Blythe: ‘Field Work’

 When Ronald Blythe was a young farm worker, he used to find buttons from the Victorian era in the cultivated fields of East Anglia.

It took him a while to discover that the village ancestors used trash as manure. All the waste bins of the village were spread on the fields. Bones from crowded churchyards in London were sometimes collected, carted off, ground up and spread on the crops.

Blythe, who died a couple of years ago at 100, spent a lifetime puzzling over his place, gradually growing in his understanding of it. He was what he called a “long stayer.” He tended to stay in a house for at least 20 years. When he moved, he didn’t go far. His lifetime fit with a radius of 30 miles.

He came from a family that had worked the land forever. He thought of farming as the original occupation.

But it was not his occupation. He became a writer, and I like his work because it pays attention to place. Places have bits of history whose meaning must be discovered. Those bits include old buttons in the middle of grain fields.

Life changes even in ancient places, and so each generation must confront the old ways. We sometimes find that old ways are no longer tenable and can’t be done without.
When he was 85, Blythe saw 36 of his essays collected in Field Work. The book begins with “Remedial Scenes,” an essay about how landscape can influence a person. The remaining essays are in sections that reflect his interests:

• His own connection to his place, East Anglia.

• Farming.

• How and where writers work.

• Pictures, paintings and artists.

• Visited places that somehow became a part of him.

• Books that were more than good reads — books that changed him.

I like autobiographies in the form of essays. This one is excellent.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007.