Helen Macdonald garnered praise and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2014 with H is for Hawk. A substantial strand of the book is about TH White (above) and his book The Goshawk, written shortly before World War II, but not published until 1951.
Ingy and Alan gave me White’s book last year and I have only now started to read it. First, a bit of Terence White’s story. He got a First in English at Cambridge in 1928 and went to teach at Stowe for four years. He left the school but stayed nearby living in a cottage in the woods where he wrote novels, including The Sword in the Stone, and attempted to train a goshawk. He was a conscientious objector and spent the war at Doolistown near Trim in Co Meath. In 1946 he left Ireland for Alderney where he lived until his death in 1964.
Macdonald owes a great debt to White. I am pleasurably immersed in the routines of training a goshawk, the terminology and White’s imagery. An austringer trains a goshawk, the jesses are the straps on the bird’s feet that the austringer holds to stop the bird flying off, the creance the line that the bird is attached to while being trained to fly free, a mews the outhouse where the bird is kept, a haggard a female falcon with mature plumage. When White needs to conceal himself near a netting trap to capture a wild bird he says he is nasconded – from the Italian nascondere.
The punishing training that he imposes on himself and the bird lies at the heart of this absorbing and rewarding book. A Kestrel for a Knave written by Barry Hines and published in 1968 may owe a debt to White. The title of the film adaptation, directed by Kenneth Loach, Kes, certainly echoes White’s name for his goshawk, Gos. Shakespeare often evokes falconry and this is from the heart of Othello.
If I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart strings,
I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind
To play at fortune.