Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape

By James Canton

Beyond the brash modern stereotypes of Essex there exists a landscape that has inspired some of England's finest writing. This book tracks the paths of those literary figures who have ventured into the wilder parts of Essex. Some are illustrious names: Shakespeare, Defoe, John Clare, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Arthur Ransome. Others may be lesser known but here are well remembered: Samuel Purchas, Sabine Baring-Gould, Margery Allingham, J. A. Baker. In ten chapters James Canton crosses five centuries into the furthest reaches of the county in search of writers and what can be seen of their work today. J. A. Baker follows the peregrines along the Chelmer valley to the Blackwater estuary at Maldon. John Clare wanders the hidden pathways of Epping Forest scribbling poetry while Arthur Ransome sails around the islands of the Hamford Waters. William Shakespeare appears in the woody glades beside Castle Hedingham, Joseph Conrad stares across the Essex marshes at Tilbury to the Thames, while Sabine Baring-Gould's Gothic heroine Mehalah lives upon a lone muddy stretch beside Mersea Island, where Margery Allingham sets her first tale of smuggling and murder; Daniel Defoe recounts the horror of the ague on the Dengie Peninsula; H. G. Wells writes a tale of the First World War from his home at Little Easton. Samuel Purchas tells such seafaring tales from his Southend vicarage as to inspire Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write Kubla Khan. Combining detailed literary detective work with personal responses to landscapes and their meanings, James Canton offers a fresh vision of Essex, its cultural history and its living legacy of wilderness and imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signal Books
• Release date: Jul 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781908493866

James Canton

Dr. James Canton runs the Wild Writing MA at the University of Essex and is the author of Ancient Wonderings and Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape, which was inspired by his rural wandering in East Anglia. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Essex and reviews for the TLS, Caught by the River, and Earthlines. Canton is a regular on British television and radio and lectures frequently. He lives in Essex, England.

Book preview

essex.

Seeking J. A. Baker

Little Baddow And The Chelmer Valley

October 9th. Fog hid the day in steamy heat. It smelt acrid and metallic, fumbling my face with cold, decaying fingers. It lay by the road like a jurassic saurian, fetid and inert in a swamp.

As the sun rose, the fog shredded and whirled and died away under bushes and hedges. By eleven o’clock the sun was shining from the centre of a great blue circle. Fog burned outwards from its edge, like a dwindling white corona. Colour flamed up from the kindled land. Skylarks sang. Swallows and martins flew downstream.

J. A. Baker, The Peregrine (1967)¹

BY HOE MILL LOCK on the River Chelmer, the sun was also shining. I had ventured down from the wastes of North essex to tread the land of a man who had started to seep into my thoughts. John Alec Baker had walked this landscape every day for at least a decade of his life. I was now on Baker’s footsteps. The date was also 9 October; sometime between forty and fifty years after his diary entry.

***

J. A. Baker spent much of his life watching birds. For ten years, from the mid 1950s, he walked along the river valleys of the Chelmer and then continued out along the edges of the estuaries of the Blackwater on the trail of a particular type of bird: the peregrine falcon. each autumn a handful of the birds, typically two pairs, returned to winter in essex; each spring they departed for the Scandinavia summer. every day Baker made detailed notes on the birds, the landscape and the weather. By 1965 he had quit all other work, all life pursuits, and turned entirely to his study of the peregrines of essex. His search for the few remaining birds to escape the deadly effects of men with guns and pesticides drew Baker closer to the bird. He came to know the patterns of the birds’ lives, their bathing places in the streams which fed the Chelmer, their favoured perches. As he tracked them, so the birds came to know Baker. As the earth turned to spring, he found he could get nearer to them without their flight. The birds grew used to Baker. Wearing the same clothes to forge a relationship of familiarity, Baker became a stable presence in the landscape and so something to accept rather than something to fear.

The book which finally emerged from those endless hours of patient study was called simply The Peregrine and was published in 1967, winning the Duff Cooper Prize, a literary award given to the year’s outstanding work of non- fiction. The bulk of the book was a series of diary entries that tracked one year in the life of the essex peregrines and their ever more intimate human follower. It is a year that runs from 1 October to 4 April. In the preface to the Penguin paperback edition, first published in 1976 and reprinted in 1984, there are some brief, teasing details about the author:

John A. Baker lives with his wife in essex. He has no telephone and rarely goes out socially. Since leaving school at the age of seventeen he has had some fifteen assorted jobs, which have included chopping down trees and pushing book trolleys in the British Museum, and none of which was a great success. In 1965 he gave up all work and lived on the money he had saved, devoting all his time to his obsession- the peregrine. He re-wrote his account of this bird five times before submitting it for publication. Although he had no ornithological training and had never written a book before, when The Peregrine was published in 1967 it was received with enthusiastic reviews and praise for his lyrical prose.²

When I first read the passage I had been in my own essex landscape for a couple of years. There was something wonderfully romantic in the notion of Baker as a social recluse, itinerant worker and wanderer of essex who found something on which to fix his mind and who, with no training, lifted his pen, tracing and retracing his words until he achieved a masterpiece. I was held by the mystique of Baker’s story before I even started to read The Peregrine. Some years later, when I returned to the book, I resolved to follow Baker’s footsteps just as he had trailed the paths of the peregrines.

***

9 October. I walked from the village of goldhanger, out and round the sea path that runs between the marshes and the estuary. I had come to try to spot a peregrine. I sat on a bench which looked over goldhanger Creek and the wider estuary, out towards the low carcass of Osea Island. The sun shone. My map was flapping happily. From the creek came the scraping of sandpaper on wood. A man was working on a boat, deserted in the heavy mud of low tide - marooned. I had already been to Woodham Walter in the morning tracing a contemporary reference to Baker. Rob Macfarlane had written in The Wild Places of walking ‘east of the old village of Woodham Walter’ on the Baker trail. Macfarlane had forged into an area of woodland called The Wilderness, ‘on the path of someone who had himself entered into an obsessive relationship with the birds’.3 I too had followed the trail to Woodham Walter and after walking along the northern bank of the Chelmer from Hoe Mill Lock for an hour or so, had returned to the village to seek anyone who might know about Baker or his book.

In The Victoria pub the only customers were a middle-aged couple saying their goodbyes to the landlord - a kindly-faced man with prematurely whitened hair. Something in his appearance made me think he’d worked in the city, in finance, and had thrown it all in, come out to the sticks to run a country pub. I made my greetings and ordered a half of the Oscar Wilde brewed by the Mighty Oak brewery of Maldon. I reasoned that it would be a good conversation starter and launched into a discussion on the ales of essex. The landlord was friendly enough and handed me a half pint of a dark mild the colour of liquorice. It tasted foul. I produced the aging Penguin edition of The Peregrine from my bag and asked it he knew of a John Baker who had lived in the village in the 1950s and 1960s. He didn’t. He suggested I try at the post office opposite the pub.

‘If he lived in this village, then Lucy will be able to tell you about him,’ he observed and turned the talk back to his forthcoming Beer Festival at the weekend.

I finished the Oscar Wilde, glad I’d only ordered a half.

The post office had something distinctly unusual about it. It was a converted chapel and split into two halves; one with a glass counter where you bought your stamps, sent parcels and the like; the other half, a village shop with a table-top counter. I stepped into the shop and glanced at the wares while I waited. There was a curious display of Coleman’s mustard boxes, some of which had started to show signs of rust. Of the items for sale among the collection of sweets, drinks and cards was a dual wall-socket kit which impressed me enormously. I had needed one only the week before. If I’d lived in Woodham Walter I could have bought it from the village shop.

A late-middle-aged lady with white curls and a white jumper stepped down from the post office to the shop counter. I explained that I’d been sent from The Victoria. I produced the book and said I was after John Baker, that I believed he’d lived in Woodham Walter in the 1950s and 1960s, that he might even still live there. She looked at the book, then back at me.

‘Don’t know of a John Baker,’ she stated firmly after a few seconds’ thought.

‘Though there was a family of that name that lived in the village. Some time ago.’ I nodded.

‘Lucy will know,’ she declared. ‘She’s due in at two. Works Thursdays and Fridays.’

It was not yet noon by the shop clock. I asked if I could leave my number for Lucy. Perhaps she would call me. I wrote my name and telephone number on a scrap of paper. She picked up the book from the counter.

‘It’s about this area,’ I said. ‘About watching birds. Peregrine falcons.’

‘Good is it?’ she asked

‘It’s brilliant,’ I replied. There was another customer waiting, so I thanked her for her time, collected the book and said my goodbyes.

‘If Lucy don’t know, there’s always her older sister. She’ll know. She knows everything about the village.’

***

On the bench overlooking goldhanger Creek the sun glistened off the mud. I opened the book and returned to Baker’s words. It was 8 October, yesterday- years ago. He too was out on the estuary though the tide was high, the curlew forced out to the fields.

I looked up, and saw a falcon peregrine circling overhead. She kept above me as I moved nearer to the waders, hoping I would put them up. She may have been uncertain what they were. I stayed still, crouching like the waders, looking up at the dark crossbow shape of the hawk. She came lower, peering down at me. She called once: a wild, skirling ‘airk, airk, airk, airk, airk’. When nothing moved she soared away inland.

As I closed the book I noticed there was a couple on the path, close to approaching.

The monotonous sounds of sanding from the boat in the creek had disguised their footsteps. I drank the tea down and tackled the flapping map. They passed with a greeting. I stayed on the bench until two men carrying tripods over their shoulders, the scaffolds of serious birdwatchers, had also passed by.

The bird appeared just a minute later. It glided along forty feet from the estuary floor heading inland towards Lauriston Farm. I caught it in the binoculars, reeling at the thrill of the sighting, enthralled in the silence it brought. I followed its serene flight as it cruised over the two birdwatchers whose vast lenses were pointed at the waders on the distant shore line. It was a peregrine: dark, sleek, a powerful presence in the sky. The thought that came into my mind was of a great white shark; a vast, terrifying creature passing by and all those it threatened suddenly alert, aware of that mighty threat, of the potential of death. The air was tight, breathless. Then all seemed to gently sigh, to relax, as the falcon headed inland, and crows rose to croak and mob.

It was later when I had lost sight of the bird to a distant copse on the higher ground beyond the marshes that I returned to the notion of the great white which the sudden appearance of the bird had conjured. As the great white shark is the ultimate predator in the sea, so the peregrine is supreme in the sky. I headed around the sea wall, in the rough direction of the peregrine, past a series of hillocked marsh islands in the inlet, past Joyce’s Farm. In the grey blue- black of the two creatures there was something more that united them - the sleekness of their unhurried manner. They were fearless for they had nothing to fear, except man. The peregrine flew with the grace and ease which I had always associated with the great white. I was a child of the 1970s; Jaws had made a powerful impression on all our young minds. In the essex estuaries I had witnessed the passage of a great white of the skies.

***

It was not my first essex peregrine. Almost a year before, with three days to go to my daughter eva’s first birthday, I had headed off to the Dengie Peninsula. I had been reading Baker again and become entangled in his world. eva was due to have a Naming Ceremony, with Non-god Parents and poems of significance. I parked the car at the end of the Roman road in Bradwell-on-Sea, wondering whether ‘Beattie is Three’ by Adrian Mitchell really needed to be recited to those soon to be assembled. The path led to the Chapel of St. Peter on the Wall, also known as St. Cedd’s abbey. This square of stone sitting on the headland had been in place since the seventh century. It had been built from the remains of the Roman fort of Othona, the finest of nine strongholds constructed along the english coast to guard against Saxon pirates.

Before I had even reached the abbey door a peregrine appeared in the sky above, signalled by the cawing of two crows whose clumsy lunges sent the bird gently reeling higher and higher into the cumulus. I watched through binoculars as the bird turned steadily to a dark dot above and was lost. Beside me was a local who turned out to be the headmaster of Bradwell’s primary school, out for a walk with his dog at lunchtime.

‘Probably one of the pair that’s nesting on the power station,’ he noted, indicating west towards the towers of Bradwell nuclear power station. The plant had been undergoing decommissioning since being shut down in 2002.The peregrines clearly liked its height and isolation from man. Some months later in London I watched another falcon rising over the Thames from her nest on the peak of the Tate Modern.

‘See them most days,’ he reflected. ‘Behind these trees there’s the Cockle Spit reserve. We get merlins, hobbies and marsh harriers flying over too.’

It seemed a throwback to Baker’s world: a primary school head teacher, in an age of league tables, Ofsted reports and SATs, taking his daily lunchtime stroll with his dog; a bird watching break. I listened to his words, still buzzing from the sight of the peregrine, still with half an eye to the skies.

Two months later I stood on the eastern extremity of Tollesbury Wick marshes at Shinglehead Point and looked across the Blackwater to Bradwell power station. Sitting on a hexagonal bunker, a legacy of World War Two, I thought of the nesting peregrines. I had just seen my second essex peregrine, which had flown past me at head height as I walked out from Tollesbury. The bird had been heading for the hundreds of plover and snipe that collected in the low tide at Tollesbury Fleet. It had a slim, tapered tail, an almost glossy sheen to that dark, inky coat. Once again, the pull of the peregrines and of Baker’s quest to know them had brought me to the farthest reaches of essex.

***

11 December. It was two months since I had been to Woodham Walter Post Office. There had been no phone call from Lucy so I decided I would go and see her. I rang on the Thursday morning to check she would be in. Indeed, the male voice said, Lucy would be there from two. I forewarned that I was the man who had been in before, asking about a writer called John Baker who had lived in the village.

I had bought another copy of The Peregrine. In 2005 the New York Review of Books had published a new edition with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane:

The Peregrine is, unmistakeably, a masterpiece of twentieth-century nonfiction. As an elegy for a landscape, it stands alongside Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. In its dredging of melancholy and beauty from the english countryside, it rates with W. g. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. As a fusion of the spiritual and the elemental, it matches Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard. And as an account of a human obsession with a creature, it is peerless. Introductions are supposed to sound the trumpets for their books, of course, but there is nothing ceremonial about these claims. They are simply the case.⁴

There was a preface which mentioned ‘John Alec Baker (1926-?)’. I read on: ‘Baker’s second book was his last, and he appears to have worked as a librarian for the remainder of his life. Little else, including the exact year of his death, is known about this singularly private man.’

I decided to walk from Beeleigh Lock along the north bank of the River Chelmer, cutting inland at Hoe Mill Lock for Woodham Walter and my meeting with Lucy. At the lock the waters of the Chelmer and Blackwater rivers met in a flurry of rapids. It was a dull, overcast mid-December day. On a broken reed mace stem a kingfisher sat watching one of the streams of water. The outer coat of rust opened in flight to reveal a shock of iridescent lapis lazuli startlingly brazen and beautiful on such a day. I strolled along the river’s edge in the murk, heading west and glad to be back in Baker country. It was nearing the shortest day and darkness was never far away. The sun had hardly risen. I walked beside the Chelmer and met no-one. I was brought to a standstill by the sight of thirteen ghostly little egrets in the branches of a distant willow like white lights in a village Christmas tree. One silently rose; a perfectly pale cloak lifting into grey skies.

At the post office Christmas trees leaned against the fence and there was wood for sale. I walked to the counter, listening to a voice I knew was Lucy’s as she served a customer. She seemed to know why I was there before I spoke.

‘You come about the Bakers,’ she stated. I smiled, explained who I was and pulled the Penguin from the bag.

‘It’s this man, John Baker, who I’m trying to trace,’ I said, pointing to his name on the cover. Lucy turned the book over in her hands.

‘He would have lived here from the late 1950s. At least for ten years or so,’ I added. She glanced towards me. There was a wary glint in her eyes, but it soon seemed to fade.

‘Well, there was a family called Baker. Had two sons. Lived over at Woodlands. You know The Cats pub?’

It took a moment to think.

‘I do, yes.’ I had walked by it the last time I had been in the village.

‘Well, Woodlands is past that.’

I pulled the map from the bag which fluttered and settled on the counter. I pointed Lucy to Woodham Walter and she found Woodlands.

‘There. They lived there. But they went to Australia a long time ago.’

‘Australia? To live?’

‘Mmm, Australia. I only spoke to him a couple of times. Quiet man, he was. Kept to himself. Joyce kept in touch with Jenny from the Women’s Club. You could ask her about him: Jenny Fowler.’ Lucy paused. ‘But there is the son. He’s still around. Lives up at ulting. Sells worms.’

‘Worms?’ I repeated.

‘Yes, worms.’ She turned back to the post office counter where the man I had spoken to earlier that day had finished serving a customer. ‘Nigel, isn’t it? Nigel Baker?’ The man had clearly been following our conversation. He agreed. It was Nigel. Drylands nursery.

‘Big bearded man he is. Nice fellow,’ Lucy said.

I turned back to the map and with Lucy’s finger traced the path to ulting, the neighbouring village north of the Chelmer. I would go and see Nigel Baker.

The road through ulting curled and rose up a hill. I peered out for a sign saying Drylands and saw it too late, etched on a piece of wood, and was forced to turn. There was a grassy track which led to a roughly gravelled patch where two vans lay, their finally resting place. I parked by one and took the book from the bag once more. I headed towards the shed but met Nigel Baker on the way. He was tall, well over six feet, long-haired and bearded. A true grizzly Adams. It was with a certain trepidation that I introduced myself and briefly told how I’d been guided his way from the post office at Woodham Walter. I offered the book and asked if it could have been his father who wrote it. He looked at it, then back at me, holding my gaze with his eyes: ‘Don’t know anything about it,’ he stated with a gentle shake of the head. ‘Sorry.’

***

For much of the next week I thought of Baker while everyone else thought of Christmas. everywhere there were signs of the festive season. Through the town ran a colourful string of lights, down each side of the high street from the top of the hill to the bottom. I played with the thought of Nigel Baker being John Baker’s son. Perhaps they both possessed that same drive to distance themselves from the rest of mankind, to step away from other human beings. Was this gentle, bearded giant lying to protect the memory of his father from those prying into his world? Baker had given them his words in two books. It was enough. They needed no more and deserved no more. Yet I