Postscript: Ronald Blythe 1922 - 2023

Ronald Blythe (Photo by Eamonn McCabe)

I see in the Times that Ronald Blythe has died: “Ronald Blythe, Scribe of the English Countryside, Dies at 100” (The New York Times, February 8, 2023). Blythe wrote Akenfield (1969), one of my favorite books. It’s a powerful elegy for the fading of “the old pattern of life” in a Suffolk village. Blythe asked, “How much preserved? How much lost?” Pig farmer, sheep farmer, blacksmith, ploughman, nurse, gravedigger, orchard worker, thatcher, veterinarian, horseman, harness maker, magistrate, teacher – Blythe talked to them all, and many others as well. One of his most memorable portraits is of “the ringing men”:

The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with names of saints, princes, squires, parsons and merchants, as well as rhymes and prayers, engraved on their sides. The ringing men know them both by parish and individually, and will travel from tower to tower across the county in pursuit of a particular sound. The world to them is a vision of belfries. Some part of the general fretfulness of humanity seems to be soothed by this vision. Theology is put to the count. Lost in an art-pastime-worship based on blocks of circulating figures which look like one of those numeric keys to the Great Pyramid’s secret, the ringing men are out on their own in a clashing sphere of golden decibels. The great changes are mesmeric and at half-way through the “attempt” the ringers are drugged by sound and arithmetic. Their shirt-sleeved arms fly with the ropes and, because their whole personality bends to the careening mass of metal above, they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them.

That “The world to them is a vision of belfries” is very fine. The book brims with surprising, original, delightful sentences:

The clay acres themselves are the only tablets on which generations of village men have written, as John Clare did, I am, but nothing remains of these sharp, straight signatures.

His own life and the life of the corn and fruit and creatures clocks along with the same fatalistic movement. Spring-birth, winter-death and in between the harvest. This year, next year and forever – for that was the promise. 

The older farmers, too, are still emotionally caught up in what they called at the time the “coming down process” and have vivid memories of being young in a twitch-ridden landscape, with water spread in thin lakes on top of the undrained clay and buildings sliding down into nettles.

Yet the one certain thing about Davie is his crushing sanity.

It is a suitable climate for a little arable kingdom where flints are the jewels and where existence is sharp-edged.

Blythe is gone now, but his splendid Akenfield ensures he will not be forgotten.