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| Charsfield is still pretty, but Tom Cox finds village life much changed from that recorded in ‘Akenfield’ |
Folded into a shallow valley 11 miles north-west of Ipswich, Charsfield is a place almost entirely without distinguishing features. But that’s not to say it is ugly or neglected. A medieval church of intriguing doors and shadows peeks out from behind trees as you stroll across the overlooking fields; a “crinkle-crankle” wall snakes in a curve along the road. Nevertheless, were I to be blindfolded and returned here, I’d probably need to find a road sign before gaining any more insight into my whereabouts than “you’re probably somewhere in Suffolk”.
Even the man who made the place famous, Ronald Blythe, appears to struggle for suggestions when I ask him to recommend landmarks. “You should definitely see the Baptist Chapel,” he tells me, after a ponder. This turns out to be a nice enough building, but, if I’m honest, mostly just reminds me of a spruced-up version of my grandparents’ old council house.
When Blythe gave Charsfield the alias of Akenfield and published an oral history of the place in 1969, he wanted, he says, to create a book “not about one village, but about every village”. That he also lived there was enormously useful. Akenfield is an elegiac tribute to a way of agricultural life that at the time was in its death throes, but, owing to Blythe’s pre-existing intimacy with his fellow villagers, it is also much more than that. The hours he spent interviewing the village’s 298 residents resulted in a far more colourful work than one would expect from a heavily factual account of village life. It quickly became a bestseller, recently spawned a sequel and a play, and in 1974 led to a movie that, in its own way, was equally innovative: a part-improvised mini masterpiece filmed in the nearby village of Debach and starring Charsfield’s villagers themselves (Blythe plays a vicar).
Before my walk, Blythe invited me to visit the house he moved to a couple of decades ago, when he left Charsfield: a wonky, ancient farmhouse 30 miles south in the Stour Valley, which he inherited from his friend, the painter John Nash. With the mildness of manner suited to a person who lives somewhere called “Bottengoms Farm”, he supports the legendary East Anglian nature writer J. Wentworth Day’s assertion that the Suffolk character is “softer” than the neighbouring Norfolk and Cambridgeshire equivalents. Over incongruously strong coffee, he talks about his love of walking (he still doesn’t drive) and Suffolk. When we get onto the subject of Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder who infamously terrorised innocent women in this area in the middle of the 17th century, he speaks with the outrage of someone whose own maiden aunt was burned at the stake just last week.
Blythe is 87, though he could pass for at least a decade younger. While his other books have not sold nearly as well as Akenfield, he’s still prolific, particularly as a poet and diarist. Before I started writing this piece, he’d already written a column in the Church Times about our encounter, noting that I looked like I “had just escaped the denouement of a D.H. Lawrence story” (which is odd, because I really thought I’d got the coal stain out).
Time seems frozen in Blythe’s little corner of North Essex, which means I’m half an hour late meeting Malcolm, the FT’s photographer, by the village sign in Charsfield. Upon parking the car, this seems infinitely less worrying than it did five minutes previously on the A12. How could anyone feel rushed on a day like this? Hedge clippers whir in the distance. A Burmese cat gives me a “What’s your hurry, square?” look as it suns itself in the lane leading out of the village.
As I pass through the apple orchards, which since the 1960s have provided much of Charsfield’s income, a lazy summeriness starts to take over. There are parts of rural Suffolk with a portentous Pagan edge, but this is not one of them. Even a scarecrow would seem like a macabre impostor in these neat fields, along whose adjacent lanes you’re as likely to see a Jeremy Clarkson dreamcar as a tractor. Everything is so clement and smoothly updated that when I find a 40-year-old jalopy hiding behind a hedge, weighed down with random timber and rusty toolshed detritus, I get a little overexcited.
Arguably the most powerful sense one gets while reading Akenfield is not of a deceased, cut-off way of rural life, but of the astonishing work ethic of its population. Here was a village where young farmhands slaved so hard in the fields that, when they went off to join the army in the early 1900s, they immediately put on a stone in weight, such was the relative ease of their new life. With this in mind, the lazy ambience of today must feel like a practical joke to the ghosts of the original book.
The walk itself is almost laughably free of difficulty. In compensation for this, my guidebook gets a bit overemotive in its language. A “ditch” it tells me to “scramble across” is really more of a very slight hump. The five miles covered are as gentle as Blythe himself, and seem more so owing to the sense that nobody here is in a rush. A couple of joggers saunter past, barely moving their arms. Gardeners potter. In three hours, I spot not one person doing anything resembling hard labour. I think of my relatively busy day, up at 6am to interview a rural legend. And I think of Blythe, talking about people who toiled so hard that it changed the shape of their faces. We con ourselves that we live in a busy age, but we know nothing of real “work”. Not much hits you hard when you explore Akenfield, but that does.
‘Akenfield’, by Ronald Blythe, is published by Penguin.
