A falcon flew across the marsh, weaving through the wind

On Thursday Radio 4 are broadcasting a new play by Helen Macdonald about that classic of English nature writing, J. A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967).  It will be, I'm told, "a strange thing", comparing Baker's pursuit of wild falcons with Helen's own experiences keeping a goshawk called Mabel.  The play has been produced by Tim Dee, who wrote in his own bird memoir, The Running Sky, about his fascination with the book and its strange author, who seemed to lose himself in a quest to follow the peregrine wherever it took him: 'earthed, haggard and self-loathing, traipsing through marshes, crouching in ditches and lurking on field edges.'  Whether Helen ended up in this state too we shall be able to hear next week.

Robert Macfarlane's preface to the 2005 NYRB edition of The Peregrine noted that little is known of Baker's life beyond what is recorded in his book.  This mystery has added to the aura surrounding him over the years (in a way reminiscent to me of Robert Johnson, who in 1961 could be described on King of the Delta Blues Singers as 'little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists').  But (as with Johnson) investigators have now unearthed more information and it turns out that when he wasn't on the trail of falcons or composing his visionary masterpiece, Baker managed the Chelmsford branch of the AA.  This new biographical material has been included in the introduction to The Complete Works of J. A. Baker, published earlier this year.  In addition to The Peregrine this volume has a selection of diary entries devoted to bird watching, The Hill of Summer (Baker's second, almost-forgotten book) and an essay, On the Essex Coast.

'Detailed descriptions of landscape are tedious,' writes Baker at the start of The Peregrine, and indeed he never needs to amass detail to convey a vivid and original sense of place.  By omitting all reference to identifiable locations (500 of which actually appear in the newly published diary selections), Baker strips his landscape down to the shapes and colours and sensory impressions that a falcon might experience.  Mark Cocker (in his introduction to The Peregrine) says that '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.'  But equally, it has the effect of transforming Baker's corner of Essex into a universal landscape.

The Peregrine draws on observations made over a ten year period but is written as if they all took place in one year.  I have quoted below some of the opening lines to convey a sense of the way Baker often sets the scene with a distilled, imagistic landscape description. The first entry in the book is for October 1st, when he finds a peregrine and watches as it picks off a jay (too vivid and conspicuous against the green water-meadows) and vows to follow him all winter, sharing 'the fear, and the exultation, and the boredom, of the hunting life.' The last entry is on April 4th, when he pursues the peregrine until he is able to crawl to a position five yards away, right in front of the bird, whose eyes look into his but seem to see something beyond 'from which they cannot look away.' 

October 14th: One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist...

October 30th: The wind-shred banner of the autumn light spanned the green headland between the two estuaries...

November 2nd: The whole land shone golden-yellow, bronze, and rusty-red, gleamed water-clear, submerged in brine of autumn light...

November 11th: Wisps of sunlight in a bleak of cloud, gulls bone-white in ashes of sky...

November 16th: The valley was calm, magnified in mist, domed with a cold adamantine glory...

November 21st: A wrought-iron starkness of leafless trees stands sharply up along the valley skyline...

December 8th: Golden leaves of sunlight drifted down through the morning fog...

December 15th: The warm west gale heaved and thundered across the flat river plain, crashed and threshed high its crests of airy spray against the black breakwater of the wooded ridge...

January 5th: Broken columns of snow towered over lanes dug from ten foot drifts.  Roads were ridged and fanged with white ice, opaque and shiny as frozen rivers...

February 10th: This was a day made absolute, the sun unflawed, the blue sky pure...

March 10th: Towering white clouds grew in the marble sunlight of the morning.  The wind eroded them to falling weirs of rain.  The estuary at high tide brimmed with blue and silver light, then tarnished and thinned to grey.  A falcon flew across the marsh, weaving through the wind...