Review - Barry Hines: A Kestrel For A Knave

Barry Hines
A Kestrel For A Knave (5***)

I have seen so many clips from Ken Loach’s film Kes, I felt I knew this book well. I didn’t.

I knew the outline well enough: “grubby little lad in Yorkshire … finds and trains a kestrel … bringing hope and meaning to a drab life crushed by bullying schoolmasters and a downbeat home life,” to quote the Daily Mirror (20th March, 1970). I even once co-wrote a parody called ‘Budge’, poking fun at a friend who kept animals, about a boy who found an escaped budgerigar in his coalhouse and trained it to sing rude songs in a Yorkshire accent. 

This entirely misses the poetry of the book: the vivid and lyrical descriptions of the streets and countryside around the coal mining community where it is set. It is an astonishing piece of writing. The story absorbs you completely. Every page shines with brilliance. The language mirrors the shifting emotions: the joy of escape from the dirt and poverty of the town into the natural beauty of the hills, woods and fields; the elation on seeing the kestrel wild and free in flight; the constricting terror in hiding from an inescapable beating; the dread when the bird is missing.

I can only give examples. The first has often been quoted before: 

A cushion of mist lay over the fields. Dew drenched the grass, and the occasional sparkling of individual drops made Billy glance down as he passed. One tuft was silver fire … and when it caught the sun it exploded, throwing out silver needles and crystal splinters. (p19)

There is despair at the end as Billy wanders the streets bereft through a scene familiar to anyone who has walked alone through an empty northern town at night:

A shadow rippling across a drawn curtain. A light going on. A light going off. A laugh. A shout. A name. A television on too loud, throwing the dialogue out into the garden. A record, a radio playing; occasional sounds on quiet streets.  (p157)

There is the language, the Barnsley dialect, such as in Billy’s words as he comes alive in describing the bird’s first free flight to his class during an English lesson: 

‘Come on, Kes! Come on then! Nowt happened at first, then, just when I wa’ going’ to walk back to her, she came. You ought to have seen her. Straight as a die, about a yard off t’floor. An’ t’speed!  … like lightnin’, head dead still, an’ her wings never made a sound, then wham! Straight up on t’glove, claws out grabbin’ for t’meat,’  (p66)
(clip of this scene from the film)

The accent would in truth be much stronger than rendered in the book (as in the film clip linked above). After the film was premiered at the Doncaster Odeon in March, 1970, some thought it would need sub-titles for audiences south of Sheffield. Like my mother-in-law, whose recurring nightmare, each time she heard the local accents when she travelled up on the train to see us and passed through Barnsley, was that her grandchildren might grow up to speak like that. (They did and they didn’t. Other kids at school said they talked posh but when they went out into the wider world their Yorkshire accents were obvious.)

The book took me back to my own Yorkshire town: the streets of terraced housing, the industrial grime, the local accent, but none of it quite as grim and hopeless as here.

Barry Hines grew up near Barnsley at Hoyland Common. He wrote other novels and also scripts for radio, film and television. Before becoming a full-time writer he was an inspirational teacher. He was enormously influential. He died in 2016 and funds are being raised for a bronze statue to be erected in Barnsley in his honour, showing young Billy Casper with his kestrel. The bronze has now been cast but funds are still needed for the plinth.

The film Kes remains legendary in the area and many of those who were extras as children are still around. A fundraising screening at the Penistone Paramount a couple of years ago was a sell out. The folk ensemble I play in put on a fundraising ceilidh (barn dance) in Barnsley last year.

As Ian McMillan says in the introduction to the Penguin Decades edition I have, “Going back to the book with the film in my head is a revelation.” Indeed it is. I should have read it a long time ago. I’ll definitely read it again.


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

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