Country Mouse

The outward life

SOME 50 years ago, The Peregrine, written by J. A. Baker, was published. It’s a book of dazzling lyricism and genius, one man’s obsession with the wintering peregrines on the Essex coast. Who could fail to be moved by this starburst of Nature writing: ‘Rain began, and the peregrine returned to the brook. He flew from an elm near the bridge, and I lost him at once in the hiss and shine of rain and the wet shuddering of the wind. He looked thin and keen, and very wild. When the rain stopped, the wind roared into frenzy. It was hard to stand still in the open, and I kept to the lee of the trees. At half past two the peregrine swung up into the eastern sky. He climbed vertically upward, like a salmon leaping into the great waves of air that broke against the cliff of South Wood. He dived to the trough of a wave, then rose steeply within it, flinging himself high in the air, on outstretched wings exultant.’

When I first read the book at 14, this summed up my love for the countryside: ‘I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.’ MH