Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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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. 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. I think Ronald Blythe is a genius in a special, but perhaps overlooked, journalistic genre – the nature notes or country talk columns. 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”. 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."

Hope this book reaches a much wider audience than just readers who might remember Akenfield and those of us who immediately turned to the Word from Wormingford column when the Church Times landed on the door mat. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe.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. 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.” Blythe recovered, and also survived a recent fall. His dear ones bring him three meals a day and everyone is determined that he will still be in his home, as he wishes, when he dies. 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.” 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.

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

Church Times/Sarum College:

It is a celebration of one of our greatest nature writers, and an unforgettable ode to the English countryside. By using the words of the real farmworkers and their families, Blythe dealt matter-of-factly with the notions of life, death, farming, religion and the countryside. 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.”