J.A. Baker was a nature writer. Born in 1926 he remains a figure hidden – deliberately – behind his prose. His most famous (of two) works is The Peregrine, which chronicles, in condensed form, Baker’s ten-year fascination with the peregrine falcons he observed near his hometown of Chelmsford, Essex. The admirers of this book are legion: Robert Macfarlane, Werner Herzog, Sir David Attenborough.
His other, lesser known work is The Hill of Summer. The book has twelve chapters. Starting in May, ending in September, Baker presents experiences of place: beech wood, a river, an estuary. He writes in an intensely present tense, as close to a state of meditative awareness that it’s possible to get on paper.
Baker lived in Writtle, just outside Chelmsford. I grew up in Springfield, on the other side of the town. These twelve chapters may refer to places I think I know: the Essex coastline at Goldhanger, woods near Danbury, poplars by the Chelmer south of Boreham. Sickness prevented Baker from driving, but he cycled and he was driven by his wife. These places may have been elsewhere. I can’t be sure and it doesn’t matter. Baker’s writing enables visceral experience. Readers are drawn into woods, onto earth, under skies. His writing captures what it means to be sentient in a natural environment.
These sketches are not particular to place. They were inspired by Baker’s writing and my own experience – and memories – of Essex.
Why pastels? It seems appropriate. Quick, momentary, intense.
“The oaks and chestnuts of the lower slopes are now recognisable as individual trees, but the pines do not come any closer. They keep their sombre remoteness, their suggestion of a different country… .” The Hill of Summer: July: A River
‘The barley is whiter, blonde… Each stalk sways over at a different angle as the breeze blows them apart, so that the whole field breathes open and seals again with an endless ocean swell.” The Hill of Summer: July: A River
“Within the grove, there is always the smell of sun-warmed resin… The spirit of this place is elusive, it escapes into the surrounding air. Yet something breathes upon the edge of vision, like rain beginning… At a distance the grove seems to have entity, the self-possession of a single tree. But go in, and at once the wholeness leaps apart, fragmenting into more than individual trees.” The Hill of Summer: May: A Journey
“Water, air, and light, float upward together. This is the world of the sky, of the east wind, of the ancestral sea. There is a strange breathlessness in the air.” The Hill of Summer. August: Estuary
“To be in these woods then was to be in a beyond world. Towns and people had no meaning. They were shut out by the horizon, by the shining rim of the trees… I could only go forward, treading stealthily through the mossy gloom…”. The Hill of Summer: May: A Storm
