What must it be like to live in a world where you cry because you believe your father will kill you on your birthday, a world in which you are beaten, daily, for no reason? A world in which you write a letter to your mother in India enclosing your school photograph, and she writes back to tell you that your lips are ‘growing sensual’,3 and that you should hold them in, with your teeth if necessary? I cannot imagine White’s childhood of terror and shame, but I can understand how it made him see the world as controlled by cruelty, by dictators and madmen. I can see how that powerless child in front of the play-castle never quite stopped believing that he was going to be shot.
For it was not just his fear of success that made White sabotage the training of his hawk. Underlying the whole long affair was a deep repetition compulsion, the term Freud used to describe the need to re-enact painful experiences in order to master them. But with the hawk the re-enactment was the tragedy. ‘He has been frightened into insanity, being, like all predatory people, by nature terrified at heart,’ he wrote of Gos. What had he done? He had taken something wild and free, something innocent and full of life, and fought with it. The cost of his mastery would be to reduce it to a biddable, broken-feathered, dull-eyed shadow of the bird it was meant to be. Gos had been meant to fly slantwise across dark valleys of German pines, to slay and ravine and be his own wildest self. White had thought he could tame the hawk without breaking its natural spirit. But all he has done is try to break it, over and over again. He thinks of Gos tangled in the tree, hanging there in the branches, trapped, powerless, entirely unable to move.
It wasn’t conscious. None of it was conscious. But the disaster was inevitable. White saw that the hawk was himself, a bird that was a ‘youth who had been maddened by every kind of clumsiness, privation, and persecution’.4 And he understood, finally, terribly, that what he had done was become the persecutor, no matter how many times he told himself otherwise. The hawk was the child in front of the play-castle. He was his father. He was his father. He was the dictator, not the hawk. And so the great tragedy rolled to its conclusion, and the final blow, of course, fell from simple sentiment.
Low clouds move fast over the Ridings. It is raining hard. The cattle lie under the trees in the gale, their flanks dark and soaked, their breaths steaming in the air. White goes out to the barn where Gos is tied to his perch in shadow. Guilt uncoils in his heart. The hawk has no choice but to sit where he is told. He has no freedom at all. So White puts a bowperch in the ground just outside the door, ties six yards of twine – the tarred twine with no breaking strain, the twine that has already snapped twice, the dangerous, poor quality twine – to Gos’s swivel, then ties the other end to the perch in the barn. This way, he tells himself, his hawk can fly outside and then fly back inside when he wants. Pleased that he’s given Gos more freedom, he returns to the house.
The rain is relentless. It is not a day to try to trap the hawks. It is a day for comfort. He will make it up to Gos. He will pace up and down the kitchen with him, feed him tidbits, make him love him again. Gos likes music: he will play him songs on the wireless. But he finds the wireless has died. He bicycles to Tom’s, borrows his telephone to order a new battery. Then he pedals back. Rain and rooks. A man on a bicycle in a high wind who decides he must concentrate on small things today. Big things are too difficult. What he will do is repaint the woodwork in the passageway, and then perhaps the kitchen door. When the passageway is done he examines his handiwork with a critical eye. It looks well. Now for the kitchen door. Blue paint, he thinks. His father used to like painting things in bright and clashing colours. He knows he has inherited the vice. So he goes into the barn to fetch it. Gos bates from him, first upwards to the rafters, then straight out of the open door. When White leaves the barn, the paintpot in his hand, he looks for Gos sitting on his perch. But the perch is empty. Gos is not there. His hawk is gone. Gos has gone and the frayed end of the twine lies snapped upon the ground.
Part II
18
Flying free
TONIGHT. THE WEATHER is perfect, the hawk’s weight too. I race about the house, fizzing with anticipation, filling my morning with small and mundane tasks. I scrub mutes from the vinyl cloth on the floor, whistle happily, wash and dry my hair. But some invisible needle is picking away inside me: as the afternoon wears on, things begin to unravel. First I fight with my mother on the phone for no good reason, then when Christina arrives to see the hawk fly I snap at her for no reason whatsoever. Picking up my hawking waistcoat in the kitchen I hear her say gridlock but the word doesn’t register at all. I should have listened. There’d been a horrendous crash on the A14 outside Cambridge. Stuart had been stranded in its aftermath, stuck in his Land Rover under a flyover stanchion, air ambulances roaring overhead through roiling clouds of smoke. He’d called me. Told me he was running late because of a crash, but that was all. ‘I’m going up the hill now,’ he said. ‘Coming?’