Only two countries had falconry exhibits in the Berlin exhibition. Germany won first prize for theirs, and the British Falconers’ Club came second. That bronze falcon I’d pulled from Gordon’s cupboard was their award. It had been sent to the club after the exhibition by Hermann G?ring. G?ring: Hitler’s right-hand man, commander-in chief of the Luftwaffe, the J?germeister of the Reich, the man who’d set the Reichstag on fire. Falconry delighted him. It wasn’t only that he considered it the Romantic sport of ancient Teutonic kings. Hawks themselves were a natural elite, the perfect naturalisation of Nazi ideology: living paragons of power and blood and violence that preyed guiltlessly on things weaker than themselves. G?ring’s portrait of his favourite hawk, a white gyrfalcon standing on a cliff, is utterly true to the conventions of Nazi portraiture: bathed in morning sunlight, its wings half open, the falcon stares coldly into the distance. And G?ring had a trained goshawk, too: I had seen it stuffed and mounted on a branch in an American archive years before. It was a big goshawk in adult plumage, still wearing jesses and bells, its dry toes locked around a dusty branch. It was beautifully mounted. Someone had taken very good care to make it look alive. I stared into its glass eyes, chilled to the bone, and wondered if it was related to Gos. There was every chance that it was a cousin of White’s hawk, for the man who’d painted G?ring’s gyrfalcon, the man who headed the Deutscher Falkenorden, who had arranged falconry’s state patronage and designed the Reichsfalkenhof, was Renz Waller. And he was the man who’d sent White Gos; the man to whom White had written pleading for another hawk. And who wrote back to him a few weeks later saying he would certainly try to ‘get for you a other passager Gos’.1
A new hawk! Full of excitement, White uncapped his pen and wrote Plan for a Passage Gos on the inside cover of his new copy of Bert’s Treatise. He mapped out detailed training plans, and they rang with new authority. ‘Watch her that night, keeping her constantly in motion,’ he wrote. ‘Have an assistant to take turns at this.’2 But the new hawk was not to be. The day before it was due to arrive White was rushed to hospital with appendicitis – as if his body was rebelling against the prospect of another weary battle. The thought of the surgeon’s knife was a terror to him. ‘It made me feel cleaner in some obscure way,’3 he wrote to John Moore after the operation. ‘I think I am brave and master of my soul after all.’ He had survived the crisis, and returned to his cottage. For a while he courted the night nurse, Stella, who had tended him at the hospital – but he thought her a wholly alien creature, and when he saw she might truly want him, he spurned her cruelly.
The winter was long and dark. There was something mythical about its slow progression from snow to thaw, to snow again, to mud and misery and sickness, as if in living through it, he was passing through many ages. Hope returned with spring. He filled the house with orphans: squab pigeons and doves, a tawny owl called Archimedes and a pair of baby badgers. Then in April White drove to Croydon to pick up a new hawk. He called her Cully. She was in a dreadful state. On being trapped half her tail feathers had broken off, along with most of the primaries on her left wing. White frowned over diagrams in falconry books, cut buzzard feathers to size, and glued and sewed these replacements into the trimmed quills of her wings and tail. Imping, they called it: he knew it was one of the falconers’ Great Arts. But it was a bad job, the fixing, and all the bating in her eight weeks of training left her tail-less, part-winged, barely able to fly.
But fly she did. The hawk flew free. Heart in mouth, he flew her free. Finally he would hunt with a hawk he had trained himself. His dazzling dreams of self-sufficiency, his dreams of innocent cruelty: both were within his reach. But it was getting late in the season, and he knew that Cully should be put down to moult. Hawks shed and replace all their feathers once every year, and during this time they are not flown, but loosed in a spacious enclosure and fed ad libitum. But he needed this one success. And one evening out on the Ridings, after days of fruitless stalking, he loosed his tattered hawk at a rabbit on Tofield’s Riding and after a hapless, ragged flight – at one point running after the rabbit, rather than flying – Cully grabbed it by the head. White rushed to the scene, took his hunting knife and pinned the rabbit’s skull to the ground. Desires that had never flowered in his courting of the nurse were unleashed in a wave of darkness. ‘Think of Lust,’ he wrote, of killing the rabbit. ‘Real blood-lust is like that.’4
22
Apple Day
OH GOD. WHAT am I doing here? I’m sitting on a white plastic picnic chair under the shade of a marquee roof. Ten feet behind me Mabel resembles a shadow cast on water; her wings are crossed as tight as swords and her eyes bloom huge with horror. I know how she feels. Too many people, I think, fidgeting on my seat. Too many people.
‘So, Helen,’ Stuart had said. ‘The landowner’s asked us to bring some hawks along for Apple Day at the farm.’
‘Apple Day?’
Stuart told me that it was a tiny country fair, a celebration of rural history, farming and local food. ‘We’re not flying, just weathering the hawks in a marquee so members of the public can see them. I’ll take my tiercel. Greg’s bringing his barbary. Alan’s coming up with some eagles. Can you bring Mabel?’