Voices Of Akenfield

by Ronald Blythe

Born and brought up in rural Suffolk, Ronald Blythe was fascinated by the rhythms of country life and the stories of the people he had known since childhood. In this perceptive and moving evocation of his home, the villagers speak candidly about their lives, from the reminiscences of survivors of the First World War to a younger generation of farm workers, as well as the personal recollections of a school teacher, blacksmith, saddler, bellringer and district nurse. Together they give us the voice of a village, and of a vanished rural England.

Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Genres: Nonfiction

144 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 1, 2009

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

[Silver Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book giving an insight on life gone by in rural Suffolk. Starting from the late 19th century to the 1970’s-ish,I found it revealing and, even though I’m of a ‘certain age’, appalled at how people lived. I thought we in Leafy Warwickshire, had it bad enough, but nothing to the life people had in Suffolk villages.
Narrated by people of different walks of life, Grave Digger, Shepherds, Blacksmith’s, to name but a few, it is an intriguing book, well worth a read.
Ronald Blythe died this week so no more words from him, but I am sure his books will be referenced in the future by scholars and those wanting to see what a time gone by, had to offer people and how they coped.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voices of Akenfield opens a door into the social history of the early 20th century. We see snapshots of the past through the eyes of villagers who had an array of occupations. Some of the stories were really interesting, others not so much.

A fascinating short book which is worth a read.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the full book from which I take it this comes, Akenfield; I do not know their relation. I was using Tamara Hareven's Amoskeag, about the huge NH mill, to teach Freshman Composition in Fall River, a larger mill city, though with no one mill so massive. Hareven learned from Blythe, though the speech patterns of Yorkshire (?) and New Hampshire must share little. Both authors, however, developed an admirable, enviable gift, to inscribe the blank page with a virtual recording, the written equivalent of a cassette. For both, the speakers come alive before us. Almost as if Chaucer came into the late twentieth century and did social history. Of course, Chaucer would have expanded the speakers range into more bawdy recollection.
Because I used it in class in the 80s, I recall Hareven better than Blythe, and I remember the challenge of confronting Louis Hines' photographs of child labor--for instance, in my students' own Fall River. Neighboring New Bedford has a good collection of Hines photos, though when I came to use one in our Bristol Community College student magazine, Prevailing Wind, I had to get one from the Library of Congress. I used a Louis Hines photo of the street game "Fives" in my account of three Fall River street games that came over from Manchester, UK: Bowlywicket (street cricket played with a tin-can wicket, a pinky rubber ball, and a broomstick, much harder than a wide cricket bat); Tipcat or Cat (as Shakespeare referred to it, and 19C Dickens, a cigar-shaped stick hit twice by a shorter broomstick--first to raise it, then knock it a distance for scoring by paces; and Peggyball, like Cat but with a little wooden shingle lever, and a large-marble sized wooden ball that came in early soda bottles, and again a broomstick-bat. One student told me about hitting the ball over a water tower still in south Fall River. And I think Peggyball derived like golf from Scotland. [See my article in Vol 3 of Spinner: People and Culture of Southeastern Massachusetts or in Folklore (UK) around 1981.]
Of course I also learned from Iona and Peter Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground. But no-one ever recorded the spoken word on paper better than Blythe and Hareven--except possibly Chaucer, and maybe the other great poets of the spoken word, like Wordsworth.

[Eddie Lees · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Direct Connection with the Fascinating Past

These stories, told by authentic voices of Suffolk’s rural past, contain the humour, the realities, and recollections of the hard times of a life that will never return.
The stories are written in such a way as to easily imagine sitting in a local tavern and listening to each narrator in turn relate a yarn from the long ago.
This is history as it should be … far away from academia and, instead, humanised so that the very soul of each narrator is projected as reliable evidence of existence at the tough end of life.
Highly recommended.

[Deb Wright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leant by a friend, don't remember why I wanted to read it but interesting little account of the lives of ordinary country folk in rural Suffolk. Published in 1969 but with memories from the turn of the 20th Century and I've always been interested in social history.
Interesting reading about all the different trades; wheelwright and blacksmith - how they chose the right trees for their craft, bought them, felled them,then left them til ready to use; school teacher - trying to educate youngsters that were most likely to end up doing harvest instead of learning; gravedigger- explaining how left school and started his trade at 11years old and how he had to pile up old bones to make way for new.

[Helen Pomfrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting english social history

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting episodic social history. A bit repetitive though some vividly real accounts.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but sweet book based on an amalgam of villages in Suffolk. People from old to young give voice to attitudes and also to a way of life that was changing drastically by the time Ronald Blythe published his main work 'Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village' from which this snippet of a book is taken.

[Heather Clitheroe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a marvelous book. I cut my teeth, so to speak, on James Herriot's books, and though Akenfield would have been referring more to East Anglia than Yorkshire, the stories reminded me a lot of Herriot's characters. It's quite an interesting - if short - read. Greatly recommended.