Described as 'A nice enough man but totally unsuited to politics' by his Tatton election opponent Neil Hamilton, Martin Bell was one of the BBC's most recognised and respected reporters before his high-profile entrance into politics. Here, in an extract from Father & Son from the Penguin Collectors' Society press, he writes about his father's career as an author with Penguin.

ADRIAN BELL 1901-1980 by Martin Bell
from Father & Son, from the Penguin Collectors' Society Press

Very little that happened to me was ever planned. Most of it was accidental and even serendipitous. That certainly goes for my short career as an author. Even while the Bosnian war was still raging, in the summer of 1995, I completed a personal account of it, entitled In Harm's Way. I remember writing the final chapter by candlelight in Sarajevo's embattled Holiday Inn, as the snipers' bullets were cracking past the window. There was no point in living through all this without attempting to make some sense of it. The book was published in the autumn of that year by Hamish Hamilton, under the guidance of its Editorial Director Kate Jones. Kate later became my agent in the Tatton election campaign: but that's another story and the subject of another book, An Accidental MP. The Tatton campaign was itself a war zone, requiring a certain steadiness under fire.

Because Hamish Hamilton is one of the imprints which rest under the Penguin's wings, In Harm's Way was duly published a year later, with a couple of added chapters in the Penguin edition. It actually did quite well, especially when I was pitch-forked into politics. People bought it to find out who this odd fellow was who dared take on the formidable Hamiltons and then to try to chart a course, for the term of a single Parliament only, as an Independent MP.

My father's career as an author was much more distinguished. He could write in a more arresting manner about the pond life in his back garden than I could about the world's conflicts and commotions that I chronicled for the BBC.

Adrian Bell was entirely one of a kind. At the age of 20, then a rather Bohemian young man about Battersea, he heard the call of the land as an almost religious vocation. His dream was agricultural. He was apprenticed to Vic Savage, a yeoman farmer in Carlton Colville near Bury St Edmunds, who taught him all he knew in the best agricultural college of all, which is a working farm. Out of that experience, my father wrote a book, Corduroy, which prospered greatly by word of mouth and became a countryside classic. When he graduated to a small farm of his own he wrote two more, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, to complete the trilogy. All three books ran to many editions - the grandest of them an illustrated version with perfectly matching pictures by Harry Becker. They are hoarded to this day, and traded, by the many devotees of my father's work. There even exists an Adrian Bell Society.

The most important edition of all, without doubt, was the Penguin. It was published in 1940 in a small format and on paper of distinctly war-time quality. A Penguin could fit into a soldier's pocket or his kit-bag, and often did. It thus found a place wherever British forces served, by land, sea and air, in the war zones of the Second World War. It was especially prized in the prison camps.

I became fully aware of the effect he had only after his death. At the bottom of a drawer we found a collection of the letters sent to him by servicemen who had read his books in their bivouacs and tank turrets, and drawn from them comfort and hope in their lives' hardest times. He provided a life-line to another world, a world of peace and sanity, of enduring values and country rhythms remote from the war's destruction.

In a now almost forgotten magazine, Everybody's, he wrote an open letter to one of the members of this far-flung constituency, an RAF fighter pilot. 'You wrote to me from Malta, from a Malta pounded by air from Sicily, from North Africa, ringed by U-Boats, all but cut off. You wrote to me (heaven knows how the letter got through) that when the war was finished, you and your girl wanted to marry and have a little farm in England. You have a vision of England. Wherever you are, it has been your consolation and hope. Keep that vision, because it's true. It may be the key to your life. I am anxious that you should know this; because if you follow your impulses and live your farming life, with all its ups and downs, at the end of it you will sit back and recall that first vision of it that you had in the desert or the jungle. And you will know then that all in all it was a true vision.'

My father's vision was shared and communicated through that little paperback edition. Mr Penguin has many achievements to his credit, but in my view his wartime work was the most valuable of all. I would even call it heroic. It sustained the faith and fortitude of men who had lost touch with friends and family, and the country for which they were fighting. When it was all over and the survivors returned, it is my view that Penguin should have been decorated - with the DPM (Distinguished Publications Medal) or some such. He had surely earned it.

Corduroy has just been republished in a large print version. A production company has acquired the rights to it, with a view to turning it into a TV series - a sort of agricultural Ballykissangel. If the project comes to fruition, I would like to see someone like Colin Firth in the lead role, as the poet-turned-farmer. But the real stars of the show will be the sheaves and stacks, and the steam-powered threshing machines of the 1920s - great engines which my father saw as poetry in motion.

Nothing matters to me more - certainly not my short spell in politics - than the present revival of interest in his writing. He has as many admirers today as in his lifetime. Much credit must go to that Penguin edition. Mr Penguin also has reason to be grateful.

Taken from Father & Son, published by the Penguin Collector's Society.