Harry Mount

Rural idol

Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield, at 90

Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese tourists. On the eve of his 90th birthday, on 6 November, Blythe doesn’t mourn that lost way of life. If anything, Akenfield — his 1969 bestseller about a fictional Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966 — exposed quite how back-breakingly grim country life was for most farmworkers, like his own father, a Gallipoli veteran.

‘The old farm work was terribly hard on people — there was terrible rural poverty,’ says Blythe. ‘A lot of the people think of depressions in terms of manufacturing and the cities. But it was very hard indeed in the country in the 19th century. It was very beautiful but it was another world altogether. When I wrote Akenfield, I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. And it vanished.’

That rural beauty hasn’t entirely disappeared. Blythe has noticed a decline in the brutal agribusiness of the 1970s and 1980s — when fields were laced with chemicals, and thousands of miles of hedgerows were grubbed up to accommodate combine harvesters. ‘It has settled down to a scientific, mechanised countryside,’ he says. ‘But there has been a huge change in attitudes. Farmers now take great care of the land. A lot of trees have been planted: there are more trees now in the Stour Valley than there were in Constable’s time.’

Blythe is in rude health, blue eyes gleaming, thick pelt of white hair intact, and still writing. The Time by the Sea — his account of three years in the late 1950s, working for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival — will be published next summer.

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