The Peregrine: 50th Anniversary Edition: Afterword by Robert Macfarlane

For I mean, in addition to the standard definition of that word, his ability to make what is immaterial and without physical form somehow concrete and solid. He reifies the invisible. His prose puts flesh on the white bone of light, space, time, gravity and the physics of movement. It is as if he encountered the air as the material element that we know, from chemistry – oxygen, nitrogen, etc. – that it is, but which we seldom, if ever, truly experience. It was an art that seems almost ecologically adapted to capturing the fastest flying bird on Earth. Baker and the peregrine were a perfect consummation. Yet this special gift is everywhere in Baker’s writings. Here is how he sees a group of greenfinches:

Frequently the flock flew up to the trees with a dry rustle of wings, then drifted silently down again through the dust-moted trellis of sun and shade. The yellow sunlight flickered with a thin drizzle of bird shadow.

In The Peregrine the ability to envision the heavens as something solid leads to a whole sequence of metaphors in which the air and its inhabitants are described in terms of marine life. As Baker looked upwards, so he seems to peer down into the ocean depths. Most beautifully, towards the end of the book, he imagines the falcon: ‘Like a dolphin in green seas, like an otter in the startled water, he poured through deep lagoons of sky up to the high white reefs of cirrus.’

Elsewhere as Baker muses on the fluidity and apparent joyfulness of a seal’s motion at sea he speculates:

It is a good life, a seal’s, here in these shallow waters. Like the lives of so many air and water creatures, it seems a better one than ours. We have no element. Nothing sustains us when we fall.

Here Baker edges towards a remarkable revelation about the whole nature-writing genre. On reading the passage, one thinks of the specific creatures (as well as their most devoted author/admirers) that have made the deepest appeal to the modern British imagination: the otter (Henry Williamson, Gavin Maxwell), whales and dolphins (Heathcote Williams and the whole New-Age fixation with cetaceans) and birds, particularly birds of prey (W.H. Hudson, T.H. White and J.A. Baker himself). If we cannot move between the elements like these wonderful animals, then humans can at least imagine what it is like to be an otter or a peregrine. But no writer I know has taken us deeper into the life of another creature and allowed us to experience how that elemental mastery might possibly feel than John Alec Baker.

Mark Cocker, March 2010

Notes on J. A. Baker (#ua4f75a01-58a0-5f67-a363-db1ba1727e47)

by John Fanshawe

When the Penguin paperback edition of J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine appeared in 1970 – with a striking, black-and-white cover design by Brian Price-Thomas – the biographical sketch revealed little: ‘John A. Baker is in his forties and lives with his wife in Essex. He has no telephone and rarely goes out socially. Since leaving school at the age of seventeen he has had some fifteen assorted jobs, which have included chopping down trees, and pushing book trolleys in the British Museum, and none of which was a success. In 1965, he gave up work and lived on the money he had saved, devoting all his time to his obsession of the last ten years – the peregrine. He re-wrote his account of this bird five times before submitting it for publication. Although he had no ornithological training and had never written a book before, when The Peregrine was published in 1967 it was received with enthusiastic reviews and praise for his lyrical prose. Later that year he was awarded the distinguished Duff Cooper Prize. He was also awarded a substantial Arts Council grant. His second book, The Hill of Summer, was published in 1969, and was also received with universal praise by the critics.’

Between the first publication of The Peregrine in 1967 and the spring of 2010, when Collins republished it in a single volume with his other works, The Hill of Summer and Baker’s edited diaries, the man remained an enigma. In 1984 Penguin re-issued The Peregrine in the Country Library series with a new cover from the illustrator Liz Butler, but the introduction remained much the same. After another twenty years, in 2004, The Peregrine reappeared as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series with a fine introduction by the author Robert Macfarlane, who argued that the book was ‘unmistakably, a masterpiece of twentieth-century non-fiction’. Yet the NYRB editors were unable to reveal much more of the man whose style Macfarlane describes as ‘so intense and incantatory that the act of bird-watching becomes one of sacred ritual’. They simply concluded that ‘Baker’s second book [The Hill of Summer] was his last, and [that] he appeared to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life.’ ‘Little else,’ they admitted, ‘including the exact year of his death, is known about this singularly private man.’

Those lucky enough to own an early copy of The Peregrine treasured it. In The Running Sky, Tim Dee writes: ‘the peregrine in my young mind was built by J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. I read it when I was eleven, it stole into my head and stayed there, and then I reread it compulsively.’

What was it about the enigmatic Baker’s writing which so captured the imagination of later writers like Macfarlane and Dee? These were the years following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and, as Baker concluded in his own introduction, ‘Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching inanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.’

Without doubt, Baker would have been amazed and delighted that peregrines have recovered so successfully, returning to many traditional sites, as well as breeding in cities and towns around Britain, including London, not least the celebrated pairs that are nesting on both the Houses of Parliament and Tate Modern. This recent recovery was in no way apparent in Baker’s lifetime or to a generation of writers growing up in the 1960s. Tim Dee writes that he ‘grew up thinking of peregrines as sickly’. ‘The magnificent hunter, the apotheosis of the wild, the falcon on the king’s gloved fist, was becoming as helpless as a spastic battery hen, a bird that broke its own eggs.’

In the nineteenth century, peregrines had suffered from a host of troubles; notably persecution by gamekeepers and pigeon fanciers, but also the depredations of egg collectors. Though numbers had stabilised by the 1930s, the Air Ministry authorised widespread culling to save carrier pigeons at the outbreak of the Second World War, and several hundred birds were exterminated. By the 1950s, numbers had started to recover, but then a new and catastrophic decline began. As Baker lamented, it was the chemical ravages of organochlorine pesticides that killed adults and thinned their egg shells into fracturing. The story is now well known, and related by the late Derek Ratcliffe in his epic monograph on the peregrine, but when Baker was walking the Essex countryside, persistent pesticides were still paramount in the minds of the newly emerging conservation community as a threat to the birds that occupied the land and seascapes he loved and celebrated in all his writing. Peregrines were totems of a wilderness under siege.

In 2009, as Mark Cocker and I prepared a new edition of The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer and the edited diaries, growing interest in J.A. Baker had revealed a little more about his life, and in Mark’s introduction, and in my own introduction to the diaries, we outlined the new material that had come to light when the film maker David Cobham visited Baker’s late widow, Doreen, and was given his diaries. This began a process that has already revealed, and will, we hope, continue to reveal, insights into the author’s life and influences. Chief among these were meetings with his school contemporaries, and the discovery of a small collection of letters. An archive of these papers has since been established at the University of Essex.

John Alec Baker, only son of Wilfred and Pansy Baker, was born on 6 August 1926. His father worked as a draughtsman for the engineering company Crompton Parkinson and, we believe, spent time as a borough councillor, and later mayor of Chelmsford. The family lived at 20 Finchley Road, and Baker attended Trinity Road Primary School nearby from 1932 to 1936.

One of the first signs that Baker was a bright child appeared when he won a Junior Exhibition to the King Edward VI Grammar School. Details of his early days there remain hazy, but three of his close friends from this time, Edward Dennis (who became Baker’s best man), John Thurmer (who went on to become Canon of Exeter Cathedral) and Don Samuel (who became an English teacher), have provided further insights into Baker’s later school life. It has emerged that in 1942, after he had completed his General School Certificate, he stayed on an extra year. It was wartime, so the school was often disrupted, and only four other boys were studying the arts at that time. Baker joined them, and although he did not study for the Higher School Certificate, he enjoyed a year of ‘supervised’ reading under the wing of a charismatic English teacher, the Rev. E.J. Burton.

Exactly why Baker was allowed this apparently unusual extra year is unknown, though Thurmer recalls that he was often absent from school with ill-health, including glandular fever, and early bouts of the arthritis that crippled him in later life. Possibly staff at KEGS – as the school was known – were sympathetic to this, and felt Baker deserved some more time.

Other scraps of information have emerged. Nicknames were commonplace and Baker was known as Doughy. This was a play on his name, of course, but he was stocky, and, it seems, someone with whom you’d be unlikely to pick a fight. Despite his bouts of ill-health, and disarming short-sightedness, Baker did play cricket. A school magazine report describes him as ‘an erratic bowler, whose chief fault is an inability to maintain length. He is lacking in confidence, but shows great promise.’ Still, his friends all remembered him being keenly anti-establishment, and rather obsessive. No-one could remember an interest in birds at school – which accords with Baker’s own admission that ‘I came late to a love of birds’.

Bright enough to be allowed to stay on into the Sixth Form, given to bouts of ill-health, with a passion for reading, and a little rebellious, Baker is remembered very warmly by his friends. At the end of his time at grammar school, John Thurmer recalls, the Sixth Form master said that Baker had ‘enjoyed some general reading, but had not exerted himself’. Don Samuel goes as far as to describe him as talented, though bone idle, but notes that he was an avid reader, and literally, to quote Samuel, ‘sated himself in books’. He also recalls that Baker loved Dickens, and liked to genuflect light-heartedly before his novels in the Sixth Form library.

In 1943, his contemporaries left school to join up, a fate which Baker’s short sight ruled out. It appears that this might have been the period when, as the original biographic sketch suggested, Baker undertook the earliest of his unsuccessful ‘fifteen assorted jobs’. Information is scant, but Samuel says that Baker liked to work outside – the best environment for his health – and recalls him apple picking in the orchards around Danbury Hill, east of Chelmsford.

All three friends remember that Baker was a keen correspondent while they were overseas in the Forces, regularly sending them letters full of news, and examples of his writing – including early poems. With great prescience, Don Samuel had kept some letters, and these, largely written between 1944 and 1946, provide new insights into Baker’s development. They also confirm that he did, indeed, work behind the scenes at the British Museum (although he left after just three months). Most are written from his parental home in Chelmsford, but they include letters written from North Wales, Cornwall and Oxfordshire, revealing a first-hand knowledge of land and seascapes that appears in both The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer. In August 1946, for example, he writes to Samuel: ‘On Monday, I took trains from Paddington for Stow-in-the-Wold, and I have started enquiries concerning farm-work. I have arrived a little too early for the harvesting, but I have persevered, and obtained several half-promises from the landed-gentry’.

Critically, these letters reveal the extent to which Baker was determined to write. In one penned from Chelmsford on 25 April 1946, Baker declares: ‘I must confess that I occasionally despair of my capacity as a poet, solely because I have so few people whose opinion I can obtain. I am however, confident of ultimate success and that, as you [Don] say, is very important.’ And in his next on 5 May: ‘In the Observer this morning, I came across an extract, in a book review, from a poem by the ultra-modern poet, Dylan Thomas. Thomas is a very original writer – some of his poetry I like very much.’ He goes on to describe how the poem in question, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘epitomises the happy summer days of our childhood – the love of the woods and the rivers and hills’.

The young man revealed in these letters accords well with the boy recalled by his school friends. Indeed, in the first letter that survives, written from Llandudno, North Wales, in August 1944, Baker writes: ‘I have a book with me on my holiday, the only book I ever take with me everywhere I go; yes, you’ve guessed it – Pickwick – yet again do I marvel at the great Dickens’ mastery of the art.’

A year later Baker expounds at length his admiration for another author, the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, who, renowned for The Playboy of the Western World, drew his inspiration from visits between 1898 and 1901 to the remote group of three Aran Islands that lie west of Galway Bay, open to the full fetch of the Atlantic. Synge’s The Aran Islands notebooks were published in 1907. As Baker explains, they ‘give a faithful and vivid account of the people and their ways’. Baker argues that ‘it was Aran, that cradled his lovely, cadenced phraseology’, and that ‘for me they [the islands] will be a point of pilgrimage in my journeying through the countries of the mind’. All this was perhaps an influence on Baker’s acute and vivid style, and on his sustained interest in the wilderness and potential for solitude within his own home country.

On the last page of the same letter, Baker’s love of the Essex landscape is already clear, and, long before he is following peregrines, he is rehearsing some of the writing that appears in his later work: ‘The loveliest country of all lies between Gt. Baddow and West Hanningfield. Green undulating fields, rugged, furrowed earth, luscious orchards, pine clumps, rows of stately elms – all these combine and resolve into a delicately balanced landscape that can never become tedious to the eye. One cannot get far from people – from the little rustic cottages that huddle in the winding lanes. Yet the very proximity of these dwellings seems to give an impression of remoteness. / As you walk across these fields – Danbury stands all green and misty blue in the late afternoon of declining summer. Everchanging – sometimes assuming truly mountainous grandeur – it fascinates the eyes and brings an exaltation and a faith. / These last days of summer are delicate poems in green and gold – the clouds unfurl in unsurpassed magnificence and move me to tears for their passing. / This country with its little fields and murmuring streams that basks in its waning summer gold will still be there when you return – it is for you and all men, for it is beauty.’

Along with these letters, another recent revelation has given us some insight into Baker’s personal library. Following David Cobham’s interest in making a film of The Peregrine, Baker’s brother-in-law, Bernard Coe, took a series of photographs of the bookshelves in Doreen Baker’s house. Given that this was twenty years after Baker’s death, some books may have been lost, but the spines reveal titles on birds and nature, geography, geology, travel, aerial photography, atlases, cookery, cricket, opera and, of course, many volumes of literature, both prose and poetry. Poetry collections include Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Hardy, Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Roy Campbell, Richard Murphy, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Charles Causley and Ted Hughes.

In May 2009, when the author, Adam Foulds, reviewed The Peregrine in the Independent, he argued that Baker’s writing most resembled Ted Hughes’: ‘the harsh vitality of the living world is perceptible at every point.’ In 2005, the environmentalist Ken Worpole wrote that Baker was, ‘if anything … more ferocious in his identification with the animal world.’ Baker owned several collections of Hughes’ poetry, including Crow, Lupercal, Wodwo, Moortown Diary, Season Songs and his 1979 collaboration with the photographer Fay Goodwin, The Remains of Elmet.

Introducing The Peregrine, in his Beginnings section, Baker talks of writing honestly about killing. ‘I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word “predator” is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that spring carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.’ And consider too Hughes’ poem ‘Thrushes’, from the collection Lupercal, published in 1960, just when Baker was preparing to write The Peregrine: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, / More coiled steel than living – a poised / Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs / Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce, a stab / Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing. / No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares. / No sighs or head scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab / And a ravening second.’ And, in The Peregrine, on 20 December, Baker writes: ‘Song thrushes bounced and sprang to spear out the surfacing worms. There is something very cold about a thrush, endlessly listening and stabbing through the arras of grass, the fixed eye blind to what it does.’

With the end of J.A. Baker’s letters to Don Samuel in 1946, we enter another period of silence, although it appears that in 1950 Baker decided to train as a teacher. He would have been 23, and mentions the college in his birdwatching diary four years later on 4 April 1954, but only as background to an observation of a tree creeper: ‘Mousy little bird, with sharp call. First seen at college in 1950 from library window, intent on its own business.’ His contemporaries cannot remember the name of the teachers’ training college he attended, but all recall that it was not a success. Apparently, he loathed teaching practice, and dealing with children.

Soon after this, Baker joined the Automobile Association. His friends connived to get him the job. John Thurmer’s father was Regional Manager, and Don Samuel was already working in the Chelmsford office. Both agree it allowed Baker a chance to settle into some sort of stability.

At about this time, Baker met and fell in love with sixteen-year-old Doreen Coe. Ted Dennis remembers that they met when Baker found her bereft at missing a late bus, and gave her a ride home on his crossbar. Doreen’s father forbade her from marrying Baker before she was 21, so she waited, sticking with him, and they married on 6 October 1956. Baker was 30, and Doreen was 21 years and a month – almost to the day.

By then he was birdwatching regularly, crisscrossing the Chelmsford area on his bicycle. The diaries begin on 21 March 1954 and the last extant page is 22 May 1963. They run to 667 hand-written pages – all in a small stitched school notebook. Doreen told David Cobham that Baker’s habit was to retire to his study each evening, and write up his diaries. It is hard to believe that he took no notes at all in the field, though there is no evidence that he did so.

As is known, Baker became progressively crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, and was, by the early 1970s, seriously incapacitated. Close friends obviously knew of Baker’s growing ill-health, but another contemporary, Jack Baird, who remembers meeting Baker at a rare school reunion in the early 1980s, says he did not complain of it at all. Latterly, Doreen learned to drive, and bought a car, and would take Baker out to favourite haunts, leaving him to walk and sit a little and watch birds before collecting him in the evening. Certainly, John Thurmer says he remembers not a note of self-pity. Baker died on 26 December 1986. He was just 61.

Among fragments of letters to Baker was one from a reader, which praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. This essay formed part of a Birds issue dedicated to fighting against a proposal for a third London airport, and a deep-water port on the Maplin Sands, off Foulness. The article is entitled ‘On the Essex Coast’. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report, this article appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the kind agreement of the RSPB, we reproduce it here in full (here (#litres_trial_promo)).

‘On the Essex Coast’ also spawned an RSPB film, Wilderness Is Not a Place, produced by Anthony Clay, and filmed by Alan McGregor. The film did the rounds of the popular RSPB film circuit alongside three others, entitled High Life of the Rook, Avocets Return and Adventure Has Wings. The title and spare commentary are drawn directly from Baker’s text, which also begins with an editor’s note: ‘The Essex coastline is threatened by development. J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer, shows that it has aesthetic as well as scientific value.’

‘On the Essex Coast’ appeared a year after Collins published The Hill of Summer, and is full of the passion Baker feels for his county, and the frustration that lay behind his anger at peregrines killed by the ‘filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. The essay describes the Dengie, a fist-like wedge of coast that stretches north from Foulness to Mersea. An outcry ensued over the plans for development, and they were finally shelved, in part because of the oil crisis in 1973. It was an early conservation campaign, and Baker’s article clearly contributed positively. Indeed, in his use of what is now a potentially offensive phrase, a ‘Belsen of floating oil’, perhaps we get a sense of his despair. The infamous 1967 Torrey Canyon super-tanker disaster was still fresh in the memory. When the ship broke up on the Seven Sisters, flooding oil into the sea, and onto the Cornish coast, the government decided to bomb and napalm the oil, creating a hellish scene that would have seared itself into the minds of many people, including Baker. It was a less politically sensitive time, and perhaps, in using the image, he intended to shock.

The Birds article reveals a man who was willing to harness his powerful writing to support the emerging environmental movement. Had Baker remained well, surely he would have written much more. Indeed, were he alive now, like so many of his octogenerian contemporaries, he would still be fighting for Essex and for many other wild places, and urging us not to be ‘soothed by the lullaby language of indifferent politicians’.

John Fanshawe, February 2011

The Peregrine (#ua4f75a01-58a0-5f67-a363-db1ba1727e47)

BEGINNINGS (#ulink_5be08a60-d889-5d2b-8783-0bd8286a75eb)

East of my home, the long ridge lies across the skyline like the low hull of a submarine. Above it, the eastern sky is bright with reflections of distant water, and there is a feeling of sails beyond land. Hill trees mass together in a dark-spired forest, but when I move towards them they slowly fan apart, the sky descends between, and they are solitary oaks and elms, each with its own wide territory of winter shadow. The calmness, the solitude of horizons lures me towards them, through them, and on to others. They layer the memory like strata.

From the town, the river flows north-east, bends east round the north side of the ridge, turns south to the estuary. The upper valley is a flat open plain, lower down it is narrow and steep-sided, near the estuary it is again flat and open. The plain is like an estuary of land, scattered with island farms. The river flows slowly, meanders; it is too small for the long, wide estuary, which was once the mouth of a much larger river that drained most of middle England.

Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious. One part of England is superficially so much like another. The differences are subtle, coloured by love. The soil here is clay: boulder clay to the north of the river, London clay to the south. There is gravel on the river terraces, and on the higher ground of the ridge. Once forest, then pasture, the land is now mainly arable. Woods are small, with few large trees; chiefly oak standards with hornbeam or hazel coppice. Many hedges have been cut down. Those that still stand are of hawthorn, blackthorn, and elm. Elms grow tall in the clay; their varying shapes contour the winter sky. Cricket-bat willows mark the river’s course, alders line the brook. Hawthorn grows well. It is a country of elm and oak and thorn. People native to the clay are surly and slow to burn, morose and smouldering as alder wood, laconic, heavy as the land itself.

There are four hundred miles of tidal coast, if all the creeks and islands are included; it is the longest and most irregular county coastline. It is the driest county, yet watery-edged, flaking down to marsh and salting and mud-flat. The drying sandy mud of the ebb-tide makes the sky clear above; clouds reflect water and shine it back inland.

Farms are well ordered, prosperous, but a fragrance of neglect still lingers, like a ghost of fallen grass. There is always a sense of loss, a feeling of being forgotten. There is nothing else here; no castles, no ancient monuments, no hills like green clouds. It is just a curve of the earth, a rawness of winter fields. Dim, flat, desolate lands that cauterise all sorrow.

I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They are old before we have finished growing.

The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out, and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it. Then it stops. Suddenly, unexpectedly. But the ear hears it still, a prolonged and fading echo, draining and winding out among the surrounding trees. Into the deep stillness, between the early stars and the long afterglow, the nightjar leaps up joyfully. It glides and flutters, dances and bounces, lightly, silently away. In pictures it seems to have a frog-like despondency, a mournful aura, as though it were sepulchred in twilight, ghostly and disturbing. It is never like that in life. Through the dusk, one sees only its shape and its flight, intangibly light and gay, graceful and nimble as a swallow.