Hello Gentle Reader,
It’s an insistence really. At this point, truly, it is a perspective turned opinion, now fashioned into personal doctrine, that the reverence people hold for the countryside – with their continued yearning for what one person recently called, ‘a parcel piece of land,’ which they continued on with almost bellyaching longing: ‘Barely an acreage. Make it a postage stamp size even, it doesn’t need to be a farm. Just away.’ – all stems from the propagation and the inadvertent propaganda success, of the English romanticising their countryside. Successfully shifting and shaping their island home into a visage of arcadian idyll, second only to Eden itself. A pedestrian paradise of country lanes, snaking canals and rivers, frolicsome hills, chalk white seaside cliffs, shingle beaches, ancient dales, endearing woods, picturesque meadows, and tranquil lakes. Mention the English countryside and already people are conjuring some whimsical image. Perhaps that of Beatrix Potter, with her eloquent watercolour illustrations for her ‘Little Tales,’ which includes the adventures of Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Jeremy Fisher, and the brawling figures of Mr. Tod and Tommy Brock. If not the world of Potter, then perhaps that of Kenneth Grahame and his “The Wind in the Willows,” charting the adventures of Mole and Ratty and those misadventures of Toad. It is worth mentioning in turn, the paganistic piper of the dawn. Who is really the rustic god Pan. Salt and peppered with estates and castles and chocolate box villages, the English countryside retains its hold as a place of imaginative paradise, which everything else pales in comparison. Heralding from the Canadian countryside myself; the notion, thought, prospect, or most likely, threat of returning to those rural roots is nothing short of condemnation, tantamount to incarceration. While true, the Canadian landscape is one of untouched majestic wilderness. It is rustic and rugged, which are polite terms in this context for rough, uncontained, and lacking in civil comforts. Despite this, it is unadulterated beauty is raw, pristine, and majestic, in how little appears to have been spoiled by economic development. This does not mean it is not endangered or under threat, with bulldozers in the name of prosperity and progress waiting to be unleashed. The Canadian countryside despite its variance, diversity, and variety in features and provincial flares, retains one shared and consistent commonality: remoteness. Canadian rural, is not some country retreat, where life can be put on hold or at the very least the back burner for a few days. It is remote, in the extreme sense of the word, bringing to mind shipwrecked souls stranded in nowhere. The immensity of the landscape, is enough to swallow one whole. Why, anyone longs for this, is beyond me. Yet they do and they are out there. My own mother, who comes from rural stock and remains in her own house in what is classified as a rural hamlet, insists upon her love of where she lives. The country, she says, is peace and quiet. There’s no racing and rushing. To me, however, it always carries the sense of being left behind. Stranded in this solitary confinement. Complete with a sense of disenfranchisement and dispossession, with an unacknowledged understanding of desperation and abject poverty, easily missed amongst the usual dirt and muck that is part and parcel of country living.
The late Ronald Blythe was one of the great rural writers of contemporary English literature. Born and raised in the countryside, Blythe never seemed to escape the smallness of this upbringing by carting off to London to chase and realise his dreams of becoming a writer. Rather, Blythe understood the charm of this landscape, the beauty of its worked fields; the class of character found in field and village living their life without acknowledgement; the thankless harshness of the work. Throughout his hundred years, Ronald Blythe, became something of a rural icon and even sage. Critics often describe Ronald Blythe as the progenitor and champion of what is now considered contemporary nature writing. This is due to Blythe celebrating the seasonal rhythms and charms of the countryside from his legendary abode, Bottengoms Farm. All of which provided Blythe (especially in the later stages of his career) the inspiration and landscape turned subject, in which to reflect on the changing world, the nature of God and faith, the passage of time and the continued wonder of the natural world. “Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village,” though, was Blythe’s reputation affirming work. Upon its initial publication in 1969, “Akenfield,” was classified as a classic of modern literature, and has retained this distinction. However, upon its initial publication, the question of literary classification plagued the book. The publisher originally conceived of it as a piece of anthropology/sociology. Blythe, however, found these terms to academic for what the book sought to achieve. And while “Akenfield,” dipped its toe into rudimentary popular ethnography and social surveying, the terms anthropology and sociology, brought to mind robust humanities subjects, complete with scholars, experts, and authorities on the subject. In the same fashion, the notion and term oral history, in the sense of Svetlana Alexievich remained an otherwise niche term. In Ronald Blythe’s opinion, “Akenfield,” was a collection of essays and remembered conversations; a travelogue and piece of investigation, following in the same vein of George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier,” and the memoir “A Walker in the City,” by Alfred Kazin. Ronald Blythe in similar fashion took on different forms in compiling the material for “Akenfield.” First in returning to familiar ground as a stranger. As the wayward outsider, Blythe would be able to watch and observe. Then a transparent reporter, conversing, interviewing and listening to the stories, histories and memories of the residents. The end product is not a dry record of accounts describing a life or a series of lives, but instead capturing a rich tapestry of a world gradually falling into obsoletion. The precipice of extinction already crossed.
“Akenfield,” is organized into a series of subjects ranging from: “The Survivors,” to “God,” onwards to “The School,” “Four Ladies,” and “The Law,” with each section an ensemble of voices and vocations: Farm-Worker, Doctor, Teacher, Baptist Deacon, Rural Dean, Headmistress, Orchard Worker, District Nurse, Magistrate, Shepherd. No section is reserved explicitly for any individual. For example, “God,” naturally summons forth both the Baptist Deacon and the Rural Dean, but also incorporates the opinions on the nature of rural faith and worship with commentary provided by an Orchard Worker and the Doctor. While other sections such as “The Vet,” “Not by Bread Alone,” and “In the Hour of Death,” are singular, with commentary provided by the titular veterinarian, a poet and the gravedigger. The residents of “Akenfield,” are delineated by generations, which is further divided by defining wars of the 20th century: the First World War and the Second World War. “The Survivors,” recount the giddying prospect of escape of their meager rural existence. The army brought the notion of adventure to their otherwise predestined lives. What followed was nothing short of horror. Leonard Thompson – who like Blythe’s own father – fought in Gallipoli during the First World War. A failure of a campaign by the allies, where slaughter and death were daily occurrences. Thompson recalls with a macabre humour, the reality of dying over there and the impossibility of a humane (let alone any notion of Christian) burial:
“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.”
And while the horrors of any war would certainly make any dour or decrepit landscape more appealing, Thompson proves to be unsentimental with how the old ways were, when “Akenfield,” (a fictional rendering of the amalgamation of Charlesfield and Debach) and Suffolk in general, was impoverished and neo-feudal in social structure, complete with lacking public infrastructure, and poverty a defining natural feature to life. Thompson recalls the scarcity of water: “had to be fetched from the foot of a hill nearly a mile away. ‘Drink all you can at school,’ we were told — there was a tap at school. You would see the boys and girls filling themselves up like camels.” Ronald Blythe may have reverence and a deep-seated appreciation for the rural landscape, the “glory and bitterness,” of the countryside, but Blythe recognizes its own failings, shortcomings, and everyday cruelties. This is not Potter’s agrarian landscape with Farmer McGregor outwitted by Peter Rabbit and co. Nor is it the leisure land of “The Wind in the Willows.” “Akenfield,” grapples with rural life in manner that is honest, without being swamped in bucolic sentimentality; while refraining from being a runaway vitriolic barrage, holding up the countryfolk as a bumpkin sideshow to be gawked at, as cheap carnival entertainments for the urbane. The countryside for its inhabitants remains in Blythe’s view a place of deep roots and generational legacies:
“Akenfield, on the face of it, is the kind of place in which an Englishman has always felt his right and duty to live. It is patently the real country, untouched and genuine. A holy place, when you have spent half your life abroad in the services. Its very sounds are formal, hieratic; larks, clocks, bees, tractor humming’s. Rarely the sound of the human voice.”
Yet none of the villagers have any romantic attachments for the past. There is no nostalgic yearning for the way things were done before. As one farm-worker puts it, “Every bad thing gets to sound pleasant enough when time has passed. But it wasn’t pleasant then, and that’s a fact.” In their complaints, it is easy (at least for me) to recognise shared complaints, despite growing up under a different sky and a much different world. Farmers, are without a doubt, an easy lightning rod for any rural inhabitant to vex at. Their tax breaks. Their outright cheapness. Not frugality or wise business sense. It’s an outright penny-pinching stinginess. First grade misers. Whereby they could pull out a guitar or fiddle, and play a tune of their woes. If you’ve ever wondered why country music was founded on the blues principles of misery, look no farther then the farmer. Even now, with food costs and inflation, the farmers sing their tired tunes.
It was and is the mundane cruelties, where I immediately recognized the countryside. Life and death are ever present in the country. Cattle in the fields. Chickens in their coops. Pigs in their pens. All will inevitably make their way to the grocery store and your plate. Forests and mountains are equally open during the season. It’s a conservation effort, helps to keep the populations under control. Then there are others, who through their scopes are not interested in hunting to fill their freezers. Heads. Pelts. Paws. Teeth. Trinkets and trophies are what they’re after. There is a reason there is a local taxidermist. Then there are the others. The poachers. A hunter in some respect can at least be granted a modicum of respect. A granule at best. A poacher, however, is nothing more than a scourge. They kill mindlessly. Brainless beasts of senseless slaughter. There is not an ounce or a grain or a particle of humanity within them. Economic impoverishment? No. Those considered economically disadvantaged, who in their desperation, are best described as hillbillies or rednecks, the very ones who slow down next to roadkill, contemplating if this will be their next meal. A poacher, who leaves the carcass in the ditch, is a being with no moral compass and no capacity for humanity or respect for life.
It is the Master at the Agricultural Training Centre, whose observations of rural life and of the young men who pass through his institute’s doors, who best captured the spirit of rural life at a point which struck the nearest to home. From the dyed in blue conservative politics to the casual disregard for life:
“Both groups are conservative to an amazing degree – I mean, considering how young they are. I asked my class the other day, ‘What about hanging?’ There were thirty boys in the class, all aged between seventeen and nineteen, and every one of them was in favour of hanging. It shook me. You find some funny things out. They all have a streak of cruelty. They kill in a way which would disturb the ordinary town boy – very few town boys have ever killed anything. But by the time he’s twenty a countryman will have killed a considerable number of animals. It doesn’t mean anything to them. It doesn’t mean much to me. I’m a countryman and I was brought up in an atmosphere of natural killing, on a stock farm you see the animals going away to slaughter. You see cows which you’ve milked for years and which you have named, and whom you’ve built up quite a little relationship, going off to the butcher and you don’t feel a thing. It is logical. The countryman has no reverence for life. Things are born, things die. All the time. Death is as familiar as birth. To take a murderer’s life is just sensible to them.”
The question of animal welfare and the ethics of intensive factory farming (which in the late 60’s Suffolk, is commented on as only starting out in its early stages), became a defining dilemma for the country veterinarian, who phrased the question as profits versus ethics. The country vet commented on the horrors of profit driven mutilation found in factory farms, to stop the animals from resorting to cannibalism and madness born out of the boredom and the inhumanity of their enclosures. Pigs who bite each other’s tails off. The practise of debeaking chickens to stop them from pecking and killing one another. There is no mention of grinding of male and unhealthy female chicks. Unable to produce eggs, they are considered a wasteful byproduct and put through an industrial grinder, where they are mulched into meal. Factory farming only capitalised on the inherent nihilism widespread within the agricultural community. The notion of a ‘family farm,’ now almost 60 years later, is reaching the point of extinction. Images of ‘mothers homemade chicken pot pies,’ are now just marketing campaigns, brands, and slogans. The cheery plump woman in the photo may have existed at one point in time, but not anymore. Now, its intensive and concentrated farming, whose images would be revolting to the average consumer, if they knew exactly where their eggs, meat, poultry, and dairy come from, and the conditions in which it was produced. This is not necessarily a criticism, it’s a reality. One which has subsequently wiped-out the former agriculture economy and culture Ronald Blythe originally traced, which at that time was experiencing a mass exodus. In its wake, the images of quaint country farms have been replaced by a faceless industrial complex.
My favourite sections of the book included “Four Ladies,” and “The Law.” In particular I found the observations by the Magistrate and the District Nurse, the most interesting. In the case of the District Nurse, there’s no attachment to the agricultural world. No discussion of the field work. The fragile tightwire act of farming as one battle against the weather and other obstacles. No, for the District Nurse, an outsider in every way, the obstacle was the people themselves. Those of Suffolk are an inward, secretive and suspicious lot. Despite this, she had supported their births and laid out their dead, and understood them better than most. While the Magistrate – who did her best to hide her social standings and better than attitudes – took her position seriously, but inflected a sense of social pity on those who faced the court. Still, when the Magistrate mentioned there is always that one family, immediately anyone who had any stint in the rural trenches, knew exactly what she was referring to. The peculiar ones. The pariah. The ones always on the border edges of decency and civility and for the record, didn’t give a damn. They reveled in their squalor and had no shame in their criminal dealings. These two women’s observations, brought at times refreshing outwardly perspectives on what village life is.
“Akenfield,” certainly maintain its subtext of: Portrait of an English Village, as this is exactly what it is, a portrait of an English village in a specific period of time. The winds of change are strong as they bellow and blow through the fields. The neo-feudal era is banished to the sands of time. People are no longer expected to be invisible in the presence of their social masters or superiors. There still, the countryside is drying up of its own stock. Home is home, but there are thoughts and questions of others skies and opportunities. America? Australia? These are no longer dreams, but entertained thoughts. It also captures the comic failings of the times, as noted in “The Forge,”:
“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.”
While the gentrification of the area, as noted by the Gardener, sees the newcomers – those city folk, who’ve come down for their own parcel or postage stamp of perceived paradise – have made life rather uninteresting, or at the very least, less elaborate. By stating “Their gardens look like shopping.” Which is not a stretch of the imagination, considering the estate garden he comes from. Ronald Blythe captures all the complexities of rural life. The neighbourliness, its own set of traditions and superstitions which carry on alongside the Christian faith. There is an awkward even bashful attitudes towards discussing politics or organizing labour openly; yet each of them will affirm they hold no fondness or dewy-eyed sentiment for the old ways – those are the worst ways, the hard ways. There is also the inherent secretiveness. “Akenfiled,” does not mine or seek to propose any lesson to be worked from the various lives on offer. What Ronald Blythe captured is so much more. Blythe captured the richness of these individuals lives against a changing rural backdrop. A time that was and will never be again, but thanks to “Akenfield,” this portraiture of place and people can be revisited and reviewed. While, at times I used the book to enforce and confirm my own held prejudices against rural life; the Poet in “Not by Bread Alone,” provides enough counter argument to my own entrenched views:
“When I was a boy I lived in a country suburb of London — it was still possible to talk of a suburb being in the country then. After Oxford, I worked in London, where I wrote a poetry of despair. It was a continuous cry for what I had lost, for the hills and fields, and the vixen wood, with the dog-fox barking at night. I imagined myself dying inside and so I came to this village to find my health. My wholeness. That is what I am here. It was not my village but to say that I had returned to it seemed a true way of describing what had happened to me. Suffolk amazed me — the great trees, the towering old buildings soaring out of the corn. The huge clear spaces. I am now at home here. I know everybody and everybody knows me. Words have meaning for me here. I am lucky, I came here to get better but I have in fact been re-born.”
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
