Ronald Blythe - Akenfield

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is perhaps the greatest work of British agricultural oral history. Akenfield however, is not a real place, it is an amalgamation of two Suffolk villages near where Blythe lived in the late 1960s. The stories are mainly those of farm workers or industries closely related to them, and their authenticity comes from the oral accounts - you cannot help but feel that you are in their living rooms listening to their talk. In a later book, Return to Akenfield, Blythe (then 83) tells the author of that work that people talk about the "good old days", but that was not the Akenfield he wrote about. Then "People ere extremely poor! Their houses were uncomfortable and damp... people worked and worked and worked until they died".

But Akenfield's brilliance isn't just that it captures the voices of the people, but that it came to be produced in an era of enormous change. British agriculture had gone through enormous changes in World War Two. The war had begun an era of mechanisation, a process that contined into peacetime. By the 1960s British food production was heading well into a time of industrial and factory farming. Akenfield captures this moment, when the old traditional, local production was ending and new farming was exploding. Capital was becoming king. Roger, a thirty-one year old "factory farming" tells the reader:

The idea on these modern farms is that no breeding goes on. It is not a new idea, farming is simply splitting up into specialist groups and getting away from the concept of the old mixed farm. The old mixed farmer had a few hens, a few sows, a few bullocks, a little sugar-beet, a few greens, a little orchard... It was all so cosy. What ever you do now you've got to do it big. I mean - twelve sows! We've got sixty and we're still not nearly as large a unit as I would want.

This farming though is not without concerns. He mentions an "awful lot of petitions" about animal cruelty, and notes that "dreams of the past... have got to be abandoned. Farming is not this lackadaisical business of yesterday. Yet I think of my grandfather and his father, and I thik that although they had small profits for so much hard work, they had a carefree life".

But Akenfield also tells the opposite story. I remain haunted, and inspired, by the account by Leonard Thompson, seventy-one and a farm worker. Leonard's story opens the book and tells the grim story of a childhood effaced by poverty. But in 1896 he remembers his brother (one of ten children) dying in the Boer War. Food and money were scarse, "our food was apples, potatoes, swedes and bread, ad we drank our tea without milk or sugar. Skim milk could be bought from the farm but it was thought a luxury. Nobody could get enough to eat no matter how they tried. Two of my brothers were out to work. One was eight years old and he got 3s. a week, the other got about 7s."

After surviving the horrors of trench warfare in World War One Leonard returns, liberated by the German Revoution and concluded, "We felt there must be no slipping back to the bad old ways and about 1920 we formed a branch of the Agricultural Labourers' Union". The rest of his life, though economic slump and renewed war, he fought for better conditions. Now old he finishes "I have these deep lines on my face because I worked under fierce suns". 

It's a beautiful passage and deeply moving. Despite an atmosphere of insularity, the village is not ignorant or unaffected by outside events. I noticed that several of the younger interviewees mention the Russian Revolution, seemingly because there has been a showing of Eisenstein's film October recently, and many of them refer to books they are reading and things they would like to see. The young blacksmith, a skilled worker, has travelled to Europe to enter competitions and dreams of another big project like the cathedral lights he worked on, "I would like to work like that again" he says. You get a sense though, that the young people feel trapped. One 19 year old worker says,

One of the drawbacks to working on a farm when you are young is that yo are kept away from people and when, as I am, you spend day after day with middle-aged men who never read, who never go anywhere outside the village itself and who cannot understand what makes any modern gadget work, you being to lose touch yourself. I went to the pub to meet the young men. They never talk ideas, it is always people with them... they seem, well, hemmed-in by the village itself. 

The process of change that was taking place would transform Akenfield and was already transforming its inhabitants. The Reverand Gethyn Owen (63) who came to the area from Wales, describes it as a "revoution" and he was right. The needs of British capitalism and forced through industrial, mechanical and scientific changes which, in turn, were transforming the workers and social relations in the villages. 

It would be too easy to read Akenfield for nostalgia. The brilliance of Blythe's commentary and editing is that he makes it clear that this was no lost, green and pleasant land. But a place of customs and dreams, and class struggle. Class, and class division, runs through the book. But so does the sense of ordinary people making their own way and creating their own space. One of the lovelist chapters is that by the bell ringer who talks in detail about this singuarly British hobby, but also of the importance of the bells to community and indentify. 

Akenfield became a major sensation, spawned a feature film, and 30 years later a follow up by Craig Taylor. It captured, and continues to capture, reader's attention I think, because it is wonderful to hear ordinary people talk about themselves, their lives, their struggles and their hopes. It is a perfect response to those who think of buccolic English villages and forget the women and men who made them.

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