Landmarks (12 page)

What did I see that morning? Hot winter sun on the face’s brink, felt as red but seen as gold. Air, still, blue. Tremors at the edge of vision: quick dark curve and slow straight line over green, old in the eye. Intersection, shrapnel of down, grey drop to crop, flail and clatter, four chops and the black star away with quick wing flicks.

Let me tell that again, clearer now, if clearer is right. What did I see that morning? A green field dropping citywards. The narrow track at the bronze wood’s border. The sun low but strong in the cold. Then odd forms glimpsed in the eye’s selvedge. The straight line (grey) the flight-path of a wood pigeon passing over the field. The fast curve (dark) the kill-path of a peregrine cutting south from the height of the beech tops. The pigeon is half struck but not clutched, chest-feathers blossom, it falls to the low cover of the crop and flails for safety to a hedge. The falcon rises to strike down again, misses, rises, misses again, two more rises and two more misses, the pigeon makes the hedge and as I rush the wood-edge to close the gap the falcon, tired, lifts and turns and flies off east and fast over the summits of the hilltop trees, with quick sculling wing flicks.

And let me tell it one last time, clearer still perhaps. What did I see that morning? It was windless and late autumn. The sky was milky blue, and rich leaves drifted in the path verges, thrown from
the trees by a night frost and a gale not long since dropped away. That afternoon I was due to drive to Essex to see the archive of a man called John Alec Baker, author of
The Peregrine
, and among the contents of the archive were Baker’s binoculars and telescopes, with which he had spent a decade (1955–65) watching and tracking the falcons that wintered each year in the fields and coastal margins of Essex. Before leaving, I decided to go for a run up to the beech woods that stand on a low hill of chalk, a mile or so from my home in south Cambridge. A thin path leads to the woods; a path that I have walked or run every few days for the last ten years, and thereby come to know its usual creatures, colours and weathers. I reached the fringe of the beech wood, where the trees meet a big sloping field of rapeseed, when my eye was caught by strange shapes and vectors: the low slow flight of a pigeon over the dangerous open of the field, and the quick striking curve of a sparrowhawk – no, a peregrine, somehow a peregrine, unmistakably a peregrine – closing to it from height. The falcon slashed at the pigeon, half hit it, sent up a puff of down; the bird dropped into the rape and panicked towards the cover of the hawthorn hedge. The falcon rose and fell upon it as it showed above the surface of the crop, striking four more times but missing each time. I ran to get closer, along the fringe of the wood, but the falcon saw me coming, had known I was an agent in the drama since before it had first struck, and so it lifted and flew off east over the beech tops, black against the blue sky, its crossbow profile – what Baker calls its
‘cloud-biting anchor shape’
– unmistakable in silhouette, as my blood thudded.

I had followed the path to the beech woods a thousand times, and I had seen kestrels, sparrowhawks, buzzards, once a tawny owl, twice a red kite – but never a peregrine. That one had appeared there on
that morning seemed so unlikely a coincidence as to resemble contrivance or magical thinking. But no, it had happened, and though it felt like blessing or fabrication it was nothing other than chance, and a few hours later, still high from the luck of it, I left for Essex to look through Baker’s eyes.

~

J. A. Baker made an unlikely birdwatcher. He was so short-sighted that he wore thick glasses from an early age, and he was excused National Service during the Second World War on grounds of his vision. But this myopic man would write one of the greatest bird books ever, the fierce stylistic clarity of which must be understood in part as a compensation for the curtailed optics of its author’s eyes. As an elegy-in-waiting for a landscape,
The Peregrine
is comparable with Barry Lopez’s
Arctic Dreams
(1986). In its dredging of melancholy, guilt and beauty from the English countryside, it anticipates W. G. Sebald’s
The Rings of Saturn
(1995). Along with
The Living Mountain
– with which it shares a compressive intensity, a generic disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry and an obsession (ocular, oracular) with the eyeball – it is one of the two most remarkable twentieth-century accounts of a landscape that I know.

If Baker’s book can be said to possess anything so conventional as a plot, it is that one autumn, two pairs of peregrines come to hunt over a broad area of unspecified English coastline and hinterland – a mixed terrain of marshland, woods, fields, river valleys, mudflats, estuaries and sea. Baker becomes increasingly obsessed with the birds. From October to April he tracks them almost daily, and watches as they bathe, fly, kill, eat and roost.
‘Autumn
,’ he writes, ‘begins my season of hawk-hunting, spring ends it, and winter glitters between like the arch of Orion.’ The book records these months of chase in all their agitated repetitiveness. Everything that occurs in
The Peregrine
takes place within the borders of the falcons’ hunting grounds, and with respect to them. No cause is specified for the quest itself, no triggering detail. No other human character of significance besides Baker is admitted. His own presence in the book is discreet, tending to paranoid. We are told nothing of his life outside the hunt: we do not know where he sleeps at night, or to what family – if any – he returns. The falcons are his focus.

~

I reached the University of Essex soon after noon. I was shown into a room with a large table, in the centre of which had been placed two big clear plastic packing crates with snap-lock lids: a life reduced to 100 litres. The table was otherwise empty, so I unpacked the boxes and laid out their contents.

There were several maps: half-inch Ordnance Surveys of the Essex coast near Maldon, a road atlas, a large-scale map of northern Europe. There were rubber-banded bundles of letters by Baker, and other bundles of letters to him from readers and friends. There was a folder containing yellowed newspaper clippings of review coverage of
The Peregrine
. There was a curious collection of glossy cut-out images of peregrines and other raptors, scissored from magazines, bird-guides, calendars and cards. There was a list of the contents of his library. There were drafts – in manuscript and typescript – of
The Peregrine
and his second book,
The Hill of Summer
. There were proof copies in red covers of both books, every paragraph of which, I saw as I flicked through them, had been
arcanely annotated by Baker using a system of ticks, numbers and symbols. There were the field journals he had kept during his years of ‘hawk-hunting’. There was a sheaf of early poems. And there were his optics. A pair of Miranda 10x50 binoculars in a black case with a red velvet interior. A brass telescope, heavy in the hand, which collapsed to ten inches, extended to a foot and a half, and was carried in a double-capped brown leather tube. A featherweight spotter-scope, light and quick to lift, from J. H. Steward’s in London. And a pair of stubby Mirakel 8x40s, German-made, in a carry-case of stiff brown leather lined with purple velvet, the base of which had at some point come loose, and which had been carefully repaired with pink strips of sticking plaster that still held it together.

There were also dozens of photographs, some of them still in the branded envelopes of their developers (‘Instamatic – Magnify Your Memories!’). Among them I found a black-and-white shot of Baker taken in 1967, the year
The Peregrine
was published. He was forty-one at the time. I had not seen it before, though it was the photograph he chose as his author image on the jacket flap of the first edition. He is seated in an armchair and dressed in a collared white shirt and a dark woollen tank-top. He has wavy brown hair and an owlish gaze. He is resting his chin upon his hand, and looking away from the camera, over the left shoulder of the viewer, towards a sunlit six-paned window – we know this because there is a curved reflection of the window visible in each of the thick lenses of the spectacles he is wearing.

There was something unusual about the image, though, and it took me time to realize what it was. Baker’s right hand, the hand on which his chin rests, is distorted. The knuckles of the first and second finger appear to have fused together, and the back of his hand has
swollen and stiffened into a pale spatulate shape, so all that can be seen is the plain white paddle of the hand’s back. His fingers are invisible to the viewer, curled tightly into his palm like talons.

~

Baker was born on 6 August 1926 in Chelmsford, Essex, the only child of an unhappy marriage. His parents were Congregationalists: his father, who worked as an electrical designer, suffered prolonged mental ill health due to a bony growth that pressed onto his brain (his treatment was, brutally, a lobotomy).

At the age of eight, Baker contracted rheumatic fever, the after-effects of which would be lifelong. It induced arthritis that spread and worsened as Baker aged, and at seventeen he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an inflammatory form of acute arthritis that fuses muscle, bone and ligament in the spine. Codeine managed but did not eliminate the chronic pain, and Baker underwent agonizing long-needle ‘gold’ injections into his joints, hoping to slow the progression of his disease. But his body nevertheless succumbed: his knees and hips first, and then his hands, which were thoroughly stricken by the 1960s. Thus the fused knuckles, the curled fingers, the stiffened shield of his right hand – so bravely on show in his author photograph.

Despite the pain, photographs from Baker’s youth show him as a cheerful and sociable young man. Golden hair, hands in pockets, always the thick spectacles. Arms round his friends, drunken embraces in wartime pubs, walks along the sea wall. He was six feet tall, deep-voiced and strongly built, though the spondylitis diminished his stature. He was an eager reader and a prolific correspondent: his letters from the war years speak of an intellectually adventurous
teenager – passionate above all about landscapes and literature. He would often spend weeks writing single letters, and because of this tended to double-date his letters ‘Comm:’ and ‘Conc:’. A letter to his friend Don Samuel was ‘Comm: Sept 19th 1945’ and ‘Conc: Oct 4th 1945’, and ran to sixty-four pages of blue notepaper.
‘Dear Sam
,’ it opened. ‘Here beginneth what promises to be indeed a “weird” if not a “wonderful” letter. Many subjects will drift leisurely across the pages – vague substances phantasmal, trailing clouds of unwieldy imagery …’ It ended with loving descriptions of the ‘delicately balanced’ Essex landscape: ‘green undulating fields, rugged, furrowed earth, luscious orchards, pine clumps, rows of stately elms’. ‘In things beautiful there is an eternity of peace, and an infinity of sight,’ concluded the myopic Baker, longingly.

In the early 1950s, while working for the Automobile Association in Chelmsford, he met his wife, Doreen, a wages clerk at the company. They married in October 1956: the marriage would be durable, childless and loving, although – one suspects – difficult at times for Doreen. Also in the early 1950s Baker was introduced to birdwatching by a friend from work, Sid Harman. What began as a distraction became first a passion and then an obsession for Baker. Soon he was birding alone. Whenever possible, he would cycle – on his Raleigh bike, with khaki canvas saddle-bags – in search of birds, out into the 200 square miles of coastal Essex that comprised his hunting ground. He would pass London’s overspill factories and car dumps, heading for the inland fields and woods, or to the lonely sea wall and saltings of the shore. He would wear his standard birdwatching clobber: grey flannel trousers, an open-necked shirt, a jumper knitted by his mother, a Harris tweed jacket, a flat cloth cap, and a gaberdine mac to keep the weather off. He would take a packet of sandwiches (made by Doreen), and a flask (filled with tea by Doreen). He would also
carry a pair of binoculars or a telescope. He took a map on which he marked the locations of his sightings, and a Boots spiral-bound notebook in which he kept his field records. At the end of each bird-day he would return to a big meal (cooked by Doreen) and then retreat up to his den, the spare bedroom, to transpose and refine his notes. He was, Doreen remembered after his death,
‘a prickly customer’
, who became a ‘loner’ as an adult. Limited in sight and mobility, and suffering near-constant pain, he was prone to bursts of anger.

Birdwatching helped Baker thwart his short sight, and offered him a form of relation.
‘Binoculars and a hawk-like vigilance
,’ he wrote, ‘reduce the disadvantage of myopic human vision.’ Aided by optics and instincts, a new world became visible to him: the beyond-world of wildness that proceeds around and within the human domain. He recorded his discoveries in his notebooks and journals, in total more than 1,600 pages of field notes taken over the course of ten years, made in black and blue ink and his looping handwriting, the legibility of which deteriorated as his illness advanced.

~

The journals are coal to
The Peregrine
’s diamond. Crushed, they became his book. The first journal entry is dated 21 March 1954: it is functional and unadorned: a partridge is seen in the meadows opposite a church on
‘Patching Hall Lane
’, in ‘long’, ‘rich’ grass. Thirteen species are seen in the day; a wren is heard ‘singing lustily’. Habits of annotation that will last are established: each date is underlined; each bird name is double-underlined and capitalized (lending a Germanic feel to the prose); weather and wind direction are recorded.

Within weeks of that first entry, Baker had begun to experiment with his language, sensing that the field note might be a miniature
literary form of its own. He soon employed metaphor and simile to evoke details and aspects that conventional field notes would have eschewed as irrelevant. Such comparative tropes, often elaborate, served to sharpen rather than blur observation: