Suffolk, his Suffolk
Nicholas Bagnall, of the Sunday Telegraph, finds the author of Akenfield in an elegiac mood

Out of the Valley: Another Year at Wormingford

by Ronald Blythe. Viking £16.99

Ronald Blythe has lived for so long in his ancient farmhouse, that he has become almost part of the Suffolk landscape about which he writes. He is also old enough, at 75 or so, to be told that he "must have seen some changes". Nostalgia threatens like one of those East Anglian rainstorms he describes so well, but luckily it never quite comes, because the author of Akenfield knows as much as anyone about how hard rural life used to be: "Many an ancient ploughman walked lipperty-lop from having trod all his life with one foot in the furrow."

Of course he has his grouses ("We East Anglians have had much to contend with, first the Danes, then the fitted-kitchen men"), but a Christian peaceableness keeps them in check.

Bottengoms by John Nash

 One thing does nag him, cropping up more than once in this month-by-month, season-by-season collection of essays. The huge agri-cultural machines may have taken away the back-break-ing labour that made a man old at 50, but it has also removed him, as he climbs into his high cab, from his former intimacy with the soil. Mr Blythe cares about this because he is a lay reader who each year finds himself preaching at Harvest Festivals, few of whose worshippers, however glad at heart, have had any hand in gathering them in. "So far has the village moved from its once central task," he says, "that it takes all one’s service-taking strength to put back any sense of harvest into the harvest festival and the harvest supper."

He himself stays close to the earth. He mows, he weeds, he prunes, he cuts firewood and clears ponds, and almost everything he does recalls to his mind a Biblical fragment, a verse from George Herbert or a sentence from Thomas Traherne. A bubbling spring brings a quote from Jeremiah, a fall of snow another from the Book of Job. Since these essays first appeared in the Church Times, one expects a Scriptural slant, but such ways of thinking come naturally to him anyway.

One can’t help being struck by all the funerals he goes to, often of old men who were the last to have known how to paint a wagon or make a hickory scythe-handle. At the same time he is gratified to find how many useful rustic skills survive in this serene tract of England, out of earshot of the engirdling motorways.

Some may find Mr Blythe’s writing a little mannered, a little precious. If so, it is redeemed again and again by some nail-on-the-head felicity of phrase. When he takes us to the blacksmith’s we feel the heat of the forge - and the joy of the congregation at an Easter service, when "all the happiness of the faith flooded the building and quietened our hearts. Or so it felt, and what is felt is."

Reprinted, with acknowledgement, from the Sunday Telegraph