. I ran, bent down, parted the stinging stems, picked the rabbit up with the hawk, and put them both down on the grass. Now the rabbit is dead, its pelt bunched between the hawk’s gripping talons, but blood upwells as she breaks into its chest, and I cannot stop watching it, this horrible, mesmerising, seeping claret filling up the space, growing jelly-like as it meets the air, like a thing alive. It
was
a thing alive. I want to sit and think. This is a great mystery. I feel something pressing against my own chest, leaning in, a question wanting an answer. But there’s no time for contemplation: I have to get her back on the glove, or she’ll stuff her face and won’t fly tomorrow. It’s time for the ancient falconer’s trick to stop a hawk from feeling she’s been robbed of her prize. First I cut off one of the rabbit’s hind legs and hide it behind my back, then lay handfuls of grass in a stack by my side. Then I hold out the leg in my glove, throwing the grass over the rabbit to hide it. The hawk looks down, sees grass at her feet, looks up, sees food, leaps straight to my fist and eats.

And as I tuck the rabbit into the back pocket of my waistcoat the noise begins. First it is a low, dopplering growl. It dies away, returns. Engines. Big engines, growing louder. The note climbs to a vast marine roar – and a Second World War bomber, a Flying Fortress, emerges from behind the trees. Woodpigeons spray from the tops of the oaks in terror. Pheasants crow, shadows flicker, the remaining rabbits bolt to their holes. I feel an urgent need to hide. But Mabel gives the monstrous thing a single, indifferent glance and continues to eat. I’m astonished. How can the hawk not see it as a threat, this vast, impossibly heavy whale of a plane? She comes right overhead, absurdly low; she is painted a deep USAAF wartime green, and as she banks through the sun-furred air I see the bomb bay and the gun turret on her belly. The size of her, the deep thrumming drone of her four Pratt & Whitney engines, the sense that she is alive, an animal – all these things hold me transfixed. I sit back on my heels and stare, my fear forgotten. And two lines fall into my head.

Consider this, and in our time

As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:

The poet W. H. Auden had written those lines in 1930, and I hadn’t thought of them for years. To have the commanding view of the hawk and airman: to be lifted free from the messy realities of human life to a prospect of height and power from which one can observe the world below. To have safe vantage, from which death may descend.
Safety
. I think of the American airmen stationed here seventy years ago flying aircraft just like this one, scrambling to the iceboxes that were cockpits, wearing heated suits that didn’t work, breathing oxygen through rubber hoses that furred with crystalline ice, so that at altitude they had to bend and crush them between their fingers to get sufficient oxygen to breathe. They slept on cots in an alien land of rain and fog, dressed in silence for dawn briefings before running to their ships, holding the throttles forward, tight-chested as the engines spooled up, climbing through cloud, eyes locked on the manifold pressure gauges and the rpm displays, navigators calling headings in degrees. And then the hours of flight to and from Germany where they dropped their appalling cargo through skies thick with exploding shells. One in four did not complete their tour of duty. The sky was not a place of safety, no matter how commanding their view. What happened to them was terrible. What they did was terrible beyond imagining. No war can ever be just air.

The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives’ ends. She finishes the last scraps of rabbit, strops her beak, rubs strands of pale fur onto the glove. Then she shakes her feathers into place and gazes up at the empty sky where the bomber had been. And I feel it then, the tug. How did Auden’s poem go, after those lines?

The clouds rift suddenly – look there
¹

I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk’s eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water.
Here I am
, I think.
And I do not think I am safe
.

My father had grown up in that war. For the first four years of his life he and his family had lived under the bombers streaming over in stacked formations, cut with searchlights at night or in scrawls of ragged contrails that glowed in the upper air by day. What must it have been like to see those tiny crosses passing overhead? You know that some are trying to kill you. Others defend you. Knowing which was which must have had, in the language of the time, great danger valency. Your life was caught up in these small and migrant machines. Like all your friends you make Airfix models, spend your pocket money on
Aeroplane Spotter
. You memorise the position of engines, learn the lineaments of tail position, shape, engine note, fuselage. And so plane-spotting became Dad’s childhood obsession. Numbering, identifying, classifying, recording, learning the details with a fierce child’s need to know and command. When he was older he cycled to distant airfields with a bottle of Tizer, a Box Brownie camera, a notebook and pencil. Farnborough, Northolt, Blackbushe. Hours of waiting at the perimeter fence, a small boy looking through the wire.

I must have inherited being a watcher from Dad
, I thought idly. Perhaps it was inevitable that with Dad’s propensity to stare up at the slightest engine note, raise a pair of binoculars to distant contrails, my tiny self would emulate him, learn that looking at flying things was the way to see the world. Only for me, it wasn’t aeroplanes. It was birds.

Now I’ve come to realise that we were watching the same things: or at least, things that history conspired to make the same. Since the dawn of military aviation, birds of prey had been thought of as warplanes made flesh: beings of aerodynamic, predatory perfection. Hawks fly and hunt and kill: aircraft do the same. These similarities were seized upon by military propagandists, for they made air warfare, like hawks, part of the natural order of things. Falconry’s medieval glamour played its part, too, and soon hawks and aeroplanes were deeply entangled in visions of war and national defence. There’s an extraordinary example of this in Powell and Pressburger’s 1944 film
A Canterbury Tale
. In the opening scenes a party of Chaucerian pilgrims crosses the downs on the way to Canterbury. A knight unhoods a falcon and casts it into the air. The camera lingers on its flickering wings – a quick cut – and the falcon’s silhouette becomes a diving Spitfire. We see the knight’s face again. It is the same face, but now it wears the helmet of a modern soldier as it watches the Spitfire above. The sequence is powered by the myth of an essential Britishness unchanged through the ages, and it shows how powerfully hawks could marry romantic medievalism with the hard-edged technology of modern war.

Sitting there in the grass, listening to distant engines under a misty October sky, I thought of my father standing on the bombsite in my dream. He had stood and waited, as a boy. Had been patient and the planes had come. And I remembered, then, a story he’d told us one Saturday morning over breakfast. It was a good story. In a small way, it made my dad a hero. I felt a flood of gratitude. There’d been weeks of panic, of not knowing what to say in my father’s memorial address, and now I knew this story would be at the heart of it. ‘Thank you, Dad,’ I breathed.

In White’s little grey notebook with the snake on its cover there are nightmares of aeroplanes too. They loom ‘silver-gold through the blue haze’
²
towards him; he dives underwater, looks for cellars to hide in, but they can always find him, always know where he is. They drop high explosives and poison gas, step-dive down to render him dead. They were the dream-terrors of a boy who grew up at the mercy of violent authority: his father, his schoolmasters, the prefects, and now the dictators dragging the world to war. In
England Have My Bones
White explained that he had learned to fly because he was scared of aeroplanes. Perhaps his fear was not only of falling; perhaps his lessons were an attempt to conquer his fear of persecution by assuming for his own the airman’s eye. And just as he’d fought with his fear of the aeroplane, so he had tussled with Gos. For Gos was the dark and immoral child of ancient German forests. He was a murderer. He had all the glamour of the dictator. His laws were those of Hitler and Mussolini; he was the violence and irrationality of fascism made flesh. ‘He was a Hittite,’
³
White wrote later; ‘a worshipper of Moloch. He immolated victims, sacked cities, put virgins and children to the sword.’ I began to see, now, how you could read
The Goshawk
with a different eye: as something like a war. Siegfried Sassoon had seen it, recognised the battle that raged in its pages. When it was published White sent him a copy but he confessed that he could not read it. He had started to, but flunked it. ‘I now flinch from anything frightful,’
⁴
he explained, ‘and what I read was agonising.’