H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

White’s quest for the hawks was his final test of Gos: he was behaving like a fearful man who has finally won someone’s love and, unsure whether that love can be trusted, decides it is safer to obsess about someone else.

Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave.

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard.