Akenfield, by Ronald Blythe (Book Club 20 April 2015)

At the Book Club meeting on 20th April Peter Southgate introduced ‘Akenfield’ by Ronald Blythe. The author was born into a Suffolk farming family near Sudbury, and had associations with John Nash and his wife, Benjamin Britten and the artists’ colony set up in Hadleigh by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. He loved their bohemian life-style and said he wanted to be a painter instead of a poet. In 1977, Nash left his house, Bottongoms Farm, just into Essex, to Blythe, where he has lived ever since. He has published and edited a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, and writes a regular column in the Church Times called ‘Word from Wormingford’. He is a Lay Preacher in the Church of England and a Lay Canon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds.

‘Akenfield’ was a best seller and has been translated into 20 languages. In 1974 Peter Hall – also from Suffolk - produced a film called ‘Akenfield’, using amateur actors, including Ronald Blythe himself. It’s a fiction, drawn from the book, focussing on a young man and his grandfather who experienced the agricultural depression of the early 20^th century and the First World War. 

The book was based on interviews conducted in and around the village of Charsfield in 1966-7, and provides a series of personal accounts of life and change in the area, both at the time and in retrospect over the previous decades. It is essentially a piece of oral history:  a collection of short autobiographies narrated to Ronald Blythe by local people. Some he tape-recorded and some he wrote up from memory.

The book is a series of often unrelated anecdotes, but these stories include serious social and personal observations and implications. To these Blythe added his own comments which, along with the introductory chapter, are some of the best parts of the book. The personal accounts that follow are varied, and readers will all have their favourites. Some of the most insightful are those from people like the clergy, the blacksmith, the gardener and the teachers: people relatively detached from life on the farms and more objective about the place and the other people there.  The idea is to let the stories speak for themselves, and there’s only a limited attempt to systematically interpret, analyse and draw conclusions from what people said, so the book is not really the rigorous sociological study that some people have described it as. Nevertheless, the introduction gives a good summary of what Blythe discovered.

After WW2 the mechanisation of farming was having a major impact, and this comes out in ‘Akenfield’ and in other books of the time. It meant that there was no longer a need for cooperative working by large numbers of people and this, in turn, was destroying traditional community links. Until then harvesting, for example, employed dozens of men, but now the whole process could be done by one man in a combine harvester and another man who drove the grain away in a lorry. Employment in farming fell because of mechanisation. Ironically, as Blythe points out, many of these machines were being manufactured very near to Akenfield, in Ipswich and in Leiston, near Aldeburgh.

The book contains a number of severely critical comments about the way farmers treated their labourers. In the late 19^th century there had been attempts by farm workers to unionise, which led to a lock-out by the farmers in the 1870s and bad feeling thereafter. Farmers ignored the law and took young boys out of school when they needed labour, but families were so poor they had to go along with this to stay alive. The only ways out of the trap for a young man were to join the forces, or the railways or to emigrate, and from the 1880s the Union helped thousands of farm labourers to emigrate, while acres of arable land returned to pasture.

Some of the interviewees tell how broken down and lacking in spirit Suffolk farm labourers had become as a result of their treatment; how there is still ‘a legacy of beaten men’ in Suffolk villages. One says that ‘something happened to the East Anglian people during the great Depression. They lost their staunchness and independence. They were made to fear. They won’t talk freely.’

The book was written nearly 50 years in the past and much has changed again since then, with developments like the EU, foot and mouth, the drift of country people to the towns and town people moving to the country, rural shops closing down and the importing of immigrant labour. All these have helped further destroy rural life and its traditions.

‘Akenfield’ was a popular choice with the Group and the meeting was very well attended. It generated a lot of discussion and reflection on rural change. Some members found it very ‘political’, and felt that many of the stories in it were quite depressing. At the same time there were more hopeful and entertaining sections, and Ronald Blythe himself appears to take a positive view of life in the country today. Interviewed for a 2004 follow-up entitled ‘Return to Akenfield’, by Craig Taylor, he said that life has become more comfortable and convenient for those living in the country, though many such people were urban incomers who find country life more to their taste. Others have said that the mechanisation of farming has not totally destroyed the beauty of the countryside, and that farming methods have become a little more eco-friendly in recent years.