‘A rural looker’

 Imagine a bus ride from Wormingford to Hadleigh in Sussex. It’s a bit more than 13 miles. We’re going by bus because one of the passengers is the writer Ronald Blythe, who doesn’t drive.

As the bus travels through the countryside, Blythe notices the wild teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, growing in a field.

Blythe notices it because he expects it to be there. He’s been filling out the Wild Flower Society’s registry for years. He knows what native plants grow on what farms, although he sometimes wonders whether it’s worth all the trouble.

 

But one feels guilty when one ceases to take note of plants. Those who did so incurred the wrath of John Clare. He was a rural looker. Nothing growing, flying, running, swimming, taking to its bed in autumn escaped his eye, and he would lash out at villagers who stumped to and fro in Helpston, apparently not seeing a thing.

 

The fellow sitting next to Blythe on the bus doesn’t notice the bank of wild teasel and apparently is one of those people who doesn’t see a thing. Unlike the poet John Clare, Blythe doesn’t lash out. He keeps his thoughts to himself and goes on.

In Hadleigh, the passengers look at the shoppers on the streets and rustle for their things. When the bus turns, Blythe thinks about the Rev. Rowland Taylor, who was led down Angel Street to be burned at the stake in 1554. Taylor, a student of Erasmus, believed in education. The town was full of weavers in those days, and Taylor was so diligent about the church’s responsibilities for educating the common people that wits claimed Hadleigh was a little university town.

Blythe is lost in thought about the cruelty of religious wars and the damage done to working people  when zealots come to power.

The fellow sitting next to Blythe doesn’t know any of that history and so is not thinking about any of those things. He’s just glad the bus trip is over.

Imagine two human beings, sitting side by side, doing something as ordinary as taking a bus ride to a market town to do some shopping. One is engaged, thinking about what he’s seeing, thinking about what it’s like to live in the place he calls home.

The other has been on the same bus ride and is bored.

Two people can live similar lives in a way. One finds it fascinating, and the other is tired of it. I want to sit next to the guy who’s fascinated.

Blythe, who died aged 100 in 2023, is the kind of writer I like to read.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 393.