Akenfield by Ronald Blythe

Introduction

Ronald Blythe, who was born and grew up in Suffolk, produced an instant classic in Akenfield. This colourful, perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm workers and the fascinating personal recollections of, among others, the local schoolteacher, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate. Providing insights into farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared.

Biography

Ronald Blythe has written poetry, short stories, history and literary criticism, much of it reflecting his East Anglican background. His first book, the novel A Treasonable Growth was published in 1960. Akenfield, his remarkable evocation of rural change, much of which he had witnessed, appeared in 1969. It was followed by The View in Winter, a study of old age. The Age of Illusion and Writing in a War, an anthology, contain further personal assessments of Britain's recent past. From the Highlands, Ronald Blythe's collected essays, was published in 1982 and Divine Landscapes was published by Viking in 1986. His work has been translated and filmed and has received a number of literary awards.

Reviews

'Still the best portrait of modern rural life in England, subtle and compassionate'
Roger Deakin, BBC Wildlife magazine.

'A hundred years from now, anyone wanting to know how things were on the land will turn more profitably to Akenfield than to a sheaf of anaemically professional social surveys'
Guardian.

'Exquisite'
John Updike.

Extract from the Introduction

This book is the quest for the voice of Akenfield, Suffolk , as it sounded during the summer and autumn of 1967. The talk covers half a century of farming slump and the beginning of what is being called the second agricultural revolution. It begins with the memories of men who were children when much of the land changed hands towards the end of the nineteenth century. Described as an estate of five farms, 'all in the occupation of respectable and punctual yearly tenants', and combining ' accommodation lands, small-holdings, the advowson of the church and the manor itself, in all 712 acres of tithe-free property', it passed from Earl Howe to a Kentish Yeoman, whose grandsons farm it today. The new owners were Unitarians and fitted comfortably into Suffolk's dissenting background, although their property was bounded on all sides by the pheasant acres of sporting feudalists, chiefly the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Rendlesham. The new owners switched much of their land from cereals and roots to orchards and produced the greatest farming change which Akenfield can have seen for hundreds of years. It is not a total change: there are still many acres of wheat. Sugar-beat, barley and peas, but the presence on the valley slopes of many thousands of apple, plum and pear trees has created a feeling of enclosure from the customary bleakness which is luxurious and slightly foreign. The fruit plantations have also done something else for the communal life of Akenfield - they have perpetuated the old crowded harvest scene. A single youth is now the undoubted lord of the harvest as he steers his vast scarlet pterodactulic combine across the lonely acres, but it takes a full turn-out of many families to gather in the apples.

Down by the river lie the currant and gooseberry fields - literally the fruit of the potter's field, for the loam there is littered with Roman earthenware. Just above, the bit of straight - or the 'Army Path', as the Saxon farmers called it - shoots past towards the coast. The heights are crowned with mill sites and within the village proper there exits and empty secondary horse village, a deserted complex of packways, stables, harness rooms and tackle. Nothing has contributed more to the swift destruction of the old pattern of life in Suffolk than the death of the horse. It carried away with it a quite different conception of time.

The old farmsteads, snowcemmed and trim, ride high on the hills. They must remain remote unless some huge housing project thrusts up to meet them. And this is not likely. Akenfield itself has no development plans and even if Ipswich's overspill ever threatened it, it is doubtful if any preservationist society would launch an appeal to save it. It is not that kind of village. One or two new houses have gone up recently, usually in the depths of the valley and at the side of the stream and its meadows, with its carrs and its mosses, where a millennium of villagers have preferred not to live. This, on the quiet face of it, is as ordinary a group of country folk as one would meet anywhere in 1967. Or is it? How much is preserved: How much is lost?

Readers Comments

Brilliant, heartfelt ethnography of a vanished culture: ours

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is a book about the past. And approaching the past always involves both sadness and exhilaration: the latter because, rightly or wrongly, we see ourselves in the past, feel at home there, and know the pleasure of its kinship; and the former because we know the past is irretrievably lost, its faces vanished, and its words and songs and experiences, its life and laughter, its sharp pain and flashes of joy irredeemably gone.

This is the experience of the reader in Akenfield--and this is the book's blessing. Even after thirty years, Blythe's book about the people who live in a small rural village in Suffolk, and who told him candidly and completely the story of their lives and their village, restores to us a world we still know, but barely. It reminds us of an England that--along with single family farms, hedgerows, village pubs, and rural silence--has seen its time pass, and its depth and flavor lost. But neither the book nor the people whose lives are captured in its pages should be romanticized. That would be injustice. Akenfield is peopled by characters who without adornment or pretension tell the stories of their lives, of its bitterness and struggle, along with its victories and unexpected moments of pleasure: from farrier to farm student, from ploughman to pig farmer, from saddler to schoolmaster. We hear the voices of the nurse, schoolteacher, poet, wheelwright. We hear the magistrate, the apple-picker, and the gravedigger. These are the voices--and the lives--of generations that came before us. They are the voices of the Great War and after, of the growing middle class between the wars, of the incursion into rural existence of electricity, the telephone, the main road to Ipswich and then London, of the Second World War and the soldiers' return. The voices are familiar, they are friendly. They are also heartrending, and the stories they tell--particularly of conditions in agrarian English society in the early 20th century--can be sad and even shocking.

Yet this is also a magical work, a work of art--one invaluable to any ethnographer, but one that transcends ethnography or anthropology because of its simple humanity. The book's preface refers in passing to the Domesday Book of 1086; and, because Blythe insists on remaining a recorder instead of an author--because he transcribes the words of others instead of describing what they say--consciously or not he has wrought similarly as important a documentary history of life and society at the end of our last millennium as we received from the Normans at its beginning. Akenfield is a remarkable, enduring achievement, and surely stands as one of the finest examples in English history of the living, breathing spirit of late 19th and early 20th century English culture.

A. C. Baker, USA, November, 2000

A very realistic portrayal of a bygone time

For lovers of country tales who say things were better then this book gives a very balanced reflection. The ramblings of some of the village folk are just pure poetry.

M.Culley, Suffolk, April, 2000