In Blaine’s book White read that falconry was the art of control over the wildest and proudest of living creatures, and that to train them the falconer must battle their defiance and rebellious attitude. The training of a hawk mirrored the education of the public schoolboy. In both, a wild and unruly subject was shaped and moulded, made civilised; was taught good manners and obedience. But the methods were different, and this gave White much pleasure. ‘I had been a schoolmaster for so long,’3 he wrote, ‘in which profession the standard way of meeting a difficult situation was by punishment. It was nice after this to discover a profession of education where punishment was treated as ridiculous.’
It was the perfect kind of education, he decided, for him and for the hawk. He would call his book The Austringer, and in its pages he and his readers would take a ‘patient excursion into the fields and back into the past’.4 That excursion wasn’t just back into an imagined English past; it was also a journey back into his own. White had ‘dropped out of the curious adult heterosexual competition’, had become again ‘a monastic boy’.5 In those long hours of psychoanalysis with Bennet, White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power. Now he was going back in time with the hawk. He’d already empathised with the fledgling in the basket, had seen the hawk as himself. Now he was unconsciously re-enacting his childhood – with the hawk standing in for himself as a boy, and the grown-up White playing the role of an enlightened teacher who could not, would not, must not beat or hurt the child in his care.
He considers falconry the most glorious of mysteries. He has no one to teach him and two books to learn from, not counting the description in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he has almost by heart. There is Blaine’s Falconry, published the previous year, and Coursing and Falconry by Gerald Lascelles, from 1892. But the book White cleaves to is much older; it was published in 1619. Called An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, it is all about goshawks, and it was written by Edmund Bert, Gentleman. White didn’t yet possess a copy of his own, for it was a rare volume; but he’d read it. Perhaps he’d read the copy kept at the Cambridge University Library. Perhaps it was the very same copy I’d pored over as a student. As White was seduced by Bert’s book, so was I. It is bloody marvellous. Bert is the seventeenth-century counterpart of some of the blunter Yorkshire goshawkers of my acquaintance on whom something of the hawk’s character has rubbed off. Accomplished, cantankerous, with a bracing wit, he never fails to arrogate himself, tell us how perfectly his hawks behave: craning on tiptoe to pick marrow from his fingertips, they are happy to travel with him wherever he goes. When away from home, Bert boasts, he’d put his hawk on ‘a velvet stoole, in a dining-chamber or parlour, as the place was whereunto I went, for I would have my Hawke as much in my eye as could be. Perhaps I should see the Lady or Mistress of the house look discontentedly thereat,’6 he deadpans, ‘but so well have I been acquainted with my hawk’s good disposition that I have promised if my hawk should make a mute in the room, I would lick it up with my tongue.’
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,’7 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.8