The Hill of Summer

"He was unusual in that he didn’t drive, despite working for the AA, so he cycled and walked around, immersed in the landscape. He went out in all weathers and at all times – before dawn, late in the day and even at night – and he wrote in this incredibly lyrical way about wildlife and landscape. His descriptions of birds are searingly beautiful and also accurate, they just fly off the page. They appeal to someone like me who actually knows the birds. The nightjar is just one of many that stands out. It’s a wonderfully mysterious bird: crepuscular, a bird of twilight, and lives on heath and open woodlands. It has intricately camouflaged plumage, with a pattern like dead leaves and bark and bracken, and it twists and floats through the air on long wings and tail. It makes this extraordinary song, which has been compared to a distant motorbike or an old-fashioned sewing machine, and rises and falls as it fills the air. Baker describes this moment when he stood on the edge of a woodland clearing and was entranced by these birds displaying and singing."

"Yes. So, The Peregrine is an incredible, concentrated prose poem. He says it’s the story of one winter tracking peregrines in Essex. Actually, it was compiled from his diaries over several winters. He was a very intense man with lots of challenges. Very little was known about his life until a few years ago, when I think Robert Macfarlane brought him to attention, and he was republished. At that time, people didn’t know when or where he had died, or anything about him at all. And much more of that has come to light now. There’s an archive, a box somewhere containing his old binoculars. He had a condition that was affecting his hands—they were becoming claw-like, like a bird. Baker was living at a time when DDT was wiping out our birds of prey populations. There was a real sense that they were going to become extinct. What happens with DDT is that it builds up in the bodies of animals as they go up the food chain. It becomes more and more concentrated. In birds of prey, apex predators, it was thinning the shells of their eggs, so their broods were failing. It looked like a done deal. Baker was writing in the face of illness and enormous loss. His book is beautiful. I know a lot of people find it dark and full of death. There’s almost a death wish at its heart. He wants to witness his peregrine kill, and comes very close to its kill site. The Hill of Summer is very different. It’s similarly intense, but less death-y. It has the same, almost mystical attention to place and to detail. In that, he’s quite like Richard Jefferies , the Victorian nature writer who was, in many ways, a mystic. He had incredibly intense experiences of nature that he captured in words, some of which are breath-taking to read, and I find the same with Baker. It’s interesting. When I was growing up, summer holidays were July and August. So that’s when you think summer is: the peak of the year. But actually, those holidays were timed to coincide with the harvest. They’re actually the end of the natural year. The peak of the natural year is May and June, and in July and August, almost nothing happens. The grass stops growing, the leaves on the trees are getting old and leathery. It’s slightly too early for there to be much fruit on the hedgerows, but all the blossom is gone, nothing’s flowering anymore. Among the only things that are flowering are the non-native plants we’ve brought in for our gardens, almost everything native has stopped. There’s just this big gap where nothing happens. Except for us. We have our summer holidays, we go to the beach, we have this big explosion of life and leisure, but it doesn’t match up with the activity in the natural world at all. I find that really interesting. So, books that are truly about the peak of the natural year are always set earlier, unless you’re talking about farming memoirs. When I was writing All Among the Barley , I was reading a lot of farming memoirs from the 1930s. And of course, for them, it is September when everything’s golden and the fields are full of treasure, and they harvest and bring it in and there’s the bright grain and the wealth piled in the barns. There’s that feeling of plenty and luxury then. So, I don’t know. It’s a weird one that our summer-set books are only the human summer. They’re not the nature summer, and they’re not the farming summer. It’s a weird thing. We know what spring looks like. And we know winter is snow, although we’re going to have to adjust that, I think, especially those of us who are further down south. And we know that autumn is leaves and wood smoke. Summer is a very weird concept. We have this idea of heat, and the sea and leisure, but we don’t really have anything to pin it to, in terms of what’s going on outside. It’s almost more of a human construct than it is anything else."