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by Mark Cocker

J.A. Baker (1926-1987) is now widely acknowledged as one of the most important British writers on nature in the twentieth century. When his first book, The Peregrine, appeared in 1967 with all the unexpected power and vertiginous daring of its eponymous bird, it was instantly recognised as a masterpiece. Today it is viewed by many as the gold standard for all nature writing and, in many ways, it transcends even this species of praise. A case could easily be made for its greatness by the standards of any literary genre.

It has been thirty years since his untimely death in 1987, aged just 61, and more than four decades since the publication of his last and only other work, The Hill of Summer (1969). For much of the intervening period, neither of the books has been in print. Yet, if anything, Baker’s stock stands higher today than at any time. His writing has been intimately associated with the resurgence of literature on nature and landscape, the so-called New Nature Writing of authors like Tim Dee and Robert Macfarlane (the latter, in fact, has played a key role in Baker’s rediscovery). His books are studied as set texts at university. Major modern poets, from Kathleen Jamie to the former laureate Andrew Motion, acknowledge Baker’s poetic genius. Commentators of various stamp, from the film maker David Cobham to the TV presenter and wildlife cameraman Simon King, hail his influence upon them.

All of this is a remarkable achievement, particularly in view of Baker’s personal circumstances. He was an Essex man born and bred, living all of his days in what was then the small rural town of Chelmsford, largely at two addresses – 20 Finchley Avenue and 28 Marlborough Road. His parents, Wilfred and Pansy, were what might be called lower middle class; his father a draughtsman with the engineering company Crompton Parkinson. The formal education of their only son at Chelmsford’s King Edward VI School ended in 1943, when he was just sixteen years old. His abiding love for poetry and opera were perhaps exceptional in one of his social background, but Baker junior seems to have had little or no contact with other writers and artists. His only literary connections flowed from Collins’ eventual decision to publish The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer.

It is, in many ways, confirmation of his extraordinary talent that the author’s reputation rests entirely on two works – 350 published pages of prose – and in spite of their extremely narrow geographical focus. They describe a roughly rectangular Essex patch of just 550km2, which includes the Chelmer Valley from the eastern edge of Chelmsford as far west as Maldon and the confluence of the Chelmer and Blackwater rivers. At its heart lies Danbury Hill, the highest ground in Essex, with its glorious ancient woodlands of coppiced hornbeam and sweet chestnut. Baker country then runs down Danbury’s far slope and on to the southern and northern shores of the Blackwater Estuary, there to be extinguished in the dark silts at the North Sea’s edge. Most of this countryside now lies within a commuter belt less than an hour from central London, yet in Baker’s day it was a deeply rural district. Residents of the beautiful village of Little Baddow recall how their doors were left unlocked at night until at least the 1970s. Between the dawn and dusk of a single winter’s day, Baker could traverse the whole area via a network of quiet country lanes. Throughout his life a bicycle was his only means of transport. He never learnt to drive a car.

This concentrated focus on one patch reminds us very much of the life and work of a historical writer such as Gilbert White, or perhaps the poet John Clare. Yet, simultaneously, the strict limit to his geographical explorations marks Baker out as a singularly important modern figure. In The Peregrine he wrote: ‘Before it is too late, I have tried to … convey the wonder of … a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa.’ That he achieved this so brilliantly and excavated prose of such quality from what seems, on first acquaintance, a modest landscape, throws down the gauntlet to our own age. For a society now deeply sensitive to the issue of carbon usage, Baker is surely a shining example. His bicycle-bounded territory is a model for future writers. His books strip back from the word ‘parochial’ its accreted, pejorative associations of narrowness and conservatism. He is parochial only in its truest sense. He illuminated the rich mysteries to be found in every parish in these islands.

His two books on Essex landscape and wildlife are intimately connected with one another in terms of their style and content. They are, in some ways, very simple. They are books of encounter. They describe the wild animals, particularly the birds, that Baker saw and heard when he was out. They both draw upon his relentless foraging across the same landscape. However, while The Hill of Summer is a generic description of all his wildlife encounters between the seasons of spring and autumn, The Peregrine is distinguished by its close focus on one species, the fastest-flying bird on Earth.

During Baker’s life this glorious creature was no more than a rare winter visitor to his portion of Essex. Worse still, the raptor had endured a catastrophic decline in the second half of the twentieth century. Fortunately in recent years peregrines have reversed the trend, climbing back to a population level probably not seen in Britain since the seventeenth century. It is, once more, a breeding bird even in Essex. Today it is extremely difficult for us to recover fully the sense of crisis prevailing in 1960s Europe or North America. Yet to understand this book and its impact, we must remind ourselves how one of the most successful predators on the planet – exceeded in its transcontinental range only perhaps by ourselves or the red fox – was then so stricken by the toxic effects of organochlorine-based agrochemicals, it was considered at risk of global extinction.

It was that anxiety which charged Baker with his deep sense of mission as he tracked the falcons across the wintry landscapes of Essex. ‘For ten years I followed the peregrine,’ he wrote. ‘I was possessed by it. It was a grail for me. Now it has gone.’ This sense of the bird’s impending doom supplies the book not only with its emotional rationale but also its thematic unity and burning narrative drive. However, those elements are far less apparent in The Hill of Summer which is, in truth, a more difficult and elusive text. It has almost no plot, and the author never seeks to explain any overall shape or intention, except to hang each chapter loosely around a separate habitat: beech wood, estuary, etc. Without having first read The Peregrine and appreciated how the latter supplies a context for the second book, a reader of The Hill of Summer might easily find it a meandering, slow-moving account of rather random encounters with nature. It is, in truth, far more than that. There is writing of the highest order on every page.

Nevertheless, the overarching structure in The Peregrine leads many people to conclude that this is the finer of his two books. The inference is that Baker drew together his richest material and poured into it deeper editorial effort. It was claimed in the blurb to a later edition that he rewrote it five times. The almost inevitable speculation is that his constant rewriting arose from an attempt to find some means of fusing into a coherent whole his quest for peregrines over ten separate winter periods. I emphasise the word ‘speculation’, because truthfully we have no real understanding of Baker’s methods. Not only does he appear to have destroyed each successive manuscript, he even discarded many of his own daily handwritten notes. About one third of the surviving diaries were published for the first time in 2010.

Baker’s work presents other problems for readers because in the text itself he was extremely reluctant to reveal his own personality or his private views. These do intrude in places, but, by and large, as Baker himself asserted, The Peregrine is an objective account of what he experienced: ‘Everything I describe,’ he writes, ‘took place while I was watching it.’ The lack of any detailed self-revelation by its quiet, unassuming author creates a partial vacuum at the heart of the book, into which commentators have felt almost impelled to pour their own theories and ideas. A fact that was little appreciated even relatively recently was Baker’s full name: J.A. stands for John Alec. Another mystery solved only in the last decade was the identity of the obviously patient and understanding woman behind the dedication in The Peregrine. ‘To My Wife’ referred to Doreen Grace Baker (née Coe), who died only in 2006, more than a quarter of a century after her first husband. They had been married for 31 years.

It is perhaps the perverse fate of a deeply private person to find that the thing he or she wishes most to withhold, or deems least important, becomes the stuff of widest speculation. In the absence of hard fact, myths and half-truths have regularly added themselves to the Baker story like barnacles catching on the hull of a boat. A classic example is the idea that he was a librarian, perhaps because of an assumption that only a bookish person could have produced such a literary work. In fact, Baker was the manager of the Chelmsford branch of the Automobile Association (odd, perhaps, in one who never drove), then later the manager of a Britvic depot.

Another typical conjecture was that he wrote The Peregrine after the diagnosis of a serious illness and therefore the text is stained by the dark, mordant tones of the invalid. There is at least a germ of truth behind this suggestion. However, Baker was not seriously ill until after he had finished The Peregrine. In the ten main years of his wildlife forays (1955-1965) which supplied the raw material for his writing, Baker led a relatively normal life. By day he worked for the AA or Britvic. In his spare time he cycled out along the banks of the Chelmer to birdwatch. Yet throughout this period he did suffer increasingly from rheumatoid arthritis, and by the time that The Hill of Summer was published he was seriously incapacitated. It was this disease, in fact, which eventually brought about his premature death: the cancer that killed him was triggered by drugs prescribed for his condition.

By far the most challenging and difficult speculation to address is the claim that Baker made up parts or even all of the contents of The Peregrine. This has long been a response, particularly among readers who are knowledgeable about birds. These doubts cannot simply be dismissed as the kind of pettifogging scepticism that sometimes seems indivisible from the science and pastime of ornithology. There are serious issues that all informed readers of The Peregrine have to face. One is that Baker was finding his falcons in and around the Chelmer Valley, where few or no other fellow observers managed to see them. At that time the editors of the Essex Bird Report expressed their barely concealed incredulity by suggesting that Baker was seeing peregrines of non-wild origin (i.e. falconers’ birds).

One specific concern centres on Baker’s assertion that he found, over a ten-year period, 619 carcasses of other birds that were killed by the wintering falcons. Anyone who walks regularly in the countryside will recognise how unusual it is to see dead birds of any kind. So the author’s claim to have located the remains of so many corpses eaten by individual peregrines does seem remarkable. Baker then faced a series of smaller-scale questions. How come he saw peregrines eating worms unearthed by a tractor and plough, when nobody else had? The translator of the Swedish edition of The Peregrine, an experienced birdwatcher himself, questioned Baker’s assertion that the species ever hovers. Yet Baker insisted that an exact translation of that word (ryttla) be used. One notable peregrine expert even went so far as to claim that Baker could not tell that species from kestrel.

There are several forms of response to these suspicions and doubts. The most obvious is the counter-assertion that Baker was absolutely fixated with peregrines. His excursions into the Essex landscape were driven by a single search image. He acquired intimate insight into the personalities of individual birds, and over the years he built up an understanding of where they would be and when. It was, therefore, ever likely that he would regularly see the falcons where others did not, and also find the remains of peregrine kills because he knew exactly their preferred haunts.

Another key point is that if you watch peregrines long enough they will do things that other people do not normally see, and even things that no one else has seen, such as eating worms. Recent research has just disclosed behaviour not widely recognised – namely that peregrines hunt and kill during the hours of darkness (Baker, incidentally, noted that the birds are active after sunset). Clearly no one would judge the recent nocturnal observations as untrue simply because they are without precedent. (At least they would find it difficult, given that the bird, an individual roosting on Derby Cathedral, was filmed eating a live woodcock, and is shown on YouTube.) Why should Baker be less trustworthy? Peregrines, however well studied, are birds of mystery still. That, surely, is the allure of all field study.

A second partial explanation of why Baker has generated such suspicion or scepticism relates to his openly declared method in writing The Peregrine. The book is framed as a diary account of a single winter, but its author clearly specified that this was a way to distil all ten years of his experiences into a narrative whole. To read the book as a blow-by-blow series of genuine journal entries is to fail to appreciate the difference between the literal truth of a notebook and the literary truth as expressed by Baker. In fact, if a reader of either of his books persists in this particular false assumption, then they will face ever-deepening problems. Baker not only compressed and manipulated the time frame of both books, he stripped out the names of places or references to identifiable land features. In The Peregrine he writes of ‘the ford’, or the ‘North Wood’ or ‘South Wood’, but nothing more explicit that would enable the reader to fix the text easily in an actual moment or location.

For Baker devotees this compositional device has given rise to a kind of sport, as they try to tease out a real geography behind the otherwise anonymous descriptions. Some landmarks are just recognisable. A reference in The Peregrine (24 October) to a ‘two-hundred-foot chimney’ where the falcon roosted is almost certainly an old brick tower, now demolished, for a steam pump attached to the waterworks in the parish of Beeleigh, just west of Maldon. On 25 January he saw a ‘wren creeping over the sloping roof of a wooden church tower’. This is probably the beautiful little church by the River Chelmer at Ulting, one of the famous wooden-towered churches of Essex. Perhaps the most important geographical feature that one can identify with some certainty is ‘the ford’, a place where many of his observations are rooted and where peregrines came to bathe regularly. The most likely candidate is the spot where Sandon Brook flows across Hurrell’s Lane just west of Little Baddow.

A rough sense of Baker’s real time frame can also be teased out from internal evidence. The inferential details that help us to anchor the work in some genuine calendar is the extreme weather he described in his single winter of observations. It is without doubt the extraordinary winter of 1962–1963, that Arctic season when snow – more than at any time for 150 years – lay thick on the ground for months. It was the coldest period recorded in southern England since 1740, and long stretches of the coast froze into solid sheets with incipient ice floes. Baker’s description of an Essex landscape snowbound from 27 December right through until the first week of March fits closely with the meteorological pattern of that period.

While these details may suggest a rough template for the book’s time and place, Baker felt in no way bound by it. The fact that he opted for this degree of freedom in his treatment of the material has led some to suggest that The Peregrine could be read almost as a novel. With more certainty we can see how the device created not just the layer of ambiguity troubling his more literal-minded readers, it also conferred a remarkable universality. If not quite timeless, the book certainly seems to move with the reader, each new generation finding the text as accessible and as meaningful as the one before. Similarly, by refusing to yoke the birds to one identifiable locale, he allows the falcons in his book to become almost as wide ranging as the real species. The glorious landscape he explored could almost be any landscape. The reader is at liberty to transfer imaginatively ‘the ford’ or the ‘North Wood’ of Baker country to Skåne, or California or Quebec, or even Queensland. By stripping away so much, what Baker left us with is a mythic story of quest for a mythic bird that is magically unconfined and yet simultaneously authentic.

In a way the deepest irony about the suggestions of fraud or deception on Baker’s part is not just their irrelevance to his project. It is that he answers the charges himself in almost every sentence he wrote. The whole of his work is shot through with an almost forensic concern for truthfulness about his encounters with birds, nature and landscape, that has few rivals not just among British writers but in the entire English-speaking world. When he looks, for instance, into the piercing lemon eyes of a little owl he notes that ‘the black pupil is the same width as the vivid yellow iris’. He finds the freshly killed body of a common shrew and notes how the ‘impressions of the kestrel’s gripping toes still showed on its soft grey fur’.

In many ways his concern for veracity is even more abundantly clear in The Hill of Summer. Its structureless format seems to emphasise how the author has pared everything down to one goal: how can a naturalist capture in words what he or she sees and experiences? It is his faithfulness to this enterprise, at the expense of all else, which probably explains why The Hill of Summer has been virtually forgotten. Yet simultaneously it is his uncompromising quest for an authentic language which supplies its curious but undeniable magic.

In The Peregrine he wrote: ‘The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.’ That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy that informs all his work. It is notable that Baker never validates his own observations, thoughts or feelings by reference to those of other authors. There are no intermediaries. Instead, he drills down into the moment to haul back to the surface a prose that is astonishing for its inventiveness, yet also for its clarity and precision. Sometimes it is the sheer simplicity with which he finds ways to note the most subtle register of change that is so compelling. On 2 April in The Peregrine he writes: ‘Spring evening; the air mild, without edges’. On 27 March he sees a ‘grazing rabbit that was big with disease’; and on the same day he describes the sunlight as ‘quiet’. The full sentence reads: ‘Quiet sunlight gleamed the falling tide.’

The line typifies Baker’s delight in playing with the function of words. So verbs that are traditionally intransitive are suddenly made to take a direct object (‘They shone frail gold’). He converts nouns into verbs (‘Starlings … sky up violently’; ‘every twig seemed to vein inwards’), adjectives into nouns (‘Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud’) and then turns full circle to make nouns out of verbs (‘a seethe of white’). Sometimes it is simple juxtapositions that create the startling energy. A classic example is, ‘gulls bone-white in ashes of sky’, or this description in The Hill of Summer for the hard, nasal, invertebrate call of a willow tit: ‘a narrow parsimony of sound’. Finally, there are neologisms of almost Shakespearean daring. Perhaps the most famous is his sentence: ‘I swooped through leicestershires of swift green light.’

Occasionally it is not the language, but the structure of the sentences, which is so inventive. A classic example is the way he finds a means to express the mesmeric effect created by wader flocks on tidal mud and also their random, chaotic shapelessness.

The faint, insistent sadness of grey plover calling. Turnstones and dunlin rising. Twenty greenshank calling, flying high; grey and white as gulls, as sky. Bar-tailed godwits flying with curlew, with knot, with plover; seldom alone; seldom settling; snuffling eccentrics; long-nosed, loud-calling sea-rejoicers; their call a snorting, sneezing, mewing, spitting bark. Their thin upcurved bills turn, their heads turn, their shoulders and whole bodies turn, their wings waggle. They flourish their rococo flight above the surging water.

As the passage demonstrates, Baker was never afraid of brevity, repetition or stating the obvious. One of my favourite sentences in The Peregrine is, ‘Nothing happened.’ In The Hill of Summer he varies this nullity to ‘Nothing happens.’ No naturalist-writer has ever been more honest about, or lovingly attentive to, the real patience required in the enterprise of watching wildlife. His writing is in many ways the antithesis of wildlife television, which is always to cut to the chase. Baker is the master of emptiness and no action.

A falcon peregrine watched me from posts far out on the saltings, sitting huddled and morose under darkening rain. She flew seldom, had fed, had nothing to do. Later, she went inland.

While he might convey the emotional flatness or neutrality experienced during long passages of his wildlife excursions, Baker is never dull. In fact, if there is any criticism, it arises because there is so little downtime in the prose. It is all highly distilled, highly concentrated. The reader is being challenged with virtually every sentence. So much so, that it is sometimes easier to consider his prose as poetry. A page or two at a time can occasionally feel like enough. Indeed, it is remarkable how easily his writing can be framed as verse. Take this sentence:

Spring dusk;

Creak of bats’ wings

Over the steel river,

Curlew-call

Of the lemuring owls.

Or this paragraph:

A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees

Stands sharply up along the valley skyline.

The cold north air, like a lens of ice,

Transforms and clarifies.

Wet plough lands are dark as malt,

Stubbles are bearded with weeds

And sodden with water.

Gales have taken the last of the leaves.

Autumn is thrown down. Winter stands.

If one had to name Baker’s most extraordinary gifts as a writer then I would isolate two qualities. One is a capacity to convey the otherness of wildlife through reference to objects of domestic and human function. The risk he runs is the charge of anthropomorphism, into which he almost never descends. It sounds paradoxical, but he somehow makes the animal or plant instantly accessible through the familiarity of his imagery, yet without diminishing its separate non-human identity. Here is an extended example:

A dead porpoise was humped upon the shingle, heavy as a sack of cement. The smooth skin was blotched with pink and grey; the tongue black and hard as stone. Its mouth hung open like the nail-studded sole gaping from an old boot. The teeth looked like the zip-fastener of a gruesome nightdress case.

More perfect, perhaps, is his description of golden plovers in their summer plumage:

Their black chests shone in the sun below the mustard yellow of their backs, like black shoes half covered with buttercup dust.

The other ability at the heart of his achievement is what I call – though it is not completely adequate – his ‘synaesthesia’: a capacity to experience and express information derived from one sense as if it were encountered by another. For example, he interprets sounds as if they could be seen or tasted. In The Peregrine he writes of the crepuscular churring of the nightjar:

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.

This capacity for synaesthesia is seldom expressed in this clear and unambiguous form. More usually it is blended into his wider perception in smaller, subtler gestures that comprise a single word or phrase. Here are four sentences from The Hill of Summer:

The pure green song of a willow warbler descends from a larch.

A moorhen calls from the smell of a pond.

The churring song of a nightjar seems to furrow the smooth surface of the silence.

One by one the calls of stone curlews rose in the long valleys of the downs, like fossil voices released from the strata of the chalk.

The last two quotations are particularly important and exhibit the same sensibility manifest in that line already quoted about ‘leicestershires of swift, green light’. Note how the light is experienced as ‘swift’. These three examples emphasise how my word, ‘synaesthesia’, is not quite enough to encompass all of this facet of Baker’s genius.

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