As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:
The poet W. H. Auden had written those lines in 1930, and I hadn’t thought of them for years. To have the commanding view of the hawk and airman: to be lifted free from the messy realities of human life to a prospect of height and power from which one can observe the world below. To have safe vantage, from which death may descend. Safety. I think of the American airmen stationed here seventy years ago flying aircraft just like this one, scrambling to the iceboxes that were cockpits, wearing heated suits that didn’t work, breathing oxygen through rubber hoses that furred with crystalline ice, so that at altitude they had to bend and crush them between their fingers to get sufficient oxygen to breathe. They slept on cots in an alien land of rain and fog, dressed in silence for dawn briefings before running to their ships, holding the throttles forward, tight-chested as the engines spooled up, climbing through cloud, eyes locked on the manifold pressure gauges and the rpm displays, navigators calling headings in degrees. And then the hours of flight to and from Germany where they dropped their appalling cargo through skies thick with exploding shells. One in four did not complete their tour of duty. The sky was not a place of safety, no matter how commanding their view. What happened to them was terrible. What they did was terrible beyond imagining. No war can ever be just air.
The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives’ ends. She finishes the last scraps of rabbit, strops her beak, rubs strands of pale fur onto the glove. Then she shakes her feathers into place and gazes up at the empty sky where the bomber had been. And I feel it then, the tug. How did Auden’s poem go, after those lines?
The clouds rift suddenly – look there1
I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk’s eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe.
My father had grown up in that war. For the first four years of his life he and his family had lived under the bombers streaming over in stacked formations, cut with searchlights at night or in scrawls of ragged contrails that glowed in the upper air by day. What must it have been like to see those tiny crosses passing overhead? You know that some are trying to kill you. Others defend you. Knowing which was which must have had, in the language of the time, great danger valency. Your life was caught up in these small and migrant machines. Like all your friends you make Airfix models, spend your pocket money on Aeroplane Spotter. You memorise the position of engines, learn the lineaments of tail position, shape, engine note, fuselage. And so plane-spotting became Dad’s childhood obsession. Numbering, identifying, classifying, recording, learning the details with a fierce child’s need to know and command. When he was older he cycled to distant airfields with a bottle of Tizer, a Box Brownie camera, a notebook and pencil. Farnborough, Northolt, Blackbushe. Hours of waiting at the perimeter fence, a small boy looking through the wire.
I must have inherited being a watcher from Dad, I thought idly. Perhaps it was inevitable that with Dad’s propensity to stare up at the slightest engine note, raise a pair of binoculars to distant contrails, my tiny self would emulate him, learn that looking at flying things was the way to see the world. Only for me, it wasn’t aeroplanes. It was birds.