A Kestrel for a Knave (22 page)

Billy jumped up and blundered his way between the partitions, banged through the double doors and felt up the wall for the toilet door. It was lighter in the toilet. The open window made objects just visible. He climbed into the sink, squeezed out of the window feet first, then ran across the forecourt on to the pavement.

The traffic was still running. A woman on the opposite pavement looked across at him as she walked by. He looked round at the Palace, then turned away from it and shuddered. Somebody walking over his grave.

It had stopped raining. The clouds were breaking up and stars showed in the spaces between them. Billy stood for a while glancing up and down the City Road, then he started to walk back the way he had come.

When he arrived home there was no one in. He buried the hawk in the field just behind the shed; went in, and went to bed.

Over the years I have given readings at literature festivals, in schools and universities and been asked many questions about my work. But the weirdest question ever was in a school in Lincolnshire. I was sitting in the staff room waiting to talk to a class of children – the usual gang of demob-happy fifth-formers, last lesson Friday afternoon – when a teacher sitting next to me said, ‘You know that novel you wrote,
A Kestrel for a Knave
?’ I nodded. He said, ‘Did you write it on purpose or by accident?’ I didn’t know what to say. I can just about imagine somebody writing a line or two of verse by accident. But a novel! All those words. All those months and sometimes years of hard work. ‘Some accident!’ I should have replied. But before I could say anything, another teacher appeared in the doorway and announced dramatically that, ‘The Gay Gordons record has been stolen from the music room.’ Everybody rushed out of the staff room to find it and I was spared the embarrassment of coming up with a sensible answer.

Another question I am asked, particularly in the south of England, is how I know so much about the countryside if I come from Barnsley. It’s an ignorant question but understandable, because many people still have a vision of the north filled with ‘dark satanic mills’, mines and factories, and not a blade of grass in sight. When I try to explain that the
mining village in which I was born and brought up – just a few miles from Barnsley – was surrounded by woods and fields, I can tell they don’t believe me. Read
Sons and Lovers
by D. H. Lawrence, I tell them. He brings it off beautifully, that dramatic juxtaposition of industry and nature. In the village where I lived, the miners walked to work across meadows, with sky larks singing overhead, before crowding into the cage at the pit top and plunging into the darkness.

Like Billy Casper, the main character in
A Kestrel for a Knave
, I spent much of my childhood exploring the countryside, but unlike Billy, I was no academic failure. I had passed the eleven-plus and gone on to grammar school. Most of my friends however had failed and gone to the local secondary modern – the model for the school in the novel. A school so tough that some of the boys went dressed in boiler suits and boots because they spent so much time rolling around the floor fighting. Their mothers said they may as well dress for the job, rather than ruin good clothes.

I used some of the incidents my friends told me about, in
A Kestrel for a Knave
. For example, the boy who was caned when he took a message to the headmaster, the big brother roaming the corridors seeking vengeance because his younger brother had failed to place his bet on a winning horse, and the boy falling asleep in assembly. These anecdotes – and many more which weren’t included in the novel – were told with great amusement and relish. They may have been funny at the time, but are not so funny in hindsight because those children who had failed the eleven-plus had effectively been told that they were unintelligent and many of them continued to believe it for the rest of their lives.

Teachers were similarly affected. I remember one secondary modern schoolteacher telling me that he had obtained a post in a grammar school and even though his salary would remain the same, he still regarded it as
promotion. The eleven-plus system was ruinously divisive at all levels.

In academic terms Billy Casper is a failure. He is in the bottom form of a rough secondary modern school. He has ‘a job to read and write’ as he tells the Employment Officer. Yet once he becomes interested in falconry, he acquires a book on the subject which is full of esoteric vocabulary and technical descriptions. He then goes on to successfully train a kestrel which requires both intelligence and sensitivity. If there had been GCSEs in Falconry, Billy Casper would have been awarded an A grade, which would have done wonders for his self confidence and given him a more positive self image.

Readers seeking significance at every turn, ask me where I find the names of the characters in my books. The answer is disappointingly mundane. Sometimes I spot a name I fancy, in a newspaper or magazine and sometimes I make them up. The important point is – and this is just a question of intuition and feeling – that the name has to fit the character in my mind. The original Billy Casper was a famous American golfer whom I had read about in the sports pages. Later, after the book was published, I saw Billy Casper on television. He was a big, burly type, the exact opposite of my skinny little character. But it didn’t matter then, my Billy Casper had been born.

Curiously, there was another American golfer, called Tom Kite, whose name I would have liked to use in a novel. He sounded like a straight arrow, a brave, upright sort of fellow, but unfortunately I had seen him playing on television so I was never able to use his name.

During the bird nesting season, my pals and I would occasionally take a young magpie from a nest and try to rear it, feeding it on household scraps. Sometimes they survived,
providing rich entertainment with their mischievous ways, before eventually flying back to the wild. But sometimes, the shock of being removed from the security of the nest proved too traumatic and they gave up the ghost and died. We were filled with remorse at the sight of the dead fledgling in the orange box when we opened the shed door in the morning, but after a guilty few minutes of grieving and a quick burial under a grass sod, it was soon forgotten.

But we would never have taken a young kestrel from a nest in the same casual manner. We knew a kestrel’s nest, high up in the wall of a crumbling medieval hall. Generations of kestrels had nested in the same spot, and we used to stand out of sight at the edge of an adjacent wood watching the parents return with mice and small birds for the ravenous fledglings. It wasn’t just the fact that we had no idea how to raise a young kestrel and it might die, it was more to do with a feeling of awe and instinctive respect for such a beautiful creature. Or, as Billy Casper passionately describes it when he is discussing Kes with Mr Farthing, the sympathetic English teacher, ‘Is it heck tame, it’s trained that’s all. It’s fierce, an’ it’s wild, an’ it’s not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that’s why it’s great.’

My interest in falconry was increased further by reading
The Goshawk
by T. H. White, a classic text about a battle of wills between a novice falconer and a young goshawk. Then, more importantly, watching my brother train a young kestrel which had been given to him by a friend. I should mention here to any aspiring falconer, that it is illegal to keep a falcon unless a licence has been granted by the Home Office. But Billy Casper wouldn’t have been aware of such legal niceties, and even if he had been, he would have instinctively steered clear of anything connected with officialdom.

People have often asked me if Billy Casper was based on a real person. No, he wasn’t, but he’s not unusual, the lonely
misfit who doesn’t belong to the gang. But even though Billy has a tough life and the odds are stacked against him, it was important not to make him a weak, blameless character whom everybody picks on. This would have weakened and sentimentalized the story. Billy is a survivor, a tough little character, more Artful Dodger than Oliver Twist. When he is foiled by the bureaucracy at the public library, he immediately goes out and steals a falconry book from a bookshop. When MacDowall tries to bully him in the playground, he gives as good as he gets in the ensuing fight. We gather during a conversation with Mr Farthing that he has already been in trouble with the law, and most dramatically, he keeps the money which his brother has left for him to place on a winning bet.

A Kestrel for a Knave
was published in 1968 and was shortly followed by
Kes
the filmed adaptation of the novel on which I worked closely with the director, Ken Loach and producer, Tony Garnett. What impressed me when I first met them was their determination to stick to the harsh reality of the novel and not turn it into a sentimental, ‘Walt Disney boy and his pet’ type story. Raising money for a film is always difficult, but for a film of this nature: low budget, no sex, no stars, no violence – proved particularly daunting. After listening to the pitch, one producer dismissed it with the brutal verdict, ‘Wrong kind of bird.’ Another explained that a few changes might be necessary to make it more commercial. For example, Jud, Billy’s bullying big brother, could become his mother’s lover rather than her son. After a fight between the couple, Billy comes home from school, discovers his mother dead and runs away. The following morning, when Billy does not turn up at school, Mr Farthing embarks on a long search, finds Billy roaming the streets of a distant town, then brings him home and finds him a job in
a zoo. This scenario wasn’t too difficult to resist and eventually United Artists put up the money and the film was made in the spirit that we intended. What was especially gratifying for me, was that some of the locations in the film were the same ones that I had written about in the novel, and it gave me an extra thrill to see them on the screen.

There were a few changes in the adaptation of the book to the film; there always are, however faithful the film makers remain to the original. Sometimes, scenes that work in a book don’t work on film and vice versa. For example, I found it much more thrilling watching Billy flying the hawk to the lure on the big screen in technicolour rather than in my head. Conversely, one of the key scenes in the novel, in which Mr Farthing asks the class to write ‘A Tall Story’ didn’t work at all when it was being filmed and had to be abandoned. It was tried with a hand-held camera shooting over Billy’s shoulder as he wrote his story, but it soon became apparent that it would have taken him too long to complete and an edited version would not have had the same emotional effect. In the novel, the reader is with him, sharing his difficulties as he struggles to express his pitiful hopes, ‘Billy dipped his nib right up to the metal holder, then, balancing on the front legs of his chair, book and head askew, he begins his story…’

Another important change was the ending. In the novel, following the fight in the house after Jud has killed the hawk, Billy runs off and breaks into a derelict cinema which he used to visit with his father in happier times. He sits on a broken seat and projects onto the screen an imaginary scene of Kes attacking a fleeing Jud up on the moors. This wouldn’t have worked because it was pure fantasy taking place inside Billy’s head, and the style would have been out of context with everything that had happened previously. In the film, the downbeat ending of Billy burying the hawk
after his emotional confrontation with Jud was much more appropriate.

The film
Kes
was a huge success and it helped to popularize the novel which, although published as adult fiction, is widely read in schools and is now a set examination text. I often receive letters from children asking questions about the book; GCSE candidates I suspect seeking insider information. It’s a surreal experience. It’s like being back at school doing English Literature ‘O’ level, only this time I’m answering questions on my own text. I’ve sometimes considered sitting the examination under an assumed name to see how I would get on. Perhaps my interpretation of the book would differ from that of the examiner and I would fail. Who can tell?

I sometimes think that people read too much into novels and seek hidden meanings where none exist. I’ve received letters enquiring about the significance of the names of the two race horses in the bet that Billy failed to place for Jud. (I’ll let you into a secret here. I’d forgotten their names and I’ve just taken the novel down from the shelf to look them up.) Tell Him He’s Dead and Crackpot, that’s what they’re called. Weird names I must admit, but nothing significant in them as far as I remember. Writing a novel is hard enough without agonizing over the names of race horses, ‘… like a long debilitating illness’ as George Orwell describes it.

I once wrote a nuclear war drama for the BBC called
Threads
. A few weeks after its transmission, I received a letter from a doctoral student in an American University requesting permission to quote from the script. His dissertation was entitled, ‘An Available Means: Manifestations of Aristotle’s Three Modes of Rhetorical Appeal in Anti-nuclear Fiction’. I would have awarded him a doctorate for the title!

A Kestrel for a Knave
started life as a novel and has subsequently been adapted into a film, a stage play, a musical and
serialized on radio. ‘Kes on Ice’ hasn’t appeared yet, but don’t bet against it. Writing this afterword thirty years after the book was first published has given me the opportunity to reappraise it and consider how it would differ if I was writing it today.

The main difference educationally is that Billy Casper would be attending a comprehensive school rather than a secondary modern, which is an advance of sorts, even though the principles of comprehensive education have only been pursued in a half-hearted way. Unfortunately his job prospects would be no better, in fact they would be worse. In the late sixties, when the novel was published, Billy would have got a job of sorts, however menial. He wouldn’t even get a job down the pit now, because in South Yorkshire where the book is set, most of the mines have closed down. He would probably go on a scheme of some description designed to keep him off the streets, but with few long term prospects.