H Is for Hawk (5 page)

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ Because this story struck me as extraordinary, and it still does. Once upon a time there was a man in a spacesuit in a secret reconnaissance plane reading
The Once and Future King
, that great historical epic, that comic, tragic, romantic retelling of the Arthurian legend that tussles with questions of war and aggression, and might, and right, and the matter of what a nation is or might be.

White is not a fashionable writer. When I read English at university his name wasn’t mentioned at all. But once upon a time White was very famous indeed. In 1938 he published a children’s book about the boyhood of King Arthur called
The Sword in the Stone
and it made his name and his fortune. Disney snapped up the rights and turned it into an animated cartoon. White went on to write
The Once and Future King,
which covered the rest of the Arthurian story, and that in turn inspired the stage-musical and film
Camelot.
White’s reworking of Arthurian legend was hugely influential: when you hear Kennedy’s White House described as Camelot, that is White – Jackie Kennedy quoted lines from the musical after her husband’s assassination. When you think of the wizard Merlin wearing a tall, peaked hat embroidered with stars, that is White too. And when I think of the U2 pilot up there reading a book about King Arthur, a book that had been wrenched strangely into a fairytale about American political life, I can’t help but think of a line written by the poet Marianne Moore:
The cure for loneliness is solitude
. And the solitude of the pilot in the spy-plane, seeing everything, touching nothing, reading
The Once and Future King
fifty thousand feet above the clouds – that makes my heart break, just a little, because of how lonely that is, and because of some things that have happened to me, and because T. H. White was one of the loneliest men alive.

The Goshawk
is the book of a young man. It was written before White’s better-known works, and before he was famous. It ‘would be about the efforts of a second-rate philosopher’,
¹⁰
he explained sadly, ‘who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird’. When I read it again, years after that first childhood encounter, I saw more in it than bad falconry. I understood why people considered it a masterpiece. For White made falconry a metaphysical battle. Like
Moby-Dick
or
The Old Man and the Sea
,
The Goshawk
was a literary encounter between animal and man that reached back to Puritan traditions of spiritual contest: salvation as a stake to be won in a contest against God. That older, wiser me decided that White’s admissions of ignorance were brave rather than stupid. But I was still angry with him. First, because his hawk had suffered terribly as he tried to train it. And second, because his portrayal of falconry as a pitched battle between man and bird had hugely influenced our notions of what goshawks are and falconry is. Frankly, I hated what he had made of them. I didn’t think falconry was a war, and I knew hawks weren’t monsters. That small girl lying crossly on her bed was still cross.

That is what I thought as I sat there staring at the open book on my desk, four months after my father died. I read on, and as I did, there was a tiny jolt that was a realisation of why my eyes had spurned the book for weeks. I knew that part of why I was cross was that I felt, for the first time, that my urge to train a hawk was for reasons that weren’t entirely my own. Partly they were his.

4

Mr White

IT IS 16
March 1936. On the east side of the great Palladian palace that is Stowe School, jackdaws fuss in the sweet chestnut trees, water drips from the roof of the block of rooms that used to be the stables, and inside them, Mr White, Head of English, blankets bunched up against his shins, is balancing a notebook on his knees and writing fast in a small, clear hand. He wonders if this is the most important book he’s ever written. Not because it will make his fortune. But because it will save him.

He thinks he will leave. School life is unreal. All this is unreal. He has had enough. He can’t bear his colleagues. He can’t bear the boys any more either; en masse, he thinks, they’re horrible, like haddocks. He has to get out. He’ll live on his writing. His last book did well. He’ll write more. He’ll take a cottage in Scotland and spend his days fishing for salmon. Perhaps he’ll take the barmaid with him as his wife, the dark-eyed beauty he’s been courting for months, though he’s only in love with her
emotionally
, so far, and he hasn’t got anywhere, really, and those long hours sitting at the bar reduce him too often to hopeless drunkenness. He drinks too much. He has drunk too much, and he has been unhappy for a long time. But things are certain to change.

The notebook he writes in is grey. He’s stuck a photograph of one of his grass snakes on the cover, and written ETC above it in ink. The snake is suitable because this is his dream diary, though there are other things in it too: scraps of writing, lesson plans, line drawings of sphinxes and clawed dragons rampant, and the occasional stab at self-analysis:

1) Necessity of excelling in order to be loved.
¹

2) Failure to excel.

3) Why did I fail to excel? (Wrong attitude to what I was doing?)

But mostly the notebook records his dreams. There are dreams of women with penises, of boxes of maidenheads like fingernail parings, of hooded cobras that rear up but turn out to be harmless. There are dreams that he has forgotten his gun but can’t borrow his friend’s, because his friend is giving it to his wife; that he is a spy on the Hitlerists, hiding in a hole with only his cigarette poking out; that he must hide his shotgun in the boot of his mother’s car to stop it being struck by lightning. And a dream in which his psychoanalyst is congratulating him on how good his dreams are.

‘Bennet is the name, initials E. A.,’ wrote White to Leonard Potts, his old tutor at Cambridge, who was something of a father figure. ‘He is a very great man – must be, because cured cases like mine are I believe most rare, if not unique.’ And then there’s an assurance that is surely his wishful invention of some future self: ‘I had a friend who was a sadistic homosexual, now happily married with children.’ For the last year, White’s craze for analysis had been in full spate: he was certain that Bennet would cure him of all of it: his homosexuality, his unhappiness, his sense of feeling unreal, his sadism, all of it; all his confusions and fears. It was all going well. He was
almost
sure he was in love with the barmaid. ‘I’m so happy I hop about like a wagtail in the streets,’
²
he told Potts, with a pride that holds within it, cupped like a small bird in the hand, his abject terror of failure.

The boys treated him with a kind of holy awe. Pacing the long corridors in grey flannels, a turtleneck sweater and gown, Mr White looked a little like Byron. He was tall, with full lips and very pale blue eyes, a trim red moustache, and dark, unruly hair. He did all the right things: flew aeroplanes, shot, fished for salmon, hunted; and even better, all the
wrong
things: kept grass snakes in his room, rode his horse up the school steps on match days, and best of all, published racy novels under the pseudonym James Aston. When the headmaster found out he was
furious
: Mr White had to write him a letter promising never to write such filth again, said the boys, who passed copies of the novels around in agonies of delighted subterfuge. He was a startling, light-hearted, sarcastic figure. But a forbidding teacher. He never beat boys, ever, but they were terrified of his disdain. He demanded emotional sincerity. If it wasn’t forthcoming, he’d cut his pupils down to size, puncturing their new-grown armour of pretension with a relish that bordered on cruelty. Even so there was something about Mr White that made him an ally of sorts; boys confided in him in a crisis, and they worshipped him for his insubordination and glamour. They knew he didn’t fit, not quite, with the rest of the masters at Stowe.
Did you hear about the time he crashed his Bentley into a farmhouse and nearly died?
they whispered. And they spoke gleefully of the legendary Monday morning when Mr White arrived late and hungover, ordered the class to write an essay on the dangers of the demon drink, put his feet on his desk, and fell fast asleep.

But for all his demonstrations of bravado and skill, Mr White, Mr Terence Hanbury White, known to all as Tim after the chemists’ chain Timothy Whites, was terribly afraid. He was twenty-nine years old, had been a schoolmaster at Stowe for five years and a writer for seven, but he had been afraid as long as he could remember. ‘Because I am afraid of things, of being hurt, and death, I have to attempt them,’
³
he’d explained in a book of sporting essays,
England Have My Bones
, published the previous year. He had to be brave. From the schoolroom he’d race at top speed to the aerodrome, his heart tight in his mouth, afraid of stalling, afraid of the instructor’s contempt, afraid of getting into a spin from which he’d never recover, of burying himself in a wreck of crumpled wings and struts and earth. He rode with the Grafton over the muddy fields of Buckinghamshire in perpetual terror that he would fail to be brave, fail to ride well, fail to pass himself off as a gentleman, would incur the wrath of the Master of Foxhounds. And back in India, right at the beginning, where he remembered lizards and fireworks and candlelit darknesses and grown-ups in evening dress, he remembered also the terror of beatings, and arguments, and his mother’s hatred of his father, and his father’s hatred of her, and his drinking, and the endless, awful, violent war between them in which he was the pawn. His mother lavished attention on her dogs and her husband had them shot. She lavished attention on the boy and the boy was convinced he’d be next. ‘I am told,’
⁴
he wrote, ‘that my father and mother were to be found wrestling with a pistol, one on either side of my cot, each claiming that he or she was going to shoot the other and himself or herself, but in any case beginning with me.’ And then: ‘It was not a safe kind of childhood.’

He brings the end of the fountain pen to his lips and considers what he has written.

I pounce upon a bird with cruel talons and desperate beak. It may have been hurting me a little, but it would have hurt much more if I had let go. I held it tight and powerless to harm me, calling for somebody else to help by holding its feet. It was an English bird.
⁵

When White died of heart failure in January 1964, far from home in a cabin on the SS
Exeter
in Greece, his friends were concerned for his reputation. There were things in his journals they did not want to come to light, matters relating to his sexuality that if spoken of at all, had to be handled with rare delicacy. They needed to find a suitable biographer. They chose Sylvia Townsend Warner, because she had corresponded with White, and he had liked her books. And for another reason: she was gay. ‘You will be sympathetic to his character,’
⁶
Michael Howard informed her. ‘If it is a sufficiently bad character I should certainly be sympathetic to it,’ she replied. She travelled to Alderney and there, walking about White’s house, she found her subject. He was there, in his possessions. She wrote to her friend William Maxwell:

His sewing basket
⁷
with an unfinished hawk-hood, his litter of fishing-flies, his books, his awful ornaments presented by his hoi polloi friends, his vulgar toys bought at Cherbourg Fairs, his neat rows of books on flagellation – everything was there, defenceless as a corpse. And so was he, suspicious, morose, and determined to despair. I have never felt such an
imminent
haunt.

An imminent haunt
. Her phrase gives me pause. Because that was what White was doing as I trained my hawk; he was there even as I dreamed of the vanishing gos. Haunting me. Not in the tapping-on-the-window white-sheet ghost-in-the-corridor way, but it was a haunting all the same. Ever since I’d read
The Goshawk
, I’d wondered what kind of man White was and why he had tied himself to a hawk he seemed to hate. And when I trained my own hawk a little space opened, like a window through leaves, onto this other life, in which was a man who was hurt, and a hawk who was being hurt, and I saw them both more clearly. Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair.

The book you are reading is my story. It is not a biography of Terence Hanbury White. But White is part of my story all the same. I have to write about him because he was there. When I trained my hawk I was having a quiet conversation, of sorts, with the deeds and works of a long-dead man who was suspicious, morose, determined to despair. A man whose life disturbed me. But a man, too, who loved nature, who found it surprising, bewitching and endlessly novel. ‘A magpie flies like a frying pan!’
⁸
he could write, with the joy of discovering something new in the world. And it is that joy, that childish delight in the lives of creatures other than man, that I love most in White. He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles. ‘There is a sense of creation about it,’
⁹
he wrote, in wonderment, after helping a farmer deliver a mare of a foal. ‘There were more horses in the field when I left it than there were when I went in.’