Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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Hope this book reaches a much wider audience than just readers who might remember Akenfield and those of us who immediately turned to the Word from Wormingford column when the Church Times landed on the door mat. And yet Blythe does represent a way of life that has all but disappeared and Williams detects a gentle moral in his writing. “He’s certainly saying to us, ‘This may be a way of life that’s passing, and it’s not perfect, but you’re going to be much worse off if you’re not ready to learn from it, so let me help you learn from it.’ He’s saying, ‘Society is moving on – don’t forget this.” A richly detailed guide to parish life in England from medieval to Victorian times, based on a wide range of churchwardens’ accounts and other records. It describes the parish and church our ancestors knew - a world of rood lofts and Easter sepulchres, of Maypoles and Midsummer bonfires, of foundlings and frankincense. With over 300 illustrations.”

In an interview in 2001 for Anglia Ruskin University he described himself as "a chronic reader", in his youth immersing himself in French literature and writing poetry. He served during the early years of the Second World War before being demobbed in early 1944 when he gained, what was at the time. his dream job as a reference librarian in Colchester's Old Library.

But alongside this faith, Blythe’s writing dances with self-deprecating wit, rebellious asides, sharp portraits of fellow writers and unexpected notes of worldliness such as this: “On the radio, Evan Davis, Mammon’s angel, is talking to a Mr Warren Buffett, of Oklahoma, who is the world’s second-richest man. Mr Buffett lives in a nondescript house with a nondescript car, and there is no computer in his nondescript office. He likes Evan, with his sweet, crocodile grin.” Ronald agreed: “"I think what makes Akenfield so popular – both the book and the film – is that it captures the spirit of Suffolk. It's everyone's story. It's not the story of one person, or one family or even one village - it's everyone's story and I think that it strikes a chord.” It's extraordinary that a book I wrote in 1967, which is a world away from us now, and a film made in 1973/74, can have such an amazing and very gratifying hold over people's affections.

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 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.” Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year’s Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. With gentle wit and keen observation Blythe meditates on his life and faith, on literature, art and history, and on our place in the landscape. Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year’s Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. Landscape and Englishness is an essential read for anyone interested in why some kinds of interaction with nature are celebrated and others are frowned on. Drawing on a huge diversity of sources – books, films, preservationist tracts, walking guides, novels, music-hall songs, Ministry of Information pamphlets, maps and festival guides – Matless reveals how our assumptions about landscape and national identity were forged in the decades between the Great War and the 1950s, and how deeply they’ve been shaped by history, class and politics. He uncovers a complex history of rurality marked by a careful policing of who is allowed to be in the countryside and what they are allowed to do there. “I have seen charabanc parties from the large manufacturing towns …playing cornets on village greens”, wrote HV Morton in horror in the 1930s. Things we take for granted as part of the countryside – The Country Code and youth hostelling, nature appreciation, field archeology, orienteering, birdwatching and the scout’s “dibdobbery of observant walking” – all played their part in educating the citizen in the correct way of reading the landscape and interacting with it. The book has deep theoretical underpinnings but is a joy to read, particularly when Matless turns an arch eye on the assumptions underlying much of the material within: “If one enjoyed, for example, loud music and saucy seaside humour,” he writes, “one could not and would not want to connect spiritually to a hill.”Blythe added: “A poet friend once advised me to ‘Put everything down. The total will surprise you.’ I took him at his word. For over 25 years I kept a day-book – a journal of life in a quiet corner of the English countryside. The total must run to over one million words. It has been a joy to revisit those diaries for this selection.”

I think Ronald Blythe is a genius in a special, but perhaps overlooked, journalistic genre – the nature notes or country talk columns.The artistic couple even found him a small house near Aldeburgh and introduced him to Benjamin Britten, who put Blythe to work writing programme material and doing translations for Aldeburgh Festival. The greatest living writer on the English countryside will celebrate his 100th birthday this week at his home, Bottengoms Farm, surrounded by the friends he calls his “dear ones”. Ronald Blythe is best known for Akenfield, his moving and intimate portrait of a Suffolk village through the lives of its residents, which became an instant classic when published in 1969. But Blythe, who has spent all his 10 decades living within 50 miles of where he was born, has also devoted millions more words – in history, fiction, and luminous essays and columns – to describe with poetry and precision not simply rural folk but the very essence of existence. In his 50s, Blythe wrote The View in Winter, a moving account of growing old which Collins feels is due a revival. “It’s a wonderful book, a very positive view of old age. He lives an incredibly contented life.” Collins helped his mentor “retire” in 2017 and began to manage his affairs after asking him about a pile of unpaid bills and receiving Blythe’s answer: “I’ve decided I’ve given them enough money over the years. I’m not giving them any more!” I’ve been reading this over Christmas along with Guy Shrubsole’s brilliant new The Lost Rainforests of Britain, and I’ve enjoyed every moment. 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."

It is a celebration of one of our greatest nature writers, and an unforgettable ode to the English countryside. 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.” 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 Yes, among other things, it’s a paean to the quiet, diffused but real religion of rural life; but, that itself is inextricably linked with observation of life through the seasons (and, as Muslims continually point out, if more Christians actually “lived” their religion there would be wider ground for mutual respect and dialogue.)This article was amended on 7 November 2022 to correct references to the location of Blythe’s home.