Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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A capacious work that contains multitudes . . . a work to amble through, seasonally, relishing the vivid dashes of colour and the precision and delicacy of the descriptions' THE SPECTATOR

Landscape and Englishness is an essential read for anyone interested in why some kinds of interaction with nature are celebrated and others are frowned on. Drawing on a huge diversity of sources – books, films, preservationist tracts, walking guides, novels, music-hall songs, Ministry of Information pamphlets, maps and festival guides – Matless reveals how our assumptions about landscape and national identity were forged in the decades between the Great War and the 1950s, and how deeply they’ve been shaped by history, class and politics. He uncovers a complex history of rurality marked by a careful policing of who is allowed to be in the countryside and what they are allowed to do there. “I have seen charabanc parties from the large manufacturing towns …playing cornets on village greens”, wrote HV Morton in horror in the 1930s. Things we take for granted as part of the countryside – The Country Code and youth hostelling, nature appreciation, field archeology, orienteering, birdwatching and the scout’s “dibdobbery of observant walking” – all played their part in educating the citizen in the correct way of reading the landscape and interacting with it. The book has deep theoretical underpinnings but is a joy to read, particularly when Matless turns an arch eye on the assumptions underlying much of the material within: “If one enjoyed, for example, loud music and saucy seaside humour,” he writes, “one could not and would not want to connect spiritually to a hill.” And yet Blythe does represent a way of life that has all but disappeared and Williams detects a gentle moral in his writing. “He’s certainly saying to us, ‘This may be a way of life that’s passing, and it’s not perfect, but you’re going to be much worse off if you’re not ready to learn from it, so let me help you learn from it.’ He’s saying, ‘Society is moving on – don’t forget this.”

Book reviews

Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year's Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. With gentle wit and keen observation Blythe meditates on his life and faith, on literature, art and history, and on our place in the landscape. But the tree has a history parallel with my own in the wild garden and I sense that I am losing part of myself as the boughs fall…’ (Blythe, 2022) Slowly it dawned on me that nature could be a place of resistance to stories about the way you are supposed to be – a central concern of Hines’s Billy Casper in A Kestrel for a Knave. Billy is a persecuted soul, a loner, a troublemaker, a failure at school. He won’t keep goal, won’t work down the pit, fiercely resists the models of masculinity that surround him. Training a kestrel is an escape for him, but it is not a simple one. Hawks in literature so often stand in for emotional absences, are tutelary spirits of the lost or dispossessed. Kes grants Billy a contagious power. Explaining how he trained the kestrel lets him speak to his class with sudden, spellbinding authority, and Kes gives him a figurative and literal ability to silence his persecutors: “Steady on, Sir,” he admonishes Mr Farthing, “you’ll frighten her to death.”

When I wrote the book, I still had access to people who lived and fought in the First World War. I had people had worked on the land during the first half of the century. I had first-hand memories to work from. All that has gone now." From his home at Bottengoms Farm Ronald Blythe has spent almost half a century observing the slow turn of the agricultural year, the church year, and village life in a series of rich, lyrical rural diaries.” Speaking to me later over lunch, Blythe expanded on the theme: “Akenfield is about the Suffolk people, it's about growing up, about moving away, about staying at home, about the countryside - it's about the generations. It's about us as Suffolk people.

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

This intriguing work continues by softly carrying the reader through the seasonal rhythms of a year in the Suffolk countryside, setting ‘Word From Wormingford’ columns for the corresponding months from different years alongside each other, bringing a freshness and new vibrance for those who may have read previous collections. From the scent of impending snow in January, through to the farmers browsing seed catalogues as the bells ring in the New Year at the close of the following December, it is a journey that I found myself taking three times over. It's extraordinary that a book I wrote in 1967, which is a world away from us now, and a film made in 1973/74, can have such an amazing and very gratifying hold over people's affections. after newsletter promotion Blythe’s writing dances with self-deprecating wit, rebellious asides and unexpected notes of worldliness

This friendship inspired his visual creativity. "I was a poet but I longed to be a painter like the rest of them," Blythe said 10 years ago in a 90th birthday interview. "What I basically am is a listener and a watcher. I absorb, without asking questions, but I don't forget things, and I was inspired by a lot of these people because they worked so hard and didn't make a fuss. They just lived their lives in a very independent and disciplined way.” I was incessantly reading. We went to the old Repertory Theatre and then went for little meals at Neal & Robarts in the High Street - which we thought was very sophisticated. We'd go downstairs and there would be all the actors from the theatre.” A life rooted in East Anglia has given Blythe a rare depth of vision. His writing is attuned to the physicality of existence, attentive to the world around him, and always listening to people and other species, as here, in June: In an interview with this paper in the mid-1970s, he said: “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 just as the book came out.

Other stories

Blythe added: “A poet friend once advised me to ‘Put everything down. The total will surprise you.’ I took him at his word. For over 25 years I kept a day-book – a journal of life in a quiet corner of the English countryside. The total must run to over one million words. It has been a joy to revisit those diaries for this selection.” Blythe has long championed the poet John Clare, and there are similarities, as Olivia Laing observes, in Blythe’s “attentive and unsentimental” view of the countryside. When he writes about “gaudy” fields of borage, Blythe knows how it is harvested and where it will be sold. “A very Clare-like knowledge, this, obtained by the steady, perpetual listening that gave Akenfield its power,” Laing writes.

Of night-walking, Blythe wrote that everywhere was “all so perfectly interesting that one might never go to bed”. According to Macfarlane, this captures Blythe’s sensibility in a sentence: “inquisitive, wandering, democratic, giving us the truth on the ground”. His appreciation for everything extends to his own mortality. “He’s philosophical, he doesn’t complain and he’s interested,” Collins says. “He would be interested in dying – he finds it all fascinating.” For many years, Blythe was a lay reader for his local parish, often performing the de facto job of vicar without a stipend. Collins feels Blythe was slightly taken advantage of by the Church of England, despite the Church Times giving him the weekly column that arguably delivered his best work. Mabey, an atheist, admits he has never discussed with Blythe his “quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith”. Although I actually haven't worked this land but I have seen the land ploughed by horses, so I have a feeling and understanding in that respect.” Akenfield, the novel, is a study of what people regarded as a timeless way-of-life, but Ronald could recognise signs of change – although resolutely unsentimental, his book was eulogy for a rural idyll that had lasted for nearly two thousand years. But, Blythe, who was awarded the CBE in 2017 for services to literature, stayed true to his original calling and his latest book, Next To Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside, published to mark his centenary, does tap into the visual aspect of his personality.Having unravelled the threads and got a wider grasp of the content, I read a third time, to luxuriate in the wit, reflections and audacious splendour of it all, celebrating the words and language of someone who knew how to observe his world, squeeze every drop of texture, meaning and association from it, and, most importantly for his readers, knew how to translate those considerations to meaningful and elegant prose. Ronald agreed: “"I think what makes Akenfield so popular – both the book and the film – is that it captures the spirit of Suffolk. It's everyone's story. It's not the story of one person, or one family or even one village - it's everyone's story and I think that it strikes a chord.” Collins Bird Guide by Lars Svensson and Peter J Grant, illustrations by Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström (HarperCollins, 1999) Through his association with Britten, Blythe then met such distinguished writers are EM Forster and Patricia Highsmith. In 1960, after he published his first book A Treasonable Growth, a novel set in the Suffolk countryside, he became friends with Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End, near Hadleigh, and nurtured the talents of a young Maggi Hambling. An indication of just how prescient Ronald had been was demonstrated in 2004 when he met Sir Peter Hall and Akenfield cast members Peggy Cole and Garrow Shand at Hoo Church to shoot extras for the DVD release of the film.