The Peregrine: 50th Anniversary Edition. J. A. Baker
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letters reveal the extent to which Baker was determined to write. In one penned from Chelmsford on 25 April 1946, Baker declares: ‘I must confess that I occasionally despair of my capacity as a poet, solely because I have so few people whose opinion I can obtain. I am however, confident of ultimate success and that, as you [Don] say, is very important.’ And in his next on 5 May: ‘In the Observer this morning, I came across an extract, in a book review, from a poem by the ultra-modern poet, Dylan Thomas. Thomas is a very original writer – some of his poetry I like very much.’ He goes on to describe how the poem in question, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘epitomises the happy summer days of our childhood – the love of the woods and the rivers and hills’.
The young man revealed in these letters accords well with the boy recalled by his school friends. Indeed, in the first letter that survives, written from Llandudno, North Wales, in August 1944, Baker writes: ‘I have a book with me on my holiday, the only book I ever take with me everywhere I go; yes, you’ve guessed it – Pickwick – yet again do I marvel at the great Dickens’ mastery of the art.’
A year later Baker expounds at length his admiration for another author, the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, who, renowned for The Playboy of the Western World, drew his inspiration from visits between 1898 and 1901 to the remote group of three Aran Islands that lie west of Galway Bay, open to the full fetch of the Atlantic. Synge’s The Aran Islands notebooks were published in 1907. As Baker explains, they ‘give a faithful and vivid account of the people and their ways’. Baker argues that ‘it was Aran, that cradled his lovely, cadenced phraseology’, and that ‘for me they [the islands] will be a point of pilgrimage in my journeying through the countries of the mind’. All this was perhaps an influence on Baker’s acute and vivid style, and on his sustained interest in the wilderness and potential for solitude within his own home country.
On the last page of the same letter, Baker’s love of the Essex landscape is already clear, and, long before he is following peregrines, he is rehearsing some of the writing that appears in his later work: ‘The loveliest country of all lies between Gt. Baddow and West Hanningfield. Green undulating fields, rugged, furrowed earth, luscious orchards, pine clumps, rows of stately elms – all these combine and resolve into a delicately balanced landscape that can never become tedious to the eye. One cannot get far from people – from the little rustic cottages that huddle in the winding lanes. Yet the very proximity of these dwellings seems to give an impression of remoteness. / As you walk across these fields – Danbury stands all green and misty blue in the late afternoon of declining summer. Everchanging – sometimes assuming truly mountainous grandeur – it fascinates the eyes and brings an exaltation and a faith. / These last days of summer are delicate poems in green and gold – the clouds unfurl in unsurpassed magnificence and move me to tears for their passing. / This country with its little fields and murmuring streams that basks in its waning summer gold will still be there when you return – it is for you and all men, for it is beauty.’
Along with these letters, another recent revelation has given us some insight into Baker’s personal library. Following David Cobham’s interest in making a film of The Peregrine, Baker’s brother-in-law, Bernard Coe, took a series of photographs of the bookshelves in Doreen Baker’s house. Given that this was twenty years after Baker’s death, some books may have been lost, but the spines reveal titles on birds and nature, geography, geology, travel, aerial photography, atlases, cookery, cricket, opera and, of course, many volumes of literature, both prose and poetry. Poetry collections include Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Hardy, Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Roy Campbell, Richard Murphy, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Charles Causley and Ted Hughes.
In May 2009, when the author, Adam Foulds, reviewed The Peregrine in the Independent, he argued that Baker’s writing most resembled Ted Hughes’: ‘the harsh vitality of the living world is perceptible at every point.’ In 2005, the environmentalist Ken Worpole wrote that Baker was, ‘if anything … more ferocious in his identification with the animal world.’ Baker owned several collections of Hughes’ poetry, including Crow, Lupercal, Wodwo, Moortown Diary, Season Songs and his 1979 collaboration with the photographer Fay Goodwin, The Remains of Elmet.
Introducing The Peregrine, in his Beginnings section, Baker talks of writing honestly about killing. ‘I shall try to make plain the bloodiness of killing. Too often this has been slurred over by those who defend hawks. Flesh-eating man is in no way superior. It is so easy to love the dead. The word “predator” is baggy with misuse. All birds eat living flesh at some time in their lives. Consider the cold-eyed thrush, that spring carnivore of lawns, worm stabber, basher to death of snails. We should not sentimentalise his song, and forget the killing that sustains it.’ And consider too Hughes’ poem ‘Thrushes’, from the collection Lupercal, published in 1960, just when Baker was preparing to write The Peregrine: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, / More coiled steel than living – a poised / Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs / Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce, a stab / Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing. / No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares. / No sighs or head scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab / And a ravening second.’ And, in The Peregrine, on 20 December, Baker writes: ‘Song thrushes bounced and sprang to spear out the surfacing worms. There is something very cold about a thrush, endlessly listening and stabbing through the arras of grass, the fixed eye blind to what it does.’
With the end of J.A. Baker’s letters to Don Samuel in 1946, we enter another period of silence, although it appears that in 1950 Baker decided to train as a teacher. He would have been 23, and mentions the college in his birdwatching diary four years later on 4 April 1954, but only as background to an observation of a tree creeper: ‘Mousy little bird, with sharp call. First seen at college in 1950 from library window, intent on its own business.’ His contemporaries cannot remember the name of the teachers’ training college he attended, but all recall that it was not a success. Apparently, he loathed teaching practice, and dealing with children.
Soon after this, Baker joined the Automobile Association. His friends connived to get him the job. John Thurmer’s father was Regional Manager, and Don Samuel was already working in the Chelmsford office. Both agree it allowed Baker a chance to settle into some sort of stability.
At about this time, Baker met and fell in love with sixteen-year-old Doreen Coe. Ted Dennis remembers that they met when Baker found her bereft at missing a late bus, and gave her a ride home on his crossbar. Doreen’s father forbade her from marrying Baker before she was 21, so she waited, sticking with him, and they married on 6 October 1956. Baker was 30, and Doreen was 21 years and a month – almost to the day.
By then he was birdwatching regularly, crisscrossing the Chelmsford area on his bicycle. The diaries begin on 21 March 1954 and the last extant page is 22 May 1963. They run to 667 hand-written pages – all in a small stitched school notebook. Doreen told David Cobham that Baker’s habit was to retire to his study each evening, and write up his diaries. It is hard to believe that he took no notes at all in the field, though there is no evidence that he did so.
As is known, Baker became progressively crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, and was, by the early 1970s, seriously incapacitated. Close friends obviously knew of Baker’s growing ill-health, but another contemporary, Jack Baird, who remembers meeting Baker at a rare school reunion in the early 1980s, says he did not complain of it at all. Latterly, Doreen learned to drive, and bought a car, and would take Baker out to favourite haunts, leaving him to walk and sit a little and watch birds before collecting him in the evening. Certainly, John Thurmer says he remembers not a note of self-pity. Baker died on 26 December 1986. He was just 61.
Among fragments of letters to Baker was one from a reader, which praised a piece that Baker had written in RSPB Birds magazine in 1971. This essay formed part of a Birds issue dedicated to fighting against a proposal for a third London airport, and a deep-water port on the Maplin Sands, off Foulness. The article is entitled ‘On the Essex Coast’. Apart from a paper on peregrines which Baker wrote for the Essex Bird Report, this article appears to be his only other published piece of writing, and, with the kind agreement of the RSPB, we reproduce it here