Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 118 of 170 · 20 per page

• From City of Night (1963)

  And she punctured the dark air sharply with the beaded cigarette holder. 3 Jeremy had lain there silently, as if this was something of what he had wanted to draw out of me: a multitude of new—or perhaps merely submerged—emotions whirling within me: a vortex of guilt and sadness and excitement, now, and the most harrowing loneliness... and something else: the bare acknowledgment that “love” (the mere acceptance of it, but love nonetheless, with intensity) might be possible. He said nothing, as if expecting me to continue. But I didnt. The words I had spoken had stirred other thoughts which I could not yet verbalize.... Looking at Jeremy, I was trying to conjecture a different direction in the journey I have embarked on. If I allowed myself truly to be loved—if I did acknowledge what I had just said—if I acknowledged love by merely accepting it—... ? I tried to imagine this: that miraculously I felt loved. And then? If that feeling proved to be false?... That question, I knew, was based on that inherited fear—the wind which sweeps through our lives shaping our destinies... eroding belief.... If it proved to be false? I remembered, then, that once as a child I had watched our neighbor kill a chicken. He had severed the head with an axe. For seconds, the chicken’s wings had fluttered urgently, the headless body quivering—the motions doubly terrifying in that the protesting sounds that should have accompanied them could no longer come from the lifeless head. The only sound was the desperate flaying of those wings (just as the wings of that rooster had fluttered earlier when I had stood by the French Market mysteriously intrigued: that rooster’s wings lashing as if in protest against the impending slaughter).... And then, that earlier afternoon, from that chicken with the severed head, the blood had gushed from the neck—spilling out deep, deep, violently deep red through that opening as if to seal the wound that was carrying all life out of the convulsed body.... Why, now, had I remembered that beheaded chicken? Bewildered, I looked at Jeremy. He seemed again to sense the whirling thoughts, which had carried me too far, too dangerously, too swiftly. And still resisting those thoughts—even after my acknowledgment of the bare possibility of “love”—I grasped for the memory of the earlier moments of sex with him, as if that memory were an anchor in turbulent waters. But my mind moves swiftly forward—the anchor buried in shifting sand; and I think: Now, beyond the spilled sperm—if nothing more than sex is possible—are we like enemies in that spent battlefield of fugitive sex—in which there is every intimacy and no intimacy at all?... My life was crammed with memories of that corpse-strewn battlefield. Those memories....

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  His fear of war meshed darkly with all his other fears. He’d long had nightmares of bombs and poison gas, of tunnels and flight and escape routes under the sea. The previous year he’d published Gone to Ground, a kind of mid-century Decameron in which foxhunters hiding in an underground bunker told each other stories as gas-bombs and incendiaries fell from the sky to obliterate the whole nervous, broken thing that was Civilisation. Civilisation was over. It was pointless. Modernity was bunk, and danger, and politics, and posturing, and it was going to lead to the end of everything. He needed to run. Perhaps he could escape to the past. It would be safe there. He started reading a book on falconry by Captain Gilbert Blaine. It was there that White came across a story of a lost goshawk. ‘From being on the day on which she was lost as domesticated as a household parrot,’ Blaine recorded, ‘she had reverted in a week to a feral state, and became thereafter a myth and legend in the neighbourhood.’ For White the sentence was an epiphany. The hawk was a myth. A legend. ‘There was a sentence which suddenly struck fire from the mind,’ he wrote. The sentence was: ‘She reverted to a feral state.’ A longing came to my mind, then, that I should be able to do this also. The word ‘feral’ had a kind of magical potency which allied itself with two other words, ‘ferocious’ and ‘free’. ‘Fairy’ ‘Fey’, ‘aeriel’ and other discreditable alliances ranged themselves behind the great chord of ‘ferox’. To revert to a feral state! I took a farm-labourer’s cottage at five shillings a week, and wrote to Germany for a goshawk. Feral. He wanted to be free. He wanted to be ferocious. He wanted to be fey, a fairy, ferox. All those elements of himself he’d pushed away, his sexuality, his desire for cruelty, for mastery: all these were suddenly there in the figure of the hawk. White had found himself in the hawk that Blaine had lost. He clutched it tightly. It might hurt him, but he wouldn’t let go. He would train it. Yes. He would teach the hawk, and he would teach himself, and he would write a book about it and teach his readers this doomed and ancient art. It was as if he were holding aloft the flag of some long-defeated country to which he staked his allegiance. He’d train his hawk in the ruins of his former life. And then when the war came, as it surely would, and everything around him crumbled into ruin and anarchy, White would fly his goshawk, eat the pheasants it caught, a survivor, a yeoman living off the land, far from the bitter, sexual confusion of the metropolis or the small wars of the schoolroom. 5 Holding tight

• From Educated (2018)

  sure how much flour she’d added. Click click click. If she was mixing oils and couldn’t remember whether she’d added frankincense. Click click click. She’d sit down to read her scriptures for thirty minutes, forget what time she’d started, then muscle-test how long it had been. Click click click. Mother began to muscle-test compulsively, unaware she was doing it, whenever she grew tired of a conversation, whenever the ambiguities of her memory, or even just those of normal life, left her unsatisfied. Her features would slacken, her face become vacant, and her fingers would click like crickets at dusk. Dad was rapturous. “Them doctors can’t tell what’s wrong just by touching you,” he said, glowing. “But Mother can!” — THE MEMORY OF TYLER haunted me that winter. I remembered the day he left, how strange it was to see his car bumping down the hill loaded with boxes. I couldn’t imagine where he was now, but sometimes I wondered if perhaps school was less evil than Dad thought, because Tyler was the least evil person I knew, and he loved school—loved it more, it seemed, than he loved us. The seed of curiosity had been planted; it needed nothing more than time and boredom to grow. Sometimes, when I was stripping copper from a radiator or throwing the five hundredth chunk of steel into the bin, I’d find myself imagining the classrooms where Tyler was spending his days. My interest grew more acute with every deadening hour in the junkyard, until one day I had a bizarre thought: that I should enroll in the public school. Mother had always said we could go to school if we wanted. We just had to ask Dad, she said. Then we could go. But I didn’t ask. There was something in the hard line of my father’s face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all he’d sacrificed to raise me. I made some effort to keep up my schooling in the free time I had between scrapping and helping Mother make tinctures and blend oils.

• From Educated (2018)

  scream but instead I ran, out the back door and up through the hills toward the peak. I ran until the sound of blood pulsing in my ears was louder than the thoughts in my head; then I turned around and ran back, swinging around the pasture to the red railroad car. I scrambled onto its roof just in time to see Tyler close his trunk and turn in a circle, as if he wanted to say goodbye but there was no one to say goodbye to. I imagined him calling my name and pictured his face falling when I didn’t answer. He was in the driver’s seat by the time I’d climbed down, and the car was rumbling down the dirt road when I leapt out from behind an iron tank. Tyler stopped, then got out and hugged me—not the crouching hug that adults often give children but the other kind, both of us standing, him pulling me into him and bringing his face close to mine. He said he would miss me, then he let me go, stepping into his car and speeding down the hill and onto the highway. I watched the dust settle. Tyler rarely came home after that. He was building a new life for himself across enemy lines. He made few excursions back to our side. I have almost no memory of him until five years later, when I am fifteen, and he bursts into my life at a critical moment. By then we are strangers. It would be many years before I would understand what leaving that day had cost him, and how little he had understood about where he was going. Tony and Shawn had left the mountain, but they’d left to do what my father had taught them to do: drive semis, weld, scrap. Tyler stepped into a void. I don’t know why he did it and neither does he. He can’t explain where the conviction came from, or how it burned brightly enough to shine through the black uncertainty. But I’ve always supposed it was the music in his head, some hopeful tune the rest of us couldn’t hear, the same secret melody he’d been humming when he bought that trigonometry book, or saved all those pencil shavings. — SUMMER WANED, SEEMING TO evaporate in its own heat. The days were still hot but the evenings had begun to cool, the frigid hours after sunset claiming more of each day. Tyler had been gone a month. I was spending the afternoon with Grandma-over-in-town. I’d had a bath that morning, even though it wasn’t Sunday, and I’d put on special

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence. And the vocabulary I’d learned from the books distanced me from death. Trained hawks didn’t catch animals. They caught quarry . They caught game . What an extraordinary term. Game. I sat quietly watching the line and wondered. I would hunt with this hawk. Of course I would. Training a goshawk and not letting it hunt seemed to me like raising a child and not letting it play. But that was not why I needed her. To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away. There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings. But I had forgotten that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too. ‘ To him I am still the rarely tolerated enemy, and to me he is always the presence of death,’ White wrote of Gos in his notebook. ‘Death will be my last failure.’ His neglect had made Gos wild again, and the hawk had become death to him because it could not be beaten. For six weeks he had struggled with it and the struggle had been as Jacob’s with the angel. ‘ I have lived for this hawk,’ he wrote in despair. ‘I have gone half bird myself, transforming my love and interest and livelihood into its future, giving hostages to fortune as madly as in marriage and family cares. If the hawk dies almost all my present me dies with it. It has treated me today as if I were a dangerous and brutal enemy never seen before.’ Perhaps the final blow, when it came, was born of simple exhaustion. His hawk had beaten him, and he could not bear to fight it any more. But I think that it was more than this, much more. When I think of the tragedy of White and Gos I think of a small boy back in India standing in front of a wooden play-castle his father has made for his birthday.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had never told her about those days. Cyril wriggled, and she kissed his head and murmured in his ear, and for a moment all was very still - perhaps she thought me wondering about the gent I said I had lived with in St John’s Wood. But then she spoke again, more briskly. ‘Besides, I don’t believe it is an endless task. Things are changing. There are unions everywhere - and women’s unions, as well as men’s. Women do things today their mothers would have laughed to think of seeing their daughters doing, twenty years ago; soon they will even have the vote! If people like me don’t work, it’s because they look at the world, at all the injustice and the muck, and all they see is a nation falling in upon itself, and taking them with it. But the muck has new things growing out of it - wonderful things! - new habits of working, new kinds of people, new ways of being alive and in love ...’ Love again. I put a finger to the scar upon my cheek, where Dickie’s doctor’s book had caught it. Florence bent her head to gaze at the baby, as he lay sighing upon her chest. ‘In another twenty years,’ she went on quietly, ‘imagine how the world will be! It will be a new century. Cyril will be a young man - nearly, but not quite, as old as I am now. Imagine the things he’ll see, the things he’ll do ...’ I looked at her, and then at him; and for a moment I felt almost able to see with her across the years to the queer new world that would have Cyril in it, as a man... As I looked, she shifted in her seat, reached a hand out to the bookcase at her side, and drew a volume from the bulging shelves. It was Leaves of Grass: she turned its pages, and found a passage that she seemed to know. ‘Listen to this’ she said. She began to read aloud. Her tone was low, and rather self-conscious; but it quivered with passion - I had never heard such passion in her voice, before. ‘0 mater! 0 fils!’ she read. ‘0 brood continental! 0 flowers of the prairies! 0 space boundless! 0 hum of mighty products! 0 you teeming cities! 0 so invincible, turbulent, proud! 0 race of the future! 0 women! O fathers! O you men of passion and storm! 0 beauty! 0 yourself! 0 you bearded roughs! 0 bards! 0 all those slumberers! 0 arouse! the dawn-bird’s throat sounds shrill! Do you not hear the cock crowing?’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But that - considering the circumstances - seemed quite impossible. All continued smoothly for, perhaps, six months or so: my colourless life at Mrs Best’s went on, and so did my trips to the West End, and my renting. My little stash of money dwindled, and finally disappeared; and now, since renting was all I knew and cared for, I began to live entirely from what I earned upon the streets. I still had had no word of Kitty — not a word! I concluded at last that she must have gone abroad, to try her luck with Walter — to America, perhaps, where we had planned to go. My months upon the music-hall stage seemed very distant to me now, and quite unreal. Once or twice on my trips around the city I saw someone I knew, from the old days - a fellow with whom we’d shared a bill at the Paragon, a wardrobe-mistress from the Bedford, Camden Town. One night I leaned against a pillar in Great Windmill Street and watched as Dolly Arnold - who had played Cinderella to Kitty’s Prince, at the Britannia - made her exit from the door of the Pavilion and was helped into a carriage. She looked at me, and blinked - then looked away again. Perhaps she thought she knew my face; perhaps she thought I was a boy that she had worked with; perhaps she only thought I was a miserable ningle, haunting the shadows in search of a gent. Anyway, she did not see Nan King in me, I know it; and if I had an urge to cross to her and reveal myself and ask for news of Kitty, it lasted for only a moment; and in that moment the driver shook his horses into life, and the carriage rumbled off. No, my only contact with the theatre now was as a renter. I discovered that the music halls of Leicester Square - the very same halls which Kitty and I had gazed at, all hopefully, two years before — were rather famous in the renter world as posing-grounds and pick-up spots. The Empire, in particular, was always thick with sods: they strolled side-by-side with the gay girls of the promenade, or stood, in little knots, exchanging gossip, comparing fortunes, greeting one another with flapping hands and high, extravagant voices. They never looked at the stage, never cheered or applauded, only gazed at themselves in the mirror-glass or at each other’s powdered faces, or - more covertly - at the gentlemen who, rapidly or rather lingeringly, passed them by. I loved to walk with them, and watch them, and be watched by them in turn.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Our working day began at seven, and ended twelve hours later; and through all those hours my duties were the same. While Mother cooked, and Alice and my father served, I sat upon a high stool at the side of a vat of natives, and scrubbed, and rinsed, and plied the oyster-knife. Some people like their oysters raw; and for them your job is easiest, for you have merely to pick out a dozen natives from the barrel, swill the brine from them, and place them, with a piece of parsley or cress, upon a plate. But for those who took their oysters stewed, or fried - or baked, or scalloped, or put in a pie - my labours were more delicate. Then I must open each oyster, and beard it, and transfer it to Mother’s cooking-pot with all of its savoury flesh intact, and none of its liquor spilled or tainted. Since a supper-plate will hold a dozen fish; since oyster-teas are cheap; and since our Parlour was a busy one, with room for fifty customers at once - well, you may calculate for yourself the vast numbers of oysters which passed, each day, beneath my prising knife; and you might imagine, too, the redness and the soreness and the sheer salty soddenness of my fingers at the close of every afternoon. Even now, two decades and more since I put aside my oyster-knife and quit my father’s kitchen for ever, I feel a ghostly, sympathetic twinge in my wrist and finger-joints at the sight of a fishmonger’s barrel, or the sound of an oyster-man’s cry; and still, sometimes, I believe I can catch the scent of liquor and brine beneath my thumb-nail, and in the creases of my palm. I have said that there was nothing in my life, when I was young, but oysters; but that is not quite true. I had friends and cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small town in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice - my dearest friend of all - with whom I shared a bedroom and a bed, and who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I even had a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked a dredging smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle Joe on Whitstable Bay. And last of all I had a fondness - you might say, a kind of passion - for the music hall; and more particularly for music-hall songs and the singing of them.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Edmund Bert haunted White as he trained his hawk, just as White haunted me. But it was a different kind of haunting. ‘I had a sort of schoolgirlish “pash” for that serious old man who lived three hundred years ago,’ he privately confessed. He wanted to impress Bert. He was in love with him. Dizzied by medievalist imaginings, in love with a falconer three hundred years dead, he had decided to ignore the teachings of Blaine, for the most part, and train his hawk the old-fashioned way. The old hawk masters had invented a means of taming them which offered no visible cruelty, and whose secret cruelty had to be born [sic] by the trainer as well as by the bird. They kept the bird awake. Not by nudging it or by any mechanical means, but by walking about with their pupil on their fist and staying awake themselves. The hawk was ‘watched’, was deprived of sleep by a sleepless man, for a space of two, three, or as much as nine nights together. White wilfully misunderstood Bert’s methods. The seventeenth-century austringer would have had any number of friends and attendants to take over while he slept. But White was desirous of a rite of passage. A proper knight’s vigil. And he needed to do it alone, man against man, as it were. Watching his hawk would be a privation, an ordeal, a test of his Word. He would not be cruel. But he would conquer both the hawk and himself in one fell swoop. ‘Man against bird,’ he wrote, ‘with God as an umpire, they had sat each other out for three thousand years.’ In this long vigil – White had six hours’ sleep in six days – the effects of extreme tiredness took their toll. Again and again, delirious from lack of sleep, sitting in the kitchen or standing in the lamplit barn, he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello – ‘but the tragedy had to be kept out of the voice’ – and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Those books about people running to the wild to escape their grief and sorrow were part of a much older story, so old its shape is as unconscious and invisible as breathing. When I was a student slogging through the first years of my degree, I read a long and beautiful thirteenth-century poem called Sir Orfeo. No one knows who wrote it, and I had forgotten it existed. But one morning while pulling a handful of chicks out of the freezer the poem came to mind, turned out of the ground in one of those strange excavations of the disordered mind. Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and the underworld by way of traditional Celtic songs about the otherworld, the Land of Faery. In Celtic myth that otherworld is not deep underground; it is just one step aside from our own. Things can exist in both places at once – and things can be pulled from one to the other. In the poem, Heurodis sleeps in an orchard under a grafted fruit tree – an imptree – and dreams that the next day she will be stolen away by the King of Faery. Terrified, she tells her husband the King. Orfeo surrounds her with armed knights, but they cannot protect her from this otherworldly threat: she slips through the air and vanishes. Stricken with grief, Orfeo gives up his crown and runs to the forest. For ten years he lives a solitary, feral existence, digging for roots, eating leaves and berries, playing his harp to charm the beasts around him. His beard grows long and matted. He watches the grand hunting parties of the Faery King pass through the forest. He cannot follow them. But one day sixty ladies with falcons on their fists ride by, hunting for cormorants, mallards, herons. As he watches the falcons strike down their prey the world changes. He laughs with delight, remembering his love for the sport – ‘Parfay!’ quath he, ‘ther is fair game’ – and he walks towards the women, and sees among them his wife. He has entered that otherworld, and now he can follow them back to the castle of the Faery King, a palace full of people that were thought to be dead but are not. And it is there he plays his harp to the King and persuades him to release his wife. But it was the hawks’ flight and the deaths they brought that ushered him into that other world, let him find his wife that was lost. And this ability of hawks to cross borders that humans cannot is a thing far older than Celtic myth, older than Orpheus – for in ancient shamanic traditions right across Eurasia, hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But the countryside wasn’t just something that was safe for White to love: it was a love that was safe to write about. It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak. Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, for example: the tale of a lonely man on the Scottish coast with an Iraqi otter on his sofa. Or the books of the BBC radio naturalist Maxwell Knight, former MI5 spymaster and closet queen. Doubly disallowed to speak openly of his allegiances, Knight wrote a book about hand-rearing a cuckoo called Goo. His obsession with this small, greedy, feathery, parasitic bird is terribly moving; it was a species made of all the hidden elements of Knight’s life: subterfuge, deceit, passing oneself off as something one is not. White is part of this poignant literary tradition. He remained alone all his life. He had a few dispiriting romances with women; nearly married one, almost proposed to another: all were very young. He was frightened of grown women. He confessed that he found their shape unpleasant and could scarcely bring himself to draw it. Much later in life he fell for the teenage son of a friend; it was his last love, hopeless and unreciprocated. But there were always animals. They populated White’s life and his books. Dogs, owls, hawks, snakes, badgers, hedgehogs, even ants. And apart from his much-loved setter Brownie, whom he adored, he insisted his animals were never pets: for pets were ‘almost always fatal, to oneself or to them’. They are ruined by their owners the same way that ‘mothers ruin their children, choke them like ivy’. Pets meant dependency and he had a terror of it. One of the chapters in England Have My Bones is prefaced with a passage from Stella Benson that sheds light on why White dreamed of a hawk: Independence – a state of being self-contained – is the only generosity, I thought, the only charity we can claim of a living creature. We must have nothing to do with another’s bones; that is our only right – to have nothing to do with them. The bone must be the axis of a globe of intrusion-proof glass. One could not say, watching a hawk: ‘I ought perhaps to do this for him.’ Therefore, not only is he safe from me, but I am safe from him.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  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.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  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’, 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’. And in years to come White would write of how falconry gave him a comforting sense of unspoken fellowship with like-minded men: It was not until I had kept some hawks by myself that I met another mature falconer, and saw his birds, and talked to him. Then, for the first time, I found the heart turning over with excitement at the spectacle of falcons in first plumage: found that neither of us needed to complete the grammar of a question or answer. It was a revelation: he saw now that right back to prehistory there had been men like him. ‘I thought it was right that I should now be happy to continue as one of a long line,’ he wrote, musing on a photograph that showed a carving of an Assyrian falconer from three thousand years ago. He closed his eyes and imagined reaching back across the centuries to grasp ‘that ancestor’s bony hand, in which all the knuckles were as well-defined as the nutty calf of his bas- relief leg’. To public-school men raised on tales of knights and chivalry, the sensation of time-travelling that falconry provoked could be overwhelming. When the countryside writer J. Wentworth Day went hawking with the British Falconers’ Club in the late 1920s he wrote that with the marshes at your feet, ‘the wind in your face, the hawk on your fist, you may know that you are, for a brief space, an heir of the ages. A minor page of history has turned back a thousand years.’ Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history because they are in a sense immortal. While individual hawks of different species die, the species themselves remain unchanged. There are no breeds or varieties, because hawks were never domesticated. The birds we fly today are identical to those of five thousand years ago. Civilisations rise and fall, but the hawks stay the same. This gives falconry birds the ability to feel like relics from the distant past. You take a hawk onto your fist. You imagine the falconer of the past doing the same. It is hard not to feel it is the same hawk.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  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. 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’, 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’. And in years to come White would write of how falconry gave him a comforting sense of unspoken fellowship with like-minded men: It was not until I had kept some hawks by myself that I met another mature falconer, and saw his birds, and talked to him. Then, for the first time, I found the heart turning over with excitement at the spectacle of falcons in first plumage: found that neither of us needed to complete the grammar of a question or answer. It was a revelation: he saw now that right back to prehistory there had been men like him. ‘I thought it was right that I should now be happy to continue as one of a long line,’ he wrote, musing on a photograph that showed a carving of an Assyrian falconer from three thousand years ago. He closed his eyes and imagined reaching back across the centuries to grasp ‘ that ancestor’s bony hand, in which all the knuckles were as well-defined as the nutty calf of his bas-relief leg’. To public-school men raised on tales of knights and chivalry, the sensation of time-travelling that falconry provoked could be overwhelming. When the countryside writer J. Wentworth Day went hawking with the British Falconers’ Club in the late 1920s he wrote that with the marshes at your feet, ‘ the wind in your face, the hawk on your fist, you may know that you are, for a brief space, an heir of the ages. A minor page of history has turned back a thousand years.’ Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history because they are in a sense immortal. While individual hawks of different species die, the species themselves remain unchanged.

• From Educated (2018)

  It was spring when I arrived in the valley. I drove along the highway to the edge of town, then pulled over at the drop-off overlooking the Bear River. From there I could look out over the basin, a patchwork of expectant fields stretching to Buck’s Peak. The mountain was crisp with evergreens, which were luminous set against the browns and grays of shale and limestone. The Princess was as bright as I’d ever seen her. She stood facing me, the valley between us, radiating permanence. The Princess had been haunting me. From across the ocean I’d heard her beckoning, as if I were a troublesome calf who’d wandered from her herd. Her voice had been gentle at first, coaxing, but when I didn’t answer, when I stayed away, it had turned to fury. I had betrayed her. I imagined her face contorted with rage, her stance heavy and threatening. She had been living in my mind like this for years, a stone deity of contempt. But seeing her now, standing watch over her fields and pastures, I realized that I had misunderstood her. She was not angry with me for leaving, because leaving was a part of her cycle. Her role was not to corral the buffalo, not to gather and confine them by force. It was to celebrate their return.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  No. In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail. You might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and never see one, just traces of their presence. A sudden hush, followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds, and a sense of something moving just beyond vision. Perhaps you’ll find a half-eaten pigeon sprawled in a burst of white feathers on the forest floor. Or you might be lucky: walking in a foggy ride at dawn you’ll turn your head and catch a split-second glimpse of a bird hurtling past and away, huge taloned feet held loosely clenched, eyes set on a distant target. A split second that stamps the image indelibly on your brain and leaves you hungry for more. Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how. But you have a slightly better chance on still, clear mornings in early spring, because that’s when goshawks eschew their world under the trees to court each other in the open sky. That was what I was hoping to see.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s a child’s world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed about when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ants’ nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I’d run to check the place where once I’d caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. And now I’m giving Mabel her head, and letting her fly where she wants, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful. She is building a landscape of magical places too. She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rabbit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again. It is wild superstition, it is an instinctive heuristic of the hunting mind, and it works. She is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine. Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning. Mabel is doing the same. She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours. 26 The flight of time It’s turned cold: cold so that saucers of ice lie in the mud, blank and crazed as antique porcelain. Cold so the hedges are alive with Baltic blackbirds; so cold that each breath hangs like parcelled seafog in the air. The blue sky rings with it, and the bell on Mabel’s tail is dimmed with condensation. Cold, cold, cold. My feet crack the ice in the mud as I trudge uphill. And because the squeaks and grinding harmonics of fracturing ice sound to Mabel like a wounded animal, every step I take is met with a convulsive clench of her toes. Where the world isn’t white with frost, it’s striped green and brown in strong sunlight, so the land is particoloured and snapping backwards to dawn and forwards to dusk. The days, now, are a bare six hours long.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  History collapses when you hold a hawk, just as it does for my friends with their small and precious objects. The vast differences between you and that long-dead person are forgotten. You cannot help but assume that they saw the world as you see it. And this has troubling ramifications. It is a small step from imagining you are the same as that long-dead falconer to presuming that the land you walk upon has been walked upon by people like you since time immemorial. And the ancestors falconers have chosen to imagine tend to have been a cut above the common crowd. ‘Falconry is certainly of high descent,’ wrote the falconer Gage Earl Freeman in 1859. ‘Look at the pride – the honest noble pride – of ancestry!’ When a friend countered this by saying his own love for falconry was ‘perfectly independent of any feeling for antiquity or the middle ages, for which he cared nothing’, Freeman’s response was blunt. ‘I believe he was mistaken.’ But hawks did not always grant you communion with lords and earls and kings. At Chapel Green a hawk let White feel part of the community of a pre-Reformation English village. It made him feel at home. When I was small I’d loved falconry’s historical glamour. I treasured it in the same way children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary. But that was a long time ago. I did not feel like that any more. I was not training a hawk because I wished to feel special. I did not want the hawk to make me feel I was striding righteously across the lands of my long-lost ancestors. I had no use for history, no use for time at all. I was training the hawk to make it all disappear.

• From Educated (2018)

  study, just as I’d seen him do on a thousand nights. I didn’t study history or math. I studied religion. I read the Book of Mormon twice. I read the New Testament, once quickly, then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross- reference, and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one read the essays; I wrote them for myself, the way I imagined Tyler had studied for himself and himself only. I worked through the Old Testament next, then I read Dad’s books, which were mostly compilations of the speeches, letters and journals of the early Mormon prophets. Their language was of the nineteenth century—stiff, winding, but exact—and at first I understood nothing. But over time my eyes and ears adjusted, so that I began to feel at home with those fragments of my people’s history: stories of pioneers, my ancestors, striking out across the American wilderness. While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study. In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand. — BY THE TIME THE SNOW on the mountain began to melt, my hands were thickly callused. A season in the junkyard had honed my reflexes: I’d learned to listen for the low grunt that escaped Dad’s lips whenever he tossed something heavy, and when I heard it I hit the dirt. I spent so much time flat in the mud, I didn’t salvage much. Dad joked I was as slow as molasses running uphill. The memory of Tyler had faded, and with it had faded his music, drowned out by the crack of metal crashing into metal. Those were the sounds that played in my head at night now—the jingle of corrugated tin, the short tap of copper wire, the thunder of iron. I had entered into the new reality. I saw the world through my father’s eyes. I saw the angels, or at least I imagined I saw them, watching us

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He tried exposing his isolated fledglings to looped tapes of the songs of other species: could they be persuaded to sing like tree pipits? It was a groundbreaking piece of research into developmental learning, but it was also a science soaked deep in Cold War anxieties. The questions Thorpe was asking were those of a post-war West obsessed with identity and frightened of brainwashing. How do you learn who you are? Can your allegiances be changed? Can you be trusted? What makes you a chaffinch? Where do you come from? Thorpe discovered that wild chaffinches from different places had different dialects. I listened carefully to the bird outside. Yes, its song was different from the song of Surrey chaffinches I’d learned as a child . It was thinner , less complicated; seemed to cut off before it was properly finished. I thought I would like to hear Surrey chaffinches again. I thought of sad birds in soundproofed cages, and how your earliest experiences teach you who you are. I thought of the house from my dream. I thought of home. And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realised that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. It was about to begin. In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, café-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai. ‘Hello hawk,’ I whisper, and at the sound she draws her feathers tight in alarm. ‘Hush,’ I tell myself, and the hawk. Hush . Then I put on my falconer’s glove, step forward and take her up onto my fist, untying the falconer’s knot that secures her leash to the perch. She bates. Bating . A ‘ headlong dive of rage and terror, by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom’. That’s how White described it in The Goshawk . The falconer’s duty, he explained, ‘is to lift the hawk back to the fist with his other hand in gentleness and patience’. I lift her back onto my fist with gentleness and patience. Her feet grip the glove convulsively. This perch is moving . I feel her mind grappling with novelty. But still it is the only thing I understand. I shall hold it tight . I persuade her to step onto a perch on a modified set of scales. Hawks have a flying weight, just as boxers have a fighting weight. A hawk that’s too fat, or high , has little interest in flying and won’t return to the falconer’s call. Hawks too low are awful things: spare, unhappy, lacking the energy to fly with fire and style.