Today I am going to revisit Akenfield by Ronald Blythe a favourite book which I first came across in the mid-1970s.
To quote the publisher’s description it is a “perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm-workers and the fascinating and personal recollections of, among others, the local schoolteacher, doctor, blacksmith, saddler, district nurse and magistrate.
Providing insights into farming, education, welfare, class, religion and death, Akenfield forms a unique document of a way of life that has, in many ways, disappeared”.
And here is the confession, I only got part way through which was nothing to do with the quality of the book, the writing or the content, but simply because my social life was full, and work very busy.
The result was that it was put aside, first on the coffee table, then the to do read on the bookshelf and finally filed away.
Then during a clear out it went and now its back, or at least a new copy.
In the interim it was adapted into a film and later a play, neither of which I saw.
And perhaps I should stop at this point till I have read it but when I came to write my first book I drew on the format.
That book was The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy which was a study of a small rural community on the edge of Manchester during the first half of the 19th century.
And Mr. Blythe’s wish to record life in a small Suffolk village was the inspiration for my book.
I suspect his will be the better writing and he wrote from first hand experience while mine was a labour of research.
So while I can not claim to match his work I shall read it to learn about rural life in his community up to the end of the 1960s.
Picture; cover of Akenfield, Penguin Classics, £12.99
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