H Is for Hawk (25 page)

White’s politics were deeply unfortunate. He loathed capitalism, and while he’d flirted with Communism at Stowe, loving its revolutionary fervour, he began to fear it, for if the revolution came, it would take away his individuality and he was sure that was all he had. Now he wondered if he might be a fascist. He was not sure. He hated nationalism, but certainly did not believe people were equal. He did not like Hitler. But he did not like the British government either. He had a child’s vision of apocalyptic redemption: he believed that war, when it came, would bring waste and murder and the ruin of civilisation, but that war would be worthwhile if we could emerge from the ruins with wisdom.

One had to choose one’s side. Democracy against fascism. The rational against the irrational. Blood or peace. People or rabbits. White chose to shoot rabbits, rather than people, and he chose to fight the war in person with a hawk. Through Gos, he battled the dictator in himself. And for him the hawk was a salutary thing, for he believed that war came from society’s repression of innate human urges. Because the hawk could not dissemble he was a ‘tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart’.
⁵

And so the war was fought, here, in a kitchen and a barn, a garden and a wood. To and fro across the disputed territory the battle onward raged. When White understood that he was the dictator he tasted defeat, engineered the hawk’s loss and pushed it away. Then came a new stage in the war: his retreat to forest bunkers. From these miniature shelters, he hoped to bring down the hawks of the air that flew like the aeroplanes in his dreams.

Years before, back in those happy times of safety in St Leonards, his greatest thrill had been when his grandparents took him to Hastings Caves and the guide led them underground into the curious halls of smuggler-carved sandstone. ‘At a particular point in the journey under the earth,’
⁶
he wrote, ‘as we children and the nannies and the ordinary holiday trippers stood mute in the silent, sound-absorbing sand, the guide used to put out his candle – and there we were in the utter darkness as well.’ He treasured that memory. For a boy who always felt imperilled, that pitch-black cave was a refuge, and he returned to it in his imagination again and again. He dreamed of tunnels and caves as sanctuaries. He called his cottage in the woods his badger’s sett. In
Gone to Ground
he made an underground bunker save a field of hunting folk from the end of the world; and in
The Queen of Air and Darkness
, the second book of
The Once and Future King
, he wrote of Merlyn’s imprisonment for centuries in the cave beneath the hill. The imprisonment is in Malory, but Merlyn’s foreknowledge of his fate is not. ‘It will be charming to have a rest for a few hundred years,’
⁷
he announces to the astounded king.

A return to the womb would be one way of seeing this obsession with dark and private spaces. But White saw them not as the womb of the mother he despised, but as refuges under the ground; they were safe because they were hidden from the persecutor’s hunting eyes.

He has made himself a grave. It is a skeletal coracle of slim ash poles covered with a wet blanket sprouting with mustard and grass. He’d scattered the seeds on the wool and waited for them to grow. This morning he toiled like a tortoise with the shell on his forehead and shoulders, took it out to the wood, arranged the blanket over it and lay on the ground inside. He has no tobacco. He cannot smoke. He can barely move. He has been here for hours, shivering with cold, lying in wait for hawks that would not come. It is a vigil, an ordeal, just as those long nights with the hawk. Another thunderstorm crosses the Ridings. The sky is rusty water and the trees have blurred to ink. Fat raindrops hammer on the blanket and soak through his steaming clothes; there is wet wool and sweat and the electric scent of the storm carried in with the rising wind. He is closer to them now, those long dead men who understood him. He lies in a grave like them. He holds his breath as poachers walk past, men who know the forest in all its perfect parts, men who have the instinctive ability to read the landscape. They do not see him. He has become invisible. It is something like a miracle. The suffering of his body is as naught to the joy of being free from the pain of being seen.

21

Fear

IT WAS ALWAYS
there, kneeling by Mabel on her prey, that the thoughts came, when I wondered how I could be doing this, how I could be hunting at all. I hate killing things. I’m loath to tread on spiders and get laughed at for rescuing flies. But now I understood for the first time what bloodthirstiness was all about. It was only when I was aligned with the hawk’s eye that it made sense, but then it made more sense than anything else in the world. When I saw birds fly overhead I’d turn my head and follow them with a kind of longing.

Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and the air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to block out anything like the past or the future, so that the only thing that mattered were the next thirty seconds. I felt the curt lift of autumn breeze over the hill’s round brow, and the need to tack left, to fall over the leeward slope to where the rabbits were. I crept and walked and ran. I crouched. I looked. I saw more than I’d ever seen. The world gathered about me. It made absolute sense. But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill.

Yet every time the hawk caught an animal, it pulled me back from being an animal into being a human again. That was the great puzzle, and it was played out again and again. How hearts do stop. A rabbit prostrate in a pile of leaves, clutched in eight gripping talons, the hawk mantling her wings over it, tail spread, eyes burning, nape-feathers raised in a tense and feral crouch. And then I’d reach down and put my hand on the bunched muscles of the rabbit, and with the heel of one hand at the back of its head where the fur was soft and tawny, I’d pull once, twice, hard on its back legs with the other, breaking its neck. A fit of kicking, and the eyes filming over. I had to check the rabbit was dead by very gently touching its eye. Everything stopping. Stopping. Stopping. I had to do this. If I didn’t kill the rabbit, the hawk would sit on top of it and start eating; and at some point in the eating the rabbit would die. That is how goshawks kill. The borders between life and death are somewhere in the taking of their meal. I couldn’t let that suffering happen. Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human. Kneeling next to the hawk and her prey, I felt a responsibility so huge that it battered inside my own chest, ballooning out into a space the size of a cathedral.

For years I’d explained that I’d rather eat hawk-caught food than things that have had a blind and crowded life in a barn or battery cage. One minute the rabbit is there, twitching its nose in a field that smells of nettles and grassy roots, then it is running, and then it is caught, and then it is dead. I’d told people that there are no injuries in hawking: either things are caught or they escape, and I’d told them, too, that nothing is wasted: everything the hawk catches is eaten by the hawk or me. If you choose to eat meat, I’d said, this is the best way I know to get it.

But these arguments seemed petty now, and pointless. They had nothing to do with what it was like. To be there, with a hawk and a caught rabbit that twitched and kicked and died. And the world biting into me. The serious, everything puzzle that was death and going away. ‘But how could you?’ people asked. Someone said it was a way of destroying the world a piece at a time after my father’s death. ‘Were the rabbits you?’ another asked. No. ‘Were you killing yourself?’ No. ‘Were you sorry?’ Yes. But the regret wasn’t that I had killed an animal. It was regret
for
the animal. I felt sorry for it. Not because I felt I was better than the animal. It wasn’t a patronising sorrow. It was the sorrow of all deaths. I was happy for Mabel’s success and I mourned the individual rabbit. Kneeling by its corpse I’d feel a sharp awareness of my edges. The rain prickling on my collar. A pain in one knee. The scratches on my legs and arms from pushing myself through a hedge that had not hurt until now. And a sharp, wordless comprehension of my own mortality.
Yes, I will die
.

I learned that momentary shouldering of responsibility that allowed me to reach down and administer the
coup de grâce
to a rabbit held tight in Mabel’s feet. A part of me had to click into place and there was another part of me I had to put far away. There’s no better phrase than the old one to describe it:
You have to harden your heart
. I learned that hardening the heart was not the same as not caring. The rabbit was always important. Its life was never taken lightly. I was accountable for these deaths. For the first time in my life I wasn’t a watcher any more. I was being accountable to myself, to the world and all the things in it. But only when I killed. The days were very dark.

They darkened further. Driving back to the house one afternoon I passed a huddle of walkers staring at a rabbit crouched in the grassy verge on the other side of the road. They were upset. Their shoulders were hunched in concern. I pulled in a little further up the road and waited. I did not want to talk to them, but their concern pulled at me. They knew the rabbit was sick and wanted to do something, but no one knew what that could be, and no one was brave enough to get near it. For minutes on end they stared at it, unable to intervene, unwilling to leave. Then they walked on. When they were gone I got out of the car and went up to the little lump of fur. It was a small rabbit. Its muscles were wasted, its head covered in tumours, its eyes swollen and blistered. It was matted with mud. It could not see. ‘Oh rabbit,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Leaning down I hardened my heart and put it out of its misery.

The rabbit had myxomatosis. It arrived in Britain in 1952 and in two years the virus – originally from South America, but already introduced by humans to Australia and Europe – killed ninety-five per cent of the British rabbit population. Tens of millions of rain-soaked corpses littered the roads and fields, and their disappearance had huge effects on the countryside: rabbit-grazed grasslands grew thick with scrub and predator populations crashed. Rabbits have recovered since, though never to the numbers that we once thought normal. And while the virus is less virulent now, outbreaks still occur.

That small rabbit sat huddled in my mind. It would not go away. It felt like a revenant, something pulled from the past, from back when I was small and the countryside was in crisis. It wasn’t just the rabbits dying. Hawk populations were in freefall from agricultural pesticides. Skeletal elm trees were chopped down and burned. The otters were gone, rivers were poisoned, there were guillemots drowning in oiled seas. Everything was sick. And we’d be next. I knew it. All of us. I knew that one morning there’d be a siren, then a double flash of light on the horizon and I’d look up and see a distant mushroom cloud, and then, on the wind, the fallout would come. Invisible dust. And then everything would be dead. Or we’d go back to the Stone Age, and live in rags huddled around ruins and smoking fires. But even that slim dream of survival was dashed. ‘Are we going to build a nuclear fallout shelter under the garden?’ I asked my parents one afternoon after school. They looked at each other. Maybe they didn’t understand, I thought, so I went on. ‘In the leaflet it says we should build a shelter under the stairs and there’s not very much room under ours for you and me and James.’ There was a long pause, then they gently told me that our house was very close to several very important military targets. ‘There’s no point in worrying,’ they said. ‘There’ll be no fallout. If there’s a war, we won’t even know about it. We’ll be instantly vaporised.’ This, needless to say, did not help at all. I scratched my name on bits of slate and buried them as deep as I could in the garden, under the earth. Maybe they’d survive the apocalypse.

The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world. The rabbit was a ghost from the apocalypse of my childhood, and later that week another appeared. This one was not a rabbit, but a book. I had pulled it from my friend’s shelves: a new edition of J. A. Baker’s
The Peregrine
, the story of a man obsessively watching wintering wild peregrines in the Essex countryside of the late 1960s. I’d not read it for years. I remembered it as a poetic celebration of nature. But as I started reading it I found it was not like that at all.
This
, I thought with a chill,
comes from the same place as that rabbit
. I saw in it the writer’s awful desire for death and annihilation, a desire disguised as an elegy for birds that flew through poisonous skies, falcons as searing-bright and pewter-flashed as reflected sun, already things of memory before they were ever gone.

I was frightened of Baker and what he meant. I was not as frightened of White. Despite his disaster with Gos, despite his desire for cruelties and his dreadful politics, White fought hard against death. He loved the small things of the world, and knowing war was coming, he lived in hope of miracles. In Baker’s book I saw no hope at all. For him the world was dying, and his hawks were icons of extinction: ours, theirs and his own. There was no struggle in him. He shared the falcons’ fate; had no choice but to follow them. He was lured towards them just as the gulls and plovers in his book rose helplessly towards the peregrine’s killing strike, just as the compass-beaks of all the small birds hiding in hedges pointed in fear towards the magnet that was the falcon in the air. There were no place names, no people in his book. They’d fallen away. I understood this better now, for I knew the pull of the hawk, and I knew how the world could disappear in the light it cast. But his hawks were made of death. Troubled, I hoped my hawk was life. I hoped it very much.