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Quotation

Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing. From her sunlit perch she descends to the hand I hold out in the shade of a hedge and I feel a surge of indescribable relief. I start shivering, cold and hot all at once. In the imagination, everything can be restored, everything mended, wounds healed, stories ended. White gives himself a new pupil to train: not a hawk, but the boy who will be king. …you can reconcile the wild. You can bring it home with you. ‘A herd of deer,’ he says, beaming, then his expression folds into something I don’t recognise. ‘Doesn’t it gives you hope?’ he says suddenly. ‘Hope?’ ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?’ I don’t know what to say…