Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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Parker, Peter. "At the Yeoman's House and At Helpston by Ronald Blythe: review", The Daily Telegraph, 23 December 2011. Retrieved 7 November 2012. A life rooted in East Anglia has given Blythe a rare depth of vision. His writing is attuned to the physicality of existence, attentive to the world around him, and always listening to people and other species, as here, in June: He was almost as reticent about his faith, but his writing was deeply suffused in his Christian beliefs and his knowledge of the scriptures. He was a lay reader – deputising for vicars across several parishes – and became a lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, but turned down the chance to become a priest. Each Returning Day: The Pleasure of Diaries (Viking, 1989) - published in USA as The Pleasures of Diaries: Four Centuries of Private Writing (Pantheon, 1989)

Next to Nature, review: the great Ronald Blythe turns 100

The Nash wood engraving that closes the December section is of a Bee Orchid, a commonly known British wildflower that is becoming scarce, but is most often found inhabiting the meadows and farmlands of Suffolk. The once common ways are diminishing, as are those who remember and tell their stories. We will not encounter the likes of Ronald Blythe again. East Anglian author appointed lay canon". East Anglian Daily Times. 24 March 2003 . Retrieved 12 February 2020. But the tree has a history parallel with my own in the wild garden and I sense that I am losing part of myself as the boughs fall…’ (Blythe, 2022) Having unravelled the threads and got a wider grasp of the content, I read a third time, to luxuriate in the wit, reflections and audacious splendour of it all, celebrating the words and language of someone who knew how to observe his world, squeeze every drop of texture, meaning and association from it, and, most importantly for his readers, knew how to translate those considerations to meaningful and elegant prose. a b BBC, "Suffolk nature writer Ronald Blythe dies aged 100", 16 January 2023. Retrieved 16 January 2023.

Akenfield's Ronald Blythe turns 100

Honorary Graduates, Orations and responses: Ronald Blythe", University of Essex, 12 July 2002. Retrieved 6 November 2012. Blythe was politically radical throughout his life, a Labour voter who joined peace vigils outside St-Martin-in-the-Fields in London. Friends were surprised when he accepted a CBE in 2017, around the time he was gently “retired” from public speaking and writing as his short-term memory faded. When he reached 100, he was still well enough to sign 1,500 copies of a new compilation of his best Church Times columns.

Next to Nature (Signed) - Ronald Blythe - The Bookery Next to Nature (Signed) - Ronald Blythe - The Bookery

This friendship inspired his visual creativity. "I was a poet but I longed to be a painter like the rest of them," Blythe said 10 years ago in a 90th birthday interview. "What I basically am is a listener and a watcher. I absorb, without asking questions, but I don't forget things, and I was inspired by a lot of these people because they worked so hard and didn't make a fuss. They just lived their lives in a very independent and disciplined way.” 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." The eldest of six children, Blythe was born in Acton, near Lavenham, into a family of farm labourers rooted in rural Suffolk. His surname comes from the Blyth, a small Suffolk river, but his mother and her family were Londoners. His mother, Matilda (nee Elkins), a nurse, passed to him her love of books. Although Blythe left school at 14, by then he had already established a voracious reading habit – “never indoors, where one might be given something to do,” he remembered – which became his education.

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Blythe has long championed the poet John Clare, and there are similarities, as Olivia Laing observes, in Blythe’s “attentive and unsentimental” view of the countryside. When he writes about “gaudy” fields of borage, Blythe knows how it is harvested and where it will be sold. “A very Clare-like knowledge, this, obtained by the steady, perpetual listening that gave Akenfield its power,” Laing writes. after newsletter promotion Blythe’s writing dances with self-deprecating wit, rebellious asides and unexpected notes of worldliness a b c "Ronald George Blythe, Honorary Doctor of Letters: Bio", Anglia Ruskin University, 2001. Retrieved 6 November 2012.

Ronald Blythe releases a new book as he turns 100 Ronald Blythe releases a new book as he turns 100

The book begins with an introduction by Blythe’s friend, the distinguished writer and broadcaster, Richard Mabey, in which he, rightly, gives a brief biography of Blythe and prepares the reader for what is to come, but what is most touchingly evident is the respect and admiration from Mabey (educated through independent schools and an Alma Mater of St Catherine’s College, Oxford) for Blythe (largely a product of self-education), and the mutual acceptance of unwavering and enduring friendship between the two, despite diverging thoughts on some salient issues. Blythe was a Lay Reader in the Church of England who brushed off suggestions that he might become ordained with the counter-argument that laity have a specific place to play in the work of the church, as part of the quietly gathered congregation, rather than standing outside and above their number – he was ahead of his time; it is only in recent days that the church is slowly opening up to the importance of laity. Mabey claims no organised interest in faith. Blythe’s views on farming and land management occasionally differed from Mabey’s own, but both had the preservation of the countryside and its eco-system at their cores. The things they had in common far outweighed their dissimilarities, and I sensed a deeply warming humility in reading Mabey’s summation of their friendship, He befriended local writers including the poet James Turner, who helped his passage into a bohemian, creative Suffolk circle that included Sir Cedric Morris, who taught Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling and lived nearby with his partner, Arthur Lett-Haines. Blythe “longed to be a writer”, he said, and he listened and learned – inspired by the example of poet friends including Turner (the unnamed poet in Akenfield) and WR Rodgers of how to live with very little money. “It was a kind of apprenticeship,” he once recalled. His father, Albert, had served in the Suffolk Regiment and fought at Gallipoli and Blythe was conscripted during the second world war. Early on in his training, his superiors decided he was unfit for service – friends said he was incapable of hurting a fly – and he returned to East Anglia to work, quietly, as a reference librarian in Colchester library. Over 1967 and 1968, he listened to the citizens of Charsfield, recreating authentic country voices while somehow adding a poetry of his own. The result was a portrait of the “glory and bitterness” of the countryside: the penury and yet deep pride of the old, near-feudal farming life, and its obliteration in the 60s by a second agricultural revolution alongside the arrival of the car and television. In 1969 he published Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, a fictionalised account of life in a Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966. Blythe had spent the winter of 1966–7 listening to three generations of his neighbours in the Suffolk villages of Charsfield and Debach, recording their views on education, class, welfare, religion, farming and death. [7] [13] [14] 'Akenfield' is a made-up placename based partly upon Akenham (a small village just north of Ipswich) and probably partly on Charsfield. [15] "When I wrote Akenfield," Blythe said, "I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. And it vanished." [7] The book is regarded as a classic of its type [1] [16] and was made into a film, Akenfield, by Peter Hall in 1974. [1] [17] When the film was aired it attracted fifteen million viewers; [9] Blythe made an appearance as the vicar. [17] "I actually haven't worked on this land but I've seen the land ploughed by horses," Blythe told The Guardian in 2011. "So I have a feeling and understanding in that respect – of its glory and bitterness." [9]Of night-walking, Blythe wrote that everywhere was “all so perfectly interesting that one might never go to bed”. According to Macfarlane, this captures Blythe’s sensibility in a sentence: “inquisitive, wandering, democratic, giving us the truth on the ground”. His appreciation for everything extends to his own mortality. “He’s philosophical, he doesn’t complain and he’s interested,” Collins says. “He would be interested in dying – he finds it all fascinating.” Ronald George Blythe CBE FRSL (6 November 1922 – 14 January 2023) was a British writer, essayist and editor, best known for his work Akenfield (1969), an account of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s. He wrote a long-running and considerably praised weekly column in the Church Times entitled "Word from Wormingford". [1] [2] [3] Early life and education [ edit ] Sensing a need to sit at the feet of this rural Gamaliel and slowly untwist the wisdom in each precious strand, I read for a second time, with a notebook and pen by my side, jotting down facts, quotes, things to enquire further about, and simply to play with the prose. It was in this interaction that, for me, the real appreciation of Next To Nature began. I have heard of devotees of Blythe who use his writing as morning meditation, taking one of the short sections daily and focusing their full attention on it and, with hindsight, I perceive that to be a sensible way of approaching it; after all, the individual pieces were originally presented as short, separate essays, not as a collection, and the content is so beautifully rich and crammed with sensory overload that, like a luxurious chocolate cake, the smallest portion is a feast.

Ronald Blythe at 100: ‘A watchful, curious and gratefully

For all the brilliance of his memory a decade ago, he has now been diagnosed with dementia. “He lives in a kind of dream world and he’s probably still writing books in his head,” Collins says. “He’s so fortunate to have this amazing physical strength. He’s never taken any medication apart from a bit of sherry. He caught Covid on his 98th birthday. A short course of antibiotics just sent him into space.” 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.In an interview with this paper in the mid-1970s, he said: “When I wrote Akenfield, I had no idea that anything particular was happening, but it was the last days of the old traditional rural life in Britain. And it vanished just as the book came out. 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 This intriguing work continues by softly carrying the reader through the seasonal rhythms of a year in the Suffolk countryside, setting ‘Word From Wormingford’ columns for the corresponding months from different years alongside each other, bringing a freshness and new vibrance for those who may have read previous collections. From the scent of impending snow in January, through to the farmers browsing seed catalogues as the bells ring in the New Year at the close of the following December, it is a journey that I found myself taking three times over.