Word: akenfield
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...Does landscape enter the bloodstream with the milk?" The poser of this oddly shaped question, Ronald Blythe, is author of a classic documentary on English village life (Akenfield), and he permits no doubt about the answer. In this celebration of social roots, Blythe contrasts what he sees as the skittering superficiality of jet-age tourists with the intense thereness of stay-putters like the 19th century poet John Clare, who went mad when he had to leave the village where he was born. Blythe celebrates all nature except the open sea, which "makes us treacherous; it captures our senses...
...AKENFIELD by Ronald Blythe. 286 pages. Pantheon...
...grow more difficult, the new looks less promising; the settled old ways take on new luster. Anyone too inclined to idealize the countrified past, however, or dote on the imagined joys of continuity, might do well to study, as a cautionary text, this extraordinary portrait of an English village. Akenfield is a pseudonym for a real agricultural village of 300 souls about 90 miles and-until recently-several cultural centuries removed from London. "On the face of it," remarks Ronald Blythe, "it is the kind of place in which an Englishman has always felt it his right and duty...
...Akenfield, plodding, unsentimen-talized detail accumulates, suddenly evoking the devotion of a lifetime's hard work. A shepherd loses himself in telling exactly how he trains a sheep dog ("Once you have taught him stillness, you're getting somewhere"). An orchard foreman navigates his way through the niceties of pruning apple trees. A wheelwright remembers how he used to build wagons ("For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm") and paint them ("The blue rode well in the corn"). The village veterinarian, a sensitive man, contemplates the tortuous ethics of "factory farms," where pigs and chickens...
What really sets Akenfield apart is a sot-in-its-ways, living connection with the rural English past. With vision unblurred by the nostalgia that so often distorts literary renderings of bucolic yesterday, the inhabitants of Akenfield look back to a way of life only just starting to disappear and find it a world well lost. Leonard Thompson, for instance, is 71, a farm laborer from an old family of farm laborers. "Village people in Suffolk in my day," he says, "were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech." The "old ones," he adds...
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