H is for Hawk

Peggy Frew for the ‘What I’m Reading’ series.

Last year I, like many others, fell in love with Helen Macdonald’s memoir H is for Hawk. In this book Macdonald details her relationship with Mabel the goshawk, ‘trainable’ to some extent, yet fundamentally elusive, indomitably and gloriously wild, while giving a parallel account of the tragic life of T. H. White, author of the 1938 Arthurian classic The Sword in the Stone.

White is a fabulous and pitiful character, unloved child of wealthy, violent alcoholics—literary, sensitive, fucked up. Leaving his post as a teacher he retreats to the countryside, determined to, through training his hawk Gos, connect with a world of pure wildness, an animal world—a refuge from the reality of his own social ill-ease, his miserable and repressed sexuality, and the looming Second World War.

Within White’s ill-informed and unintentionally yet distressingly cruel attempts to tame his hawk Macdonald finds elements of her own motivations with Mabel. Macdonald is vastly more functional than White, far more emotionally literate, and far less damaged. But her father has died, and it’s her grief that’s prompted her to take Mabel on, and here is the binding thread of this impressively multifaceted work: Macdonald is broken— her grief over the death of her gentle photographer and bird-watching father has brought her undone— and in entering into the role of falconer she is seeking something, just as White sought, and failed to find, something in his taming of Gos.

There is so much in this book, and it’s all so expertly put together, and when you add the loveliness of the actual writing, the whole package is truly special. And despite the breadth and depth of Macdonald’s masterful interrogation of some very specific and esoteric subject matter, what lies at the heart of this work—the human-animal connection—is extremely relatable.

One especially resonant element, for me, is Macdonald’s nerdy childhood obsession with the details of falconry, its language and trappings—jesses, creance, quarry—and the schism between this ‘perfect, secret language’ and the actual birds she eventually encounters, ‘spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed’.

I read the book in the springtime, at Phillip Island, which is where my partner and I take our children during the school holidays. This is also where I spent my own childhood holidays, and those of my early adolescence, at the home of my grandparents. While the jagged, rough-and-tumble island with its yellow dunes and dark, wind-stunted masses of ti tree is a world away from Macdonald’s more ordered, mossy, woodsy, rust-and-green landscape, there is both wildness and the presence—at times futile, at others destructive—of humans to be found in each.

Walking on the sand between reading sessions, I remembered one summer when, aged fourteen or so, I was allowed to ride a horse belonging to a friend of my grandmother’s. I wasn’t an experienced rider, my knowledge of horses was a fantastical one, much more about drawing pictures and poring over books than about interacting with an actual, physical animal. I knew just about everything there was to know about horses and riding them, I just had hardly ever done it myself, in real life. The reality was a shock. The horse was huge; she didn’t do what I expected her to do; her movements, her smell, the sudden sounds she made all frightened me. Her realness, and her independence, the remoteness of her experience from my own—what logic existed behind those big, dark eyes? What was she seeing when she shied away from those bushes, or threw back her head and lifted her top lip as if sending some kind of signal?— both fascinated and terrified me.

Macdonald writes of Mabel: ‘She was beautiful; taut with antipathy; everything a child feels when angry and silenced.’ My horse was beautiful too, and so strong. She could kill me if she wanted to. Yet here she was contained in a small yard, controlled by the bridle, the bit and the reins, her strength still there, densely coiled, but magically dampened by these human contrivances. And was it not true that at any moment she might break out, like a circus elephant trampling the crowd? This was part of my terror, and part of the thrill, too, of riding her, of surfing the wave of her.

I was unhappy that summer. I was seeking something I didn’t understand, something to equal my unhappiness, which I recall now as being adolescently vast, majestic and mysterious, to meet it, perhaps to obliterate it. I got more than I bargained for, and it occurs to me now that I never really understood what exactly I did experience. I’m not sure I’d ever have the words myself to express it, and so I’m very pleased to have been able to revisit and make sense of—and so much more—through this remarkable book.

Peggy Frew is a musician and writer. She is a winner of The Age Short Story Competition and has been published in New Australian Stories 2, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, and The Big Issue. Her first novel, House of Sticks, published in 2011, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript by an Emerging Victorian Writer, and was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing. Hope Farm, her second novel, was published in October 2015.