Apple Acre (Paperback) - Common

by Adrian Bell

Food rationing, blackouts, and the threat of invasion became part of everyday life in Britain during the Second World War. Yet despite the wartime austerity and growing mood of unease, Adrian Bell and his wife went about their business in Suffolk, happily absorbed in the daily tasks of rearing children and struggling against enemies like weather and unyielding clay. Theirs was a way of life shaped by the seasonal rhythms of planting, cutting hay, apple picking, cider-making, the harvest festival, and the midwinter lifting of sugar beet. Apple Acre is an intimate portrait of a hamlet content to draw its strength from the land.

Genres: Nature

192 pages, Unknown Binding

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Adrian Bell is one of the best-known of modern writers dealing with the countryside. His books are noted for their close observations of country life.
The son of a newspaper editor, Bell was born in London and educated at Uppingham School in Rutland. At the age of 19 he ventured into the countryside in Hundon, Suffolk, to learn about agriculture, and he farmed in various locations over the next sixty years, including the rebuilding of a near-derelict 89-acre smallholding at Redisham.

Reviews

[Fenella Ford · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across this book on a recently rediscovered reading list from my schooldays when I was 14 and just starting my two-year O’ level courses. It wasn’t what I expected at all ! It reminded me a bit of Akenfield and the more recent Return to Akenfield, giving views of country living and working on a Suffolk Farm. This book was written in wartime, 1942 and was something of an elegy to British farming life. Billed as fiction, there was a very light storyline around the author and mainly his three year old daughter, although his wife and twin babies had occasional mentions. I found it quite heavy going but wanted to finish it. There was quite a lot of lyrical and philosophical reflection and it ended with a patriotic sense of - our way of life will not be beaten. All the old farming methods were in use - hand scything and making haystacks, gleaning the fields after harvest. I don’t think I would have persevered with this book had I read it as a fourteen year old, there wasn’t enough of a personal story to engage with, but I’m glad I read it now.

[Robert Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book. The book flows superbly detailing farming and life during WW2 in the Waveney Valley. The detail is so descriptive you feel like you are there, bringing it all to life.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the earlier trilogy and especially the first book, Corduroy, so I was really excited to get hold of this follow-up volume, covering the war years. What a disappointment. It's written in a really irritating, stream-of-consciousness way, jumping from war news to vague farming incidents via 'cute' stories about Bell's toddler daughter and younger twins. There were a few passages which reminded me of the excellence of his earlier books, but mostly it just felt like a hack job - someone who was being pressured by his editor to produce another 'popular farming book' and who was scribbling down some random thoughts in between ploughing and milking. If this is your first time reading Bell, please don't be put off - try Corduroy instead. How on earth 'Apple Acre' ever got described as 'a work of genius', as it is on the dustcover, is beyond me. Presumably, the reviewer hadn't read the book and was going by the quality of the previous titles.