Ronald Blythe grew up in a family of farm laborers in East Anglia between the world wars. Farm laborers were horribly poor in the decades before they finally disappeared.
Wages were low, and housing was spartan. The house Blythe was born in burned down. As an older man, he visited the place and wrote these lines:
I would have been three or four when we moved. All I can remember was the night when a wild swan came down the chimney and beat about the papered bedroom in terror, creating havoc, they say. My parents’ shouts remain in my ears like an equal terror.
The house was thatched, and birds and rats slept in its roof. No country person had a dwelling all to himself then.
Farm hands by the hundreds worked the fields, tending and harvesting crops before machines and economics drove them into the cities. The farm workers didn’t just contribute to the rural communities. They were the communities. They supported the church, sent their kids to school and the village merchants. When all those workers and their families were gone, rural communities collapsed.
Similar forces were at work in this country. A lot of the places where the political climate is most irrational are rural places that once had thriving communities based on agriculture. Those left behind are beyond angry.
Blythe had no nostalgia for the kind of labor that farms required in the old days. But something was lost when the connection between ordinary people and the land was severed.
• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 437.
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