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:
Sunday May 9th. Wood Hall Wood – Nightingale singing well, and perched amongst brambles and white may. Throat working convulsively as it sang, like an Adam’s Apple, or bobbing, like a pea in a whistle, tremendous sound to come from such a narrow place as a bird’s throat.
As I read the journals that afternoon, Baker’s well-hidden personality became more visible to me: a private and pained man, in flight himself, who discovered a dignity and purpose in the work of watching – and whose encounters with birds supplied him with kinds of happiness that were otherwise unavailable. On 16 June 1954, five days before midsummer, he went out with Sid late in the evening in search of nightjars, undeterred by the heavy rain. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they heard the song of a wood lark and, inspired, they impetuously ‘plunged into the wet wood’ to find its source:
I had a handkerchief over my head, like a puddingcloth, and followed the sound – at first along the footpath, then through the bracken, the ditches, and the bushes, until … we stood under that wonderful sound, coming down to us in the thick darkness and the pouring rain. And a feeling of great exhilaration possessed me, like a sudden lungful of purer air. The great pointlessness of it, the non-sense of nature, was beautiful, and no one else would know it again, exactly as we knew it at that moment. Only a bird would circle high in the darkness, endlessly singing for pure, untainted, instinctive joy, and only a bird-watcher would stand and gorp up at something he could never hope to see, sharing that joy.
A feeling of exhilaration possessed me as I read that entry, smiling at the detail of the handkerchief, sharing something of Baker’s joy. But I was aware of the reflexivity, too: that I had become a watcher myself, a second-order spotter, trying to see Baker through the darkness of six decades – ‘gorping’ after something I could never really hope to perceive.
Half a year or so into his journal-keeping, Baker started to produce more intense entries: brief prose-poem paragraphs, modernist and spiky, that anticipate the dense energies of The Peregrine:
Saturday November 20th 1954 Great SE/SW gales each night, Rooks were swept from home to roost on immense waves of wind, thrown like burnt paper, very high, revellers in the wind.
Tuesday November 1st 1955 50 degrees. Edney Wood was quiet, but frighteningly beautiful. The sodden glow of the millions of leaves burnt my eyes. But after sunset it was just a desolate, deserted autumn slum of trees.
Light fascinated him, as he worked at how to represent its volatilities in language. He tried out phrase after phrase, remaining hostile to cliché: ‘clear varnish of yellow, fading sunlight’; ‘that quality of sunlight, which is like the dusty golden varnish on some old Rembrandt oil-painting’. Occasionally he relinquished simile in favour of common adjectives, uncommonly combined: ‘Wednesday April 23rd 1958. Light was tricky and strange.’
The early years of Baker’s journals reveal him to be a good writer but a rather bad birdwatcher. Partly because of his myopia, he did not develop what birders call ‘the jizz’: the gestalt of body shape, flight-style, song or call, context, behaviour and location within a landscape that allows an experienced birder to make an instantaneous identification. The jizz is the knowledge-without-reflection that the bird glimpsed at the edge of vision is a kestrel, a firecrest, a curlew. Baker, though, was often uncertain as to what he had seen. Early one January he watched a bird in ‘glorious light’:
moving very fast, with wing’s [sic] beating quickly, rolling slightly from side to side. Its tail looked longish and tapering. The instant I saw it I thought it was a Hawk, a Kestrel or a Sparrowhawk, or even a Peregrine […] or a Wood Pigeon or Stock Dove. … No markings could be seen in the glasses, so it wasn’t a Wood Pigeon. Either a Stock Dove, or a falcon, presumably.
Another day he spots what he supposes to be a wood pigeon but ‘the possibility of it’s [sic] being an immature male Peregrine flashed across my mind’. ‘Presumably’, ‘possibility’: wish fulfilment is at work here: the beginnings of a longing for the peregrine so keen that it caused – in the blurry distance of Baker’s far-sight – dove to morph into falcon, pigeon to pass into peregrine. From the start, the predatory nature of the falcons, their decisive speed, their awesome vision and their subtle killings all thrilled him. Baker was enraptored.
~
After two hours with the journals, I set them aside and turned to Baker’s maps. The Essex maps, inch-to-a-mile Ordnance Surveys, had obviously been heavily used. At the corners where the panels met, the paper had worn through from folding, and threads of cloth were visible. The maps were also heavily annotated in ink and pencil. There were territories marked out with ruled biro-line perimeters, which presumably represented the area of a single day’s exploration. Pocking the maps, too, were hundreds of inked circles, each containing a capital letter or pair of letters: LO, M, K.
It took me longer than it should have done to realize that each of the circles recorded a raptor sighting. P = peregrine. SH = sparrowhawk. M = merlin. LO = little owl. BO = barn owl. HH = hen harrier. K = kestrel. Only raptors
– birds that hunt and feed on other animals – were recorded in this way by Baker. Our word raptor comes from the Latin rapere, meaning ‘to seize or take by force’. I felt a sudden surge of unease at seeing Baker’s obsession with raptors recorded in this way: as if I had stumbled into the room of someone fixated with serial-killers, note-boards and walls papered with yellowing news-clippings of past crimes …
The Peregrine is a book of bloodiness, strewn with corpses whose lacerations and dismemberments Baker records with the diligent attention of a crime-scene investigator. Indeed it is, in many ways, a detective story: there is the same procedural care, the gathering of clues as to the nature of the killer, the bagging of evidence, and the following of hunches when evidence falls short and deduction will not suffice. And as with so many crime dramas, the killer comes to fascinate the pursuer.
After he first saw (or believed himself to have seen) a peregrine, Baker quickly elected the bird – which he often, inaccurately, calls a ‘hawk’ rather than a ‘falcon’ – as his totem creature, rife with dark voodoo. In the late 1950s, peregrines become the chief object of his searchings, and his language from this period begins to invest the birds with disturbing powers and qualities: a northern purity, a shattering capacity for violence – and the ability to vanish.
~
The winter of 1962–3 was the fiercest since the mid eighteenth century. The sea froze for two miles out into the North Sea. Spear-length icicles hung from eaves and gutters, and snow drifted to twenty feet deep in places. The estuaries of Essex iced up, and the wading birds that depended upon access to the mudflats for their food supply died in their thousands. Not a day in England dawned above freezing from 26 December to 6 March.
Soon after the snow at last left the land, Baker resigned from his job at the Automobile Association in order to commit to his pursuit of the falcons and work on the book he was starting to compress out of the field journals. By day he watched, and by night he wrote. It was a frugal, focused life. He and Doreen lived off savings, a tiny pension and National Assistance. The house had no telephone, and Baker seems to have communicated little with friends. These were the circumstances he needed to convert the sprawling journals into a crystalline prose-poem.
Waiting for Godot was once described as a play in which nothing happens, twice. The Peregrine is a book in which little happens, hundreds of times. Dawn. Baker watches, the bird hunts, the bird kills, the bird feeds. Dusk. Thus again, over seven months. What Baker understood was that to dramatize such reiteration he had to forge a new style of description. The style he created, up in his Chelmsford spare room, was as sudden and swift as the bird to which it was devoted, and one that – like the peregrine – could startle even as it repeated itself.
Baker gained his effect by a curious combination of surplus (the proliferation of verb, adjective, metaphor and simile), deletion (the removal of articles, conjunctions, proper nouns) and compression (the decision to crush ten years of ‘hawk-hunting’ down to a single symbolic ‘season’, its year unspecified). This mixture of flaring out and paring away results in the book’s shocking energies and its hyperkinetic prose. Neologisms and coinages abound. There are the adjectives Baker torques into verbs (‘The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges’), and the verbs he incites to misbehaviour (‘Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse’). Adverbs act as bugle notes, conferring bright ritualism upon scenes (‘Savagely he lashed himself free, and came superbly to the south, rising on the rim of the black cloud’). There are the audacious comparisons: the yellow-billed cock blackbird ‘like a small mad puritan with a banana in his mouth’, the wood pigeon on a winter field that ‘glowed purple and grey like broccoli’ – like broccoli! – or the ‘five thousand dunlin’ that ‘rained away inland, like a horde of beetles gleamed with golden chitin’. Such flourishes have the appearance of surplus to them, but in fact they aspire to maximum efficiency. A baroque simile is offered because it seems to Baker the most precise way to evoke the thing to which it is being compared. These comparisons are ‘far-fetched’ in two senses: elaborate in their analogies, but also serving to fetch-from-far – to bring near the distant world of the birds.
I had known before coming to the archive that Baker had rewritten the book five times after its first draft. But until I opened the red-jacketed proof copy of The Peregrine I had no idea of the unique method of analysis he had devised for his own prose. Almost every page of the proof was rife with annotations. Ticks indicated phrases with which Baker was especially pleased. Here and there he had re-lineated his prose as verse. He had subjected his sentences to prosodic analysis, with stress and accent marks hovering above each syllable, as if scanning poetic meter (echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins).
On every page, he had also tallied and totalled the number of verbs, adjectives, metaphors and similes. Above each metaphor was a tiny inked ‘M’, above each simile an ‘S’, above each adjective an ‘A’ and above each verb a ‘V’. Written neatly in the bottom margin of each page was a running total for each category of word-type, and at the end of each chapter were final totals of usage. ‘Beginnings’, the first chapter of The Peregrine, though only six pages long, contained 136 metaphors and 23 similes, while the one-and-a-half-page entry for the month of March used 97 verbs and 56 adjectives.
There, laid bare, was the technical basis of Baker’s style: an extreme density of verbs, qualifiers and images, resulting in a book in which – as the writer and ornithologist Kenneth Allsop put it in a fine early review – ‘the pages dance with image after marvellous image, leaping forward direct to the retina from that marshland drama’. That quality of ‘leaping forward’ is distinctive of Baker’s writing: distinctive, too, of course, of what the world does when binoculars are raised to it. Thus the stunning set-pieces of hunt and kill, close to imagist poems, describing chase and ‘stoop’ – that ‘sabring fall from the sky’ when the peregrine drops onto prey from a height of up to 3,000 feet, at a speed of up to 240 mph, slaying with the crash of impact as well as the slash of talons:
A falcon peregrine, sable on a white shield of sky, circled over from the sea. She slowed, and drifted aimlessly, as though the air above the land was thick and heavy. She dropped. The beaches flared and roared with salvoes of white wings. The sky shredded up, was torn by whirling birds. The falcon rose and fell, like a black billhook in splinters of white wood.
‘What does a falcon see?’ asked Anaximander in the sixth century BC. According to Baker, it sees like a Cubist painter gazing from the cockpit of a jet aircraft. It perceives in surface and plane, a tilt-vision of flow and slant. It remembers form and the interrelation of form:
The peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and water. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist; the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries … he sees maps of black and white.
One of the many exhilarations of reading The Peregrine is that we acquire some version of the vision of a peregrine. We look upon the southern English landscape from above and perceive it as almost pure form: partridge coveys are ‘rings of small black stones’ on the fields, an orchard shrinks ‘into dark twiggy lines and green strips’, the horizon is ‘stained with distant towns’, an estuary ‘lift[s] up its blue and silver mouth’. These are things imperceptible at ground level. We become the catascopos, the ‘looker-down’: a role usually reserved for gods, pilots and mountaineers. This falcon-sight, this catascopy, makes Essex – a county that never rises higher than 140 metres above sea level, a county that one sees often across, but rarely down onto – new again. Baker gained this perspective for his prose by studying RAF and Luftwaffe aerial photographs of the south-east of England. To see like a peregrine, he had first to see like a helmeted airman. Short sight led to bomb-sight led to hawk-sight.
~
/> The Peregrine is not a book about watching a falcon but a book about becoming a falcon. In the opening pages, Baker sets out his manifesto of pursuit:
Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.
There, in four eldritch sentences, is the book’s chill heart. Baker hopes that, through a prolonged and ‘purified’ concentration upon the peregrine, he might be able to escape his ‘human shape’ and abscond into the ‘brilliant’ wildness of the bird.
He begins his ‘hunting life’ by learning to track his predatory prey. Peregrines can often fly so fast, and at such altitude, that to the human eye – especially the myopic human eye – they are invisible from the ground. But Baker discovers that they can be located by the disturbance they create among other birds, almost as the position of an invisible plane can be told from its contrail: ‘Evanescent as flame,’ he writes on 7 October, ‘peregrines sear across the cold sky and are gone, leaving no sign in the blue haze above. But in the lower air a wake of birds trails back, and rises upward through the white helix of the gulls.’
As he improves his tracking skills, so Baker draws closer to the bird, and he begins to seek contact with it, through ritual mimicry of its behaviour and habits (a method that has affinities with those of revolutionary mid-twentieth-century ethologists such as Frank Fraser Darling and Konrad Lorenz). One November day he rests his hand on the grass where a peregrine has recently come to ground, and experiences ‘a strong feeling of proximity, identification’. By December he has gone fully feral. Crossing a field one afternoon, he sees feathers blowing in the wind:
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