Attachment and holding tight

Attachment and holding tight is a recurring idea through which the material bonds of falconry acquire emotional force. For Helen Macdonald, jesses are practical leather straps, but their function of keeping a hawk connected to a handler recalls a childhood image of a bird made unable to leave and later becomes charged by the deaths of her twin brother and her father. The narrative connects these facts without claiming a single explanation: the jesses can be equipment, an imagined safeguard against separation, and a means of making the hawk and the remembered father feel present.

A bond made by hand

When Helen begins preparing for a hawk of her own, falconry equipment is not simply purchased ready-made. She and other falconers source materials from unrelated trades: swivels from deep-sea-fishing shops, leashes from ships’ chandlers, and leather scraps from tanneries and shoe factories. Making jesses and hoods involves repeated, imperfect labor. She waxes cotton thread, punches her hands while trying to pierce leather, wipes away blood, and starts again. The work is at once practical preparation and a long-held anticipation of owning a hawk.

The equipment’s language has its own history. A jess is a leather strap passed through an anklet on a trained hawk’s leg, and the word comes from French falconry vocabulary. Helen remembers having been drawn as a child to the specialized names for the parts and actions of hawking, a secret lexicon she wanted to master. That vocabulary gives her a precise way to describe the connection between handler and bird; making the straps turns that connection from an anticipated idea into an object she can hold. The account does not reduce this practical craft to symbolism, but shows how the two meanings come to coexist.

The kestrel and the anchor

A childhood sketch in a scrapbook offers an earlier image of attachment. Drawn when Helen was six, it shows a kestrel on a falconry glove. The bird is ghostly and imperfectly rendered: its feet float above the glove because she did not know how to draw toes gripping it. Yet the legs, talons, and jesses are carefully detailed. A broad black leash leads to a dark point on the glove, marked over until the paper is indented and polished. In the picture’s construction, the connection is more carefully made than the contact between bird and hand.

Helen reads that dark point as an anchor. The drawn jesses seem to promise that the kestrel will stay: “It is not going away. It cannot leave.” The image therefore holds a tension between an imagined bond and the freedom of the living bird it represents. The sketch is not evidence of a conscious plan; its significance emerges retrospectively, when Helen recognizes how insistently the child has drawn the means of keeping the bird attached.

An absence not spoken of

That retrospective reading deepens when Helen learns, many years later, that she had a twin brother who died soon after birth. She had spent the first weeks of her own life in an incubator and survived. She knows almost nothing about what happened to her brother, and says the tragedy was not spoken of: bereaved parents had been encouraged to move on and forget. Her discovery is surprising, but also seems to meet an older sense that part of her was missing.

Helen asks whether her attachment to birds, and falconry in particular, could have originated in that first loss. She wonders whether the ghostly kestrel and its painstakingly drawn jesses might have expressed a wish to hold on to something she did not know she had lost. The passage explicitly leaves this as a possibility, not a settled psychological explanation. Its force lies in the belated connection: an image made before Helen knew of the death can be reread in its light, while the silence surrounding the loss prevents that rereading from becoming certainty.

Helen places this interpretation beside D. W. Winnicott’s account of a child who repeatedly tied objects together. Winnicott understood the behavior as a wordless response to fear of abandonment and as a symbolic denial of separation. The parallel offers a way to consider the drawing’s insistence on a leash and anchor, not a diagnosis of Helen. In both accounts, joining things can communicate what is difficult to say; the image of holding tight becomes especially poignant because the separation it might answer is not fully available to conscious memory.

Making the jesses after bereavement

After Helen’s father dies, she returns to the task of making jesses. She cuts hide into strips, soaks and stretches it, applies leather dressing, and tapers one end with a craft knife. In that room of broken objects, the straps cease to feel like mere components. Helen understands them as cords that will hold her to the hawk and the hawk to her. The reciprocal wording matters: the bond is not presented only as human control over a bird, but as a connection constituted between two beings.

As the jesses take shape, the hawk becomes real to Helen, and her father becomes vividly present in memory. She recalls him with grey hair, glasses, a blue cotton shirt, a crooked tie, and coffee in hand. He used to call hoods hats and creances bits of string, apparently provoking her to correct him. Helen now understands that he knew the proper terms. In his work as a photojournalist, he called photographs snaps and cameras kit; his casual names were not teasing but, as she interprets them, a compliment to her expertise. The memory changes the emotional meaning of their earlier exchanges even as grief makes the realization painful.

The practical task continues through that pain: Helen’s hands shake as she cuts the second jess, then she lays the matching straps side by side on the glass tabletop. The paired pieces give the scene a small completion, but not a resolution of bereavement. She is still preparing to meet a stranger from the Belfast ferry and exchange an envelope of paper for a box containing a goshawk. The impending acquisition is both concrete and improbable to her; the jesses make the next bond tangible without undoing the losses that have shaped its meaning.

Meaning and limits of the motif

Across these episodes, tying and fastening carry several related but distinct meanings. The childhood drawing presents attachment as an effort to prevent departure; the account of Helen’s twin makes that effort newly legible as a possible answer to unrecognized absence; and the jesses made after her father’s death connect mourning to the anticipated relationship with a living hawk. The motif gathers these meanings but does not collapse them into one cause. Helen’s own questions remain questions, and the narrative preserves the difference between remembered fact and retrospective interpretation.

The material bond also holds a productive contradiction. Jesses connect the trained hawk to its handler, but they cannot make a bird into an unchanging possession; the childhood picture’s promise that the kestrel cannot leave belongs to the drawing, not to the living creature. In the later scene, the straps instead signify a relation that runs both ways. Their making does not erase death or guarantee that nothing will depart. It gives Helen a concrete task through which attachment can be fashioned, remembered, and carried into a new relationship.