Ronald Blythe : Next to Nature

There were two reasons for me to select this book, one was it was FREE on Amazon Kindle or possibly cheap, I forget which, and the gentle persuasion of a lady.   I am not sure which was most urgent.

Ronald Blythe lived not that far from me, as the rich persons car has it, but in the middle of the countryside as opposed the middle of a busy small town.  

Blythe was born in Acton, a small village just north of Sudbury in 1922 to a man bred among the farm workers and farmers in the county.  Like so many others his father saw action at Gallipoli and Palestine during the war.  Blythe was educated in Sudbury leaving school at 14 but his mother, who was a VAD nurse during that conflict, bred in him a delight in literature. 

For the rest of his life, he died in 2023 a few months after his 100th birthday, he spent time working in libraries or mixing with the literary and artistic set in Suffolk.  The artist John Nash became a friend, so much so that when he and his wife Christine died Ronald inherited their 400 year old farmhouse called 'Bottengoms.'  No, I never understood why it was called that either.  The house lay at the bottom of a long tree shrouded lane, difficult to find, and no doubt cut off during heavy snows, though I don't think our man objected to that.  

Luckily for him he was not considered soldier material during his war and enabled to survive peacefully in his county paradise.  He was a Lay Reader in the Church of England, and obviously popular with many.  Clearly of a 'High Church' persuasion as the majority of those attending the three churches he ended up covering were.  I doubt whether his theology would endear him to many Baptists but it is clear he successfully earned his non fees for many years in the area.

I did find his style in this book a bit hard to get used to.  Sentences ran from one subject to another as we are taken through a year at the farm.  Once mastered it became one of the 'light' reading books, short chapters, self contained, each giving an impression of the land as the seasons past.

We see the constant work in the garden, always watched by the white cat but never aided, the time the birds complained late in the year that he was not letting them roost by cutting wood, and the visit by the postman wending his way down the narrow lane to deliver.  Council workers passed by cutting hedges, not always to Ronald's pleasure, and all the year the crops were being planted and slowly growing towards harvest, a harvest that changed greatly over the hundred years of his life.  When he was born there must have been 30 men working a farm, when he died there was a farmer and his man, until the harvester arrived to harvest by computer. 

We see into the three churches and their flocks, the slow loss of numbers, the lack of knowledge as to what each one actually believed, if anything.  The traditional Anglican services (I wonder if all three of his churches still operate?) the occasional mention of the vicar who had oversight of all three and who knows what else, the burial of individual churchgoers, some of whom had been friends for many years, and the individuals who keep such churches open, bell ringing, cleaning, maintaining.

All in I liked the book and have another now lying, somewhere, to follow one day.  A light gentle read with perceptive insights of the land around him, the changes over the years, and nature itself as the wildlife around adapt to change as it has done for hundreds of years.  A wee book which is well worth a read, especially if free.