Ronald Blythe (b. 1922) is an essayist and novelist best known for Akenfield (1969), his study of a (fictionalized) Suffolk village through intimate interviews with its residents. He was born in Suffolk and spent ten years working as a librarian in Colchester where he first met Christine Nash, wife of the artist John Nash. Christine encouraged Blythe’s writing. For three years in the late 1950s, Blythe worked for Benjamin Britten at the Aldeburgh Festival, befriending E. M. Forster among others, a period remembered in his memoir The Time by the Sea (2013). Blythe’s first novel, A Treasonable Growth (1960), was followed by The Age of Illusion (1963), a social history of the inter-war years. He edited the Penguin Classics series and later cared for the Nashes, writing presciently about old age in The View in Winter (1979). He continued to write prolifically in his later years, revealing his remarkable memory and panoramic knowledge of country life in a long-running Church Times column, collected in various books including Word from Wormingford (1997). Living in the old farm he inherited from the Nashes on the border of Essex and Suffolk, he has influenced many recent nature writers including his friends Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin.
Mr Grout has been recently widowed after sixty-seven years of marriage. He was married at eighteen – ‘I was a pretty lad’ – but had begun work on his father’s farm when he was eleven. Both his father and his grandfather had worked this farm of some 150 acres and had lived to a great age, so Mr Grout had often talked with men who knew the Suffolk farmers of the eighteenth century. He is short and sturdy, with a shining brown face and the strange new-looking wide blue eyes of the very old countryman. Day by day he sits in his hilltop house, dressed in thick rough clean clothes and polished buskins, sometimes listening to the clock, sometimes to the radio. [Where is Vietnam, Mr Grout? – ‘Far away…’]
The rooms in the house, once the Akenfield miller’s home, are sedately brown: brown paint, pale oatmeal brown wallpaper, snuff-brown tablecloth, oily brown lampshade, creamy brown curtains. There are sash windows at a right angle and nothing passes on the road which doesn’t offer the chance of a second complete glimpse if one happens to have missed the first. Just outside, and casting a livid reflection on to the ceiling, is the harsh green circle of the miller’s pond. At the side of the house rest the millstones, with nettles and honeysuckle sprouting through the shaft-holes.
*
I have farmed in Akenfield since 1926. I had 135 acres and didn’t use a tractor until 1952, and then I never got on with the thing. I have been a man without machinery, as you might say. I was born near Campsey Ash and worked for my father as a child. I did the cows. He was a man who didn’t like cows, so I did them. Then I went to school. My father had five labourers who got 9s. a week but he always gave them a shilling extra when they got wed.
Nobody really saw money then, though that didn’t mean that they didn’t want to see it. I wanted to see it so much that I applied for a job on the railway. A ‘situation’, they called it, and they weren’t so far wrong – it was a situation all right. Whatever could I have been thinking about! A relation of mine spoke for me and soon I was working at Broad Street Station near Liverpool Street. There were lots of Suffolk men working there and hardly any mortal one of them ever got home again. They all wanted to get home, they were that sad in London. And their big wages were little there. Some ran away to Canada and were never heard of again. They couldn’t write, you see; that is how they got lost. There was a place in Broad Street Station where you can stare through the arches and see the stars, and they were the only things I can remember seeing in London. That is the truth.
I stayed ten months and then I got home. I wouldn’t go back to my father’s farm, I got a job with Lord Rendlesham. He was a rare big gentleman in the neighbourhood and was famous for his horses. Why, he kept three men who did nothing else but see after the stallions. There were scores of horses – mostly shires and punches. The greatest of these was a punch stallion called Big Boy who had won so many brass medals he couldn’t carry them all on his harness. Men came from all over to see these horses but they hardly ever saw Big Boy. He was hid up and not to be looked at.
The head horseman was called the ‘lord’ – and that’s what he was, lord of all the horses. That was me one day, I was the lord of the horses. The place ran like clockwork. All the harnessing was done in strict order, first this, then that. The ploughing teams left and returned to the stable yards according to the rank of the ploughman. If you happened to get back before someone senior to you, you just had to wait in the lane until he had arrived. Then you could go, but not before.
The horses were friends and loved like men. Some men would do more for a horse than they would for a wife. The ploughmen talked softly to their teams all day long and you could see the horses listening. Although the teams ploughed twenty yards apart, the men didn’t talk much to each other, except sometimes they sang. Each man ploughed in his own fashion and with his own mark. It looked all the same if you didn’t know about ploughing, but a farmer could walk on a field ploughed by ten different teams and tell which bit was ploughed by which. Sometimes he would pay a penny an acre extra for perfect ploughing. Or he would make a deal with the ploughman – ‘free rent for good work’. That could mean £5 a year. The men worked perfectly to get this, but they also worked perfectly because it was their work. It belonged to them. It was theirs.
The plough-teams left for the field at seven sharp in the morning and finished at three in the afternoon. They reckoned a ploughman would walk eleven miles a day on average. It wasn’t hard walking in the dirt, not like the rough roads. The horsemen were the big men on the farm. They kept in with each other and had secrets. They were a whispering lot. If someone who wasn’t a ploughman came upon them and they happened to be talking, they’d soon change the conversation! And if you disturbed them in a room where the horse medicine was, it was covered up double quick. They made the horses obey with a sniff from a rag which they kept in their pockets. Caraway seeds had something to do with it, I believe, although others say different.
A lot of farmers hid their horses during the Great War, when the officers came round. The officers always gave good money for a horse but sometimes the horses were like brothers and the men couldn’t let them go, so they hid them. I wasn’t called up. Nothing happened to me and I didn’t remind them. We didn’t really miss the men who didn’t come back. The village stayed the same. If there were changes, I never felt them, so I can’t remark on them. There was still no money about. People seemed to live without it. They also lived without the Church. I’m sorry about this but it is true. I hardly ever went when I was young. The holy time was the harvest. Just before it began, the farmer would call his men together and say, ‘Tell me your harvest bargain’. So the men chose a harvest lord who told the farmer how much they wanted to get the harvest in, and then master and lord shook hands on the bargain.
We reaped by hand. You could count thirty mowers in the same field, each followed by his partner, who did the sheaving. The mowers used their own scythes and were very particular about them. They cost 7s. 6d. in Wickham Market, but it wasn’t the buying of them, it was the keeping them sharp. You would get a man who could never learn to sharpen, no matter how he tried. A mate might help him, but then he might not. Some men mowed so quick they just fled through the corn all the day long. Each mower took eleven rows of corn on his blade, no more and no less. We were allowed seventeen pints of beer a day each and none of this beer might leave the field once it had been brought. What was left each day had to be kept and drunk before eight on a Saturday night. It was all home-brewed beer and was made like this:
You boiled five or six pails of water in a copper. Then you took one pail of the boiling water and one pail of cold water and added them together in a tub big enough to hold eighteen gallons. You then added a bushel of malt to the water in the tub. You then added boiling water from the copper until there was eighteen gallons in all in the tub. Cover up and keep warm and leave standing for at least seven hours, although the longer the better. When it has stood, fill the copper three parts full from the tub, boil for an hour and add half a pound of hops. Then empty into a second tub. Repeat with the rest. All the beer should now be in one tub and covered with a sack and allowed to cool. But before this, take a little of the warm beer in a basin, add two ounces of yeast and let it stand for the night. Add this to the main tub in the morning, then cask the beer. You can drink it after a week. And it won’t be like anything you can taste at the Crown, either.
The lord sat atop of the last load to leave the field and then the women and children came to glean the stubble. Master would then kill a couple of sheep for the Horkey supper and afterwards we all went shouting home. Shouting in the empty old fields – I don’t know why. But that’s what we did. We’d shout so loud that the boys in the next village would shout back.
Stacking was the next job, all very handsome they had to be – handsome as a building. Then thrashing. It was always reckoned you had to thrash a stack in a day. There wasn’t any rest after the harvest. The year had begun again, you see.