Why Ronald Blythe is so revered

Ronald Blythe, the celebrated author of Akenfield, is to turn 100 next month, and to mark his centenary a beguiling calendrical selection has been made of his ruminations for the Church Times, for which as a lay reader he penned a weekly ‘Word from Wormingford’. It is distilled from 25 years of musings that chase the months from first ghostly intimations of snow at New Year to the blaze of the fire at Wood Hall’s mid-winter supper, while outside ‘the trees crack and the moon is made of ice’. Coming full circle and anticipating the ever-repeating rhythms of the year, they glance between past and present, sacred and secular and serious and wry in such a way that, to quote Richard Mabey in his introduction, ‘a profundity by an Apostle can shade into anxieties over a fish pie’.

Shading, glancing – yes, Blythe’s writing here is agile, light in tone and brimming with playful possibilities and allusions, which is not to say that it is not deeply serious and learned, too. Within moments of embarking on January’s dark days we are in the company of Dr Johnson making and breaking his New Year resolutions (‘like some January fool’); watching George Crabbe plant snowdrops; learning that Gilbert White’s Selbourne jackdaws were reduced to building their nests in rabbit burrows for lack of church towers of sufficient height; and that Laurence Sterne thought ‘writing is but a different name for conversation’.

Blythe’s own writing is warmly conversational and engaging, if never confessional. It is nevertheless revealing, and conjures a sensibility deeply attuned to the natural world, a catholic spirituality, and a complete lack of self-importance. This is a writer who has elevated pottering to an art:

I write a bit, then wrap up, go out… come in, type a page or two, read a chapter, listen to a story on the radio, water hyacinths, answer letters and call it a day.