Berlin

Berlin appears as a place where private choices and public histories of falconry meet. In one strand, it is the destination of an academic job that Helen declines because she cannot imagine leaving to pursue a career while she has a hawk to fly. In another, the city hosts the 1937 International Hunting Exhibition, where falconry is presented not merely as a sport but as a symbol shaped by national power. The book’s movement between these strands makes Berlin a hinge between the intimate work of training a hawk and the political meanings others have attached to it.

A future refused

Helen has been offered a job at a German university, with a move to Berlin planned for December. On the day she goes out for Mabel’s first calling-off lessons, she looks from the cricket pitch towards her college office and recalls sending the university a letter declining the offer. She told them that her father had died and that she needed to stay, but recognises that these were not the real reasons. The decisive thought was that she could not leave Berlin-bound plans behind while she had a hawk to fly. Career and future, which once might have seemed ordinary possibilities, have become difficult for her to imagine; her attention has contracted around Mabel and the immediate demands of training.

Berlin therefore enters this part of the narrative not as a destination reached but as a life left unrealised. The choice is made amid grief, but the passage distinguishes the explanation Helen gave the university from the force that actually guided her. Her refusal marks how completely the hawk has reorganised her sense of what matters and what can be postponed.

The 1937 exhibition

A very different Berlin appears in the account of 1937, when Gilbert Blaine and Jack Mavrogordato travel there with a British falconry display of stuffed birds, equipment, photographs, books and paintings. Their invitation to the International Hunting Exhibition may, the narrator suspects, have offered diplomatic cover for Lord Halifax, Britain’s pro-appeasement Foreign Secretary, who had been invited for secret talks with Hitler. The account presents that possibility as a suspicion, not a confirmed purpose of the falconers’ journey.

The exhibition placed falconry within a conspicuously political setting. Although Germany had no more than fifty falconers, the Deutscher Falkenorden enjoyed state patronage, and the Reichsfalkenhof had been built in the forest at Riddagshausen. In Berlin, Blaine and Mavrogordato passed through halls hung with antlers and red banners bearing swastikas, and saw hawks, falcons and eagles displayed on perches. The outdoor demonstrations impressed them less: a saker falcon was shown catching a tethered pigeon, while an eagle was thrown at a rabbit that remained tame enough to nibble grass until the bird landed.

Falconry, class, and state power

Only two countries had falconry exhibits at the Berlin exhibition. Germany won first prize, and the British Falconers’ Club came second. The bronze falcon awarded to the British display became a material trace of that encounter: Hermann Göring sent it to the club after the exhibition. The narrator finds the object beautifully made but wishes it had never been made, a response that registers the burden of its political provenance rather than any defect in its craftsmanship.

The exhibition’s symbolism gains force beside the book’s account of falconry’s unequal social history. Flying falcons properly required access to large open landscapes, making the practice difficult for those without wealth or connections; an older falconry writer had described possession of noble falcons as an aristocratic privilege. In Berlin, the language of an elite bird was taken up by a regime that represented falcons as a natural hierarchy of power and violence. The display thus connects an older association between falconry and privilege to its appropriation as nationalist spectacle.

A German connection to White

Berlin’s falconry history also intersects with T. H. White’s experience as a trainer. Renz Waller, a leading figure in the Deutscher Falkenorden and the designer associated with the Reichsfalkenhof, had sent White Gos. After Gos was lost, Waller wrote that he would try to obtain another passage goshawk for him. This link brings the German falconry world into the personal history of White’s training: the network represented in Berlin was not only an exhibition display but also a source of birds and expertise reaching into an English falconer’s life.

Together, these appearances give Berlin a double significance. It is the unrealised destination of a woman whose life has narrowed around a hawk, and the historical setting where falconry becomes a public emblem of hierarchy and national power. The book holds those meanings in tension, refusing to treat the hawk as either a purely private companion or an innocent symbol detached from the histories in which people have placed it.