H Is for Hawk (29 page)

I sob right through twenty minutes of delicate discussion, and agree to try a course of antidepressants. He is a good doctor. He tells me all about SSRIs, talks me through their side-effects, their history, their mode of operation. He draws little diagrams of neurons, adds dots and wavy lines for serotonin molecules and the action of re-uptake inhibitors. I peer at the pictures, fascinated.

An hour later I’m walking down the street with a white paper bag in my hand. It weighs almost nothing. He says it will make things better. Which is ridiculous. How can this grey and mortified world be washed away by little dots and lines? Then I start to worry that the drugs will make me ill. Even more absurdly, I panic that they’ll stop me thinking clearly. That they’ll stop me flying Mabel. That whoever I’ll become under their chemical influence will be so strange and alien she won’t fly to me any more. The worries are a tedious avalanche but I put them to one side for long enough to swallow the drugs with water. There is an almost immediate effect: a tiredness so vast I can hardly walk, and my skull is empty, tight and painful. I don’t sleep that night. I lie in bed. The next morning I drink coffee. I drink more coffee. I keep on flying the hawk.

Those books about people running to the wild to escape their grief and sorrow were part of a much older story, so old its shape is as unconscious and invisible as breathing. When I was a student slogging through the first years of my degree, I read a long and beautiful thirteenth-century poem called
Sir Orfeo
. No one knows who wrote it, and I had forgotten it existed. But one morning while pulling a handful of chicks out of the freezer the poem came to mind, turned out of the ground in one of those strange excavations of the disordered mind.

Sir Orfeo
is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and the underworld by way of traditional Celtic songs about the otherworld, the Land of Faery. In Celtic myth that otherworld is not deep underground; it is just one step aside from our own. Things can exist in both places at once – and things can be pulled from one to the other. In the poem, Heridice sleeps in an orchard under a grafted fruit tree – an
imptree
– and dreams that the next day she will be stolen away by the King of Faery. Terrified, she tells her husband the King. Orfeo surrounds her with armed knights, but they cannot protect her from this otherworldly threat: she slips through the air and vanishes.

Stricken with grief, Orfeo gives up his crown and runs to the forest. For ten years he lives a solitary, feral existence, digging for roots, eating leaves and berries, playing his harp to charm the beasts around him. His beard grows long and matted. He watches the grand hunting parties of the Faery King pass through the forest. He cannot follow them. But one day sixty ladies with falcons on their fists ride by, hunting for cormorants, mallards, herons. As he watches the falcons strike down their prey the world changes. He laughs with delight, remembering his love for the sport – ‘
Parfay!’ quath he, ‘ther is fair game
’
¹
– and he walks towards the women, and sees among them his wife. He has entered that otherworld, and now he can follow them back to the castle of the Faery King, a palace full of people that were thought to be dead but are not. And it is there he plays his harp to the King and persuades him to release his wife. But it was the hawks’ flight and the deaths they brought that ushered him into that other world, let him find his wife that was lost. And this ability of hawks to cross borders that humans cannot is a thing far older than Celtic myth, older than Orpheus – for in ancient shamanic traditions right across Eurasia, hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.

There’s another poem in Latin about a grief-stricken flight to the forest. It was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a twelfth-century cleric best known for his
Historia Regum Britanniae
, The History of the Kings of Britain. The
Historia
was a hugely influential chronicle, but the other poem, also in Latin, is much less well known. It starts with a great battle in which a Welsh king loses many of his friends. For three long days he weeps, strews dust on his hair, refusing food: grief consumes him. Then a ‘strange madness’ or ‘new fury’ comes upon him.

He departed secretly, and fled to the wood and rejoiced to lie hidden under the ash trees; he marvelled at wild beasts feeding on the grass of the glades; now he chased after them and again he flew past them; he lived on the roots of grasses and on the grass, on the fruit of the trees and on the mulberries of the thicket. He became a silvan man just as though devoted to the woods. For a whole summer after this, hidden like a wild animal, he remained buried in the woods, found by no one and forgetful of himself and of his kindred.
²

Geoffrey’s poem is the
Vita Merlini
– the Life of Merlin – and the feral figure who in forgetting himself flew with the birds is Merlin Sylvestris, the Merlin of the Woods, the prophet and seer who in later tales would be recast as the greatest magician of all, and who as Merlyn in
The Sword in the Stone
would educate the King.

It’s tempting to imagine an originary moment, one perfect opening scene. An autumn evening in 1937, when White takes down a book from the shelves that he does not want to read. It is a small blue book with a cloth cover; the first volume of
Le Morte D’Arthur
, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century retelling of stories about the legendary king. White had written his dissertation on it at Cambridge, and he is disinclined to return to it now. But he’s finished all the other books in the house, so he sits in his armchair and begins to read. It is plodding, slow work, like wading through treacle. He nearly puts it down. But suddenly it catches on him, grips him like Gos had his shoulder with eight fierce talons, and he is stricken with amazement. This is a proper story.
A proper tragedy
, he thinks. The people in it are real. They had not been real before. Over two days he reads the whole thing ‘with the passion of an Edgar Wallace fiend, then put it down and took up a pen’.
³

It is easy to say – there. That is how
The Sword in the Stone
began. But I do not think that is the story at all. The book had been started months before, when a round thing that was something like a clothes-basket was set down before his door.

White thought it a warm-hearted book, quite unlike his previous efforts. ‘It seems impossible to determine whether it is for grown-ups or children,’
⁴
he wrote to Potts. ‘It is a preface to Mallory.’ The boy in the book is called the Wart. He is a kindly soul, loyal and slightly stupid. He is an orphan and does not know he will become king. Sir Ector has raised him along with his natural son. The Wart will never become a knight because he is not a gentleman. But in the book he is given a magical teacher – Merlyn – and a magical education, too. Eschewing schooldesks and lessons learned by rote, Merlyn turns the Wart into animals and sends him off on quests. As a fish the boy learns about the dictator’s passion for power by meeting the pike in the castle moat. As a snake he learns of history. He hears the trees speak, and sees the birth of the world through the eyes and ears of an owl. He discusses mankind’s role in God’s plan with a donnish badger in a comfortably furnished sett. And at the end, his education complete, the Wart pulls the sword from the stone, learns he is the son of Uther Pendragon and is crowned King Arthur.

It is a glorious dream of wish-fulfilment for White. He writes himself into the character of the Wart, the boy of unacknowledged royal blood who runs wild around the castle just as he had raced about West Hill House in St Leonards-on-Sea, wild, and happy, and free. White had been torn from safety and sent away to school, but he saves the Wart from such a fate. There would be no beatings in his education. But even so, his lessons are full of cruelty. I did not understand quite how cruel a book it was when I was young. But I responded to that cruelty all the same. Because my favourite part of the book was the Wart’s ordeal as a hawk. It was truly terrifying. I’d read it and squirm, and curl my toes, then read it all over again.

Merlyn turns the Wart into his namesake, a merlin, and looses him in the castle mews at night. And as a new officer in the cadre of the castle’s trained hawks, the Wart must undergo the customary ordeal. He is ordered to stand next to Colonel Cully the goshawk until the rest of the hawks ring their bells three times. It is an exquisitely dangerous initiation, for the colonel is insane. As the ordeal begins the goshawk glowers and mutters. He quotes broken snatches of Shakespeare and Webster, run all together in a fugue of rising horror. After the bells ring once the goshawk begs for the test to end, cries, ‘I can’t hold off much longer.’ The bells ring twice. He moves towards the Wart, stamping the perch convulsively: ‘He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.’

In that awful ordeal, White is the Wart, the boy who must be brave. But he is not just the Wart, and the boy is not the only one imperilled. There’s a sad passage in Olivia Laing’s book
The Trip to Echo Spring
that reminds me of this desperate scene. She quotes the writer John Cheever, whose alcoholism was intimately bound up with his erotic desires for men. He hated his homosexuality and felt himself in constant danger. ‘Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy,’
⁵
he wrote in his journals, ‘was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.’

Despite several affairs with women, White’s fantasies were sadistic and directed mostly at pubescent boys. He was certain that these fantasies had been shaped by his early abuse, and they shamed and horrified him, for in them he played the role of the abuser, just like his father and the masters who had beaten him. Therapy with Bennet had not taken these urges away. They never left him. Late in his life he wrote a pornographic novel about spanking schoolboys: it was a prolonged and awful confession. But he locked it away and never showed it to anyone. All his life he suppressed his desires. But sometimes, just sometimes, he could speak of them through other selves. Colonel Cully is one of them: a hawk wracked with desire to hurt a boy who is also a bird – a boy who is also himself. You can see the whole of his life’s tragedy there in one small scene.

Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave. You tested your bravery in the playing fields, and through the beatings by masters and prefects. And there were the ceremonies of cruelty of the boys themselves: the initiations and ordeals that were the price of entrance into the school, and later into boys’ secret societies. White had put his hand between the cocked hammer of an unloaded revolver and its frame before the trigger was pulled. The pain was a triumph; in bearing the agony, he proved he could belong.

But White was not always the victim in these rituals. School taught him that as he suffered at the hands of older boys, so he should punish the younger. He joined gangs and terrorised those weaker than himself, testing them as he had been tested. One term the test was to jump from a window in Big School fourteen feet to the ground. Puppy Mason
⁶
was too scared to do it, so White assisted in pushing him out. When the fall broke his leg in three places, they were impressed by his silence. He told the masters that he had tripped over a twig on the headmaster’s garden path. Puppy had been tested, had behaved heroically, and his membership of the fraternity was approved.

I knew nothing of such things. I knew about being hurt: the impossibly clumsy child that was me scraped her knees, tripped, grazed herself, hit her head on open windows and bled terribly. But I did not understand the logic behind ordeals of belonging. I did not see pain and bravery as steps toward gaining self-reliance, as necessary parts of growing up. But still I noticed, when I read
The Sword in the Stone
, that whenever the Wart became an animal, he seemed to be in danger. I puzzled over this.
Merlyn is teaching him to be brave
, I thought, eventually.
Because he will need to be brave to be King.

I read Colonel Cully’s ordeal with the Wart over and over again. It mesmerised me because when you are small you don’t have to worry about the child heroes in books. They might suffer peril, but they are human: they never, ever die. But there was always a flicker of worry as I read
The Sword in the Stone
, for it was not quite clear if the Wart was human any more. He had been turned into a bird. Was he still the Wart? He was an animal now. Could he die? He might die. He might. And it was that possibility that held me spell-bound every time I read the scene; I felt an apprehensive terror that was just big enough to master. I’d read on, desperate to reach the end, for that moment when the Wart springs up from the perch, the goshawk’s great foot clutching at his wing, before he wrenches himself free and survives. I knew nothing of ordeals, but reading it felt like one. Every time I finished reading it, part of me was relieved that I’d survived to read it again.

White had escaped the school by running to the woods, but he’d rented a cottage on the old road to its door. He’d gained freedom by changing his life, but he’d not escaped the concept of freedom that school had given him. At school you move up from year to year, gaining more power and privilege until finally you leave. It was this notion of freedom – as the natural end to an ordeal-filled education – that never left White, and it was working within him when he lengthened Gos’s leash with breakable twine. As a schoolboy he knew that the boys over whom he’d had authority would one day have authority themselves. As a schoolmaster, too. And a falconer. Deep down he knew he was always training his charges for a time when they would be free.