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
