Helen Macdonald
When you lose somebody you love, throwing yourself into your work can be overwhelmingly tempting. Anything to distract you from the white heat of grief.
But Helen Macdonald took this one step further.
Consumed with sadness after her father’s sudden death, she felt compelled to do something extraordinary. And so, after stuffing her freezer with hawk food (steak, day-old chicks, rabbit legs), the historian and nature writer drove up to Scotland, handed over £800 to a breeder, and headed home with her precious cargo - a baby goshawk named Mabel - in a box on the back seat. Then, curtains drawn, phone unplugged, she set about training her deadly bird of prey in her small Cambridge house.
It isn’t as bizarre as it sounds: as a keen falconer, Helen has flown hawks for many years. But she’d never wanted to fly a goshawk.
Colossal, psychopathic and brutal, it seems that goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble pussycats. And, as Helen submerged herself into Mabel's macabre world of hunting and killing, she found herself slowly slipping away from humanity.
Now her “very strange” year has been recorded in a beautifully written and almost unbearably poignant new book. Called H is for Hawk, it's been causing quite a stir: fought over by publishers at auction, it topped the Sunday Times bestseller list within a fortnight of its release at the end of July.
Anyone who’s read the book will know why. I devoured it in a weekend, alternately shivering in awe and sobbing into soggy tissues before thrusting it on my other half to read (it’s too good not to share). And, having been so moved by her plight, I’m half-expecting Helen to be an ethereal, rather gloomy figure when we meet for coffee at CB2.
Gloomy? No chance. Vivacious, warm and blessed with an explosive laugh, I like her immediately - and it seems a shame that as soon as we get chatting I have to ask about her dad’s death. But Helen insists that it's fine. “It was quite a long time ago,” she shrugs. “I needed that time to be able to write about it without it being too difficult.”
Helen's father was, she says, “completely ace. He was a photojournalist - a really good photojournalist. You know the picture of Princess Diana and Prince Charles kissing on the balcony? That’s one of his. And he was a great dad; always very keen to take my brother and I out and teach us about nature and the world.”
Alisdair Macdonald died in London in March 2007. He was photographing storm-damaged buildings when he had a massive heart attack, “and was just gone. I think the suddenness of his death made it incomprehensible for a long time.
“So the book is basically about coming to terms with his loss. Quite badly, in my case! I don’t recommend that people go and train goshawks as a way of managing grief. It’s a really terrible idea,” she says with a laugh. “It’s funny, there are very few times in life when you do things that just seem necessary, even though you know to an outsider they’re a bit bewildering. But it was a compulsion. An extraordinary compulsion.
“I trained the hawk because I didn’t want to be me anymore. I wanted to stop being a human because humans feel deep grief and emotions, and I wanted to fly away from that and become something else.”
Growing up in Surrey, Helen, who’s 43, was obsessed by hawks from a young age. 'Obsessed' is no exaggeration: she read every falconry book she could lay her tiny hands on, and would even try to sleep with her arms folded behind her back like wings.
“My poor parents,” she says, shaking her head. “I must have been a nightmare. All I could think about was hawks. I would talk about them incessantly, and they never told me to shut up, bless them.
“I’ve always just thought they were the most beautiful, perfect things. There’s a line in Kes which I always found very moving: it’s when little Billy Casper says that when they fly, everything goes silent. And I think that captures it: there’s a kind of awe about them. They seem a little bit other-worldly.”
After studying at Cambridge (“I wanted to be a biologist, but my maths is execrable so I ended up reading English”), Helen worked in falcon research in Wales and the Gulf States, but found herself missing academia. She returned to Cambridge, eventually teaching at the department of History and Philosophy of Science, “and then my dad died and life took a very different turn.”
From the moment she brought Mabel home, Helen was absorbed in her painstaking new role. “In the early stages of taming her, I was with her all the time; your life shrinks to just a room with a hawk in it. And often very bad daytime television. I did watch some terrible programmes with my hawk; lots of David Dickinson…”
Did she ever regret what she was doing? “Yeah, I got very, very tired. It’s exhausting training a goshawk, and I was worn down by grief. And although I loved it, it was very stressful, and there were times when I used to just bury my head in a pillow and weep.
“In a way, Mabel kept me in the world, but it was a very strange world. I was becoming less and less human, because I spent so much time with her.”
But H is for Hawk isn’t just about grief, nor is it a falconry training manual (although I reckon I could now have a pretty good stab at it): it's also an absorbing literary biography. Woven into the narrative is the story of TH White, a troubled author best known for his Arthurian tale The Once and Future King, who did exactly as Helen did back in the 1930s before writing a book about his woeful experience.
“I read The Goshawk as a kid, and hated it because White was so mean to his hawk,” recalls Helen. “But I became fascinated with trying to understand why he trained a hawk, and why he treated it so badly.”
White was born in India “to parents who clearly hated each other. His mother would lavish attention on her pet dogs, and his father would have them shot. And White was convinced that he would be killed by one or other of his parents.”
Banished to a particularly harsh boarding school, he was physically and mentally abused, “and it just left these huge scars. On top of that he was struggling with his sexuality, and he pretended all of his life to be things that he wasn’t.
“Eventually he just cracked. He went off and hid in the woods to try and train this hawk. So both he and I, although very different creatures, were struggling with our own demons when we trained hawks.”
Like White, Helen spent countless hours alone in the wild as Mabel hunted for prey. Did her friends ever suggest she should get help? “I think I might have been a bit scary,” she grins. “I’d come back covered in mud and thorn scratches, with glary eyes and a hawk on my fist, and I suspect a lot of my friends were like ‘We’ll just leave it…’
“No, that’s not exactly true. There were times when my friends did say ‘Are you OK?’, but I had to come to the realisation myself that I needed some help.
“Slowly I realised that I’d gone too far. I’d pulled away from people too much, and I ended up getting antidepressants, which were really helpful.
“It sounds cheesy, but it was a spiritual journey, really. A coming to terms with death and life – the big themes. God, I sound like a Californian New Age person,” she adds, laughing again.
Sadly, Mabel died last November. “Mabel!” she wails. “No, it’s fine, it’s just really sad. I’ve still got her little numbered ring - I keep it in my jewellery box.”
What was she like? “She was lovely,” says Helen, extending the vowels. “I flew her for hours every day, and then in the evenings she’d sit on her perch on the living room floor and watch television with me. And it’s amazing how normal it seemed after about four or five days. It was like ‘Oh yeah, there’s a goshawk in my house. It’s fine…’”
Would she ever get another? “I think I will at some point, but there won’t be another one like Mabel. The reason I never wanted to train a goshawk was because they are meant to be the most nightmarish animals to handle: highly-strung, aggressive, bloodthirsty, murderous… But Mabel was extraordinarily calm, and slowly, as I trained her, she became incredibly friendly.
“We did things that used to bewilder my male falconer friends: we’d play catch - I’d throw her scrunched-up paper balls and she’d catch them and throw them back to me - and they thought this was ridiculous.
“This is a big message of the book, I think. We give animals meanings that help us, and hawks have always been seen as symbols of wildness and ferocity and remoteness - which means that a lot of their actual character is obscured - and there’s poor Mabel, playing like a kitten. So that was a bit of a lesson.”
Helen now lives in Exning, near Newmarket, with Birdoole - a small parrot with a penchant for being cuddled. “Parrots are awesome. They’re like people: they have enormous personalities.” Does he talk? “Very badly. He says ‘Hewow’. He can’t do Ls. There he is, having a raspberry,” she says, showing me a picture on her phone. “He’s a sweetie.”
She’s also given up academia to write full-time, a job she describes as “infuriating and absorbing and amazing - and it means you can get up a bit late. It can be quite lonely, but when things are going well it’s the most exciting feeling in the world.”
So how is she now? “I still miss Dad an awful lot, but it’s that old chestnut about grief: you have to be patient and wait. There’s a saying that ‘grief is just love with nowhere to go’, which is basically what I realised by the end of the book. I just waited and waited and was patient, and finally I realised that what I felt for him was just love.
“But I’d also gone to some very dark places. I went from light into darkness and then back into light again - and I didn’t realise at the time, but I think that’s the shape of everyone’s grief. It changes you and makes you a different person.”
So she’s a different Helen? “Yeah, absolutely a different me! Older and wiser, a bit more battered and a bit more loving. I always used to hide from things, but that year with the hawk taught me to be more open and loving of everything in the world.”
H is for Hawk is published in hardback by Jonathan Cape, priced £14.99
August 2014 (c) Cambridge News