twentieth century villages

Change in the village was published in 1912. George Bourne was a man of socialist good will. He thought exhaustively about the hundreds of Acts over hundreds of years that enclosed common land away from the peasant. He made an argument in five parts.

           I      The Village

II     The Present Time

III     The Altered Circumstances

IV     The Resulting Needs

V     The Forward Movement

People whose lives were dependent on the common land where they could graze a cow or a donkey, cut their firing, their reeds for lamps, must now buy their livelihood from an employer and lose their relationship with the land.

In the nineteen sixties Ronald Blythe interviewed people where he lived in rural east suffolk to make a portrait of a village he called Akenfield. He talked to farm labourers, gardeners, farriers, wheelwrights, teachers, old families and recent incomers, some of them drawn to east suffolk for unknown reasons. I liked the teacher who came to realise that what he wanted to teach was how to find out what is most valuable in yourself and how to keep it alive. 

Ronald Blythe lived and worked at Bottengoms Farm in Wormingford until his death, following the opinion expressed in The View in Winter that the elderly should remain in their own homes whenever possible. He never learned to drive and did not use a computer.

Akenfield on google summons a Stephen King story/film/play about a small, remote village in nineteenth century Pennsylvania that lives in fear of nameless humanoid creatures, "Those We Do Not Speak Of", that inhabit the surrounding woods.

Where was the village supposed to take place? People ask. Google as ever, on the money. 

This is The Forward Movement.

I've read three books lately about English villages in the twentieth century, all of which I've read before. This must be because I've been trying to write about where I live. In fact there is little connection between these villages in the early and mid-twentieth century and the place I live in Ireland, except that Akenfield, written by Robert Blythe in the nineteen sixties, overlaps with my growing up in Essex. So what am I doing? Bolstering my nerve for understanding where I live now?

Akenfield by Ronald Blythe

I bought my copy in 1974, the year I came to Ireland. I grew up fifty or so miles south of Akenfield, in east Essex. It is reassuring to know that I liked the spoken/written word in 1974. Polar opposite of Mallarmé and the lads. Or maybe not. There was much that was unsayable whether you were a Suffolk ploughman or a Paris poet. The loneliness and self-determination were the same. Living inside books and never reading books were the same too.

Pigs are interesting people, says the pig man, and some of them can leave quite a gap when they go off to the bacon factory.

It is a jolt now to read about a farm worker my age in 1967, on day release to a college in Ipswich, eating up the chance to think about the broader world. He came to conclusions about the Vietnam war far earlier than I, some way down the path of education, could have: they're just farmers having a revolution, he said. I had to ask my brother who was fighting whom in Vietnam.

The Suffolk village Ronald Blythe creates out of conversations with its inhabitants was, and remains, what I think of as a village. I did not come to live in any such village  in Ireland, though from my address you'd think there was one. Ireland doesn't do villages; there's another style, another culture, longer, meandering over miles, unadmitted. It has taken forty years for me to muster a sense of community — if very far-flung, diffuse, occasional, and nothing to do with my address.

I like the JP/Samaritan who concludes disbelievingly that some people just aren't joiners. I like the district nurse, the orchard men, the orchard timetable; I'm amazed by the school log in the 1930s (half-day off for blackberrying!), entranced by the craftsmen, the shepherds, the hands of the forge, the open-ended community Ronald Blythe created and laid out: here, consider this if you will, here is a village in the late sixties in England.

I read it twice this time. I wanted to know what a village was, wanted to be reminded of what people in their lives will say if you give them the space, the ease of mind.