The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (30 page)

We had shared adventures, and there would have been others to come, but for the cancer. A night stake-out of a badger in Thornham Woods, near Walnut Tree Farm. A trip to Cumbria in the coming autumn, to climb and swim and give a joint lecture. At some point a journey to Australia, where we had both been invited to speak. When the invitation had arrived, Roger had wondered if we could earn our passage out to the Antipodes as oarsmen on a quinquereme. I hadn’t been sure that we could.

I tried not to grieve too much: to do so seemed somehow to deny the worth of Roger’s extraordinary life. But I still could not rid myself of a sense of waste. I had wanted to know Roger as he aged into his seven-tiesand his eighties, for he would have grown old, properly old, so superbly. He was an expert in age: in its charisma and its worth. Everything he owned was worn, used, re-used. If anyone would have known how to age well, it would have been Roger.

One night after his death, feeling morose, I read back through our correspondence. His e-mails were sharp, erudite and always inset with beautiful little field-notes, told for the joy of telling. His letters, which he preferred to write by hand, would often be accompanied by a poem, or a leaf or a feather; once a bunch of tiny teasels for Lily. One passage from the correspondence stood out, evoked Roger and his world instantly. It was the spring before his diagnosis, and he was in excitement about new arrivals at Walnut Tree Farm:

The next day, someone wrote to me to say that having heard about Walnut Tree Farm, from the obituaries that had been written about Roger, she had added it to her ‘list of imagined magical places’. I liked that very much, liked the idea of Roger’s home becoming somewhere magical even to people who had never been there: part of the wild maps they held in their minds.

13

Saltmarsh

The autumn equinox was close, and a northerly wind blew down across the east of Britain from Scandinavia, carrying with it cold temperatures and migrating birds. Through the blue skies were arriving fieldfares, mistle thrushes, redwings, starlings, rooks, lapwings, coming in from Siberian river deltas and Finnish forests. They arrived with the Arctic trapped in their feathers, landing in gusts on the newly ploughed fields, or flying overhead in chattering companionable groups. Raptors came too, singly or in pairs: sparrowhawks, peregrines, leaving their boreal roosts, moving south as the Arctic coasts became too cold for them, and the polar sea began to grow its bark of ice. As I walked home one day, a sparrowhawk came past me at a low glide, then rose up to the branch of a glossy laurel tree across the road. It perched there for perhaps half a minute - barred tigerish chest, airman’s helmet of grey-blue feathers, burnt-yellow eyes - then pushed off the branch and sculled out of sight, leaving the laurel tree shivering.

As the bird migration got underway, I decided to travel south-east, out to the clays of the Essex coast, where woodland and field frayed away to saltmarshes, and the saltmarshes gave into miles of shining mudflats. Out there I would be able to watch the moving birds, and I hoped the journey might somehow help me shift the sadness of Roger’s death, which I was finding impossible to shake off or even lessen. It occurred to me, too, that the mud would complete the mineral dissolve of my journeys: begun on hard rock, in Essex they would reach the softest and most yielding substance of the archipelago, its tidal muds.

I left home on a bright mid-September morning. Another northerly was blowing. A pale lemony sun hung low in the sky, throwing a light that fell unexpectedly hot on the face. There was the vinegary smell of windfallen apples in my garden. Chestnuts bobbed like little mines in park ponds. I drove at first through the landscape of Essex - the poor mocked Essex of jokes and news items - passing chain pubs with pseudo-Tudor frontages, and business parks in ‘Phase II of Construction’: colonies of unfinished corrugated-steel hangars. I counted ten second-hand car dealerships: showrooms of metal and glass, blank-plated BMWs and Mercedes parked in obedient ranks on the outdoor lots, and red and white bunting strung between the arc-lights overhead. St George’s crosses were everywhere, snapping in the wind on domestic flagpoles, or hanging as air-fresheners from rear-view mirrors. Somewhere away to my south, I knew, was the industrial shoreline of Dagenham, and the oil refineries at Coryton, which at night released sudden air-balloon flares and licks of flame from their chimneys. Once I passed a roadside shop selling garden ornaments. Its forecourt was filled with gnomes, and Bambi-like deer, lying at rest with their legs crooked up beneath them. In pride of place at the front of the display was a plaster falcon of indeterminate species, perched on a polka-dotted toadstool twice its size.

But as I got further east, deeper into the county, away from the main roads and the towns, the marks of this new retail Essex thinned out and fell back. Farmland began to border the roads. A digger dozed up a pile of manure twice its own height, which steamed in the morning air. Tractors gave new naps to thousand-acre fields. Old Man’s Beard climbed profusely through the chain-link fencing on a stretch of roadside. A group of magpies joked in a stand of beech trees. A line of willows leaned out over the road, trailing fingertips over the roofs of passing cars. The density of woodland thickened until it was visible on every horizon.

Near the village of Woodham Walter, I stopped, my eye caught by the sign bolted to a big zinc gate. ‘Falconer’s Lodge’, it read. I got out, and as if by proof of place, a small sparrowhawk slipped from a hedgerow oak a few yards away from me, and made a concave glide to the next tree along. It stood on a low bough, observing me. It seemed to have orange eyes, and from this I guessed it was an old bird. For as sparrowhawks age, the colour of their irises changes. They are born with pale yellow irises, that darken to orange over time, until, in the very oldest birds, the eye blazes red in colour.

Falcons, hawks and other raptors had slipped in and out of all my journeys, and now I had come to Essex to hunt these hunters, and to see if wildness existed in this far south-east of the country. I had come, too, on the path of someone who had himself entered into an obsessive relationship with the birds.

Each autumn and winter, between 1953 and 1963, a man called John Baker tracked the peregrines of coastal Essex. ‘Peregrines arrive on the east coast from mid-August to November,’ Baker wrote. ‘They may come in from the sea in any weather conditions, but are most likely to do so on a clear sunny day with a fresh north-west wind blowing.’ Every autumn, once the hawks had arrived, Baker would follow them - at dusk and dawn, and often for whole cold days - through the mixed landscape of woodland, field, sea wall, mudflat and saltmarsh over which they flew. Baker could not fully explain his fixation with the birds; he knew only that he was committed to a quest whose meaning he did not understand, but whose necessity he could not refute. So absolute was his commitment that, during the months of pursuit each year, he would go almost entirely feral, avoiding human contact as far as possible, keeping to cover wherever he could.

For a decade, while Orion stood bright in the sky, the peregrines hunted and Baker hunted them. Following the falcons for so many miles, he came to know the Essex landscape intimately: its boulder clays and river gravels, its cricket-bat willows and hazel coppices. He moved, once winter arrived, along ‘the bone-white coral of frosted hedges’, and through ‘black hard winter woods’. He watched small waders - knots, plovers, turnstones - form their palping jellyfish-like shoals in the air over the mudflats. He tracked nightingales from the sound of their singing. He collected beautifully marked feathers: partridge, tern, woodpecker, peregrine.

Baker became, during those years of chase, an explorer of what he called the ‘beyond-world’: the wild world of birds and small creatures that existed in hedgerows, in woodlands, in the air, and out on the coastal borderlands of the mudflats and saltmarshes. This ‘beyond-world’ was always occurring, mingling with our world of tarmac and cars and pesticides and tractors, rarely more than a turn of the head or a turn in the road away. Most people were entirely blind to this world, but Baker saw it wherever he looked. In his eyes, the Essex landscape - never more than 150 metres above sea-level, only fifty miles from London, heavily farmed - was as inspiring and elemental as the Pamirs or the Arctic.

I had become interested in Baker through
The Peregrine
, the book he wrote about his decade of falcon-hunting, which had been acclaimed as a masterpiece on its publication in 1967. I had read the book again and again, for its wildness and its fierce beauty. It set my imagination aloft, and kept it there.

One reason for Baker’s pursuit of the peregrines was that he feared for their survival as a species. By the 1950s, the atrocious impact of pesticides upon bird populations in Britain was becoming clear. In 1939 there had been 700 British peregrine pairs; a 1962 survey showed a decline to half this number, with only sixty-eight pairs appearing to have reared chicks successfully. Sparrowhawks, too, had almost disappeared. It would have seemed likely to Baker that both hawks and falcons would become extinct due to what he called ‘the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals’. ‘I remember those winter days,’ he wrote of the pre-war years, ‘those frozen fields ablaze with warring hawks . . . It is sad that it should be so no longer. The ancient eyries are dying.’

The medieval patterns of the Essex countryside, too, were under threat at that time, as the county was drastically reshaped for the purposes of agribusiness. Hedges were grubbed up to make vast open fields. Thousands of spinneys and copses were bulldozed, and many old lanes and shallower holloways were filled in and farmed over. Rivers and streams foamed with surfactants, and became choked with water-weed, that grew in abundance due to nitrogen run-off from fertilisers.

Baker found the decline of the raptors and the damage to the landscape almost unbearable. His only solace came in following the peregrines. Hunting as haunting. Out in the fields, he was brought closer to wildness: he could step through the looking-glass and into the beyond-world. Out there, he was also able to forget the fact that he himself was ill. For Baker was suffering from severe and worsening arthritis, particularly in his arms and legs. It was becoming more and more difficult for him to hold his pen or his binoculars, as his fingers tightened in on themselves, curled over. Hands clenching into talons.

Half a century on, I had come to Baker’s hunting ground. I wanted to follow some of the routes he had taken, and to explore this county in his footsteps and through his eyes. To see if, in this month of migration, I could find my way into his beyond-world. My plan was to begin in the county’s wooded interior, and from there move out towards the coast, where the migrating birds - redshank, dunlin, gulls of several kinds - would be settling in their thousands on the mudflats.

Before leaving, I had called up copies of the 1950s Ordnance Survey maps of Essex, and read them off against the present-day versions to see what had changed. The woodlands had shrunk, the towns had swollen and the fields had expanded: all this was clear from the comparison. But there were still thousands of acres of native woodland there: ash, maple and hazel woods in the north-west, lime and low elm in the mid-north, and hornbeam in the south. Its distribution dated in the main from the Middle Ages. Scrutinising the new maps, one name in particular had caught my eye: ‘The Wilderness’ - a long thin skein of broadleaf wood, stretching round to the east of the old village of Woodham Walter. It was an area through which I knew Baker had tracked the peregrines.

I left the car near the entrance to Falconer’s Lodge, and began the walk to The Wilderness, following footpaths that led down the edges of freshly ploughed fields, and through small copses. The hedges were still heavy with fruit: plump blackberries, hard orange haws on the turn to red. The smell of ripe fruit and new earth was thick in the air. I ate handfuls of blackberries. A red admiral on a fence post let its wings fall open like a book. The hedgerows were slung with spider’s silk, and I recalled the webby corners of Roger’s house. Huge females sat in the centres of their webs: big tawny creatures, whose colours reminded me of Rannoch Moor.

The Wilderness was only half a mile from the road. After a few minutes’ walk, I turned a corner of a hedge, and followed a faint path into a tunnel of old elders that led into the wood like a secret passage.

There, immediately, at my feet was a kill: a woodpigeon on its back, wings cast out to either side like fans, a pillow-burst of breast feathers. The quills of several of its tail feathers were shorn off halfway through: it had been killed by a fox, not a falcon or hawk. A peregrine or sparrowhawk would have zipped open the chest; the peregrine would have crushed the breastbone, the sparrowhawk would have nipped it out and discarded it.