Akenfield

The portrait of a 1960's English village, by Ronald Blythe

‘Akenfield, on the face of it, is the kind of place in which an Englishman has always felt it his right and duty to live. It is patently the real country, untouched and genuine.’

Ronald Blythe wrote those words in 1969, in the introduction to his masterpiece of social history, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village. According to Wikipedia, it is ‘a gritty work of hard scholarship, rooted in detailed statistical data, presenting a very realistic grounded understanding of the economic and social life of a village.’ Which sounds rather forbidding, and not the sort of light or captivating reading you might be looking for if you are a fan of the English pastoral. But do not be put off! Wikipedia is doing it no favours, as I have just finished reading it and found it absolutely fascinating, full of humour, pathos, extraordinary glimpses into our recent past, and many clues as to some of the predicaments currently troubling English rural life.

The meat of the book consists of transcripts of some 48 taped interviews with various inhabitants of a Suffolk village. You cannot find Akenfield on a map, it is an amalgam of a couple of small communities situated ten miles from Ipswich, in the direction of Framlingham and Woodbridge. (This is Ed Sheeran territory, of course - in fact I kept wondering if I was meeting his neighbours as I read the book!) The interviews are cleverly transformed into a series of personal essays almost meditations - obviously Blythe’s pen has shaped and moulded them, but the individual personalities come through clear and strong. They are roughly divided by theme, such as The Forge, The School, The Ringing Men, The Orchard Men. And yes, Blythe has surrounded these essays with some of the hard gritty facts that Wikipedia mentions - there is a description of the various types and ages of houses in the village, there is a complete list of the inhabitants by occupation. You can pick up much of interest if you confine your attention to these lists alone: for instance there are eighteen families out of a population of around 300 who have lived in the same place since at least the 1750s - the heyday of British agriculture, before enclosures and industrialisation changed the character of the land so completely.

At the time in which Blythe is writing, times are still changing the character of rural Suffolk. The population of the village is continuing to fall - down by 25 per cent, from over 400 people in the 1930s. The land, however, is far more intensively cultivated than it was before the War: roughly 800 acres are put to wheat, barley and oats against 350, nearly 130 acres are growing vegetables, where before there were less than ten; and there are nearly 200 acres of orchards, where before there was half that. But machines are taking the place of farmworkers, and in any event the young men now prefer lower-paid jobs in Ipswich to hard farm labour. In 1967, according to Blythe, only ten per cent of boys leaving rural schools want to do farm work. Farms, which used to be major sources of rural employment, are increasingly family concerns alone: of the 300,000 farms in England and Wales, more than half employ no workers at all, and only 10,000 farms employ more than five staff. Land costs £300 an acre (today, £11,000) and farmworkers are earning £10 a week (around £460 a week now).

Reading Akenfield is not just about agricultural economics, however: in fact, hardly at all. It is principally about the character of the people of rural Suffolk, the ones who have not left for the City lights, and about why they stay. All of which is fascinating, and Blythe is particularly good at subtly picking out the differences, and suspicions, in the relationships between the ‘incomer’ versus the ‘born and bred’. Of course, in 1967 the arrival of weekenders and retirees pushing up house prices and forcing the locals out of the market had not reached the epidemic proportions being experienced in places like East Anglia, the Cotswolds and the West Country today.

What I particularly relished in my reading of this book is the little, almost thrown-away lines, which tell us so much about what has changed in England since the 1960s, and even earlier, as the book delves into the memories of many of the older inhabitants. There’s the talented young craftsman working at the forge who says ‘I was hit every Monday morning at school because I couldn’t draw…I kept out of trouble as best I could but I’m left-handed and teachers don’t like that.’ There’s the lady magistrate who remembers when she started in the courts in 1945, when the crimes she witnessed ranged from cycling without a lamp to ‘incest and bestiality.’ There’s the excerpt from the school governors’ report from as recently as 1938 ‘The Sanitary Inspector called to examine the pit where pails are emptied.’ There are the memories of being in service, when anyone found smoking was instantly dismissed, and if the maid met the lady of the house in a corridor, she had to turn to face the wall and not move until her ladyship had passed on. It’s hardly the jolly camaraderie of Downton Abbey! I know that my maternal grandparents and uncles and aunts were in service in Essex in the first decades of the century, but I can’t imagine my feisty Granny ever turning to face a wall, or my Uncle Stan taking the roll-up out of his mouth.

I particularly enjoyed the glimpse into the life of the Civil Defence Corps (an organisation started in the aftermath of the War, consisting of 75,00 volunteers trained mainly by ex-Army officers to cope with any emergency - sadly this was disbanded in 1968. It would have come in handy during Covid, I feel!). One young male volunteer describes a particular session ‘There we were building toys on the table with bits of stick and stone. ‘That’, they say, and you should hear their voices, ‘is a Mark 2 field kitchen. It will be easy to make after The Bomb because there are bound to be lots of loose bricks around.’ Indeed.

The abandoned church at Akenham, one of the villages that inspired Akenfield

One of the oddities that struck me is how male-centric life was in the village, even in the 1960s. Women are described as fanatically polishing and scrubbing the front doorstep, doing the washing on a Monday and baking on a Wednesday, whatever the weather. Of all the people listed as having paid occupations, there are just two women driving vans, two working in the village store, two teachers and four housekeepers. On top of that, about twenty take occasional work picking fruit in the summer. Of the rest, there are thirty-three housewives, ten widows and a retired district nurse. Yet already the men are picking up undercurrents of unhappiness, traces of rebellion. The Vicar recently had to organise a Mothers’ Union outing to Yarmouth to coincide with General Election Day as he was concerned the women would all vote Labour. Blythe only bothered to/managed to (?) interview a handful of women, and they comprised the retired district nurse, and the grander women who were the pillars of the Women’s Institute and the Samaritans. Dangerous, subversive organisations, nevertheless…As the President of the WI says, ‘We, all the women in the village, feel frightfully bound in at times.’ Their meetings, where talks were given on places these women would never see, and dishes were demonstrated that they would never dare to cook for their husbands, were held in the evenings, and that caused issues with attendance, as ‘a lot of the husbands won’t mind the children…they like to feel free.’ But, to coin a phrase, the women are up to something: one evening they dared to hold their meeting in the village pub…'it was very jolly, the men didn’t know where to look.’ Watch out, men of Akenfield, these women might be brave enough to try going into a pub on their own any day now.

The idyllic village of Charsfield, one of two sources for Akenfield

One of the young men, working as a forester but also a Labour party organiser, regrets the limitations of village life. ‘A town boy can drift into an art gallery, if it is only to get warm, and then see a picture and then begin to feel and think about art. Or he might go to a concert, just to see what it was like, or hang around in a big public library. From the minute he does these things he begins to be a different person, even if he doesn’t realise it…Village people live almost entirely without culture.’ This will have struck a chord with Ronald Blythe. Born in Suffolk in 1922, Blythe himself came from generations of agricultural workers, although his mother was a Londoner from whom he would inherit his passion for books. (This background must have made it easier for him to build relationships with his interview subjects in Akenfield.) He left school at the age of 14. Invalided out of the Army during the War, he was taken on as a reference librarian at Colchester in Essex, and could be described as a truly inspirational auto-didact. The Macmillan brothers would have loved him, but in fact he fell into the orbit of Christine and John Nash (the artist) and came to live in and around the Aldeburgh arts colony, making friends with the likes of Benjamin Britten and EM Forster, all of whom encouraged him to become a professional writer. His first novel, set in the Suffolk countryside, was published in 1960. Akenfield, published in 1969, became an instant classic and has never been out of print. In 1974 Blythe created a film treatment based on a fictionalised version of one character’s story, and the film was made by the director Peter Hall, with Blythe himself having a walk-on part as the Vicar. It was apparently seen by 15 million people.

Ronald Blythe: Image courtesy of Church Times/Nick Spurling

Blythe wrote about what he considered to be a vanishing way of life, and his book certainly captures a moment in time, when men who had worked with plough horses and who had seen combat in the Great War, were making way for combine harvesters, and their grandchildren were buying televisions, driving cars and going to France not to fight, but for their holidays. Today those Suffolk villages are being preserved, but perhaps thanks to the incomers, the dormitory-town commuters. The process was already underway in 1967, when the young blacksmith admitted that his principal source of business was the production of artistic weathervanes and doorknockers for the townies. But from old villages, new businesses can grow and flourish. Akenfield was an amalgam of Akenham and Charsfield. Akenham is now best known as the site of the Akenham Trenches, a recreation of WW1 trenches used in many recent film and Tv productions Down the road from Charsfield you can visit Easton Farm Park, a ‘great family day out in Suffolk’, on land once owned and farmed by the Duke of Hamilton. As far as I can see on the web, it’s a successful organisation owned and run by two women, Fi Siddall and Jill Kerr. I suspect they are brave enough to go to the pub on their own, and don’t spend every Wednesday baking or polishing the front door step. Some things have definitely changed for the better.