Akenfield Read online

  RONALD BLYTHE was born in 1922 in Suffolk, England, where his family has lived for centuries. He is the author of some thirty books including works of fiction, criticism, memoir, and social history, and has served as editor for a number of novels, poetry anthologies, and diaries. For the past twenty years he has written a weekly column for the Church Times about daily life in the Suffolk village of Wormingford, where he lives. He is the president of the John Clare Society and in 2006 received a lifetime achievement award from the Royal Society of Literature.

  MATT WEILAND is a vice president and senior editor at W.W. Norton & Company. A former editor at Granta and The Paris Review, he is also the co-editor, with Sean Wilsey, of State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Republic, and The Nation, and he contributed the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States by George R. Stewart.

  AKENFIELD

  Portrait of an English Village

  RONALD BLYTHE

  Introduction by

  MATT WEILAND

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1969, 1999 by Ronald Blythe

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Matt Weiland

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: John Piper, Horham, Suffolk, 1975; © 2015 Piper Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London; photograph © 2014 Tate, London

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Blythe, Ronald, 1922–

  Akenfield : portrait of an English village / by Ronald Blythe ; introduction by Matt Weiland.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  Originally published: 1969.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-830-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Villages—England—Suffolk. 2. Suffolk (England)—Social life and customs. 3. Suffolk (England)—Biography. I. Title.

  DA670.S9B59 2015

  942.6'4—dc23

  2014042913

  ISBN 978-1-59017-831-7

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction to the 2015 Edition

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Population and Houses

  Work in the Village

  Domesday for 1936 and 1966: The Second Agricultural Revolution

  1. THE SURVIVORS

  Leonard Thompson, farm-worker

  Emily Leggett, horseman’s widow

  Fred Mitchell, horseman

  Samuel Gissing, retired farm-worker

  John Grout, farmer

  2. GOD

  Doctor

  Brigadier

  Teacher

  Orchard worker

  Baptist Deacon

  Rural Dean

  3. THE RINGING MEN . . .

  Robert Palgrave, tower captain

  Sammy Whitelaw, farrier

  4. TO BE A FARMER’S BOY?

  George Kirkland, N.U.A.W. secretary

  David Collyer, forester and political organizer

  Brian Newton, farm student

  5. GOOD SERVICE

  Christopher Falconer, gardener

  6. THE FORGE

  Gregory Gladwell, blacksmith

  Francis Lambert, forge-worker

  7. THE WHEELWRIGHT

  Jubal Merton, wheelwright and blacksmith

  8. THE CRAFTSMEN

  Ernie Bowers, thatcher

  Horry Rose, saddler

  9. THE SCHOOL

  Mrs. Sullivan, headmistress

  Daphne Ellington, assistant teacher

  The Cook’s Tale (Suffolk dialect)

  Robert Munro, schoolmaster

  Hugh Hambling, schoolmaster

  10. THE AGRICULTURAL TRAINING CENTRE

  Raynor Creighton, master

  11. OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN

  Colonel West, pig-farmer

  Major Paul, Civil Defence Organizer

  12. THE ORCHARD MEN

  Alan Mitton, orchard foreman

  Michael Poole, orchard worker

  13. FOUR LADIES

  Marjorie Jope, district nurse

  Mrs. Tom Cooper, President of the W.I.

  Mrs. Ferrier, Chairman of the W.I.

  Mrs. Carter-Edwardes, Samaritan

  14. THE YOUNG MEN

  Terry Lloyd, pig-farmer

  Bruce Buckley and Thomas Dix

  Anthony Summer, shepherd

  Roger Adlard, factory farmer

  Derek Warren, ploughman

  15. THE LAW

  Mrs. Christian Annersley, magistrate

  Persis Ede, odd-job man

  16. LIMITATIONS

  Lana Webb

  17. THE VET

  Dr Tim Swift

  18. NOT BY BREAD ALONE

  The Poet

  19. THE NORTHERN INVADERS

  Jamie McIver, farmer

  Duncan Campbell, sheep-farmer

  20. IN THE HOUR OF DEATH

  William Russ, gravedigger

  INTRODUCTION

  First published in 1969, Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield is an enormously vivid and affecting portrait of life in one village in the southeast of England, as told through the voices of the farmers, workers, and villagers themselves. Blythe, a novelist who had edited editions of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy for the Penguin Classics series, chose “Akenfield” as a pseudonym for a village in the East Anglian county of Suffolk, where he had grown up. He spent the winter of 1966–67 in what he called “a kind of natural conversation with all three generations” of his neighbors, capturing their thoughts on “farming, education, welfare, class, religion and indeed life and death.” The best-selling book that resulted captured the changing nature of English rural life, and it has remained in print in England ever since as a Penguin Modern Classic.

  Akenfield was also greeted enthusiastically in America, receiving rave reviews from John Updike, Paul Fussell, John Leonard, and, in The New York Times, Jan Morris (then still writing as James). “It is a brilliant and extraordinary book. Its effect is one of astonishing immediacy,” Morris wrote. “It is as if those country people have looked up for a moment from their plow, lawnmower, or kitchen sink, and are talking directly (and disturbingly frankly) to the reader.” In The New Yorker, Updike declared Akenfield to be “exquisite” and “a wonderful book.” In December 1969, The New York Times selected it as one of its twelve best books of the year, along with such epochal titles as Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation, Erik H. Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

  Tellingly, many of the reviews hailed Akenfield as “a classic of its kind,” judiciously dodging the question of just what kind of book it might be. The original Penguin edition classified it as “Sociology/Anthropology,” which was fitting given its blend of popular ethnography and sociological survey. In form, it is often compared to the timeless works of Studs Terkel, another admirer of Akenfield, who hailed it as “a revelatory book”; or to those of Blythe’s lesser-known English contemporary Tony Parker, who produced a celebrated series of oral histories of British life on the margins. Like those books, Akenfield comprises a wide variety of edited monologues rendered in the distinctive styles of their speakers, and features contextualizing material in the author’s own voic
e.

  But Blythe saw it less as a work of social science or oral history than as a travel book. He described writing it as “making a strange journey through a familiar land,” and like George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier or Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Blythe’s grand achievement in Akenfield is fundamentally that of the writer as eyewitness reporter, as traveler with a fresh eye and a great ear for language. These are books that ignore the question of what experience means and instead burrow deeply, richly into describing experience itself. Their writers are obsessed with the particulars of a place and the lives lived through it, with a time and the lives lived across it. They ask the deepest and most vital question, and answer it as well as any work of art can: What does it feel like to be anyone other than ourselves?

  The place and the people Blythe chose to document in Akenfield couldn’t have been less promising subjects for such a work. “There is one thing about Suffolk folk,” a sixth-generation East Anglian named Christopher Falconer says in Akenfield, “and that is that they find talk terribly difficult.”

  Blythe himself acknowledged the challenge of what he called “that famous Suffolk taciturnity,” and he wrote movingly about how easy a village such as Akenfield was to miss:

  The village lies folded away in one of the shallow valleys which dip into the East Anglian coastal plain. It is not a particularly striking place and says little at first meeting. It occupies a little isthmus of London (Eocene) clay jutting from Suffolk’s famous shelly sands, the Coralline and Red crags, and is approached by a spidery lane running off from the “bit of straight,” as they call it, meaning a handsome stretch of Roman road, apparently going nowhere. This road suggests one of those expensive planning errors which, although cancelled in the books, will mark the earth for ever. It is the kind of road which hurries one past a situation. Centuries of traffic must have passed within yards of Akenfield without noticing it.

  As he explained years later, Blythe had been commissioned to write the book jointly by Penguin Books in the United Kingdom and Pantheon Books in the United States, as part of a series on how village life was changing around the world. “When they came to me and said I should do Britain, I told them I was not a sociologist remotely, nor had I heard of the term oral history at the time.” He had no idea how to get started on the task.

  I was editing Hazlitt for Penguin and I quite liked this bookish thing, working in libraries and being scholarly. At some point they said, “Have you started this book yet?” So I went for a walk around Akenfield. It was an awful February day. The ditches were full of churning water coming through the field drains. These were partly the medieval ditches of the village, and when I looked down I could see what people had seen for centuries. I went to speak to the village nurse, a very old lady. Although I knew her very well, I soon realized I didn’t know her at all. When she started speaking about her own life, another person emerged. When I got home, I was astonished, shaken really, by knowing what I now knew about her. When I wrote it down, that other person emerged: she worked in what was really an army hut, she’d got a club foot (which I never put in the book because I thought it would upset her), she delivered all the children and laid out all the dead and patched people up with basically vaseline and strips of sheets. From there, I just shaped the book. . . . Often I hardly asked any questions at all, I just listened.

  Blythe spent the next two years cycling around the village on a Raleigh bicycle and talking with its people. “My only real credentials,” he wrote later, “was that I was native to its situation in nearly every way and had only to listen to hear my own world talking.” Blythe is an extraordinary listener—patient enough to identify and buttonhole the most interesting sources, garrulous enough to get them to reveal truths beyond the cheerful banalities every reporter hears. As one man in the book says of East Anglians generally: “You’d hardly call them colourful yet they certainly aren’t grey.” In teasing out the most subtle differences in their experiences and views, Blythe revealed a teeming world in the smallest and barest of places. The experience of reading Akenfield feels like standing before a rich but outwardly inaccessible painting and finding its deepest beauties slowly emerge, both as individual details and as a unified whole. Blythe’s first wish had been to be a painter, after all, and it’s no accident that Akenfield is subtitled “Portrait of an English Village.”

  The book is divided into twenty sections, such as “God,” “The Forge,” “The Craftsmen,” and “The Law,” which introduce some fifty people. We meet women and men, the old and the young, all of them identified simply by age and vocation: there are farm owners and farmworkers, a plowman, a shepherd, orchardmen, teachers and students, a deacon, a group of bell ringers, a blacksmith, a wheelwright, a thatcher, a saddler, a military man, a doctor, a nurse, a vet, a poet, a gravedigger. The book opens with the seventy-one-year-old farmworker Leonard Thompson, in a section called “The Survivors,” who tells the story of having first left the village for the war in 1914. What the English experienced in the trenches of the western front or, as in Thompson’s case, of Gallipoli, was famously a shock, but even amidst the vast and horrifying literature of the First World War, there may be few passages more viscerally affecting than Thompson’s:

  We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging—even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, “Good morning,” in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath.

  There are dozens of passages like this one in Akenfield, moments when a reader is forced to pay closer attention, to notice as much as the people of Akenfield do. As when the thatcher recounts his satisfaction in the look of a finished roof, in which “the reeds shine silver and grey, and the deep eaves are cut razor-sharp.” Or when the forge worker declares, “I look at everything. I don’t open a church door without looking at the hinges.” Or when the gravedigger insists, “I can always tell if a person is dead by looking at the eyes. I never make a mistake about dead eyes. I see at once when the seeing has gone.”

  The great subject of Akenfield, and the reason it remains such a vital book to read now, even in America, thousands of miles from its milieu, is the ways people grapple with changes in the patterns of life in their own time—whether through social flux, cultural variation, demographic shifts, technological progress, environmental degradation, or some combination. Blythe recognized that under the placid surface of a place as seemingly unchanging as Akenfield lay a clash of virtual tectonic plates, as a class-riven, tradition-bound, nearly feudal community began to erupt and fissure.

  The people of Akenfield express deep reverence for the past and its traditions, and at the same time an overwhelming urge to leave it all behind—and this tension gives Akenfield its distinctive drama. The villagers describe with palpable regret bits of knowledge that were fast being lost—how to shape a corn-dolly, how to thatch a roof—and they render their ancient tasks and tools with great pride and precision. “Crucifixes, iron coats of arms, hurdles, harrows, vast abstract light-holders for a West Country cathedral, surgical horseshoes . . . rage in the [blacksmith’s] flames.” Even some of the words they use have withered into disuse: “neats” (cattle), “stook” (a group of sheaves of grain), “clung” (shriveled and juiceless).

  Their reverential views of the past and its continuity and stability are often moving: “I have a lot of my grandfather’s features,” says the blacksmith. “I have his hands. Hands last a long time, you know. A village sees the same hands century after century. It is a marvellous thing but it’s true.” Their heartfelt faith in an older order and a slower way of doing things, which even in 1966 was disappearing, can sometimes turn comic: “Life now is much less elaborate and, consequently, much less interesting,” says a gardener. “[The newcomers] buy exp
ensive ugly things. Their gardens look like shopping.” And it’s arresting when one of the bell ringers recalls the lost tradition of tolling bells for the death of a fellow villager:

  It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, “Hullo, a death?” Then the years of the dead person’s age would be tolled and if the bell went on speaking, “seventy-one, seventy-two . . .” people would say, “Well, they had a good innings!” But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty a hush would come over the fields.

  Yet Akenfield does not bow to sentimental ideas of the countryside as idyll, and even the villagers we might expect to romanticize their work, or to sink into simple nostalgia for the past, take a more complex view of it. They speak candidly of the brutality of country life, and of hopes to escape the village. “I don’t want to see the old days back,” says one farmworker. “Every bad thing gets to sound pleasant enough when time has passed. But it wasn’t pleasant then, and that’s a fact.” Discussing the reasons he makes such handsome furrows, the plowman sagely points to the pride he and others like him took in their hard-won autonomy. “The harvest would not have been the less if the furrows wavered a little. But, of course, a straight furrow was all that a man was left with. It was his signature, not only on the field but on life.” The owner of the harness shop, in recounting for Blythe the traditional way he makes harnesses from horsehide and cowhide—“We worked the fat in with a bone, just as a soldier bones his boots”—looks back with pride on the quality of their work, but he recognizes the irony. “Our harness lasted for ever, as you might say. It was our downfall, wasn’t it! We made these things so well that after a while they did us out of a living.”

  The people of Akenfield are well aware of their own anachronism, their struggle with time’s passage and the social changes they see all around them. Their refusal to simply accept the prerogatives of the future, to both resist it and want it on their own terms, gives Akenfield a novelistic potency as mournful and wary of the coming of modernity as Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White or John Williams’s Stoner. Who doesn’t cheer for the plowman when, describing his solitary vocation, plowing furrow after lonely furrow, he insists that “It is surprisingly interesting. The gulls are with me.”