Craig Taylor - Return to Akenfield

Forty years after Ronald Blythe published his seminal account of a Suffolk village, Akenfield, Craig Taylor returned to the villages that Blythe disguised as the fictional eponymous location, to look again at the lives of villagers. Four decades later the people that Blythe interviewed have mostly gone, as have the specialised trades that were on the cusp of vanishing in the first book. The village however, retains much of its identity, though there are more incomers, far fewer agricultural labourers and very different attitiudes. Work now is done by a handful of workers, and farmers tend to employ seasonal labour in ways that were inconceivable decades before.

In fact its to Taylor's credit that three of his interviews are with immigrant farm workers, two from Eastern Europe and one from Portugal. They recount the difficulties, the hard work and the costs of working in England for a few years, but all retain a belief they will return home with money to get their own farm. 

There are also deep connections to the past. The first three interviews are with former orchard workers, a staple of the local economy, and now a shadow of its former self. These retired workers are wistful about the old economy, but mostly about the old varieties of fruits. The endnotes include copies of the handwritten lists of pear and apple varieties that one worker could remember. Dozens and dozens of varieties, some perhaps no longer in existence. These former workers recount the impact of technology and the way it changed production and labour. 

In the original Akenfield we got a sense of agriculture in transition to a new intensified industry. In Return to Akenfield we see what that is. Chris Green, a dairy farmer explains

the likes of Wla-Mart and Tesco are not worried at all about us. They want the supply and that's all they care about. We see to a Footsie 250 company, quite large, and even they can't go to Tesco and Wal-Mart and drive a bargain. They still have to take the price and as as conseqyence the guy at the bottom of the chain, which is us, eventually takes the hit. And because we take the hit we have to take the subsidy, which comes off the taxpayer.

Return to Akenfield has little about class struggle. In Blythe's original the question of trade unionism ran through the book. Here there is little open struggle, though class difference remains. There is also much less poverty, though the lack of a mass agricultural workplace means that the poorest workers have moved away. Indeed the only real open differences are those between the retirees and commuters who've bought up expensive housing and feel excluded. The migrant workers refer to racism, but not in as great amounts as you might expect. One Polish worker says:

The work is difficult and the money is not so good. People here would rather get others to do the work. I think it is more easy for a person in this country to find the work he wants to do. And the work they wants to do is in an office or in a bank.

A farmer refers to paying gang-masters who pay the immigrant labourers. It smacks of a return to a very dodgy and poor past, when workers were highly exploited. That, however, did eventually lead to strikes and protests. Modern farming remains much more difficult to organise - though its clear that some farmers use the opportunity.

The book opens and closes with two interviews with Ronald Blythe himself. At the end he cautions about a rose-tinted view of the past and discusses how he put that into the original book deliberately:

I wasn't interested in quaintness or crafts, picturesque things necessarily. It's a slightly hard book, not sentimental. People always say 'the good old days'. People were extremely poor! Their houses were uncomfortable and damp. Children left school very early. In that village in that time it was very hard to get away, to do anything or to be yourself, and people worked and worked and worked until they died.  Between the wars they were getting twenty-seven and six a week, they could be given the sack any minute, and they worked sixty to seventy hours a week on the land and often got one days holiday a year, Christmas Day.

Things, in many respects are better. Return to Akenfield then is a snapshot of a village that has been transformed, through change and struggle. It retains a link to the past - the young workers rennovating tractors are pleased that the older retirees get so much pleasure from sitting in their old tractors. But it is a village that has fundamentally changed. If Return to Akenfield lacks some of the intensity of the book it is trying to emulate, that is because it is about a period where great changes feel very distant. Forty years ago Blythe wrote in the shadow of two World Wars and the end of Empire. Craig Taylor wrote in the aftermath of the victory of neoliberal agriculture. Let's hope that by the time a third book is written, we have transformed things in a very different, less corporate way.

Related Reviews

Blythe - Akenfield
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle
Howkins - The Death of Rural England