The body of a woodpigeon lay breast upward on a mass of soft white feathers. The head had been eaten … The bones were still dark red, the blood still wet.
I found myself crouching over the kill, like a mantling hawk. My eyes turned quickly about, alert for the walking heads of men. Unconsciously I was imitating the movements of a hawk, as in some primitive ritual; the hunter becoming the thing he hunts … We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men.
The pronouns tell the story – ‘I’ turns into ‘we’; repetition becomes ritual; human dissolves into falcon. Allsop understood this drive for transformation to be the book’s central psychodrama: ‘The [book’s] strange and awful grip,’ he wrote, ‘is in the author’s wrestling to be rid of his humanness, to enter the hawk’s feathers, skin and spirit.’
Why might a man want to become a bird? Baker’s illness, and the pained discomfort of his daily life, bear upon this question. The peregrines – in their speed and freedom of manoeuvre, with their fabulous vision – idealized the physical abilities of which the earthbound, joint-crabbed, eye-dimmed Baker had been deprived. One can hear a hint of envy when, one November, Baker notes seeing a peregrine moving with ‘his usual loose-limbed panache’. The falcons embody all that is unavailable to him, and so they become first his prosthesis and then his totem: ‘the hunter becoming the thing he hunts’.
Baker was also suffering from intense species shame. The peregrines of Europe and North America were, at the time he wrote, suffering severe population decline. In 1962 Rachel Carson had alerted the world to the calamitous effects of pesticides on bird populations in Silent Spring. A year later a British raptor specialist called Derek Ratcliffe had published a landmark paper revealing the terrible impact of agrichemicals upon peregrine numbers in Britain. Pesticide use, notably DDT, was leading to an aggregation of toxins in raptor prey species, which in turn was causing eggshell thinning and nesting failure in the falcons. Their breeding success rate plummeted, with chicks typically dying in the egg. In 1939, Ratcliffe noted, there were 700 pairs of peregrines in Britain. A 1962 survey showed a decline to under half of this number, with only 68 pairs appearing to have reared chicks successfully. Baker was aware of both Ratcliffe and Carson’s work; as was J. G. Ballard, whose work Baker admired, and whose story ‘Storm-bird, Storm-dreamer’ (1966) imagines a future in which pesticide overuse has caused massive growth in the bird species of the country, who then begin coordinated attacks on the English crop-fields in an attempt to feed their vast hungers. The south-east English coastline becomes a militarized zone, with anti-aircraft guns mounted on barges, there to resist aerial attacks not by Heinkels but by hawks.
In the mid 1960s, as he laboured over his drafts of The Peregrine, it must have seemed likely to Baker that the peregrine would vanish from southern England, extinguished by what he called ‘the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. Over a decade he had watched the dwindling of peregrine numbers: ‘Few winter in England now, fewer nest here … the ancient eyries are dying.’ Thus the atmosphere of requiem that prevails in The Peregrine: a sadness that things should be this way, mixed with a disbelief that they might be changed. Occasionally, the elegiac tone flares into anger. Out walking on 24 December, a day of cusps and little light, Baker finds a near-dead heron lying in a stubble field. Its wings are frozen to the ground, but in a ghastly thwarted escape, it tries to fly off:
As I approached I could see its whole body craving into flight. But it could not fly. I gave it peace, and saw the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud.
No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man … A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it. A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis … will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes.
We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.
‘We stink of death. We carry it with us.’ By this point in The Peregrine, we understand these to be the words of a man who feels himself stricken with disease – and of a man appalled to belong to his own kind. He wants to resign his humanity, and to partake of both the far-sight and the guiltless murders of the falcon.
~
Towards the end of the afternoon in the archive, I took Baker’s telescopes and binoculars one by one to the window. There was a view of beech trees, concrete buildings, and a lecture hall with a curved zinc roof. I tried out each instrument in turn. When I extended the Steward scope, there was an ominous rattle from its interior. I held it to my eye and stared into milk. The eyepiece was misty, glaucous. I tried the other telescope, brass and heavy. But it was missing its front lens, and there was only blackness to be seen, with a tiny circle of light at its centre.
Both pairs of binoculars, though, were scratched but functioning. Through the Mirakels I tracked wood pigeons on their clap-clap-glide crossings of the campus sky, passing over the green-gold of late-season oaks. Through the Mirandas I watched a wagtail figure-eighting for flies above the zinc of the lecture hall.
Binocular vision is a peculiarly exclusive form of looking. It draws a circle around the focused-on object and shuts out the world’s generous remainder. What binoculars grant you in focus and reach, they deny you in periphery. To view an object through them is to see it in crisp isolation, encircled by blackness – as though at the end of a tunnel. They permit a lucidity of view but enforce a denial of context, and as such they seemed to me then the perfect emblem of Baker’s own intense, and intensely limited, vision. I thought of him out in the field towards the end of his decade of hedge-haunting and hawk-hunting; how difficult it must have become to hold the binoculars, as his finger joints thickened and fused, and his tendons tightened.
The Peregrine, a record of obsession, has itself in turn provoked obsessions. It is a book which sets the mind aloft and holds it there. In the archive I found scores of admiring letters written to Baker by readers. Some wished to acquire his supernatural abilities as a tracker: ‘I hope to have the good fortune to see Peregrine somewhere in the [Blackwater] estuary on Thursday Feb 9th or Friday Feb 10th,’ wrote one – as if Baker the magus might magic these wild birds up to order. A student of mine was so inspired by The Peregrine’s vision of human irresponsibility that she became an eco-activist, paddling kayaks up rivers to gain illegal access to coal-fired power stations. Several years ago I came to know a young musician living a marginal life in a south London squat and performing as the front man for a hardcore punk-rock band. He was a talented and troubled person, for whom ‘nature’ as conventionally experienced was irrelevant, tending to incomprehensible. But he had found his way to The Peregrine, and the book’s dark fury spoke to him. He read it repeatedly, and began to mimic Baker’s mimicry of the falcons: once, on a London street outside a club, he demonstrated the action of ‘mantling’ – when a peregrine spreads its wings, fans its tail and arches over its prey to hide it from other predators. He and I collaborated on a project one summer and made plans to work together again. Then that December he died of a heroin overdose, aged twenty-three. He was lowered into the cold hard earth of a Cornish field a few days before Christmas, with the cars of his friends pulled up around the grave, their stereos blasting out his music in tribute. Buried with him was a copy of the book he revered above all others.
I am another of those obsessives, differently stricken, unable to free myself from The Peregrine’s grip. As Nan changed the way I see mountains, so Baker changed the way I see coasts and skies. I have written often about the book, and followed Baker’s own wanderings through Essex as best I have been able to reconstruct them: hunting the hunter’s huntings. The opening sentences of a book of mine called The Wild Places knowingly invoke the opening sentences of The Peregrine; Baker is present through the whole wor
k, his style stooped into its prose.
When I have seen peregrines I have seen them, or I remember them, at least partly in Baker’s language. A falcon up at the Mare’s Tail waterfall in the Scottish Borders, riding along the rim of the sky in a tremendous serration of rebounding dives and ascensions, then dipping down in hooping dive to its nest on the cliffs of the cataract. A breeding pair high above a crag in misty sunlight on the side of long Loch Ericht in the Central Highlands, heard first, giving high, husky muffled calls, keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk, keerk, sharp-edged and barbarous, then appearing as dark crossbow shapes. And then the peregrine that morning, before leaving for the archive, first a tremor at the edge of vision, then at last sculling away with quick wing flicks.
The month I finished writing this chapter, eight months after I had been to the archive, a pair of peregrines took up residence on the great brown brick tower of the university library in Cambridge. They made their nest on a ledge high on the tower’s south side, in front of one of the small windows that let light into the dim miles of book-stacks. A friend told me one afternoon that they had arrived, and gave me directions to the window: South Front Floor 6, Case Number 42. I went the next morning, rising up the tower in a cranky lift, and approaching the window cautiously. I could see feather fluff and guano; then, tucked in tight to the retaining tiles, a clutch of three eggs, brick-red and black-flecked. And suddenly I stepped back, because she was there also, scything in and up to the edge of the ledge and perching, the feathers of her piebald breast rippled by the wind, her yellow feet gripping the ledge, the ridged knuckles tense, and big with muscle, and her great black eyes looking into mine, or rather through me, as though they see something beyond me from which they cannot look away.
Glossary IV
Coastlands
Bays, Channels and Inlets
barra channel cut in a rocky shore for boats to enter Manx
caol narrow channel between two islands, or between an island and the mainland Gaelic
caul embankment built across a river or an inlet of the sea to divert water Galloway
cilan small inlet, creek (place-name element) Welsh
crenulate of a shoreline: having many small irregular bays formed by the action of waves on softer rock geographical
firth arm of the sea; estuary Scots
gat gap in an offshore sandbank East Anglia
geo, gjo coastal cleft; narrow, rocky-sided bay Gaelic, especially Orkney, Outer Hebrides, Shetland
gunk-hole small narrow channel that is dangerous to navigate, owing to current and to numerous rocks and ledges nautical
laimrig clear channel between rocks; marine landing place Gaelic
mijn mouth of a voe Shetland
oyce lagoon formed where a bar of shingle has been thrown up across the head of a bay Orkney, Shetland
pill tidal creek or stream south-west England
sump muddy shallow near the mouth of a creek, offering anchorage Kent
swatch passage or channel of water lying between sandbanks, or between a sandbank and the shore East Anglia
vaddel gulf that fills and empties with the flowing and ebbing of the sea, commonly at the head of a voe Shetland
voe inlet or arm of the sea Shetland
wik little open bay Shetland
zawn vertical fissure or cave cut by wave action into a coastal cliff Cornwall
Cliffs, Headlands and Defences
bill promontory southern England
cadha way up the ragged face of a cliff Gaelic
dragon’s teeth rows of concrete blocks or pyramidal shapes laid on beaches and tidal flats to prevent tanks from landing and becoming operational military
gabion large wire or netting baskets containing earth or rubble to provide protection or reinforcing against military attack or coastal erosion conservation, military
heuch cliff above water Scots
neap, noup lofty headland dropping steeply into the sea Shetland
ness promontory, cape or headland North Sea coast
revetment retaining wall, usually sloping: in military terms to defend a position or vulnerable site; in coastal management to protect the shoreline against erosion conservation, military
rhu, roo headland Galloway
rock armour large stones, boulders or concrete rubble used to defend a sea wall, usually in the form of a revetment conservation
scon footway linking beach and cliff-top Suffolk
squilving-ground land which slants towards the sea at the edge of a cliff Exmoor
tairbeart isthmus between two sea lochs Gaelic
wannen-place ‘one-end place’, such as a projecting seaside resort only accessible from one direction Suffolk
Currents, Waves and Tides
adnasjur large wave or waves, coming after a succession of lesser ones Shetland
af’luva, af’rug reflex of a wave after it has struck the shore Shetland
ar’ris last weak movements of a tide before still water Shetland
bòc-thonnach covered with swelling waves Gaelic
bod jumping motion of waves Shetland
bore, eagre tide-wave of extraordinary height, usually caused by the rushing of the tide up a narrowing estuary hydrological
bretsh breaking of waves on a rocky shore Shetland
cockling of a sea: jerked up into short waves by contrary currents Lancashire
faks to swell up with a threatening motion without breaking, as a wave Shetland
ootrogue undercurrent from shore, taking sand out with it North Sea coast
pirr light breath of wind, such as will make a cat’s paw on the water; a light breeze Shetland
roost turbulent tidal race formed by the meeting of conflicting currents Orkney, Shetland
saatbrak foam and spray of the surge Shetland
smooth calm sea, usually around the sixth or seventh wave in a sequence, used to launch and beach longshore boats Suffolk
sruthladh violent motion of waves advancing upon and receding from the shore Gaelic
Fishing and Boats
an’du to keep a boat in position by rowing gently against the tide Shetland
back fu’ wind on the wrong side of the sail North Sea coast
bak’flan sudden gust of wind which, by mischance, strikes a boat’s sail on the back side (i.e. the lee side) and so endangers the boat Shetland
berth small area of beach on which a longshoreman kept his boats Suffolk
bichter stone used as an anchor to long lines Shetland
bill bubble-like ripple made by the stroke of an oar in water Shetland
blash, plash to hit the water with an oar (or similar) in order to disturb and drive fish when inshore, netting for salmon North Sea coast
blaze to take salmon by striking them at night, by torchlight, with a three-pronged spear North Sea coast
breast mark at sea, a landmark (church, lighthouse, coastguard buildings) sighted from abeam Suffolk
broached knocked sideways by the sea North Sea coast
cade measure of herrings or sprats Suffolk
caraidh fish-trap with low walls Gaelic
comharran twin markings on land used to give an offshore boat its location Gaelic
dabba stick with point on end used by children to catch flatfish on sand North Sea coast
dan flag on lobster pot Cornwall
dopper oilskin North Sea coast
eela fishing with a rod from a boat anchored in shallow water near the land Shetland
fendi capable of fending off the waves; having the qualities of a good sea boat Shetland
gear lobster pots Cornwall
girt to be caught by a powerful tide or surge of water while in a boat or craft south-east England
glister squall, squally
weather Manx
griping groping at arm’s length in the soft mud of the tidal streams for flounders and eels Kent
gyte fish-slime North Sea coast
herengro matcho crab Anglo-Romani
holly to leave lobsters in boxes in the sea for a period of time North Sea coast
jip to gut herrings Suffolk
kep-shite skua, so called because it chases other birds until they drop their food, thought by fishermen to be droppings North Sea coast
limmitter lobster with one claw missing North Sea coast
long-mark landmark sighted from ahead Suffolk
luff to sail nearer to the wind nautical
matchkani gav Yarmouth (literally ‘fish village’, from the European Romani words macho, ‘fish’, and gav, ‘village’) Anglo-Romani
meith landmark used by sailors Scots
pallag lump on a hill as seen from the sea, used as a fishing mark in association with other objects Manx
plouncing beating the surface of the water of dykes in marshlands with leafy branches to drive fish along into nets Suffolk
skurr fishing ground near the shore with a hard bottom Shetland
slogger sucking sound made by waves against a ship’s side (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic
soft general term for a fishing ground with a sandy bottom North Sea coast
swad fine green weed that grows on ropes, etc. North Sea coast
thwart seat across a boat nautical
tommy small crab, thrown back North Sea coast
trim the most advantageous set of a ship in the water, and/or the most advantageous adjustment of a ship’s sails nautical
wow-tin fisherman’s lunch tin North Sea coast
Lights, Hazes, Mists and Fogs
aggy-jaggers mist that forms along the sea edge north Kent coast
bar’ber haze which rises from the surface of sea water when the air is very cold Shetland