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.

Meeting on Friday, Milton by Lorna Challand

Lorna is a retired teacher of English and has taught “Paradise Lost” by John Milton many times for A Level English. She kindly provided the following introduction:

"Milton  lived from 1608 to 1674, a turbulent time in English history, and was both a poet and  revolutionary. He was a Parliamentarian and a Puritan who supported Cromwell. He wrote a pamphlet “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”, after the execution of Charles I, which argued that a king was as much subject to the law of the land as any of his subjects. He became a member of Cromwell's government during The Commonwealth and continued his work even after losing his sight.

Although disillusioned after the Reformation he began writing “Paradise Lost”, his greatest work, an epic poem about the fall of man which was published in 1667."

Thanks to Cindi Cogswell for the following, which appeared in the Rye Observer's Winchelsea "Village Voice" column:

"Milton’s epic:  The Literary Society met last Friday evening to
hear Lorna Challand’s talk on Paradise Lost, the epic poem which dramatised the fall of man and the removal of Satan from Heaven. Lorna introduced Milton’s work as, in the genre of an epic poem having many of the components such as the influence of the gods, fate of mortals and visits to theunderworld and likened it to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid.  Milton was also a person
of his time and his epic style was unique in its combination of the poetic, political and biblical contexts.  He wrote in the 17th century at a time of social and political turmoil during the English Civil War.  In 1649 King Charles I, who believed in the: ‘divine right of kings’ was executed for treason by Parliament.  Milton’s political writings favoured Puritan reformation in the church and the replacement of the monarchy with a free commonwealth. His support for Cromwell led to his appointment in 1649 as Secretary for Foreign Languages and in that time he wrote with great passion and dispute.   Although Paradise Lost can be read as a political allegory the basis of this writing overshadows the fleeting events of the time.   The substance of this poem begins with man’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden through Satan’s deception, who with his rebel angels was cast by God into Hell.  It is a remarkable and familiar account in highly descriptivelanguage but the poem can be challenging.  Before her retirement Lornadescribed a situation when she was teaching Paradise Lost to her A Level students.  It became clear that their difficulty with the poem was due to agreat lack of knowledge of the Bible.  Despite having been taught otherreligions in the past, most of which they had forgotten, they had notreceived a sufficient grounding in their Christian heritage.  In response tothis Lorna gave them a detailed explanation of the events of Creation in thebook of Genesis which clarified the matter and proved beneficial in their exams."

Another Man's War by Barnaby Phillips, speaker at February 2016 meeting.

Richard Thomas has invited Barnaby Phillips, the author of the very well-reviewed "Another Man's War", to address the Literary Society.  He has agreed, and will be our speaker on 19 February 2016. Richard kindly provided the following introduction, which will be of particular interest to members of the Book Group who recently discussed Richard Flanagan’s book:  

“Another Man’s War is about the vital part played by colonial West African troops in Slim's campaign in 1944-45 to drive the Japanese out of Burma ("a forgotten army in a forgotten war").  It focuses on the astonishing and very moving story of one of these soldiers, Isaac Fadoyebo, whom Phillips got to know while he was the BBC Correspondent in W Africa.  I found it unputdownable, and it should form an interesting counterbalance to "The Narrow Road to the Far North".   

Richard Thomas on "Sagas". Meeting on 27 February 2015

A packed Court Hall heard Richard Thomas's fascinating talk on Sagas. As mentioned below, (see post below, dated 15 January), Richard spent some years in a diplomatic service posting to Reykjavik. Here is a summary of his talk:

" In modern English the word “saga” means a long, often tedious account of a series of events or misfortunes.  It is in fact Old Norse or Icelandic for “story”, and has for centuries denoted a corpus of some hundreds of mediaeval prose works, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century.  The greatest of them, the so-called “family sagas”, are mainly about real people who lived at or soon after the time of the settlement of Iceland, two or three hundred years earlier. They were written from folk memory, and combine actual history with imaginative fiction. They are characteristically composed in spare, often humorous, prose, and range in length from about thirty to three hundred pages.  Half a dozen or so of them are among the greatest works of medieval, or indeed any, literature, including Njal’s Saga, Laxdaela Saga, Egil’s Saga and Hrafnkel’s Saga.

The sagas survive mainly in the form of vellum manuscripts, repeatedly copied out in the isolated manor farms in which most mediaeval Icelanders lived.  In a country with few archaeological remains these precious objects serve as its principal historical artefacts.  But the sagas survive also as a spirit or feeling that informs almost everything that is thought about in Iceland, a country unlike anywhere else. From the settlement, in the late tenth century, until the end of the thirteenth, it was a kind of republic, free of the malign rule of kings, largely free even of the priestly grip on education exercised by the mediaeval church in the rest of Western Europe. This state of affairs, combined with the scattered and isolated nature of the farms and churches, served mainly by amateur priests, meant that ordinary Icelanders became literate, hundreds of years before their counterparts in the rest of Europe.  The amazing oral transmission of Iceland’s laws was mirrored by the way folk memories and the country’s history, in particular of its settlement, were eventually written up and preserved as sagas, which were read and recounted time and time again, right up to modern times, in evening “saga entertainments”.

There is plenty of fiction in the sagas, including accounts of monsters and other supernatural beings.  But this is mixed with apparently straightforward history, including in the two Greenland Sagas the story of Leif Eiriksson’s “discovery” of North America, five hundred years before Columbus, dismissed as a fairytale by many sceptical scholars until confirmed by the discovery of clear archaeological evidence in Newfoundland in the Nineteen Sixties. 

Leif had set out from Brattahlid, the farm a thousand miles away in Greenland which his father, Eric the Red, had built ten or twenty years earlier, when he established the Icelandic colony there at the end of the tenth century – a colony that was to survive for five hundred years.  Eric was a pagan, but his wife Thjodhild was a newly converted Christian, and her wish to build a church was granted by her husband provided it was out of sight from the main buildings at Brattahlid.  Archaeologists in the Nineteen Thirties found further proof of the historical accuracy of what the sagas describe when they discovered the remains of a tiny church, hidden by a small hill, only yards from Eric’s house.  That little church, by a fjord in Greenland, has since been reconstructed, to stand as a lonely and poignant monument to the toughness and humanity of those Viking explorers and colonizers whose deeds are known to us through a wonderful corpus of mediaeval literature known as the Icelandic Sagas."

For more information on Sagas, including full texts of English translations of some of the Sagas mentioned by Richard, click here to access the Sagas Database website. If anyone would like a copy of the text of Richard's talk, e-mail me at lyoulten@aol.com 

Poetry reading by Jonty Driver with violin recital by Peter Field, 11 July 2015

As part of the 2015 JAM (John Armitage Memorial) Festival in the Romney Marsh churches, on Saturday 11th July at 4-00 p.m., in the church of St Mary in the Marsh,  C.J.Driver (Jonty) will read his long poem, REQUIEM, first published in 1997/8, with Peter Fields, the violinist, playing transposed excerpts from Bach’s Cello Suite No 1, in between the seven sections of the poem. 

1. “Before Sunrise” and 7. “Late `Night: Waking” balance each other, so do 2. “Love-song in Twelve Fragments” and 6. “Love-song in Old Age”;  so do 3. “I shall keep my mouth as it were with a bridle…(Psalm 39)” and 5. “Three Elegies"; and 4. “Halfway to Heaven” holds the arch in place.  The poem moves from early morning to mid-afternoon to late night; from winter to spring to high summer; from time present to time past and back to time present; from despair to rage to acceptance - and the forms balance not only each other but the structure, raining from rhymed quatrains to the pentameter (broken and fragmented) to leisurely syllabics.  Yet, for all its technical variety, the voice of the poem is utterly personal: quiet, experienced, sombre, vulnerable. 

REQUIEM provided the words for an order of evening service in Westminster Abbey in November 2014, read then by Chris Chivers, with a cellist, Bryan O’Kane, providing the accompaniment. Details of this event, including the text of the poem, can be seen below in a blog entry dated, appropriately, 11 November 2014.

Book Group meeting Monday 16 February: 2014 Man Booker prize winner

Introduced by Lawrence Youlten, Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Far North, was of particular interest to those members whose friends or relations had personally experienced the conditions under which the prisoners of war captured at the fall of Singapore had been used as slave labour to build the Burma Railway. Many did not survive the appalling conditions, and deaths among the native population forced to work alongside the PoWs were also very high. This is a theme that has been treated in several notable films (eg The Bridge on the River Kwai) and books, both fiction and non-fiction (The Railway Man). Flanagan's novel draws largely on the recollections of his schoolteacher father who was such a prisoner. In the novel, the protagonist is a doctor who has to try and cope with the deprivations, illnesses and injuries suffered by the other Australian prisoners. The story of this phase of his life is interwoven with his experiences before and after the war, and one criticism of the book was that the interweaving of the stories did not succeed convincingly. Others were not impressed by the attempts to draw parallels between poetry by Tennyson and the haikus liked by one of the brutal camp guards. Some doubt was expressed about the authenticity of the descriptions of appalling violence directed against the prisoners, but a timely obituary of a British PoW survivor, Henry McCreath, published in theTimes on 20 February, included details every bit as savage as those in the book. Some of our members had found the book unreadable, and others, as I did myself, had found it a moving and thought-provoking story. These disparate opinions were parallelled by the reviews in the literary press,  that ranged from the vituperative, (London Review of Books) to the adulatory.(New York Review of Books). Two members of the book group who had lived in Tasmania, (where Flanagan was brought up), were able to provide some interesting background to the author. Whatever we thought of it, the Man Booker judges gave it the thumbs-up.

Our Speaker on 20 March: The King James Bible: from Word of God to Work of Art

Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature, at the University of Glasgow and honorary Professor of English at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has also taught at the University of Sussex, the Australian National University in Canberra (where he had the chair of English), Duke University, North Carolina, and Baylor University, Texas, where he was Margaret Root Brown Professor, and Director of the Armstrong Browning Library. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, former Chairman of the U.K. Higher Education Foundation, former President of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology, President of the George MacDonald Society, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Artois, in France.
    He has published one novel, nine monographs, ten edited volumes, and over a hundred articles on Romanticism, Victorian Studies and literature and theology. His fourteen-language, Reader in European Romanticism, (2010) won the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for the best book published in Romantic Studies that year, and his most recent publication is The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts (2014).