Memoir by a man who grew up in a small coal-mining town in Yorkshire. Where most men were employed in “the pit” and some never came out alive again. Prospects for the future seemed slim when Hines failed to pass a test for better education, he was shunted into a public school that didn’t seem to teach much. Corporal punishment and petty cruelty from teachers was all over the place. Kids were prepared to take jobs of manual labor, or at best learn a trade. Hines’ older brother moved on to the better school and became a writer. The author himself often spent time roaming the fields and hedges, when he happened to find a nest of kestrels in an abandoned building, took a young bird and then taught himself falconry from old books. His fascination with the archaic terms and the methodology of teaching hawks became an obsession, he would talk about it with anyone he met. Reading about his patient success with the kestrel was lovely. Especially the little close observations on its behavior and wild beauty. After schooling, the author took a few jobs he didn’t care for (plumber’s assistant, office worker for a housing council, etc) but was fired to move on with his hawking experiences. He wanted to man another bird of prey species, but goshawks and others were very scarce in England at the time only kestrels were commonly found. The only way back then to obtain a bird, was to catch a wild one. He decided he’d have to travel to find other avenues for his passion, so volunteered to do chairty work abroad and ended up in Nigeria. He didn’t find any opportunities there to catch and train a wild hawk, but did discover that he liked teaching when his assigment changed. Returning to England he went back to school to get liscenced as a teacher.
Meanwhile, his older brother wrote a fictional book about a boy in a mining town who finds and trains a wild kestrel. While the home life and trajectory of the story in Kestrel for a Knave was completely fictional, details surrounding capture of the falcon and its training were patterened after reality. In fact Hines’ older brother questioned him closely about falconry, borrowed some of his books, and watched him work with the bird. Later when a film was made of the novel, Richard Hines also worked on the set, he was the person who (of course) trained the three falcons used for filming, and taught the young boy actor how to handle the birds and fly them to the lure in scenes. It was fascinating reading about the filmmaking. Of course there were some frustrations involved, and disgruntlement when Hines found out his brother was taking more credit than he felt was due.
The latter part of the book tells how the author lost his desire to keep a hawk after he met a falconer at a demonstration and experienced some class prejudice. He felt he’d never be accepted among elite falconers, but didn’t want to just keep flying kestrels, so he gave up on it for decades, though still always had a keen interest when he saw birds in the wild or read about them. Also growing concern for environmental issues that impacted birds of prey. He’d read and gushed about T.H. White’s Goshwak as a boy, and now discussed many times J.A. Baker’s Peregrine. Which delighted me as I own, and highly regard, both these books- but of course there are many other works he talks about in this memoir, which I haven’t had the pleasure to read yet.
And then, thirty years after abandoning the hobby, the author began making film documentaries about the lives of working-class people. In his travels and interviews, he met more upper-class men and realized they didn’t intimidate him as in years past. He attended a falconry demonstration and realized that things had changed- talked to the man and learned that birds of prey were now bred in captivity, anyone could buy a bird to train, methods were a bit different now, it would be easy to join a falconry club, etc. So he obtained a captive-bred merlin and once again trained a bird to fly. Reading about the differences in this experience to the ones in his youth was enlightening, and I’m not even involved in this hobby! I’ve just always been kind of fascinated by it.
There’s much more in here about his family, life in the mining town, amusing incidents between friends, the volunteer work in Africa, teaching experiences, what it was like working with the film crew, his growing concerns about wildlife and so on. It was very interesting to read about the film and then watch it, even though I’ve never read his brother’s novel (though it’s been on my TBR for many many years). Enough is patterned after real life that I could follow what was going on in the film, though I struggled a lot to comprehend the dialect and slang. The film was made in the author’s hometown, in the very fields where he flew his kestrel as a young man. But not having read that book, the film’s ending took me by surprise, and it was very sad. It made me think a lot of stories by Helen Griffiths. With the bitter, gritty reality.
Borrowed from the public library.
