Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village Read online

  The book also speaks to a very contemporary yearning in America, as we struggle to retain some connection to the land and pastoral traditions and values as they inevitably get, in the immortal words of Laurie Lee, another great English writer, “bulldozed for speed.” Even the views of gentrification expressed in Akenfield can sound utterly of the moment: “The blacksmith’s shop in most villages is now either a garage, a smart cottage called The Olde Forge or a forlorn lean-to still redolent of horse musk and iron, its roof gradually slithering down to the couch-grass mat which covers the yard.”

  Akenfield does not seek to draw a single lesson of meaning from the lives it captures so resonantly. The book’s lasting power lies in the way it takes those lives, which might otherwise be missed or seem too circumscribed to draw in great detail, and renders them fully, richly, memorably. As Blythe later remarked: “I think my view of human life is how brief and curious most people’s lives are. Yet when you come to talk to them you realize how strong they are and how unbelievably rich their lives are; also how subtle and various.” Or as Updike once put it, “Perhaps, as Proust suggested, the transformation of experience by memory into something ineffably precious is the one transcendent meaning each life does wrest from death.”

  In 2004, the writer Craig Taylor was commissioned by Granta magazine to return to the village in Suffolk on which Akenfield was based to see how things had changed in the generation since the book appeared. In Return to Akenfield, the acclaimed piece and book that resulted, Taylor described his method: “I sought out locals who had appeared in the original book to see how their lives had changed, and met newcomers to discuss their own views. The thatcher and saddler have disappeared; in their place is the gas station attendant and the commuter,” he wrote. Among the many contemporary residents of Akenfield, Taylor also included an interview with Blythe himself, in which he spoke about what he had seen in Akenfield:

  I think what I understood was the emotional aspect of the countryside and the people in it. Just underneath the sometimes hard exteriors are many things: erotic, emotional sides. Because writers can see it, can’t they? They can view it in a sense and take the whole person in. When this last generation is gone there will be a break from people who have had any experience with this life at all. It will be missed. Some of it will be missed: the part that cannot be put into words.

  Ronald Blythe lives today some twenty miles from the village he called Akenfield, in a house that once belonged to John Nash, the painter to whom Akenfield is dedicated. In the nearly half century since the publication of Akenfield, he has written books about aging, botany, and the poet John Clare, and he contributes a popular column in Church Times that has been hailed by The Guardian as “one of the most elegant and thoughtful columns in British journalism.” In an interview with the writer Robert Macfarlane in 2013, Blythe, then ninety years old, confessed that, as ever, he still lives “half in the present and half in the past.”

  —MATT WEILAND

  AKENFIELD

  To John Nash

  PREFACE

  THIS BOOK was written in 1966–7 and first published in May 1969. I was then living at Debach, a tiny parish of some eighty souls which adjoined the larger village of Charsfield. I remember walking the ancient boundaries of flat-land Debach and hollow-land Chars-field on a grey winter’s day and thinking of the ritual toil which had engaged them, and thousands of villages like them, since those who settled them made the first field. All around were similar settlements with “field” names, so I called my book Akenfield after the oaks which stood in the field opposite my old house. “Acen” = Old English for “oak.” Also because I was born in the Suffolk village Acton. “Actun” = “the homestead by the oaks.” Akenfield is chiefly based on Charsfield, but with the surrounding countryside and myself drawn into it. My excuse for the former extension is that, like man, no village is an island, entire of itself, but has always relied on the blacksmith, wheelwright, schools, transport, butcher, and now priest of the area. The book is more the work of a poet than a trained oral historian, a profession I had never heard of when I wrote it. My only real credentials for having written it was that I was native to its situation in nearly every way and had only to listen to hear my own world talking. Thus a thread of autobiography runs strongly through it. Having been born between the wars during the last years of the great agricultural depression, I was in a kind of natural conversation with all three generations who spoke to me in the mid-sixties, and I was able to structure their talk over farming, education, welfare, class, religion and indeed life and death in terms such as I myself was experiencing these things, although now with a writer’s vision of them. I saw the two World Wars as extraordinary intrusions, walling-off two successive generations from each other, and giving each of them a distinctive voice. And I was delighted as always with those who bent the rules, dodged the system and who managed to be “different” within the rigidities which rural communities like to impose. There is no place like the countryside for the most imaginative —and blatant—nonconformity.

  The most unlooked-for change of fortune during the rural sixties would have been that for agriculture thirty years on. Then it was grow all the grain you can, never mind what eccentrics calling themselves “ecologists” said. An often brutal and ignorant rationalization of the old field system which so upset John Clare when his village was enclosed was government-inspired and payed for. One Suffolk village, Tannington, was in the van of such change, with scarcely a tree or hedge to its name. Although cornfields had to expand to take combine harvesters, it was shocking to see centuries’ old hedgerows bulldozed, the pouring on to the land of chemicals about which the average farmer understood very little, and stubble-burning as an economy. Now there is official and social condemnation of such practices, and because of the eventual withdrawal of subsidies, plus European laws, there is a feeling of insecurity among today’s farmers such as most of them have only read about and would never have imagined could return. The labour force was small enough then but is now minute. A couple of men on eight hundred acres. The “old people,” that is, those who truly belong to a village, are the least surprised. Ups and downs are in their blood, and although vague about agronomics they don’t expect anything to last. But some farmers today are nerve-racked and fearful. Gone is that first fine careless confidence when the grain grew as it never had grown before. Thus a recovered respect for nature, often brought about, I sometimes think, by their children, who have been thrillingly “ecologized” at school and university, not to mention by television. One of my hardest tasks in the nineties has been to make the villagers look at their fields, not drive through them as though nothing existed between their houses and the supermarket. An almost total lack of contact with its growing acres by the majority of people now living in the countryside has, more than anything else, brought about its increasing urbanization. The old work ground is seen only when it becomes a playground. But the locals as well as the visitors are walking more, which is something they would have found difficult to do during the sixties when the ancient village paths petered out in seas of grain.

  My father had fought at Gallipoli in the Suffolk Regiment and it was while listening to Len Thompson about what to me, as a boy, was a half-glamorous, half-terrible experience, that I recognized the “iceberg” quality in those I thought I knew pretty well. Only the tip of them showed, all the rest ran deep. A similar revelation occurred when I listened to our retired district nurse. She was the secretary of the P.C.C. and I was a churchwarden, and we had every reason to believe that there was not much we could tell each other which was not already known. Many years after Akenfield I sat by her death-bed and watched the old “authority” come and go in her dark eyes.

  The earlier poet of this region was Edward FitzGerald who lies buried under rose-trees seeded from those which grow round Omar’s tomb at Naishapur in Boulge churchyard, just a mile or two from my house. How often he would have seen it, and how often I sat in what was once his lodge-
cottage distributing our Flower Show prizes—mainly to two grimly competitive farm-workers who yearly cleared the board. Tramping and cycling about, I frequently found myself haunted by FitzGerald. Many of his lanes had been obliterated by the American bomber base across which the Welsh rector and myself would take our blowy walks. The poet in Akenfield is James Turner, my first writer friend, who lived three miles away, and with whom over many years I explored Suffolk—a vivid, sometimes testy man whose wife moved him on and on until he reached Cornwall.

  There was the question of dialect. “Suffolk” being my first language, so to speak, I did not find it wholly impossible to write even if it is thought to be notoriously hard to get right. I sat with the wheelwright’s nephew as we asked each other the meaning of words in Forby’s The Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830, and found that we were rarely stumped. Eventually I decided to keep to what was being said, and to a certain personal rhythm in each speaker, using a story, “Tom-Tit-Tot,” from the Suffolk Folk-lore Society’s collection to give a wonderfully accurate example of our dialect. It has always intrigued East Anglians how their speech gradually broadens out between the Stour and the Wash. This is one thing which hasn’t altered much since the sixties. In fact, certain “country” groups may be re-establishing the local speech of their grandparents.

  One can compare the economics of then and now but it would need an expert to explain the real difference. The Rural Dean’s annual stipend in 1969 was £1,175; in 1998 it is £15,000. The farm-worker’s weekly wage then was £11.11; now it is £200 with overtime. But the long struggle against the poverty wages and grim conditions of the inter-war years continues to lie like a barely credible memory at the heart of today’s prosperity and leisure. The middle-aged, let alone the aged, have to shake themselves to admit that things were so. There are various ways to describe a time, a place, a condition. One can come to them from outside and say what one saw. Or one can emerge from within a community, as so many rural writers do, and be at a particular moment its indigenous voice.

  —RONALD BLYTHE

  May 1998

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD like to thank all those many friends and neighbours in Suffolk whose great kindness made it possible for me to plan and complete this statement about living in an East Anglian village at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. All the facts about the economy, population, and social life of Akenfield are drawn from a village in East Suffolk; only the names of the village and the villagers have been changed. My countless enquiries were everywhere answered with patience and courtesy, and the warmth lurking just behind that famous Suffolk taciturnity made my many visits to the farms and cottages a remarkable collective experience.

  As always, I owe a special debt to Miss White, the Borough Librarian of Ipswich, and her staff, and among the various public bodies which gave me invaluable assistance, particular thanks must go to the National Union of Agricultural Workers (Lord Collison of Cheshunt and Alderman J. M. Stewart), the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food for allowing me to see the Parish Summaries of Agricultural Census Returns; and to the Agricultural Training Centre, Witnesham.

  I would also like to acknowledge the help I received from the following books:

  T. Eastwood. Industry in the Country Towns of Suffolk and Norfolk. O.U.P., 1951.

  G. Fussell. The English Rural Labourer. Batchworth, 1949.

  P. Wilson Fox. Report on the County of Suffolk. Royal Commission on Agriculture, 1958.

  W. P. Baker. The English Village. O.U.P., 1953.

  E. Morris. History and Art of Change-Ringing. Chapman and Hall, 1931.

  W. Fream. Fream’s Elements of Agriculture. Murray, 1962.

  A. Klaiber. Story of the Suffolk Baptists. Highgate, 1931.

  C. D. Harris. Geography of the Ipswich-Orford Area. Unpublished thesis, Ipswich Reference Library.

  Reg Groves. Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers’ Union. Porcupine Press, 1959.

  H. Rider Haggard. Rural England. Longmans, 1902.

  C. Gurdon. County Folk-lore: Suffolk. Folk-lore Society, 1893.

  A. K. Giles and W. J. G. Cowie. The Farm Worker: His Training, Pay and Status. Bradley, 1964.

  Pay of Workers in Agriculture in England and Wales. H.M.S.O., 1967.

  W. E. Tate. The English Village Community. Gollancz, 1967.

  Lord Ernle. English Farming, Past and Present. Heinemann, 1961.

  L. Dudley Stamp. Man and the Land. Collins, 1967.

  George Ewart Evans. The Horse in the Furrow. Faber, 1967.

  W. M. Williams. The Sociology of an English Village. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956.

  INTRODUCTION

  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.

  It is a “round” village, with the houses lining the edges of the perimeter lanes, but with shops, church, pub, school, chapel, etc. spread along a central road following the bank of a creek officially known as the Potsford River but called locally the “Black Ditch.” This stream is a tributary of the Deben, one of a dozen or more which wind towards its right bank and which drew the Danish and Saxon settlers to their secluded pastures. By the time the Normans arrived, the village was part of the most densely populated belt in Britain. Details in the Little Domesday Book (1086) describe its take-over by the French and provide some of the few recorded facts in all its long history.

  Lands of Earl Alan: . . . 16 free-men . . . 12 of these under commendation to Edric the Grim, and 1 under St. Ethelreda, and over 3 others [the saint?] had half commendation— [held] a caracute of land. Then 5 plough teams, now 4. An acre of meadow.

  In Akenfield Thurston son of Wido holds a free-man Brihtmar [who was] under St. Ethelreda’s commendation in King Edward’s time with 30 acres. Always 1 plough team, 1 acre of meadow. . . . This Thurston holds of Roger Bigot.

  Lands of the Bishop of Bayeux . . . 14 free-men [held a caracute] of land. Roger Bigot holds this and Ralph de Savigni [holds it] of him—and 13 acres. Then 5 plough-teams, now 3. An acre of meadow . . . then valued at 60 shillings.

  Lands of Hugh de Montford . . . in Akenfield [were] 2 free-men under commendation to St. Ethelberga.

  Lands of Robert Malet [the Conqueror’s great friend] . . . Lands of Geoffrey de Magnaville.

  and so on, this same sloping heavy soil, so tough to plough, which dominates every view still, this same bright hard climate of wind-chilled sunshine. An oceanic climate maintained by the North Sea, which is a dozen or so miles away on the other side of a great tract of heath full of rare steppe flora, fossils and the bones of ancient men, and in which lies the royal burial ground of Sutton Hoo. The rainfall here is the lowest in Britain, averaging 24.6 inches annually. Before the mains water arrived in 1944, there were droughts most summers. So the ponds and wells are likely to belong to the old habitation pattern. Most houses and groups of cottages possess one or the other, usually a pond, and “pond pox” was a normal hazard of life up until the last war.

  Like the majority of Suffolk villages, Akenfield was enclosed centuries before the notorious Georgian enclosure acts destroyed peasant England. But its hedges—now being slaughtered—were planted in the eighteenth century and, where they remain, shelter all the wild life of the particular fields they surround. Earlier field boundaries can be easily traced by ridges and ditches, and here and there a great tree spreads itself out in Time, ma
king no sense at all. The clay acres themselves are the only tablets on which generations of village men have written, as John Clare did, I am, but nothing remains of these sharp straight signatures.

  The centre of the village remains self-contained and quiet in spite of farm machines, motor-bikes and the dull murmur of summer holiday traffic on the bit of straight. Jets from the American base at Bentwaters occasionally ordain an immense sound and the place seems riven, splintered—yet it resumes its wholeness the second the plane vanishes. Nobody looks up. In Breughel’s painting of Icarus Auden noticed:

  How everything turns away

  Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

  Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

  But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone,

  As it had to . . .

  Could this be village indifference or village strength? Insensitivity or a discipline? These East Anglian field workers are the descendants of men who were given battlefield leave to return home and get in the harvest. There is, in the bony quiet of their faces, not insularity or an absence of response, but a rational notion of “first things first,” as they say. The peculiarly English social revolution which began immediately after the war has dramatically changed the countryman’s life, though not nearly so dramatically as that of his cousin’s life in the town. He has his 1960s comforts and luxuries, as well as a fair inkling of popular sixties culture, but these things, though grabbed for by one who has a long memory of bleakness, are apt to be regarded as trimmings. The earth itself has its latest drugs and fertilizers poured into it to make it rich and yielding, but it is still the “old clay.” In both its and his reality, the elemental quality remains uppermost. Science is a footnote to what he really believes. And what he knows is often incommunicable.