FINISHED READING - Next To Nature by Ronald Blythe

There are times when one must be an adventurous listener.'

When a friend is reading a book, and they tentatively suggest that they think you might appreciate it. And then lend it to you. You know this is a risk, for both you the reader and the lender. Do they really know you, or your tastes, that well? For if you were to find it really was not your sort of thing at all, imagine the awkwardness, the embarrassment. How do you respond when asked how you found it? But fortunately with this particular loan, from the moment I read its first paragraphs I knew this was right up my street.  I instantly fell in love with him, and the world he describes living within. I have literally devoured it with great gluttonous amounts of joy. And, as with everything I so instantly take to, I've had to carefully ration the amount of attention I give it, lest I do it a disservice through my haste, or miss anything by not imbibing with the fullest of full attention.

'I know that it has arrived before I draw the curtains. Snow. It's silent voice fills the landscape. Snow is weather with a finger to the lips. A faint cold wind will be blowing towards the house in powdery drifts.'

Blythe became widely known with his novel Akenfield and Peter Hall's docu-drama that followed, a cleverly contrived recollection of life in an imaginary village, that drew upon Blythe's own extensive knowledge and experience of the history of rural lives. Next To Nature, is a compilation of short articles, originally written for his much lauded weekly column in the Church Times, from the nineties through to noughties. Grouped according to the month and season. Each month with a brief introduction by a person who was a close friend of Bylhe, both literary and otherwise. His style of writing is remarkably unshowy, but very far from being plain. It's so carefully composed, with a vivid sense for the captivating detail, the tossing and turnings of personal reflections, that delightfully wander off piste on intimate literary reveries. Quite often in reference to the poet John Clare, the sort of self effacing hero that Blythe felt an innate personal affinity with. His ghost seems to inhabit his imagination and every village in Middle England he visits. The simplicity of Blythe's expressiveness is deceptive, it lacks guile or pretention, but effortlessly communicates so much via the perfectly expressed sentence. Often accompanied by the witty barb, that manages to encapsulate a situation or a person's character foilbles, without being savagely cruel. He cherishes their eccentricities.

'The question arose whether it would be breaking the Sabbath to visit it on a Sunday, and whether the key was given to people who could be trusted to do this without enjoyment.'

'Miss Scott carried the exactitude of weights and measures to the limit and would, they said, have halved a toffee.'

'I suddenly think how unpleasant it must be to be prayed for by the self righteous.'

Then there is his love of 'night walking' the semi dark of unlit country roads. The ever dominant presence of servicing the needs of the 'the white cat' he doted upon. His thoughtful preparations for talks or sermons he was about to dispense. The day to day interactions of living in a small community like Wormingford, in a house he lived in for many decades. He recollects the era before double glazing and central heating when windows would freeze on the inside. Arising bright and early in order to get a fire going in the hearth. How the farming calendar of rituals has changed since the arrival of mechanisation. What once required community wide organisation and provided a huge social occasion, can now be done by one farmer single handedly, who struggles with his loneliness. He tells you all about this history without ever feeling patronised or overly sentimentalised. Reminding you that things have indeed changed, not always for the better. Not everything has been of benefit in enriching the quality of ordinary country folk's lives.

I was still reeling from the joy of hearing the flower judge say, "Oh I do like that ! First prize' when she came to my succulent, when I observed the jam judge when she came to my quince summoning up the kind of courage which a bomb disposal unit requires.'

'I have moved my desk by as much as two feet to have the light fall better on the page. Why did I not do this before today? Before ten years ago, to be accurate? Furniture has a way of taking up a stance of its own, a moral or aesthetic position which says, 'Don't dare to shift me, I know where I belong.' I have friends whose rooms are tips, but move a chair to the window, and they are dreadfully put out.'

 

As I read, I was all too aware I was picking up the recognisable signs of a modest, but clearly gay sensibility. It's in the evident delight he takes in composing those beautifully structured, yet gently satirical sentences. And indeed, Blythe had lived a wilder transgressive youth, at a time when this was a far from safe thing to do. His sex life appears to have been resolutely private, mostly casual and occasional, but above all quiet, discreet and definitely unspoken of.

But the man we are reading in Next To Nature, is writing to be published in the Church Times, so it's unsurprising that he reveals to us none of his personal yearnings for intimacy. Presenting us with an unremarkable low key domesticity. Happy to observe the comings and goings, enjoy his encounters with locals with a kindly, yet silent amusement. Knowing this could compose the nub of an interesting vignette. The period these extracts are from, are the last thirty years of his one hundred year lifespan. Published in 2022 the year before his death. It captures the still sparkling quality of his thought and intellect, that could recall poetry and obscure but telling anecdotes. Gosh, was this man well read. Weaving it all into a captivating tableau, with a deep resonating feeling for how people live with the landscape they are in, and how closely their two destinies have been entwined.

The writers and painters of the past from East Anglia remain alive to his imagination, as he walks those country paths and roads through market towns. His writing is filled with memories of lives and ways of inhabiting the countryside, which if not passed already, are well on their way to forgetfulness. Blythe 's own writing spanned a century of huge changes. He provides a bridge between Clare and Constable, between the Nashe's, Cedric Morris and Elliot, as this post Bloomsbury world too is fast fading away from personal recollection. Evidently well suited to his gentile style of country living, even when all that consisted of was observing the prevailing wind direction in the fields, the ones first ploughed, sown and reaped in Anglo-Saxon times.

'As I add my parents' names, and those of close friends, to the All Souls roll call, how is it that tears do not disturb my rationality? The ballpoint scrawls on the lined paper require all my attention. Both morning and evening congregations kneel and listen so as not to miss Aunt Doris and poor John. Here come the priests who helped us out during the frequent interregnums, here is a tower captain, here are the good old regulars, here is a boy. Here are my brief pauses and a mounting silence. But how is it that, churchwise, they have all gone without leaving an unfillable space? Something strange here. Is this what mortality is?'

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

All quotes are from Next to Nature by Ronald Blythe.

Published by John Murray, 2022.