The pheasants are dead. One is in my waistcoat pocket, and the other is being plumed by my errant goshawk in lifting puffs of soft contour feathers that float and catch in the wire behind her. We need to get out of here fast before I have explaining to do. Shaking with worry, I take Mabel from her quarry. And then I injure myself horribly. Cutting through pheasant sinew, I take a wide, shallow strip of skin from my thumb. And as soon as I get Mabel back on the glove and stow her illicit prize in my waistcoat pocket, I start to worry about the amount of blood I’m losing. It’s not just that my hand is completely red; I can hear the drips falling to the woodland floor. I press the wound hard into the fabric of my hawking jacket. It’s covered in germs, I know, but I must stop the bleeding. Must. Stop. The. Blood. And blood pours from me all the long way back to the car, and all the way to Stuart’s house. I can never go back there, I think. Never, ever again.
In March 1949, the publisher Wren Howard of Jonathan Cape travelled to the Channel Islands to stay at White’s new home. White had moved to the island of Alderney: it was a perfect refuge from the taxman and the world. He’d bought a white three-storeyed house in St Anne’s with magnolia wainscoted walls. He’d filled it with new things: his own surrealist paintings, a boudoir grand piano, silver candlesticks and a statuette of the Emperor Hadrian. There were dark curtains printed with bouquets of ghostly silver roses, jazz records, Jacobean chairs, and a sofa, towards which White ushered Howard to sit. Howard sat. It was wildly uncomfortable. He got up and examined the seat. There was something beneath the cushion. He reached under it and pulled out a thick pile of papers. He asked White what it was. White looked worried. It was the manuscript to a book he had written about hawks, he explained. He did not want it published because after it was written he became a good falconer, an authority on the subject, and there were things in it that were embarrassing to remember. Besides, the hawk had been lost.
Howard leafed through the first few pages and was intrigued. He took it upstairs and read it overnight. In the morning he insisted on taking it back to London, for he was sure it should be published. White balked at the idea, but as the weeks went by, Howard and his friends persuaded him, and he consented to its publication on one condition: that he could write a postscript explaining how he ought to have trained the hawk, in the light of his later experience.
When The Goshawk was published in 1951 it was not a bestseller, but it brought an extraordinary number of letters from readers. Some were congratulatory, others strange: one offered White an eagle. Some disliked the book greatly. And one of these letters White never forgot. It touched a very raw nerve. It was from a man who said that he had for thirty years lectured on birds and watched them all his life. ‘How you can talk of love for a bird after subjecting our wonderful predatory birds to such torture is beyond a normal mind,’1 the letter ran. ‘Is there not enough cruelty in the world without adding to it for one’s amusement or hobby?’
‘This letter put me off food for three days,’ White later confessed, ‘though I answered it with several pages of affection, apology and explanation.’ He waited for a reply. When it came, White wrote, the letter-writer ‘used the word “normal” five times, concluding with the pronouncement that he did not wish to hear from me again. It seemed polite to leave it at that.’
I’ve moved back to the city, to a little rented house in a street near the river with a small sunny garden that ends in a tangle of briars. Cats stalk the pavement outside, there are pigeons all over the roof, and it’s good to be in a house that I can call my own for a while. Today I’m unpacking boxes and stacking books on shelves. Three boxes down, five to go. I open the next box. Inside, on top of the other books, is The Goshawk.