H Is for Hawk (36 page)

‘I’ll see you after the summer’s over,’ I say. Forgetting. Remembering. I put my hand out, drag the tips of my fingers down her teardrop-splashed front. The new feathers she will grow will be barred stone-grey and white. The tones of earth and ochre will disappear. Her eyes, when I see her next, will be the deep orange of glowing coals. Everything changes. Everything moves. I lift my hand, cast her towards the nearest perch. She flies, lands, shakes her tail, sees a branch above her and leaps upon it. She’s facing away from me. ‘I’ll miss you,’ I say. No answer can come, and there is nothing to explain. I turn and walk out of the door, leaving the hawk behind. Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘Come inside the house,’ he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm.

Postscript

I needed to find out more about White to write this book. So I spent a week in the Harry Ransom Center, the Texas archive where T. H. White’s papers and journals are kept. Reading about muddy English winters while sitting in an air-conditioned library was a very strange experience; outside, vultures soared on tilted wings through ninety-degree heat and grackles hopped on the burning sidewalks. I turned pages, sifted through manuscripts, read through the books he had owned, returned home with stacks of notes and thoughts. But they did not seem enough. There was something else to be done. So one hot July day I drove across England to Stowe. It’s still a school, but its grounds are open to the public. I parked my car in the National Trust car park, paid my entrance fee, clutched a map, and walked up the long lane to the gate. ‘Turn left for the best views,’ the man at the sentry box said. I turned right out of sheer contrariness and set off on my quest, the vast Palladian palace bright on the horizon, everything under metallic sunlight that made the lime-leaves black and the lake-water a deep, painful blue. Water lilies glowed on it in thick constellations. Ink-black shadows underpinned the parkland trees. Swifts pushed through air so thick they hardly beat their wings against the breeze. These were the grounds of the school where White had taught, landscape gardens that had drawn tourists for hundreds of years.

After an hour of walking past temples with fluted columns and painted doors, cupolas, obelisks, porticoes and follies, I started to freak out. Nothing made any sense. Greek Temples, Roman Temples, Saxon gods on runic plinths starred with orange lichen. A vast Gothic Temple in rouged ironstone. Palladian bridges, tufa grottoes and Doric arches. Nothing here seemed solid or understandable but the trees. The buildings littered the landscape as if they had been dropped by some crazed time machine, and all of them, I realised, were there to teach me a lesson. This was a landscape of aristocratic moral certainty, designed and built to lecture visitors of the dangers of modern vice and the ways of ancient virtue. It might have been the sun, it might have been incipient heatstroke, but I started to hate it. Here is the temple of British Worthies. Look at them all.
Ugh
. I turned round and began to walk back to the car. I was feeling extremely sorry for White. This was a very beautiful place, and a marvellous lesson in the exercise of power, but I would have felt unreal here, yes; I would have fled from it too. And I did. I fled from the school grounds. I got back in my car and drove, and parked, and then walked to the place where I had to go.

There it was, White’s cottage, Merlyn’s cottage, quiet on the Ridings over the hill. It looked so ordinary; not a magical place at all. Black leaf-shadows moved on its high gables. A grey horse grazed outside. Electric wires chased fenceposts down the grassy slopes. The forest behind the house was still there. But not all of it: the dark wood where the hobbies had been had gone; now it was Silverstone racing circuit, and the chapel where White had walked with Gos was long demolished; as Chapel Corner it is just a curve on the track under which the long-dead sleep. But as I stood there in the hot sunlight there was a buzzing in my ears. It was the strangest sound, as if on that windless day I could hear the marine roar of wind in all the oaks. It was winter history. Time’s receding. Or possibly heatstroke. I wished I had brought some water.

I stood for a long while and looked at the house. It was a private place. I did not want to get closer; I didn’t want to intrude on the person who lived there. But I saw that the trees had grown, that the barn was now a garage. The well would still be there. And then I heard a chipping, scraping noise, and froze. Behind a bush in the garden was a flash of white; a shirt. There was a man kneeling in the garden, bowed over the ground. Was he planting something? Weeding? Praying? I was far away. I could see his shoulders, but not his face, nor anything of him but his concentration. I shivered, because for a moment the man had been White, planting out his beloved geraniums. The feeling that White was haunting me had returned. I wondered if I should go and speak to this man. I could. I could talk to him. He wasn’t White, I knew, but there were people here who had known him still, and I could talk to them. The farmhouse was still there, and behind it the ponds where Gos had bathed and White had fished. Perhaps the same carp swam in them. I could find out more about him, make him alive again, chase down the memories here. For a moment that old desire to cross over and bring someone back flared up as bright as flame.

But then I put that thought aside. I put it down, and the relief was immense, as if I had dragged a half-tonne weight from myself and cast it by the grassy road. White is gone. The hawk has flown. Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be. I saluted the man, though he could not see me. It was a silly, wobbly salute, and even as I did it I felt foolish. And then I turned and walked away. I left the man who was not a ghost, and I walked south. Over the bright horizon the sky swam like water.

Notes

Place of publication London unless otherwise stated.

1
Travelling Sands
– John Evelyn,
Memoirs of John Evelyn
, ed. William Bray, Henry Colburn, 1827, vol. 2, p. 433.

2
There are divers Sorts
– Richard Blome,
Hawking or Faulconry
, The Cresset Press, 1929 (originally published as part of
The Gentlemen’s Recreation
, 1686), pp. 28–9.

1
No matter how tame and loveable
– Frank Illingworth,
Falcons and Falconry,
Blandford Press Ltd, p. 76.

2
She is noble in her nature
– Gilbert Blaine,
Falconry,
Philip Allan, 1936
,
pp. 229–30.

3
Among the cultured peoples
– ibid,
p. 11.

4
Do not house your graceless austringers
– Gace de la Bigne, quoted in John Cummins,
The Hound and the Hawk
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, p. 221.

5
One cannot feel for a goshawk
– Gilbert Blaine,
Falconry,
Philip Allan, 1936, p. 182.

6
Bloodthirsty . . . Vile
– Major Charles Hawkins Fisher,
Reminiscences of a Falconer
, John Nimmo, 1901, p. 17.

7
When I first saw him
– T. H. White,
The Goshawk,
Jonathan Cape, 1951, p. 11 (hereafter
The Goshawk).

8
The Goshawk is the story
– Back cover text, T. H. White,
The Goshawk,
Penguin Classics, 1979.

9
For those with an interest
– Anonymous, review of
The Goshawk
,
The Falconer
, Vol. II, No. 5, 1952, p. 30.

10
would be about the efforts – The Goshawk
, p. 27.

1
1) Necessity of excelling
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript notebook ‘ETC’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

2
Bennet is the name . . . like a wagtail in the streets
– Letter from T. H. White to L. Potts, 18 January 1936, in
T. H. White, Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence between T. H. White and L. J. Potts,
ed. François Gallix, Alan Sutton, 1984, pp. 62–3.

3
Because I am afraid of things
– T. H. White,
England Have My Bones,
Collins, 1936, p. 80 (hereafter
England Have My Bones
).

4
I am told that my father
– T. H. White, quoted in Sylvia Townsend Warner,
T. H. White: A Biography
, Jonathan Cape 1967, p. 27.

5
I pounce upon a bird
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript notebook ‘ETC’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

6
You will be sympathetic
– Sylvia Townsend Warner, unpublished manuscript of interview by François Gallix, 28 March 1974, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, p. 1.

7
His sewing basket
– Sylvia Townsend Warner to William Maxwell, 22 July 1967, in
The Elements of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell 1938–1978
, ed. Michael Steinmann, Counterpoint, New York, 2001, p. 179.

8
A magpie flies like a frying pan
– T. H. White, entry for 7 April 1939 in unpublished manuscript ‘Journal 1938–1939’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

9
There is a sense of creation
– T. H. White,
England Have My Bones
, p. 59.

10
Falling in love – ibid
, p. 31.

11
He was an extremely tender-hearted
– David Garnett,
The White/Garnett Letters
, ed. David Garnett, The Viking Press, New York, 1968, p. 8.

12
The safest way to avoid trouble
– Henry Green,
Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait
, Vintage, 2000 (first published 1940), p. 58.

13
is one of the best parlour games
– T. H. White, letter to Leonard Potts, 2 February 1931, in
T. H. White: Letters to a Friend
, p. 15.

14
Can one wear topper
– T. H. White, unpublished letter to Ronald McNair Scott, 2 November 1931, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

15
I believe I did not misbehave
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘Hunting Journal 1931–1933’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

16
concealed its individuality
–
England Have My Bones
, p. 15.

17
almost always fatal . . . choke them like ivy – England Have My Bones
, p. 120.

18
Independence – a state
–
England Have My Bones
, p. 105.

19
train them to place no reliance . . . more food – ibid,
p. 121.

20
it was impossible to impose
– ibid
, p. 107.

21
All through his life
– T. H. White,
The Once and Future King
, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1958, p. 327.

22
tense, self-conscious . . . that of the human
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘Hunting Journal 1931–1933’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

23
boiling with a strange unrest
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘A Sort of Mania’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

24
This party has no racial
– Harriet Hall,
Bill and Patience: An Eccentric Marriage at Stowe and Beyond
, Book Guild Ltd., 2000, p. 53.

25
I was like that unfortunate man
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘A Sort of Mania’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

26
It needed courage . . . a complete write-off
– T. H. White, letter to Leonard Potts, 16 May 1936, in
Letters to a Friend
, p. 70.

27
We all stand in the shadow
– Denis Brogan, ‘Omens of 1936’,
Fortnightly Review,
139 (Jan–June 1936), pp. 1–2.

28
masters of men, everywhere
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘A Sort of Mania’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

29
From being on the day
– Gilbert Blaine,
Falconry,
Philip Allan, 1936, p. 181.

30
The sentence was: ‘She reverted
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘A Sort of Mania’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

1
Of all Hawks, she is doubtless
– Richard Blome,
Hawking or Faulconry
, The Cresset Press, 1929, p. 28.

2
You’re a good watcher
– John Le Carré,
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
, Hodder and Stoughton, 2001, (first published 1974) p. 16.

3
It must have been like death
–
The Goshawk
, pp. 11–12.

4
All that time was too beautiful . . . sent us to schools
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript fragment ‘A Valentine’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

5
Please God, don’t let me be beaten tonight . . . that charge
– T. H. White, unpublished manuscript ‘Journals, Volume 6’, entry dated 28 November 1957, T. H. White collection, Queens’ College Library, Queens’ College, Cambridge.