Akenfield – 50 years on
Harry Mount
The world’s greatest expert on the British countryside is engagingly upbeat about modern country living. ‘Rural life is much better today,’ says Ronald Blythe, 96, sitting in the kitchen of his half-timbered yeoman’s house, Bottengoms Farm, near Wormingford, on the Essex-suffolk border. ‘People love it now – their centrally heated houses with televisions. They’ve all got a car.
‘Houses that are now worth a fortune were practically slums a century ago. Things have changed utterly. People still had servants then – they were often treated abominably. It was rough – very rough indeed – and class-ridden.’
This cheeriness about the modern – and a refusal to look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles – was a crucial element in Blythe’s masterpiece, Akenfield – Portrait of an English Village, published 50 years ago.
The book – a series of interviews with a farming community who worked the land from the late 19th century to the late 1960s – wasn’t just a bestseller. It was also a revelation.
Country life wasn’t an H E Bates idyll of merry farmhands and apple-cheeked milkmaids. Akenfield revealed the
backbreaking nature of agricultural work, and the appallingly low wages and poor living conditions of farmworkers who, a century ago, drank from the village pond and lived largely off potatoes.
In 1967, Blythe, with a borrowed tape recorder, ventured into the villages of his native Suffolk – ‘Akenfield’ is the fictional name of a village of 300 people, based on several local villages, inspired by the idea of ‘the acre field’ – and recorded the truth from real people.
Leonard Thompson, 71, a former farmworker, told Blythe he was ‘damned glad to have got off the farms’ when he was called up to fight at Gallipoli. In four months’ army training, he put on a stone in weight and grew taller – he’d been so starved on the farm.
Things were no better in the Big House, contrary to the cosy Downton Abbey picture. Christopher Falconer, 39, a gardener to the local squire, said, ‘We were just there because we were necessary, like water from the tap.’
In 1974, the book was made into a film, Akenfield, directed by Peter Hall.
‘I was astonished by the book’s success – I can’t work it out really,’ Blythe says. ‘But I knew ever so much about their backgrounds, about the class thing, about the church and the chapel, about plants. I put these fragments together to make a pattern.’
He realised he was on to something new in telling the truth about the country.
‘There were lots of charming, middlebrow country books around but they weren’t very truthful in many ways,’ he says.
He also realised he’d come along at a great watershed in rural life; at the separation between ancient and modern. And the biggest reason for that watershed was the car.
Before the car, as the 79-year-old district nurse Marjorie Jope told Blythe in Akenfield, people walked or biked. Rather than using the phone, they would walk or bike for miles with news of accidents and maternity cases. And they weren’t nearly as respectful to the old as you might think. The district nurse found the elderly pushed away into corners; even into cupboards.
‘Workhouses were still going,’ Blythe says. ‘People got rid of old people like that – they hated them. When I was 15, I was offered a job in the workhouse. I worked in the library instead.’
That emptying out of the country has only intensified in the past half-century.
‘The biggest change has been the car – enormously so,’ says Blythe. ‘Very few people go for long walks. There are lovely footpaths round here – but you rarely see people walking.’
They didn’t just walk around Suffolk in Blythe’s youth in the 1920s – ‘We all went swimming in the Stour.’
People literally did everything outside. ‘They made love outdoors,’ says Blythe. ‘The houses were crowded. So you often found lovers in the grass – no longer. A lot of children were conceived outside.’
And so you end up today with a British countryside that has been depopulated but, in many other ways, has remained miraculously unchanged. The Suffolk landscape has even improved in recent years.
‘Hedges were slaughtered half a century ago,’ Blythe says. ‘The fields were made much bigger, knocked into one for the combine harvester and the tractor. The field in front of here…’ he gestures through the window to the land beyond ‘…was several fields in those days.’
But then comes that characteristic note of optimism. ‘They destroyed a lot of the hedges and woodlands – and then they replanted them.’
Blythe is particularly heartened by the look of his local villages today.
‘The buildings haven’t changed,’ he says. ‘A great many beautiful villages are unchanged. Very few people go to church, but they have weddings and their funerals in church. A lot of the chapels have been made into houses; a lot of nonconformist buildings, beautifully made.’
Blythe was born, the oldest of six, in the village of Acton, Suffolk, ten miles from his current house, in 1922. He has spent all his life in the country. ‘I’ve never lived in London more than four days in my life.’
A gentle, quiet, intensely attentive figure, ‘a terrific reader… and a learned boy’ (he observes with detached modesty), who has always lived on his own, he is uniquely fitted to writing about rural Britain. Tree lines: Bottengoms by John Nash (1958) at
‘I knew a lot about Suffolk life,’ he says. ‘I’d seen all the changes in agriculture. When I was born, I could remember people ploughing with horses.
‘My mother came from London. My father came from Acton. We had a long and ancient background of ordinary farming. I was a great walker. I’ve never driven. I’ve cycled everywhere and walked.’
At 15, Blythe left Sudbury Grammar School. He worked as a librarian at Colchester, where he met Christine Nash, wife of the artist John Nash; she encouraged him to become a writer. The Nashes left Bottengoms (built in around 1600) to Blythe, and John Nash’s oil paintings line its walls today.
Before he settled in the house in 1977, Blythe moved around East Anglia, becoming friends with Benjamin Britten (‘He was very good to me, giving me marvellous editing jobs’), Patricia Highsmith, Cedric Morris and Maggi Hambling.
Gradually, he became a one-man compendium guide to the British countryside, writing more than 30 memoirs, novels and books on rural life, as well as works on Jane Austen, William Hazlitt, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. And he hasn’t stopped.
‘I do feel now that it’s time to write another book. I sit about and daydream a lot, which you’re allowed to do when you’re very old.’
Blythe founded the John Clare Society and, for 24 years until 2017, wrote Word from Wormingford, his Church Times column combining a deep understanding of church and country. He became a reader at nearby Wormingford Church and a lay canon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds (although he wasn’t ordained), meaning he could take matins and evensong, as well as funerals.
‘I wasn’t allowed to take marriages because that’s a legal thing. I did love the rural church and I worked in it really all my life. I loved the liturgy. I loved the hymns. Then the bishop made it possible for me to do Communion. Very beautiful and wonderful.’
All the while, he looked, listened and wrote.
‘I was an odd man out in a way. I was shy. But I did love all the people and talk to them. They were absolutely open. They were very nice to me. I was a listener and a looker.’
And it was those acute powers of observation that led to the greatest ever book about the British countryside, 50 years ago.