Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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Although I actually haven't worked this land but I have seen the land ploughed by horses, so I have a feeling and understanding in that respect.” Akenfield, the novel, is a study of what people regarded as a timeless way-of-life, but Ronald could recognise signs of change – although resolutely unsentimental, his book was eulogy for a rural idyll that had lasted for nearly two thousand years. Many of his scriptural references are as foreign to me as Mandarin, but through the medium of our long friendship I can glimpse common threads in our beliefs: the immemorial virtues of kindness and cooperation, but also of toil; the way the land – be it Palestinian desert or Suffolk prairie farm – moulds us as much as we mould it; the worth and autonomy of all Creation’s beings.’ (Mabey, 2022) But alongside this faith, Blythe’s writing dances with self-deprecating wit, rebellious asides, sharp portraits of fellow writers and unexpected notes of worldliness such as this: “On the radio, Evan Davis, Mammon’s angel, is talking to a Mr Warren Buffett, of Oklahoma, who is the world’s second-richest man. Mr Buffett lives in a nondescript house with a nondescript car, and there is no computer in his nondescript office. He likes Evan, with his sweet, crocodile grin.” It is an introduction that honours a friendship that is as rare as hen’s teeth, and writing this review following Blythe’s death, my heart goes out to Mr Mabey, who will miss walking and talking along those wildflower strewn pathways and the extraordinary gentleman he had the privilege of knowing so well. I was incessantly reading. We went to the old Repertory Theatre and then went for little meals at Neal & Robarts in the High Street - which we thought was very sophisticated. We'd go downstairs and there would be all the actors from the theatre.”

It's extraordinary that a book I wrote in 1967, which is a world away from us now, and a film made in 1973/74, can have such an amazing and very gratifying hold over people's affections. For many years, Blythe was a lay reader for his local parish, often performing the de facto job of vicar without a stipend. Collins feels Blythe was slightly taken advantage of by the Church of England, despite the Church Times giving him the weekly column that arguably delivered his best work. Mabey, an atheist, admits he has never discussed with Blythe his “quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith”.

In his 50s, Blythe wrote The View in Winter, a moving account of growing old which Collins feels is due a revival. “It’s a wonderful book, a very positive view of old age. He lives an incredibly contented life.” Collins helped his mentor “retire” in 2017 and began to manage his affairs after asking him about a pile of unpaid bills and receiving Blythe’s answer: “I’ve decided I’ve given them enough money over the years. I’m not giving them any more!” From his home at Bottengoms Farm Ronald Blythe has spent almost half a century observing the slow turn of the agricultural year, the church year, and village life in a series of rich, lyrical rural diaries.”

Slowly it dawned on me that nature could be a place of resistance to stories about the way you are supposed to be – a central concern of Hines’s Billy Casper in A Kestrel for a Knave. Billy is a persecuted soul, a loner, a troublemaker, a failure at school. He won’t keep goal, won’t work down the pit, fiercely resists the models of masculinity that surround him. Training a kestrel is an escape for him, but it is not a simple one. Hawks in literature so often stand in for emotional absences, are tutelary spirits of the lost or dispossessed. Kes grants Billy a contagious power. Explaining how he trained the kestrel lets him speak to his class with sudden, spellbinding authority, and Kes gives him a figurative and literal ability to silence his persecutors: “Steady on, Sir,” he admonishes Mr Farthing, “you’ll frighten her to death.” after newsletter promotion Blythe’s writing dances with self-deprecating wit, rebellious asides and unexpected notes of worldliness Through his association with Britten, Blythe then met such distinguished writers are EM Forster and Patricia Highsmith. In 1960, after he published his first book A Treasonable Growth, a novel set in the Suffolk countryside, he became friends with Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End, near Hadleigh, and nurtured the talents of a young Maggi Hambling.Blythe added: “A poet friend once advised me to ‘Put everything down. The total will surprise you.’ I took him at his word. For over 25 years I kept a day-book – a journal of life in a quiet corner of the English countryside. The total must run to over one million words. It has been a joy to revisit those diaries for this selection.” This intriguing work continues by softly carrying the reader through the seasonal rhythms of a year in the Suffolk countryside, setting ‘Word From Wormingford’ columns for the corresponding months from different years alongside each other, bringing a freshness and new vibrance for those who may have read previous collections. From the scent of impending snow in January, through to the farmers browsing seed catalogues as the bells ring in the New Year at the close of the following December, it is a journey that I found myself taking three times over. There is almost a prophesy in Blythe’s words as December arrives and he fights against the shortness of daylight hours, determined to complete the task of cutting off the dead limb of the quince tree, When I wrote the book, I still had access to people who lived and fought in the First World War. I had people had worked on the land during the first half of the century. I had first-hand memories to work from. All that has gone now."

But, lest the reader become maudlin, Vikram Seth, a writer of beautiful description himself, raises an acrostic poem of celebration to Blythe, and as we close this remarkable book leaving behind Blythe’s legacy of words, the author reminds us of the words of Albert Camus, ‘In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer’. The cover of Next To Nature flips shut, the illuminated sepia shades of Nash’s watercolour, ‘Winter Afternoon’ (1945) glistens, the bright light on the horizon focuses our gaze, and we can sense that, for Blair, summer has come. Blythe recovered, and also survived a recent fall. His dear ones bring him three meals a day and everyone is determined that he will still be in his home, as he wishes, when he dies. An indication of just how prescient Ronald had been was demonstrated in 2004 when he met Sir Peter Hall and Akenfield cast members Peggy Cole and Garrow Shand at Hoo Church to shoot extras for the DVD release of the film.

A life rooted in East Anglia has given Blythe a rare depth of vision. His writing is attuned to the physicality of existence, attentive to the world around him, and always listening to people and other species, as here, in June:

Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year's Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. With gentle wit and keen observation Blythe meditates on his life and faith, on literature, art and history, and on our place in the landscape. Before ever opening the book, the reader is pulled into the summertime of a ‘Dorset Landscape’, (executed in 1930 using watercolour, chalk and graphite), standing on a high hill that casts a shadow in the foreground, looking down upon a stream around which a cluster of trees are leaning heavily in the wind, and beyond, another steep hill rises, partly prepared for cultivation, a lone tree standing near the crest. At first glance, it is dreamy; the colour palette pastoral and soothing, but it speaks deeper of the loneliness and harshness of making a living from, and dwelling, in the rural landscape, where tilling can be an upward struggle, and isolation from supportive community can take its toll. By using the words of the real farmworkers and their families, Blythe dealt matter-of-factly with the notions of life, death, farming, religion and the countryside. Ronald agreed: “"I think what makes Akenfield so popular – both the book and the film – is that it captures the spirit of Suffolk. It's everyone's story. It's not the story of one person, or one family or even one village - it's everyone's story and I think that it strikes a chord.”Speaking to me later over lunch, Blythe expanded on the theme: “Akenfield is about the Suffolk people, it's about growing up, about moving away, about staying at home, about the countryside - it's about the generations. It's about us as Suffolk people. Of night-walking, Blythe wrote that everywhere was “all so perfectly interesting that one might never go to bed”. According to Macfarlane, this captures Blythe’s sensibility in a sentence: “inquisitive, wandering, democratic, giving us the truth on the ground”. His appreciation for everything extends to his own mortality. “He’s philosophical, he doesn’t complain and he’s interested,” Collins says. “He would be interested in dying – he finds it all fascinating.”