The Sea Inside

with their bodies’, and was proud of the fact that he had not slept in London for five years. He railed against the countryside’s despoliation – ‘perhaps one day the New Forest will be the name of a tube station’ – and said that the best thing for Britain would be a new war to wipe out two-thirds of its population. Yet White would spend the coming years in exile in Ireland, a kind of conscientious objector by default, having been advised against enlisting by his friend and fellow hunter Siegfried Sassoon, who told him three days before the Munich Agreement in 1938, ‘The only way to be helpful in this emergency is to remain as calm as a wick and to keep still’ – much the same advice White had given himself when dealing with his beloved but infuriating hawks.
    You can see why White and the author of
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
might bond over dead animals. But White was much less enthusiastic about killing animals out of print. He found it difficult to sacrifice live birds to his hawk, regretted the death of a mouse, and above all doted on his red setter, Brownie, ‘my Pocahontas, my non pareil’. She sat on his lap when he wasn’t working, and groaned at the typewriter that took her place when he was. While her master hunted geese in the freezing winter dawn, she wore a flannel coat, her hindquarters in his bag, his woollen mittens on her front paws. In the rain, she sported a waterproof coat with spatterdashes to stop her feathery legs getting mud all over the house (a canine costume which, when he moved to Ireland, was the source of suspicions that White was a spy, carrying secret maps stashed in his dog’s coat). And had anyone ever harmed her, they would have faced swift retribution. When out with a hunting party, White made it clear that if anyone shot his dog by mistake, it would be the last one that they made. ‘I shoot him. Shot one. Shot two. Like that – no hesitation.’

    White might have gone on in this vein, ever more misanthropic and reclusive, fading into a grumpy literary footnote. But that same year, his life was overturned by sheer luck, as he called it, likening his success to ‘winning the pools’, going almost overnight from living on credit to being a rich man. In August 1938 the American Book Club selected his novel
The Sword in the Stone
– Arthurian romance re-imagined for a troubled age, just as Tennyson’s and Julia Margaret Cameron’s works were for theirs. Since his days at Cambridge, White too had been fascinated by Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
– a story with a new relevance, despite being sourced in medieval and Anglo-Saxon legend. White’s work would extend into five separate volumes. It was as much an act of medium-ship as of writing. ‘I am trying to write of
an imaginary world which was imagined in the 15th century
,’ he told his friend Sir Sydney Cockerell. ‘I am looking
through
1939
at
1489 itself looking
backwards
.’ He accompanied this with a sketch of himself looking through a telescope, as if through time. Perhaps he saw the black knights as storm-troopers, Camelot as a bunker, and the merlins as fighter planes, while the white cliffs of Albion, Dover and West Wight became England’s first and last defence.
    White’s book was written as war became inevitable. He was both caught up in the spirit of the times, and set outside it, too. Thirty years later it would catch my own imagination when I took it out of the little public library across the road from my school, where our father took us on Thursday evenings. I identified with its boy hero, Wart, the once and future king, a prince-to-be who becomes a hawk himself, soaring over an invented, idyllic Middle England; I saw myself pulling the sword from the stone, as page to a knight, a boy-soldier.
    White never lost his own boyish enthusiasm, his sense of self-invention. He was, in the words of his biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘more remarkable than anything he wrote’. He designed his own logo, a flying hawk, and in his
Who’s Who
entry would list, ‘Recreation: Animals’, later extending it to include painting and hawking. For him birds were not pets or prey, nor even under his dominion. He did not tame his hawks: he entered into an uneasy truce with them. So too was his relationship with the world. At that moment, as Thomas Merton was contemplating monastic life in America and would soon receive his summons to the draft, conscription became a serious possibility in Britain,