drew a laugh and an ‘oo, a say’ from the crowd. It also got the owl turning and dropping, the amber scorch of the eyes locked stone still within the nonsense of wings. Clambering into the upward arc, Banjo spread a shadow at the girl’s feet, hitting the big glove hard. Louisa gasped.
While Banjo fed from her first, Louisa – heart going crazy – walked towards her father at the dividing wall. As she approached, Banjo raised his big wings for balance and Richard Smedley took a step back. Louisa witnessed the act with fascination.
It was the falcons she really wanted to fly when she saw them dipping over the scout hut at a brutal pace. ‘Be a few years before you can handle one a them,’ Roy Ogden said.
‘That’s not so long,’ Louisa said.
Roy Ogden, black moustache on a thick face, and a way of biting the tip of his tongue when concentrating, fixed motorbikes in his own residential garage in Whatstandwell, working through the night to give himself daylight hours to fly falcons. He limped badly from the accident that had forced him to quit riding bikes, but his hawks moved with perfect grace and at his bidding.
Louisa’s apprenticeship was a constant pushing at the boundaries of pleasure, until not long after her thirteenth birthday when she taught her first peregrine, Jacko, to stoop from out of pure grey nothing towards the grouse flushed from cover. The clatter of the contact was audible, and the stunned grouse gave up feathers like a trail of puffed cigar smoke, made a soft noise as it came down in the yellow tussocks. That day was the culmination of months of training for the falcon, and years of training for the girl. ‘Nothing you can’t do, now,’ said Roy.
This was the seventies, before worldwide artificial breeding programmes, and the peregrine was teetering on the edge of oblivion. DDT pesticides had thinned the shells of peregrine eggs. Even obtaining such a bird was tricky and not always legal. There was a deathly zeal about hunting with a peregrine. The threat of imminent extinction was with them in the field.
The evening after Jacko’s stoop, Louisa’s brothers came for tea, but she felt unable to bear the presence of her family. It was a private feeling, this triumph – a lonely physical pleasure that she worried would show on her face. So she lay in the bath behind a locked door, turned up the radio and let the dirt drift off her arms. With her eyes closed she still felt tentacular, bound to her companions in the field, as though the dog was on point in the living room, Jacko was pitched hundreds of yards above the roof, and Roy Ogden was standing by the sink.
The hawking season coincided with the school term. There was no contest. The first couple of times she arrived at his house in the early morning, Roy drove Louisa the many miles back to school, but he eventually realised that he did not have the fuel money to win the war, and figured it was best to teach her well. She proved herself an asset in the field.
Mostly they took sandwiches, but they had occasional pub lunches where the landlords allowed children, and once stopped at a greasy spoon at the base of the Heights of Abraham, the cable cars swinging above them. These were Louisa’s first few mouthfuls of Derbyshire, and it was she who recommended Detton to David in later years.
On the days she attended school, Louisa went straight from feeding the birds, blood streaked across her hands. This did little for her popularity, about which only her mother cared. Mrs Smedley sometimes took the liberty of inviting other girls to tea, but Louisa always managed to sneak them into the shed, where they commented in whispers on the smell of the birds, and how it ‘explained a few things.’ Sometimes they cried over a hawk’s messy consumption of a chick; one girl even vomited. Louisa assured her that the dog would clean it up.
The transition to secondary school had been a failure, and her teens promised a lack of all healthy
While Banjo fed from her first, Louisa – heart going crazy – walked towards her father at the dividing wall. As she approached, Banjo raised his big wings for balance and Richard Smedley took a step back. Louisa witnessed the act with fascination.
It was the falcons she really wanted to fly when she saw them dipping over the scout hut at a brutal pace. ‘Be a few years before you can handle one a them,’ Roy Ogden said.
‘That’s not so long,’ Louisa said.
Roy Ogden, black moustache on a thick face, and a way of biting the tip of his tongue when concentrating, fixed motorbikes in his own residential garage in Whatstandwell, working through the night to give himself daylight hours to fly falcons. He limped badly from the accident that had forced him to quit riding bikes, but his hawks moved with perfect grace and at his bidding.
Louisa’s apprenticeship was a constant pushing at the boundaries of pleasure, until not long after her thirteenth birthday when she taught her first peregrine, Jacko, to stoop from out of pure grey nothing towards the grouse flushed from cover. The clatter of the contact was audible, and the stunned grouse gave up feathers like a trail of puffed cigar smoke, made a soft noise as it came down in the yellow tussocks. That day was the culmination of months of training for the falcon, and years of training for the girl. ‘Nothing you can’t do, now,’ said Roy.
This was the seventies, before worldwide artificial breeding programmes, and the peregrine was teetering on the edge of oblivion. DDT pesticides had thinned the shells of peregrine eggs. Even obtaining such a bird was tricky and not always legal. There was a deathly zeal about hunting with a peregrine. The threat of imminent extinction was with them in the field.
The evening after Jacko’s stoop, Louisa’s brothers came for tea, but she felt unable to bear the presence of her family. It was a private feeling, this triumph – a lonely physical pleasure that she worried would show on her face. So she lay in the bath behind a locked door, turned up the radio and let the dirt drift off her arms. With her eyes closed she still felt tentacular, bound to her companions in the field, as though the dog was on point in the living room, Jacko was pitched hundreds of yards above the roof, and Roy Ogden was standing by the sink.
The hawking season coincided with the school term. There was no contest. The first couple of times she arrived at his house in the early morning, Roy drove Louisa the many miles back to school, but he eventually realised that he did not have the fuel money to win the war, and figured it was best to teach her well. She proved herself an asset in the field.
Mostly they took sandwiches, but they had occasional pub lunches where the landlords allowed children, and once stopped at a greasy spoon at the base of the Heights of Abraham, the cable cars swinging above them. These were Louisa’s first few mouthfuls of Derbyshire, and it was she who recommended Detton to David in later years.
On the days she attended school, Louisa went straight from feeding the birds, blood streaked across her hands. This did little for her popularity, about which only her mother cared. Mrs Smedley sometimes took the liberty of inviting other girls to tea, but Louisa always managed to sneak them into the shed, where they commented in whispers on the smell of the birds, and how it ‘explained a few things.’ Sometimes they cried over a hawk’s messy consumption of a chick; one girl even vomited. Louisa assured her that the dog would clean it up.
The transition to secondary school had been a failure, and her teens promised a lack of all healthy
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