A kestrel for a knave, a merlin for m' lady

Kes is a film that made a big impression on me as a child. If I recall right, it was in a double bill with the rereleased Fantazia - at any rate, I saw it first on the big screen at our local cinema The Rex, with my mum, and then many times after that on the television. 

In my memory, I think of it as a black and white film (well, we did have a black and white TV for the entire '70s) and so it's always startling to see that it's actually colour. 

But the black-and-white mind's eye misremembering fits the grey, grim world of the Yorkshire mining town in which the boy Billy lives - and the monochrome movie genre to which Ken Loach's film belongs (Billy Liar, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner etc).. 

Looking into the story of the the film and of Barry Hines - who wrote the original novel and co-wrote the screenplay - I suddenly thought of another Northern lad with a thing for falcons: Bryan Ferry. 

 

The  model on the cover of Avalon is Lucy Helmore - who was a model but was also Ferry's posh young bride. But for the very first time in that long line of lovely ladies on Roxy covers, you can't see her face - that's Bryan's private  privilege.  

Indeed, c.f. the states of undress in which the Roxy girls hitherto have been exposed to the camera, Helsmore's body is encased protectively (chain-mail?). Not an inch of skin is visible -  her hand is covered entirely by a falconer's leather glove.

"The Avalon album cover was shot at dawn, on a lake at Helmore’s parents’ house in Ireland, with Helmore wearing a medieval helmet and carrying a falcon – designed to evoke King Arthur’s journey to Avalon, his final resting place and the mythical land where his sword, Excalibur, was forged" - Jason Draper

And here's his nibs himself, in the "Avalon" promo, brandishing a bird of prey. 

Filmed at Mentmore Towers country house

But what's the Kes connection? What bridges the gulf between Hines + Loach's Northern social realism and the aristocratic fantazia of Roxy Music? 

Well, those aristocratic fantasies stem from BF's reaction against his background - his dad was a farm worker who then toiled at a coal mine tending the pit ponies and descending with them into the Stygian depths beneath County Durham.

And in Kes, young Billy is soon to leave school aged 15 - although he looks about 12, small and scrawny and half-starved. One scene involves a meeting with the school's employment counsellor, who makes it clear that that the only real option facing someone without qualifications like Billy is the coal face - working in the same mine as his older brother Jud. 

Billy is adamant he won't work in the mine. (Bryan F has said that the best advice his dad ever gave him was: "Don't go down the pits, lad"). Hines himself was the son and grandson of coal miners.

The one bright spot in Billy's life (his mother's neglectful, his brother bullies him, the school is like "The Headmaster Ritual" ) is the kestrel he's captured, tamed, and trained. 

Wheeling in the sky, she represents transcendence: an aerial, unbound existence -  the inverse of the hellish heat and dusty murk of the coal face far below the surface. 

Billy's rapt by the raptor, an avian aristocrat.  

The film is Kes but the title of the novel is A Kestrel for a Knave, which comes from the fact that in  Medieval times a man of common birth was only allowed to keep a kestrel -  the more prestigious sorts of hawk were the preserve of the upper crust. 

"Falcons have long been considered the most desirable of the falconry birds because of their speed, dash and trainability. The fastest animal on this planet is the peregrine falcon in a headlong dive called a “stoop,” and this species has enjoyed a long history of being flown by aristocrats.   

"From highest to lowest, the ranks and their rightful birds are: Emperor – golden eagle; king – gyrfalcon; prince – peregrine falcon; particularly the “falcon gentle” or female peregrine (larger and therefore more desirable than the male); duke – peregrine falcon; earl – peregrine falcon; baron – male peregrine falcon; knight – saker falcon; squire – lanner falcon; noblewoman – merlin; page - hobby; yeoman (member of the landed gentry) – female goshawk; poor man – male goshawk; priest – female Eurasian sparowhawk; holywater clerk (clergy below the rank of priest) – male Eurasian sparrowhawk. Other references add the lowest stratum of society – the “knave” or male servant. He was accorded a bird that, in falconry terms, barely counted – the tiny Eurasian kestrel.

The Eurasian kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), a small falcon the size of a blue jay, was occasionally used by the common people. Its diminutive size meant it was limited to small, uninteresting prey like insects and mice, so nobility scorned it. They especially prized the gyrfalcon, largest of the falcons, and the peregrine, the swiftest. The merlin, no larger than a pigeon, was considered an appropriate noblewoman’s falcon, while the fast but delicate hobby was allotted to the page." 

- Wingmasters

According to the Roxy Music site, Bryan Ferry had done his research - he notes that Helmore "is carrying on her wrist a merlin – the bird of prey favored by lady falconers."

Here's a Ferry on falconry quote from a recent Rolling Stone interview:

"We just thought it went well with the original picture, on the album cover for Avalon — the mist on the lake, this female warrior with her helmet and her falcon. The bird of prey of choice for a female warrior had to be a merlin, which is the small bird of prey. So we had a merlin in that video, which was pretty cool. I called my youngest son Merlin, actually."

Back to the falcony fansite Wingmasters

"Medieval falconers, men and women, used hooded falcons as props. Since the hooded birds, a symbol of the aristocracy, would stand virtually motionless on the falconer’s glove, they could be carried anywhere. Hooded falcons accompanied their noble owners to court, into banqueting halls, even into church....

"Among the lord’s attendants at every residence would be young squires, noblemen’s sons intent on learning the knightly skills of riding, fighting, hunting (large game like wild boar and deer) and hawking....  falconry, thanks to the new Norman aristocrats and the feudal system they imposed on England, had become a pastime of the nobility. It had also become a symbol of nobility. A hooded falcon was now just as much an accoutrement of an aristocrat as a well-bred horse or a sword.

" Falconry became so firmly entrenched in society that by the 1100s even the merchant class of London was aping the nobility and flying “ignoble” hawks -shortwings like the sparowhawk and the goshawk. The “noble” hawks – the longwinged, desirable falcons – were the traditional prerogative of the privileged class because of their flying style and hunting prowess, as well as their beauty."

- Wingmasters

"Noblemen’s sons" - one thinks inevitably of Ferry's fanatical fox-hunting scions Otis and Isaac. Who make a cameo appearance in S+A:

Outraged by the Labour government’s ban on these ancient blood-rites of the English aristocracy, Otis - a member of the Countryside Alliance and joint master of the South Shropshire Hunt – joins a storming of the House of Commons. There’s a pattern here that causes Bryan’s boys to be labelled “the feral Ferrys”: two years earlier, Isaac got suspended from Eton after sending an abusive email to an anti-hunting campaigner. Their father, meanwhile, continues his drift rightwards, alluding quietly in interviews to having Conservative political views, in between more lively talk of wine connoisseurship, pheasant shooting with the Earl of Arundel, and his growing collection of paintings by the Bloomsbury Group.

Remembered that one of my favorite poems, "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins,  is inspired by and named after the kestrel in flight (windhover being another name for the bird). 

The Windhover 

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Always thought that there was a resemblance between Mark E. Smith and the young lad who plays Billy in the film (David Bradley)

Hines did a bunch of other collaborations with Ken Loach, including a 1977 BBC double-play The Price of Coal. 

"The two plays have the same actors, but are different in tone.

The first is comic, and deals with the preparations for an official visit by Prince Charles. The humour revolves around the expensive and ludicrous preparations that are required when there is an official visit from a member of the Royal Family. The workers recognise this and cannot take it seriously. Management recognises it but has to play the game. Special toilets must be constructed "just in case" and then destroyed after the visit. A worker is instructed to paint a brick holding up a window. On the eve of the visit the slogan "Scargill rules OK" is painted on a wall. The manager comments "When I find out who did that I'll string him up by his knackers". It is a surreal situation for many of the miners who obviously bear no love for Royalty.

The second deals with a pit accident where some men are killed, and attempts to rescue some trapped men. It is loosely based on the Lofthouse Colliery disaster in 1973." - from YouTube.

Here's the first one 

Love the so-Seventies look of Barry Hines in this clip. 

There is also a "lost" play by Hines about the Miner's Strike and its socially destructive aftermath, After the Strike, that finally got put on posthumously in Sheffield.  

Talking about devastation, Hines's other great claim to fame is writing Threads, the nuclear war TV drama that depicts the consequences of a multi-megaton bomb being dropped on Sheffield. 

Well, I got (almost) to the end of this post before noticing that it's an unintended sequel to the one about Adrian Street and his Welsh coal miner dad -  the dialectic of grime and glam. 

What working in a UK mine is like in the 21st Century. 

What working in a UK mine was like in the 1980s and 1970s.

Lord knows what it was like back when Bryan Ferry's dad was doing it....

 

John Cameron's score for Kes, as issued by Trunk Records some years ago. Flute, that most airy of wind instruments, features prominently.

 

mysterious advert that appeared in Melody Maker in late 1996