The many passions of Ronald Blythe

In Regency Britain, balls were often timed to coincide with full moons. Provided there was no cloud cover, moonlight made it safer to send out carriages. When Ronald Blythe accepted social invitations, he also took the lunar calendar into account – because a full moon was ‘best for a merry bicyclist wheeling homeward along unlit and potholed lanes’.

This vignette captures much of Blythe’s magic. He was born in Suffolk in 1922 and his life and his writing became vessels for centuries of rural wisdom. With his death last year, that link to the distant rhythms of the English countryside was lost, but Ian Collins’s biography attempts to preserve the magic.

Blythe’s father was a gravedigger, while his mother grew up in a London slum. His childhood was spent in rural poverty, occupying cramped labourer’s cottages little different from those described by Thomas Hardy. From his mother Blythe learnt a love of reading, nature and religion. Meanwhile, his father’s life inspired several passages in Akenfield, the polyphonic account of an imagined Suffolk village from the late Victorian era to the 1960s, which secured Blythe’s reputation as a writer.

The book sold more than 400,000 copies and became an inspiration for a new generation of nature writers. Its use of family history gave many readers the impression that they knew ‘Ronnie’ well, as did the mix of memories and anecdotes in his long-running Church Times column. But, Collins argues, there was ‘a more profound silence’ behind this seeming familiarity. Truths about his childhood poverty, his second world war service and his sexuality were only shared with close friends or else kept completely secret.

Joining the army during the war, Blythe enjoyed affairs with several soldiers. This model he would follow for the rest of his life: brief but friendly couplings that protected his emotions as well as time for writing.