Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

In this rich, rare book, which John Updike called "exquisite", forty-nine men and women, from a blacksmith and a bellringer to the local vet and a gravedigger, speak to us directly, in honest and evocative monologues, of their works and days in the rural country of Suffolk. Composed in the late 1960's Blythe's volume paints a vivd picture of a community in which the vast changes of the twentieth century are matched by deep continuities of history, tradition, and nature.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Memoir, 20th Century, Classics, Biography

336 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1969

About the author

Ronald Blythe CBE was one of the UK's greatest living writers. His work, which won countless awards, includes Akenfield (a Penguin 20th-Century Classic and a feature film), Private Words, Field Work, Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends and numerous other titles. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006. In 2017, he was appointed CBE for services to literature

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a perfect book for my taste. “Akenfield” is a fictional village, but author Ronald Blythe tells us it is based on the village of Charsfield in Suffolk “but with the surrounding countryside and myself drawn into it.” In particular, most of the craftsmen that feature, the blacksmith, wheelwright, saddler, thatcher etc, are drawn from neighbouring communities. As the author highlights, these craftsmen were part of the village in the sense that the village relied upon them.

During 1966-67 the author, who was living just outside Charsfield, interviewed his friends and neighbours about their lives. Blythe was a poet and not an oral historian, but I find this book exceeds any other I have read in giving a sense of rural English life in the last century. There are a total of 48 interviews.

Blythe caught rural England at a time of great change, a major factor in which was that by the 1960s the motor car had started to come within the reach of ordinary people in Britain, meaning that people could live in the village and commute to work elsewhere.

"Only a generation or so ago, a villager who had to ‘go away to work’ was obliged to give up the close-knit and meaningful village background of which he was an important part for lodgings in an Ipswich or Norwich backstreet."

Combined with the above was the mechanization of agriculture, which had led to a huge fall in the number of farmworkers that were needed. What had once been a village of farmers and farmworkers, was rapidly turning into a community of commuters.

Not that this book is a wistful paean to a lost idyll. The older men, who had been farmworkers in the early part of the century, told of being brutally overworked and mistreated. The stories from certain “problem” families were thoroughly depressing, particularly the one featuring the odd-job man called Persis Ede. The interview with Mrs Annersley, a local magistrate, gave an unvarnished picture of the underbelly of local society. How attitudes have changed! Other interviewees struck a lighter note. Mrs Ferrier, Chairman of the local Women’s Institute, was an absolute hoot.

A gardener called Christopher Falconer provided a fascinating picture of the relations between the villagers and the local aristocracy. He was employed at the local manor house. I was interested to read that the locals called it “the big house”, the same expression used in my own local area, 500 or so miles away. Of particular interest to me was a section called “The Northern Invaders”, about a group of Scots farmers who had come to the area. One local landlord had let a farm to a man from Lanarkshire, who had proved so efficient that the same landlord wrote to estate owners he knew in Scotland asking whether they had any other tenant farmers interested in taking on a farm in Suffolk. This created a small colony of Scots who had the reputation of being more enterprising and effective than the locals. I doubt whether my countrymen have the same reputation today.

About the only section that I found to be a drag was one featuring campanologists (church bell-ringers). This was obviously something that appealed to the author, but it was too esoteric for me.

Even though there are a lot of books of this type, this is one I would recommend to anyone with an interest in British social history.

[Tony]

Before Village was appropriated into an idyll, it was a real place, with real people, and real jobs. This book is about such a place. It is a kind of oral history of a mid-20th Century English village, mostly in the words of people not inclined to talk. And it is splendid.

LEONARD THOMPSON, 71, Farm-worker: Our cottage was nearly empty -- except for people.

THE BRIGADIER (rtd), on the church going to pot: What you need is the padre type, somebody who will have a drink with you in the bar and who has the right to say to you, "Now look here, old boy. You've been grizzling away about your Ethel and her short-comings, but do you ever think about how she feels being left alone all the evening while you are lining them up here? I mean, fair's fair. . . ."

THE REV. GETHYN OWEN, 63, Rural Dean: Religion has a lot to do with where their families and ancestors are buried.

ROBERT PALGRAVE, 55, Bellringer and Tower Captain: The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, "Hullo, a death?" Then the years of the dead person's age would be tolled and if the bell went on speaking, "seventy-one, seventy-two . . ." people would say, "Well, they had a good innings!" But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty a hush would come over the fields. (I remember this well in my own village.)

DAVID COLLYER, 29, Forester and Labour Party Organizer: Although I do not like towns, I think they are necessary when one is young. A town boy can drift into an art gallery--if it is only to get warm--and then see a picture, and then begin to feel and think about art. Or he might go to a concert, just to see what it was like, or hang around a big public library. From the minute he does these things he begins to be a different person, even if he doesn't realize it. For an ordinary village boy everything to do with these things is somehow unnatural. The village people live almost entirely without culture. I was over twenty before I realized that classical music was just "music," and therefore all one had to do was listen to it. I listened and at first believed I had no right to listen. I felt affected. But when I began to enjoy it I stopped worrying. Everything I do begins with doubt and insecurity. It is as though I am using a language which I haven't a right to use.

CHRISTOPHER FALCONER, 39, Gardener: The boy under-gardeners had to help arrange the flowers in the house. These were done every day. We had to creep in early in the morning before breakfast and replace the great banks of flowers in the main rooms. Lordship and Ladyship must never hear or see you doing it; fresh flowers had to just be there, that was all there was to it. There was never a dead flower. It was as if flowers, for them, lived for ever. It was part of the magic of their lives.

FRANCIS LAMBERT, 25, Forge-worker: Young men should always look for work which interests them, no matter how long it takes them to find it. No man should go in at morning to wait for the clock at night. And people who want the money without the work spoil everything.

ERNIE BOWERS, 55, Thatcher: I get up at half past five of a morning. I work many hours. I get tired, but I will be all right, I suppose. There are all these great boys in the house--they keep you lively. But you can't get into a conversation with a young person as you could years ago. They just haven't got the interest. They don't want our kind of talk. They're all strangers--all strangers.

You don't make much money if you work with your hands. You can't make the turnover. But I have no regrets working so slowly. I began in a world without time.

MRS. SULLIVAN, 55, Headmistress: You could, if you weren't careful, become attached to the children in a school like this. Sentimental. But you don't if you're wise. They must do what they are here to do. Learn enough by eleven so that they are able to go on learning when they leave.

MICHAEL POOLE, 37, Orchard Worker ("He is simple . . ." people will say.):

I went to work on the fruit when I was fourteen. I never minded it. I got my money and that was the main thing. I grew, my money grew. It was nice to have it.
Summer was the best. You'd get the women come and give you a look. You'd torment them and they'd torment you. There used to be a regular procession of old girls who'd bike up from Framlingham for the picking. When I was sixteen, one of these old girls came up to me in the orchard and said, "Let me see your watch."
I didn't answer.
"Aren't you going to let me see your watch then?"
I said nothing. Anyway, she could see my watch; it was lying on my waistcoat under the apple tree.
"I shall take it . . ." she says.
"Take it then."
"I reckon you want me to take it?"
"I can see you're bent on it," I said, "so you may as well."
So she took it, for devilry. It was on a chain and she hung it round her fat neck the whole live-long afternoon. I wouldn't let her see it worried me. She'd walk by and shout, "Come and get it!"
I said nothing. She brought it to me about five, before she set off home. She put it over my head like a necklace and said, "There you are, you young bugger."
I wouldn't speak to her.
The next morning, along she comes, straight to where I'm about to start. Her arms were stuck out full length and she was all smiles. She got her mouth on my face and, my God, she must have thought it was her breakfast, or something.
I pushed at her. I said, "Don't! Look out, he's coming!" --He was, too. Old Fletcher the foreman. She broke away but back she arrived later when I was lying on the scythings, eating my bait. It was long grass all around.
"Don't fret," says she.
I said nothing.
"The coast is clear," she says, and comes down on me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't see nothing but grass. There was such a rocking. I couldn't tell whether I was babe or man.
At tea-time the women went rushing home with their aprons full of apples--shrieking, you can be sure. They shruck a bit more when they saw me and a couple of them rang their bike bells. My old woman shouted, "Don't torment him! He's like his old watch--not so bad when he's wound up!" Laugh! You should have heard them!
It was my first time.
Christ, that was a summer and no mistake.

MARIAN CATER-EDWARDS, 50, Samaritan: I'm fond of the old widowed men who sit quietly in their houses. Most of them aren't so much wanting food, or whatever, as for a talk. I feel so guilty. I chat my way through a quick cup of tea and they've got a look on their dear old faces like Bessie here, just longing for you to go on and on. I skip the groaners. It really does take it out of you to be groaned and moaned at. I like the ones who say, "Well, that's life!"

TERRY LLOYD, 21, Pig-farmer: I have dinner at twelve, do all kinds of jobs until half-past four, then it's feeding again. I have tea at six and at eleven, just before I tuck in myself, I have a walk round to see if everybody is cosy. Pigs are funny animals and like a sense of being cared for.

ANTHONY SUMMER, 23, Shepherd: I castrate the male lambs, the little tups, about an hour after they have been born. They say what you've never had, you never miss. I wonder.

ROGER ADLARD, 31, Factory Farmer: Pigs are very clean animals but, like us, they are all different; some will need cleaning out after half a day and some will be neat and tidy after three days. Some pigs are always in a mess and won't care. Pigs are very interesting people and some of them can leave quite a gap when they go off to the bacon factory.

There are an awful lot of petition going about concerned with cruelty to animals. They are usually got up by people who keep pets confined in flats and I am not sure that such folk are entitled to hold these opinions.

THE POET, Himself: They say that I have opted out. That is what they say. I am out of all the great events of the day--or so they tell me. The accusers come yearly and usually in the summer, for none of these kind of people have patience with a village in winter, and they point their finger at me for having turned my back on what they call current affairs. They tell me that a poet should not avoid what is going on in the world. A poet should be with the mass of mankind, they say; a poet should carry a banner. I do not march, I do not protest, I have not the people's cause at heart--so I am guilty! I do not argue about the colour question or the religious question. I am a guilty innocent, I suppose. Can one be that?

WILLIAM RUSS, 61, Gravedigger: Bodies used to be kept in the house for twelve days. Everyone kept the body at home for as long as they could then; they didn't care to part with it, you see. Now they can't get it out quick enough. They didn't like hurrying about anything when I was young, particularly about death. They were afraid that the corpse might still be alive--that was the real reason for hanging on to it. People have a post-mortem now and it's all settled in a minute, but there's no doubt that years ago there were a rare lot of folk who got buried alive. When a sick man passed on the doctor was told, but he never came to look at the corpse. He just wrote out the death certificate. People always made a point of leaving an instruction in their wills to have a vein cut. Just to be on the safe side.

I talk too much, that is my failing. I come into contact with many people at a serious time, so I have picked up serious conversation. What most folk have once or twice in a lifetime, I have every day. I want to be cremated and my ashes thrown in the air. Straight from the flames to the winds, and let that be that.

[Blaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 20th century classic documenting the fading way of life in rural farming communities. Rural life will continue, but the dense network of smaller farmers and the industries that supported it -- saddlers, generalist farm workers, wheelwrights, blacksmiths etc. -- was already yielding to factory farms and specialists when the book was written in the late 60's. I imagine there will always be isolated, insular places being lost to radio, television, the internet, economic progress or change, invasion, etc. And new ones created. It is inevitable. Stopping it is like Cnut holding back the tide. But wonderful to capture it.

What made this a classic in my eyes were the beauty and economy of the writing and the picture of the "consciousness" of the village inhabitants.

The village children aren’t jealous – on the contrary, they are convinced that they have something which none of the newcomers can ever have, some kind of mysterious life which is so perfect that it is a waste of time to search for anything else.

They are never imaginative because, again, they don’t need to be. They find it impossible to want anything which they can’t actually see in the village or which isn’t theirs already.

They are hard people. Their lives at the higher level – and make no mistake, there is a higher level: I have seen it, a fugitive glimpse into a country where I cannot belong – present an imponderable. It is the only word I have for it. Fatalism is the real controlling force, this and the nature gods, the spirits of the trees and water and sky and plants. These beliefs seem to have no language, but they rule.

We learnt nothing abstract or tenuous there [village school]. – just simple patterns of facts and letters, portable tricks of calculation, no more than was needed to measure a shed, write out a bill, read a swine-disease warning.

I would pair this with Carr's A Month in the Country as showing me a world I can never enter.

[knig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having a puta of a day? Mayhap the carburettor finally conked. (On the M25, where else?). Perhaps as one is artfully manoeuvring between two lanes and so blocks both, the other two of course being cordoned off for road works, whose estimated completion may or may not supersede the Apocalypse. Manage to survive the road rage just before you’re road kill, rush to work: Is that Fat Nelly with your coffee cup, AGAIN, because she probably ate hers for breakfast? Hell, coffee is overrated anyway. But wait, the tights have won at ‘snakes and ladders’ yet again just before the ten o’clock and the blackberry has gone into lockdown: no amount of coaxing is gonna get that baby up and running for the presentation. Which you don’t have anyway because the dog ate your homework. And it only 10.30 in the morning: is life even worth it?

Wait, don’t dial a friend: no one wants to hear your shit anyway. Instead open up Akenfield (obviously prop it between the quarterly sales ledger and put a few furrows on your forehead for authenticity). This stuff is way better than therapy, and needless to say, cheaper. Who can fail to feel assuaged and cocooned in a feel-good miasma after reading about the totally crappy, senseless, pointless, exploited lives of Ackenfiled’s residents in the early 20c. In as much as everyone needs a smaller flea to pick on, this here is the ultimate jackpot. The sheer degradation, humiliation, poverty and ignorance on display are not without their wow factor. Yes, of course, we all know it was tough back in the day, but following this docudrama as residents recall their lives (the book was published in 1960), had me hook, line and sinker. I now understand (a little bit) how anyone can watch Big Brother: am I not as guilty in immersing in these wretched lives and lapping it all up in a show of gross voyeurism?
The lives rendered bare are too many to recount: go read them yourself. The message I take with me though is that if despite all their hardships these people somehow managed to cherish life and find happiness, then I have no excuse for sitting on the moaning mini chair. (Although I can kvetch standing up, too....)

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine a monologue that takes you deep inside another person's skin, entertains, and imparts a great deal without any apparent effort. Now imagine that effect used on an entire community, set down in an entire book, and you have some measure of this book's peerless charm and wisdom. Neither Hardy nor Housman tell you as much about the English countryside or its inhabitants.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an ARC from the publisher.

This book is a history of the British village of Akenfield in Suffolk, England as told through the stories and narratives of its own citizens. Blythe interviewed 49 different people from all types of social backgrounds and occupations and recorded their words for this social history. In 1967, the year in which the villagers are interviewed, the way of life in this small village is changing from one of manual labor to mechanization. Each person from Akenfield that is interviewed by the author highlights different aspects of his or her life in a forthright, honest and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Blythe groups the book into twenty different sections of the people, some of which include “God,” “The Craftsmen,” “The School,” and “The Law.”

One group in the book that made a particular impression on me were the craftsmen such as the wheelwright, the blacksmith and the thatcher. It would seem that with the invention of cars that there would no longer be a need for such talents because of the shrinking reliance on horses and wagons for transportation. It was inspiring that these hardworking men decide to change with the times and find other uses for their crafts. The blacksmith, Francis Lambert age twenty-five, is a very talented craftsman and now that there are no longer horses to shoe in order to sustain his business he has diversified by making weather-vanes, gates and fire-screens. Francis is so talented that he is even sent to Germany to represent England at an international craft festival. Francis loves his job which is evident by the fact that he usually puts in sixty hours of work per week and he takes a great deal of pride in his masterpieces.

As one would expect, hopes of escaping the village are expressed from some of the residents, but for the most part they seem content to stay in their small part of England. Several of them mention that their families have resided within the boundaries of Akenfield for generations. But there are also a fair number of voices we hear from people who, even though that have lived in Akenfield for many years, will always be considered “outsiders” because they were born elsewhere. Hugh Hambling age thirty who is a schoolmaster tells us that he was born on Norfolk. He and his wife move to Akenfield when he was twenty because he found a charming cottage that the newly married couple could afford. Hugh feels that the villagers are very private people and although he tries to engage them in discussions, he only ever is able to talk to them about cursory things like football or the weather.

In the section on the school, Blythe includes the administrative records from the teachers and headmasters which date back to 1875. One problem, in particular, that teachers have to deal with is poor attendance by the children of farm owners. There are certain times of the year when even the young ones are needed to be out in the fields helping with the crop and later when a truancy law is passed these guidelines for school attendance are still not enforced. Outbreaks of health issues such as ringworm, diphtheria and scarlet fever are also recorded and must have certainly worsened the poor attendance issues.

Many of the details that the residents of Akenfield provide are like no other that one would find in any ordinary history book. The orchard worker, for instance, gives us a detailed accounts of different apples that are best grown in the English climate and what the prime picking time is for each breed. The thatcher provides a lengthy description of the best way to thatch a roof and which are the best materials to use. I found the section on the bell-ringers particularly fascinating; these young men are in a way considered talented musicians and go around to village and neighborhood churches in order to practice their craft of bell-ringing. I had no idea before reading this history that there is such a fine art form to the ringing of church bells.

This is a charming, interesting, candid glimpse into the pulse and essence of an English village in the middle of the 20th century. If you have any interest in British history, oral history or social history then this latest edition to the New York Review of Books classic titles is a must read.

[Bob Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Their voices jump from the past into the present

Anthropology grabbed me early and it has never let go. Why do people behave so differently from one another ? Why are they so similar too ? What would I have been if I had been born in Afghanistan instead of in Boston ? What would my life have looked like if I were an Australian Aborigine ? Why would I think what I think ? These and a myriad other questions intrigue me like no others. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, often strikes the theme of "I want to be somebody else, therefore I am." This resonates very well with me. Finally, though, you can only be whatever you are. Travelling, working abroad, making friends among different peoples---these help you answer some of those questions, but only in part. Reading ethnographies, village studies, autobiographies, or novels can also provide some answers. When such books are excellent, you plunge into somebody else's world and emerge changed---you have almost known what it is to be somebody else. When those books are about lives that began many decades before yours, you open a corridor to the past, as well.
Ronald Blythe's AKENFIELD is one of the best ethnographies that I have ever read, and I have read a lot. It certainly does not fit the academic mold and perhaps never figured in many anthropology course reading lists. More's the pity. Blythe, from East Anglia in England, wrote this beautiful, penetrating study of an East Anglia village in the 1960s. It is constructed almost entirely as narratives by the inhabitants, ranging from WW I veterans to housewives, young farm laborers to schoolteachers. Bellringers, blacksmiths, and the vet--the list of characters is comprehensive. Blythe gives description when needed and added a short, almost lyrical introduction, but has worked the interviews into a seamless whole. Arguments could be made that AKENFIELD is more social history than anthropology, but this is a barren field to sow. As the years go by, all anthropology turns into social history, as the world changes and leaves memories of what used to be. I would say that this book is one of the handful that inspired me to write anthropology, that encouraged me to avoid the jargon-strewn wastelands of academic strivings. I have never been able to reach the heights of AKENFIELD, but it stayed with me for thirty years. Who could give this book enough stars ?

[Hux · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up thinking it was a novel (the front cover suggests a quaint story of sleepy English village life). Instead, I found a work of non-fiction albeit with elements of fiction in some aspects of the presentation. In many ways, it's like a documentary but in book form. Ronald Blythe essentially interviewed Suffolk farming folk in the mid to late sixties and wrote down what they said. For all I know, he may have simply transcribed what they said word for word; but as I say, there is a definite feeling of creative license being employed here (Akenfied itself is a fictitious place and there is drama based on the book which further embellished the piece). I'm not sure what the objective was here for Blythe, to simply record the voices and experiences of a people who were quite noticeably dying out as modernity continued to march on. Maybe nothing more than that. Anyway, we get some facts and statistics along the way, dates, events, historical changes, then we get the thoughts of individual villagers and the various farm workers, people who have jobs that no longer exist (thatcher, bell ringer, malting worker, farrier, wheelwright, saddler, gravedigger etc). Plus a great many people who were directly or indirectly affected by the two world wars (and a few eccentrics thrown in for good measure too). 

This is a book which records not only a time and a place that is gone but also a place even further back in time which only the very elderly residents can now recall. Blythe seems to recognise that we are losing something, a way of life, a variety of traditions, and before it dies off entirely it ought to be captured, remembered, discussed, before all tangible traces of it (the people) have long vanished. As such the book always feels very sad, romantic, with a theme of hardship and melancholy running through it. England, (Western civilisation itself) has left behind a way of life that has existed for centuries and is being forgotten too easily. Each of the characters give their insights and opinions, some fascinating, some parochial, but it's all in service of a desperately pitiable past, both romanticised or despised, which is leaving us. I found it hard not to sympathise with the general sense of sorrow which comes from the speakers. One of the prominent themes, of course, is religion.

Gregory Gladwell 44 blacksmith

I have a tendency to be like Charles Bradlaugh, who was a Suffolk man. I am not an atheist but I have strong views about politics and the Church. Bradlaugh wasn't against Church, he was against the set-up. I'm against the set-up. But I think it was an extremely good thing that religion should be accepted as the saviour pf civilisation. So I think it right that it should be carried on, If you forsake religion, it's back to the savages. This is what is happening now.

Meanwhile there is a great deal of debate about marriage and children, the need to rush into such matters less urgent than it was in the old days, the responsibilities of so many children a daunting prospect for the young of the day (there is some brief mention of the transformative development of the contraceptive pill but this issue is mostly viewed from an angle of cultural change). 

Terry Lloyd 21 pig farmer

The village girls like to get married very young but the boys don't. Many of the boys don't want to marry until they are about thirty, although plenty of them have to long before then. I have a friend whose girl made all the running before they were wed, now he has to beg for it.

Similarly, the book doesn't shy away from the less pleasant aspects of the past either. One of the most fascinating chapters comes towards the end of the book and concerns the law and its relationship with the villagers and farm workers. Here we discover various disturbing stories including one of a group of boys who have been molested by a man with some degree of learning difficulties and they need to get one of the boys to admit to what happened in order to convict him. Despite his reticence (due to the shameful nature of it), they eventually convince him to speak. But it's all rather parochial and tolerated -- as though this is just what life consists of and we should address it accordingly. In this casual vein, we get a rather chilling account from the woman tasked with dealing with the legalities of the people's relationships and how best to deal with them when it comes to children. 

Mrs Annersley 55 magistrate

There was more incest in the past and it was always fathers and daughters, never brothers and sisters. It happened when mother had too many children, or when mother was ill, or when mother was dead. And very often it didn't matter a bit. The daughter usually proved to be very fond of the father and there would be no sign of upset in the family. No, I think it was quite an understood thing that a daughter would take on the father when the mother was ill or dead.

Yikes! You will often hear conservatives tell you that we had better morals in the past because of religion but I'm not sure that argument is very convincing when more closely scrutinised. Today things look bad but that's probably because we're actively looking for unacceptable behaviours in a way that wasn't previously done. That being said, I sympathise with the general themes of the book, the lament of a simpler time when life had more certainty, greater boundaries, and a general sense of purpose. It would be silly to ignore the bad aspects of the past entirely but nonetheless I believe we have indeed lost something of value, a greater communal environment certainly, a world that is confined and limited (often for our own benefit). People find it counter-intuitive to acknowledge this, to want less choice, less freedom, less opportunity, but the truth is such things can often provide a greater degree of stability and significantly higher opportunities for contentment. 

The whole book is a fascinating look at a time that (even when the book was published) was fading away. We now have another additional 60 years to add on to that ever increasing distance. These people are far away from us now, almost caricatures and myths, and I think it's worth occasionally thinking of them with some degree of respect and nostalgia. It's worth remembering the world we had, what we have gained and lost. Reading some of the interviews is enlightening to say the least. Some are more interesting than others and the book certainly doesn't possess any kind of plot or chronological progress. I would not describe it as a page turner but it's certainly a unique perspective into the past and definitely worth a look.

An eye opening document of a world that is long gone yet still disturbingly within reach. 

[Kathryn Bashaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by a Goodreads friend. It is a sociological study of a small English farming village in the 1960s. It takes the form of interviews with dozens of residents of the village of Akenfield, along with some limited commentary by the sociologists.

During the time studied, the English countryside was undergoing significant change. Farming was becoming more mechanized and specialized. That change is reflected in the interviews. Every interviewee who was connected with farming in any way remarked on it. Some welcomed it, but many others missed the old days. Many older people also remarked that the village didn't seem as friendly now that everyone stayed inside watching TV all the time.

Nobody missed the poverty of the past. The descriptions of farm life and childhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which elderly Akenfield residents remembered quite vividly, was heartbreaking to read about: children without shoes, whole families living on nothing but apples, potatoes and bread.

The most interesting interviews to me were the ones with the oldest residents, especially the elderly veterans of WWI. The war as they described it was simply ghastly, but they all said they felt very patriotic at the time, like they were doing something important for their country.

Some of the interviews got a little repetitive. And I was disappointed that, out of 49 interviews, only 8 were with women! Nobody would dream of such an oversight today! I imagine the (male, of course) sociologist thought that if you've interviewed one housewife you've interviewed them all. And, in fairness, women's lives probably were less interesting and varied in the 1960s than they are today.

Like my reviews? Check out my blog at http://www.kathrynbashaar.com/blog/
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[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A snapshot c. 1968 of life in an anonymised rural community south of Ipswich, Suffolk, UK. The village is given the fictional name of Akenfield. It is largely told through the words of many villagers and people who work there (but may live elsewhere), interviewed by Blythe. His introductions to them and his interpretations of their words and memories are always perceptive.

The people being interviewed cover 2 or 3 generations varying from age 17 to almost 90 so we see the place and hear the shared experiences from many perspectives. Some can describe a time when Victoria was still on the throne, others born after World War II have a very different story to tell.

Some of the stories are more memorable than others. Taken altogether it is a vast pool of information for anyone interested in rural life in England 1880ish – 1970. It is also extremely interesting and at times very entertaining and moving.

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one of a kind. I’ve never read something like it before.
Ronald Blythe didn’t simply tell the stories of Akenfield’s inhabitants. He made me feel each of them. In the two days of reading “Akenfield” I was a farmer, a shepherd, a nurse, a school teacher... Their love for the Nature, for the simple lifestyle became my love.
A book that fills you with love for the humankind. A rare work that gives ordinary people the opportunity to speak.
I think I am a different person after reading it. I would give it 10 stars not 5 if I could.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The folk of Akenfield circa 1910 had a basic understanding of the necessities required for a community to survive. They could have understood and talked to people from a hundred years earlier, and a hundred years before that, and a hundred years before that, and so on.

In the course of the past century, that understanding has been decimated. You may watch the process unfold in Akefield: most fascinating of all is to watch the old-timers talk about the lack of money when they were children, and then the sudden abundance. Where did it come from? What makes money? Who was suddenly doing the actual wealth-creating work when the people of England became professionalized after the Second World War?

I highly recommend pairing this with "The Village Laborer" by J.L. Hammond and the works of R.H. Tawney.

Beyond that, the book is beautiful simply for the glimpses it gives into the lives of our neighbors (removed though they be in time and space). One of my favorite passages is the old man complaining he has had no pleasure in his life, and then suddenly remembers all the singing from his childhood. "So I lied. I have had pleasure. I have had singing." Absolutely wonderful book.

[Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never before have I read a book that made me simultaneously so happy to be alive in the present moment and yet so despairing at the same time. We live in an age of incredible material wealth, and for this I am grateful, but Akenfield gives you a sense not only of what was gained, but what was lost in the process. The author is not sentimental though, but systematically interviews and describes people rather than paint a tinted portrait of them.
On the work:
The most common theme is that of the absolutely grueling work the people of Suffolk engaged in, especially prior to the First World War. The first person interviewed in the book, Leonard Thompson, a farm laborer aged 79, described it this way:

It was March 4th, 1914. We joined the army a few hours after we had made our decision. We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy. At the barracks we kissed the Bible and were given a shilling. The recruiting agent said, ‘You can’t go home in all this rain, you can sleep in a bed in the recruiting room’. In the morning he said ‘Go home and say good-bye, and here’s ten shillings each for your food and fares. Report back on Monday.’
In my four months’ training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food but was really because for the first time in my life there has been no strenuous work. I want to say this simply as a fact, that village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly. I am not complaining about it. It is what happened to me.
We were all delighted when the war broke out on August 14th… we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms.

Fred Mitchell, a retired horseman, age 85

I never did any playing in all my life. There was nothing in my childhood, only work. I never had pleasure. One day a year I went to Felixstowe along with the chapel women and children, and that was my pleasure. But I have forgotten one thing – the singing. There was such a lot of singing in the villages then, and this was my pleasure, too. Boys sang in the fields, and at night we all met at the Forge and sang. The chapels were full of singing. When the first war came, it was singing, singing all the time. So I lie; I have had pleasure. I have had singing.

And a similar description from the rural dean of the church:

I came to them when they had, for several generations, been literally worked to death. There was scarcely a moment they could call their own, a time when they could stop toiling and ask, ‘Who am I?’ Yet so were the miners in my father’s parish – I mean it was even worse for them – yet nothing made them indifferent to color and beauty. If you can measure the spiritual nature of men by these things, then the nature of the people of Akenfield strikes me as being uncultivated and neglected.

George Kirkland, farm worker, age 45

I don’t want to see the old days back. Every bad thing gets to sound pleasant enough when time has passed. But it wasn’t pleasant then, and that’s a fact.

On poverty:
Jubal Merton, wheelwright and blacksmith, age 60

I can remember being really hungry – there are not many people who can truthfully say that now, are there? It was during the First World War when folk who had the money had the rations. Rations! That was a joke. We never saw sugar at all. We use to have golden syrup in our tea and if we couldn’t get that we had black treacle.

Emily Leggett, horseman’s widow, age 79

we took our poorness naturally. We knew within a little what we were going to get and that there would never be any more. So that was that. My father was one of eight and I’ve often heard him say that he didn’t know what it was like to have a new pair of shoes on his feet.

Marjorie Jope, retired district nurse, age 79

I knew their homes and in most cases I had delivered them. There were so many dirty children in those days, dirty hair, dirty feet, impetigo. It was thought a disgrace to have a dirty head, but lots did. There's nothing like that now. Children have never been as beautiful as they are now.

On ringing bells:
One of my favorite sections was on the bell ringers. Prior to the Second World War, men would go from church to church ringing bells. There were numerous clubs, guilds, organizations and groups that would go from one church to another taking any chance they got to ring, and this gave village life a flavor that has largely been lost:
From the narrator:

The ringing men must reach stages of exultation which are on par with those of cannabis, but if this is so there is no outward evidence to prove it. The less extreme degrees of pleasure derived from the art of campanology are similar to those derived from chess.

Ringing is an addiction from which few escape once they have ventured into the small fortress-like room beneath the bells, and the sally – the soft tufted grip at the end of the rope – leaps to life against the palm of the hand like an animal. There then begins a lifetime of concentration, of perfect striking and a coordination of body and mind so destructive to anxieties and worries of all kinds that one wonders why campanology isn’t high on the therapy list

Robert Palgrave, bell ringer and tower captain, age 55:

The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, ‘Hullo, a death?’ Then the years of the dead person’s age would be tolled and if the bell went on speaking, ‘seventy-one, seventy-two…’ people would say, ‘Well, they had a good innings!’ But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty a hush would come over the fields. People were supposed to pray for the departed soul, and some of them may have done. This practice was continued up until the Second World War, when all the bells of England were silenced. It was never revived.

On Gardening, another favorite section:
Christopher Falconer, gardener, age 39:

It is wonderful to realize that a beautiful plant is yours. Suffolk people love you to go and boost their gardens. If people want to be polite, the first thing they say is, ‘What a beautiful garden’. If a man is clipping a hedge, you must compliment him on it. Hedges have to be praised. This is where the old employers went wrong. They didn’t understand about praise. If there had been more praise for gardeners there would still be plenty of good gardeners around. An industrial worker would sooner have a 5 pound note but a countryman must have praise.

The village gardens aren't as good as they used to be for the very simple reason that a man can go to work for an hour or two extra and earn enough money to buy vegetables for a week, whereas, if he grows them, he's got to dig, buy seed, sow, hoe, water, worry, take up and I don't know what - and all for something he can buy for a few bob. There's not time, anyway, because probably he is out to work, fruit-picking and that sort of thing, and so it is easier for them both to have a packet of frozen peas handy. Life now is much less elaborate and, consequently, much less interesting. As a qualified judge of flowers, I would like to say that Akenfield is more horticultural-minded than it used to be, but it is not, and this is the truth. Not the ordinary village worker. But then you have only to go the next step higher, the salesman in his new bungalow, and it's a very different story. Their gardening is a form of ownership and ‘getting on’. They garden neatly. They don't know the difference between tidiness and neatness. They buy expensive ugly things. Their gardens look like shopping. These are the new gardeners who are making the nurserymen rich. It is not the young farm-worker – I wish it was.

On craftsmanship:
Gregory Gladwell, 44, Blacksmith:

So many smiths are just copying the old designs. And making a poor job of it. It is abusing the old tradesmen. I believe that we should work as they worked; this isn’t copying, it is getting back into their ways, into their skins.

Ernie Bowers, 55, Thatcher:

We use Hazel rods which you cut in the woods during the winter. We use hazel because it is the best splitting wood there is and the best to get a point on. Then comes the pattern. We all have our own pattern; it is our signature, you might say. A thatcher can look at a roof and tell you who thatched it by the pattern.

There used to be special patterns and decorations for the stacks years ago, particularly for the round stacks. There were three kinds of stacks, the round, the boat shaped and the gable-end, and the stack yard was a nice place, I can tell you – very handsome. They were a way of decorating the village when the harvest was over and great pride went into putting them up. They were set where they could be seen from the farmhouse and the road, so that they could be looked at and enjoyed.

On modernity:
Robert Munro, schoolmaster, age 25:

I’ve got a twenty-two-footer caravan now and the farmer lets me live in it behind his barn. It has a coke stove and a calor gas cooker and is very pleasant. It has a bedroom, a lounge and a little kitchen. It is easy to keep clean, easy to heat. I found the idea of going into a modem house very boring. Modern houses are sterile. The caravan needs ingenuity all the time. I can never understand people who pay all this money for convenience. Convenience has become a drug to them. Easy this, easy that. If I could afford it I would buy a boat and live on that. It would need even more ingenuity to do this. I was terribly lonely at the start but I told myself, 'This is good for you. It won't last forever, so bear it. It will be good in the end.' And it is turning out this way. I mean that, without being smug, I now have the existence which I designed for myself years ago. Fair enough. Essentially, it has been marvelous.

Raynor Creighton, master at the Agricultural Training Center, age 44

One of the extraordinary things about this latest generation of villagers is that it is too comfortable! They need (provocation, stress. They are sturdy young well-fed animals being trained as farm-machine operators who don't feel strongly about anything. They are content for the world to stay as it is, poverty, pain and everything, as long as they are comfortable.

On village life:
Gregory Gladwell, 44, Blacksmith:

The biggest change which I have seen in Akenfield is the growth of discontent. Greed. Nobody ever said, ‘Bugger you, Jack, my head is out!’ when I was a boy. When you wanted help it was given.

Marian Carter-Edwardes, Samaritan, age 50

People are amazed when they learn of the amount of suicide there is. Very often, when I am addressing a meeting, I will say, "Since you have had your tea and have come here to the village hall to listen to me, somebody has killed herself? -and it shakes them. Fourteen village men and six village women committed suicide in East Suffolk this last year [1966] - as against the nine men and five women who took their own lives in Ipswich during the same period. So villages aren't always the cosy, friendly places they are supposed to be, are they? People can be as lonely there as anywhere else.

Narrator:

The truth is that there is a void where the old village culture existed. Ideas, beliefs and civilizing factors belonging to their grandfathers are not just being abandoned by the young countrymen, they are scarcely known. A motor-bike or universal pop might appear to be a reasonable exchange - but not after you have begun to think.

On Factory Farming:
Roger Adlard, factory farmer, age 31:

I keep hens in batteries, which is the same kind of thing and which people say is very cruel. But as I have worked with hens and have a certain knowledge of them, I don't really think it makes any difference to them. Pigs are different. A pig is more of an individual, more human and in many ways a strangely likeable character. Pigs have strong personalities and it is easy to get fond of them. I am always getting fond of pigs and I feel a bit conscious- stricken that one day I must put them inside for their whole lives. Yet, if you start to work out how much a pig walks about and how much time he just spends lying down and sleeping, you wonder if he is going to be worse off if he is confined all the time. Pigs are very clean animals but, like us, they all are different; some will need cleaning out after half a day and some will be neat and tidy after three days. Some pigs are always in a mess and won't care. Pigs are very interesting people and some of them can leave quite a gap when they go off to the bacon factory.
There are an awful lot of petitions going about concerned with cruelty to animals. They are usually got up by people who keep pets confined in flats and I am not sure that such folk are entitled to hold these opinions. They cause a lot of trouble to us. But I suppose that one must be democratic and allow them to have their opinions. I do have moral qualms but I also know that everything has got to go this way. Dreams of the past, like my dreams of cutting the corn in the sun, have got to be abandoned. Farming is not this lackadaisical business of yesterday. Yet I think of my grandfather and his father, and I think that although they had small profits for so much hard work, they had a carefree life.
All our factory animals have first-class veterinary treatment - that is something they didn't have in the past - and their food is far, far superior to what animals once had to eat on a farm. Of course, you've got all the additives to make them get fat quickly. But then we have all kinds of additives in our food. Take bread, it isn't natural bread, there are all sorts of things in it. It is bought all cut-up in cellophane and is horrible, but we eat it. We eat it because it is the food of our time.

And many more amazing passages throughout.

[Holley Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetic, strange, charming, eccentric, sad, admirable - eavesdropping on the internal and eternal voices of souls long gone from a way of life that's as remote to us now as... prairie homesteaders, perhaps. Not sure how Blythe got his taciturn villagers to talk so freely - probably because it's about their work, rarely their personal lives. And collectively, they never will complain about the present; it's always the past that was so difficult. Farriers, farmers, country doctors, bell ringers, gravediggers, deacons, schoolteacher, nurse, village fool, orchard manager - everyone gets a chance. Read one or two a time, then savour. Unusual and always interesting.

[Muaz Jalil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Akenfield has such an atmospheric vibe. It was calming and soothing to read. As an international development practitioner, this felt like I was going on a field visit. One thing came out: the nostalgia for a supposed golden age was always there. You have these Akenfield people complaining that the world is moving too fast or society is faltering or failing. There were always people trying to "Make Akenfield Great Again," lol.

Hudney, the game children played in 1899, strongly resembles a Bangladeshi street game called Sat Chara (7 stones). Robert Palgrave's discussion about church bells was fascinating. Bell ringing was used to notify people someone had died and their age, but the practice stopped after WW2.

I was amazed by the magistrate, Christian Annersley. She was way ahead of time. Concerned about mental health and traumatic stress. She talks about how sexual freedom and liberation led to a reduction in peeping toms, as sex was no longer taboo. She mentions an interesting point that punishment can be cathartic and give criminals a psychological way to purify or cleanse themselves. They might feel guilty and punishment helps them move beyond it.

Overall a fascinating book

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

My mother’s father grew up in Suffolk not far from “Akenfield”, his parents had a small holding in Aldeburgh. He was one of the ones that left for the bright lights of London and after a few years the Army. But he couldn’t escape village life and eventually picked up one of the “Homes for Heroes”, a small holding in Barnham, West Sussex.
My father’s father came from a long line of Agricultural Labourers in West Sussex, although he escaped and worked on the roads.

This book helped me understand the views of my parents as it highlights the struggles that must have experienced in the 30s.

Their memories of the pre war times suggest an almost frugal society with much metaphorical “tugging of forelocks” with a few interlopers coming in to buy up the neglected farms and revitalise them.

The author’s introductions to the speakers are insightful and highlight the structural changes that are going on, with the mechanisation of the farms and the availability of cars and motor bikes, opening up the village to both incomes and broadening horizons for ant villagers that wanted them broadening.

The Blacksmith’s story highlights the changes as the steady income from the horses disappears and he moves into the high value, individual items.

All of the stories are heart warming, the great majority of contented people, with some laughs as well. Although the Vets story was disturbing.

Well worth the read of a country, represented by the village, starting the change

[Susan_MG · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author clearly loved this village (or the true village). He also held the people in high regard and felt affection for them and their trials and glories. The fluidity of the author’s writing gave depth and emotion to stories he listened to and then repackaged for this book about life in a village over a period of time. There were a few places where the topic ran away a bit. Those were the pages I struggled to stay with the story. For example, all the church details became a bit blurred. Overall I can see why the author received recognition for his work.

[tara bomp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly fascinating portrait of a small community by interviews with a large proportion of its adult members. I'll leave aside questions about if it's good "history" or how "accurate" it is as I haven't researched that (although I should) - I'm not qualified to talk about it, it's a difficult subject and I didn't read it as "pure" history or whatever (to start with the village is a composite!) As something that shows a snapshot of time and place through many different perspectives, edited and filtered through another authorial perspective, it's the best I've ever read. Every person involved comes across as incredibly distinct, even with the editing creating a slightly more consistent voice. There are so many different ideas in each person's head that subtly change how they talk about the village, their lives and the changes that have taken place. It's kaleidoscopic. There's the ex-colonial army officer who now organises Civil Defence groups against The Bomb, the 66 year old sheep farmer who moved from Scotland 30 years before and still misses it, the bellringing tower captain, the retired farm worker who served in WW1, the district nurse who served a huge area and talks about how much better now is than the older times, the (female) magistrate with some frankly shocking views on sexual crimes and where particular women belong (while considering herself relatively liberal)... there's so many different parts of a village and part of society.

As a snapshot of a particular moment in time it's really striking too. The changes from television are brought up quite a lot - people don't want to go to union meetings, less attendance at the WI, people don't want to just hang around and talk any more. There are a few comments where people are shocked about long hair - in 1968! People mention The Bomb, or with the WI president if only to emphasise that they *don't* talk about it. People are VERY split on the political persuasion of most of the village. Are they instinctive deferential conservatives or taught into a long history of rural socialist defiance? There's a combination of recognition of change and a sense of already accepting it that feels very real.

The authorial voice obviously has its own agenda, but I enjoyed his additions, some of which are quite beautiful - the only place where he really stuck himself in was describing the ecstasy of bell ringers in quite astounding terms and I enjoyed that a lot.

It's difficult to precisely convey what's so great about this because so much of it is the joy of the whole thing. I was fascinated and compelled the whole way through. Trigger warning that Michael Poole's story is pretty clearly describing rape but there seems to be no acknowledgment of it. Christian Annersley the magistrate has some pretty shocking and upsetting views on incest, sexual assault, "tarts", etc. There's a couple of racist comments quoted (although a few people use "work like blacks" as a normal idiom!). Not an exhaustive list obviously, and it's kind of part and parcel of this kind of direct interview book.

Some quotes that particularly stuck with me, for better or worse:

"When we had a Questions Programme, seventy-five per cent of the questions were about the characters in telly adverts and the women knew all the answers. They knew the names of all the people in the Oxo and dog-food and detergent ads. I only switch over to I.T.A. about once a week so I didn’t know what they were talking about. I thought there was something wrong with me. They all came alive during this competition, rushing to shout out things like, “Leslie Fairy Snow!” and “Heinz meanz beanz!”" - Mrs. Tom Cooper, President of the W.I.

Marjorie Jope, district nurse:

"As for the old family doctor—he was for the old families, if you know what I mean."
“Certainly people were more neighbourly then. They went in and out of each other’s houses to help with what was needed, and thought themselves well-paid with a cup of tea, yet [a small smile at the paradox] it wasn’t better than now. It was worse, much, much worse.”"
"The old people were not taken care of. This is another thing which people like to think now, that grandfathers and grandmothers had an honoured place in the cottage. In fact, when they got old they were just neglected, pushed away into corners. I even found them in cupboards! Even in fairly clean and respectable houses you often found an old man or woman shoved out of sight in a dark niche"

"Mrs. Paul was a nurse in Nigeria—“They were beautiful, lovely people and marvellous where they had been left alone, but as soon as they got to learn about a few things they got a bit Bolshy, you know.” " - wife of an ex-colonial officer

"Television has changed the village people. I like the plays. I am always on the look-out for scenes showing ornamental ironwork. You may not have noticed, but telly plays are full of wonderful ornamental ironwork. There was this programme the other day about the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution which showed a pair of gates. Marvellous, they were. [The gates of the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, in Eisenstein’s film, Battleship Potemkin.]" Francis Lambert, forge worker

"Work in front of the house had to be done secretly. About seven in the morning we would tiptoe about the terrace, sweeping the leaves, tying things up, never making a sound, so that nobody in the bedrooms could hear the work being done. This is what luxury means—perfect consideration. We gave, they took. It was the complete arrangement. This is luxury." - Christopher Falconer, gardener

"What they can’t understand is that work is just work—something to be done and paid for. Of course we know that the old men had art—because they had damn-all else! It kept them from despairing. And we young men have efficiency, and I’m not saying that efficiency is enough either. This tractor is efficient. A man is more than a tractor, isn’t he?" - Brian Newton, farm worker and student

“Of course,” said the deacon, “you’ll get those who can’t stop, as you might say. I remember a man who went on for over an hour and so someone got up and said, ‘Excuse me, but, with all respect, I think you have said enough’—‘And with all respect to you,’ answered the preacher, ‘I’d like you to know that God is still putting words into my mouth, so where do we go from here?’ And so we had to let him go on. He used up five people’s preaching time. I wouldn’t call that Christian.” - deacon at the Strict Baptist church

"The sea is near, yet, by Akenfield, quite unfelt. The tower is like a finger held up to test its existence. “No, I’ve never been up it,” said the ditcher born in the village in 1908. “I migh’n fancy what I’d find.”"

"At Christmas 1917 they took us to Germany, right down to Kiel. It was snowing and we were in rags. No shoes. They gave us wooden clogs. We dug on the Kiel railway, making a track to the Baltic for the big guns. Many people died. On November 5th 1918 some German sailors arrived and set us free. They cut all the barbed wire and left just one guard in charge. “You can leave if you like,” they said. “The war will soon be over. There is going to be a revolution, so keep off the roads. You could go and help the farmers pick up potatoes. That would be sensible.”

So this is what we did. " - Leonard Thompson, 71, farm worker, on his WW1 PoW experience

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

[My copy is from Pantheon/Random House, not Penguin]

This is my favorite sort of history book - 90+% source material and < 10% commentary.

In the author's words, "This book is the quest for the voice of Akenfield, Suffolk, [England] as it sounded during the summer and autumn of 1967." It consists of dozens of statements by village residents of all types. These are not interviews; they are uninterrupted speeches, and cover the person's life, current events, village goings-on, outlook on life, and whatever else came to mind.

1967 was a key point in time to take a cross-section of an agricultural community, particularly in Suffolk, where the echoes of feudalism had persisted until just after World War I. Until then, farmers (as the land-holders) had acted like lords, with farm-workers being bound to farmers in hereditary positions.

By 1967, agricultural practices and labor relations were a world apart from what they'd been 50 years earlier, but the older folks still remembered what it had been like. Those memories encompass not just the old ways of being and doing, but the brutal conditions engendered by the great agricultural depression in the late nineteenth century.

I have no idea how interesting this book would be to readers in Britain, but to a reader in the US like me, who is fascinated by the way things once were, Akenfield is a precious glimpse back at the life my English ancestors might have lived.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to re-read this book decades after I first bought a secondhand copy. My how things have changed in the UK. Or rather they've gone full circle. Published in 1968, when factory farming was the up and coming thing and battery hens were the norm, chemicals were fine to spread on the plants that fed us, and industry was on the up as well. Look again in 2020 and it's all farm shops and local produce and organic farming--ie back to the old ways. Not to mention knitting vests for rescued battery hens. The vet in this book actually seems in favour of "de-beaking" for battery hens! Cruel? Well, yes, he admits it--but it's all down to food production, or what my gran would have called the Great God Mammon.

Blythe falsified the names of his villages and the people in the interests of anonymity, but one wonders how much else he pulled out of thin air as well, since disguising oral history can easily lead to fiction as many other authors attest. And how interesting that nearly all of them seem to speak with the same voice. He speaks of "classism" without apparently realising he is guilty of it himself; none of the upper class people such as the lady magistrate are physically described, but oh the snobbery in his language when he describes the lower castes such as the 14 year old lover of a farm worker, or the grandmother and her incontinent granddaughter!

An interesting look at England on the cusp. I wonder what he'd think of today?

[Neal Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written in rural East Anglia in the 1960s. A few years later, I was growing up in the Scottish countryside, and much seemed familiar to me. For example, the blacksmith diversifying away from his old stock in trade of shoeing horses. Or the man who, starting his farm, thought people were helping him out of goodwill but realised, when they promptly stopped, that they’d been coming out of curiosity, to have something to gossip about.

Although the book reaches into consumer society, the oldest memories go back to the Boer War era. “Our food was apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, and we drank our tea without milk or sugar. Skim milk could be bought from the farm but it was thought a luxury. Nobody could get enough to eat no matter how they tried. [...] There was no water near, it all had to fetched from the foot of a hill nearly a mile away. ‘Drink all you can at school,’ we were told - there was a tap at school.”

The interviewees speak candidly about crimes, incest, and cruelties - systemic or capricious - as well as fleeting joys and life's work accomplished.

The book is “pre-theoretical” in the sense that the interviews are presented one after another (with some grouping by age group and occupation) and simply finishes at the end of the last one.

[Iona Stewart · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is apparently a classic but I just couldn't get through the section about farming which I found immensely boring.

There was however a very readable chapter about bell-ringing and bell-ringers. Here I got a lot of completely new information.

I learnt that ringing is an addiction "from which few escape". You would meet the ringers in bands strolling across Suffolk from rower to tower, "Many of the old ringers couldn't read or write, yet they turned out to be really famous bell-composers and conductors."

Apparently each bell is different so you "can travel to the towers all your life and still find something new". "Chamge-ringing" is mentioned but it is not explained what this actually is.

There are probably interesting chapters later in the book that I just didn't get to since I couldn't get through the farming chapter.

The book is well-written and will probably appeal to many, just not me,

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 3 out of 5]

When it was good, it was very, very good...
Just loved the stories from the blacksmith, the bellringer, the gardener, the thatcher, the orchard men, and the gravedigger - the rest would be more interesting to a student of anthropology (dry, dry, dry).

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Akenfield is a special book for me. Its detailed descriptions of lives lived in a Suffolk village in the late Sixties mirror so many of my memories of growing up in a village an hour or so away in Norfolk at round about the same time, that it fills me with a strange mix of emotions and memories. I first read it about thirty years ago and had been meaning to revisit it for some time (a desire that was given extra impetus by reading Ian Collins’s recent biography of Ronald Blythe) when I came across the beautiful Folio Society edition of the book in a second hand bookshop. Unfortunately, that edition doesn’t seem to be in Goodreads records; in fact the only available edition seems to be from a publisher I’ve never heard of with a photo of a village street that is so obviously not in Suffolk that one wonders how on earth it was chosen!
Ronald Blythe claimed never to have heard of oral history before he came to research and write Akenfield (it was a newly emerging discipline at the time), and I suspect the book is probably better because of that. Blythe had grown up in a nearby village and spent almost his entire life strongly rooted in communities like Akenfield (itself an amalgam of several neighbouring villages). He listens to his interviewees as one of them, not as a disinterested academic researcher, and is able to understand the invisible connections that connect them like mycelia connect fungi and trees in a wood. As a study of continuity and change and of rural identity at the dawn of an age of mass media it’s a masterpiece and thoroughly deserving of its status as a classic book.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was fascinating, unlike anything i've read before and some of the ideas i've really kept thinking about and talking about to many people. i listened to the audiobook though and some of the accent work was crazy and maybe that made some of these sections less enjoyable. i also think there was maybe a point by which it was starting to drag on. i definitely liked the first third more. but glad i read it and would very much recommend.

[Adam Skelton · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved it. read the last 200 pages in a single day because I had book club

[Stephanie Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE this book!

It has had me completly engrossed - I took my time because I didn't want to stop reading the tales of the folk of the 60s in a little SE English village.

There is so much of value in this book - all the answers you can possibly want for where we went wrong as a society seen through the eyes of the folk who lived through the changes - the ones who appreciated some of them and the ones who didn't and the ones who were perceptive enough to see them for what they were, good and bad, and how they came about in the aftermath of 2 world wars.

From the voices of ordinary folk come truths we don't often hear in our society of expert-speak. What a relief!

I guess my dream now is to meet the author - he has done what in a sense I was attempting about Our times, in my book, "Tales of Our Times". The strength that comes from hearing people's voices as they lived it is invaluable to our learning of the past. I adored "Larkrise to Candleford" - but Arkenfield surpasses it simply because there are more voices - so more stories!

What I am really excited about is that if we read Larkrise and then Arkenfield we are given a picture of England that wasn't written from the perspective of the wealthy or well connected and that somehow, makes all the difference.

Bravo Ronald Blythe!

[Yasmin Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful insight into village life. It is full of prose. The transcribed interviews of the villagers have a quality of simplicity and stillness that seems to come from the villagers acceptance of life and connection with the land and its natural cycle.

Blythe's introductory descriptions of each villager, before the transcribed interviews, are an excellent lesson in character development. He has a way of describing people's physicality and character that is intricate, visceral and contains a kind of profound and distant love for the people of his homeland.

I highly recommend Akenfield as a refreshing antidote to the over-done urban-centric view and a tender and thoughtful representation of rural life.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb documentary. It's slow moving at times (those slow talking farmers and their yields), but rewarding.

It's all taken at a fascinating juncture in history (end of the sixties). Memories of the thirties are still fresh; survivors of WW1 are still knocking around; long hair and liberalism are starting to invade and paternalism is disappearing (they're still a bunch of Tories, mind). The best accounts are those of the relative outsiders - the schoolteachers in particular with their take on the dyed-in insularity of the locals.

Many of the dynamics seem not to have changed much either: newcomers still fantasise about 'country living' and community (a massive British fetish it is too); retired bankers play the squire. Lost England - but very present England too.

[Frank Callaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I petty much enjoyed reading this. Not least of all because it had for me a considerable element of nostalgia. Set in and around the 1960's in a village in Suffolk it rang true both in the era (I was a child of the 60's) and the setting, as I was born and bought in Norfolk, not so very different from Suffolk(except they were 'swedes' and we are 'dumplings')
This is not a novel nor a tale of any kind. It's a collection of short, nicely documented case studies, and through them it portrays the social history of that period.
It highlights the inequality suffered by those who worked the land, and the huge difference between farm workers of any kind and the loftier land owners who really treated their workers as poorly paid servants
The insights and descriptions of many rural trades and crafts are beautiful described, with excellent commentaries from those who worked the land, or who carried out the any of the roles that make up a village life, be that clergyman, grave digger, blacksmith or lord of the manor. They all get to have their say, and it makes for a gentle, comprehensive guide to village life in the early 1960's and beyond.
An iteresting read. Easily picked up and put down, as each person is usually given a few pages of script, some far less.
As long as you are not expecting a novel, this comes highly recommended