Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield is a strange book, sometimes called a novel. If you could imagine James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men set in East Anglia, you’d be in the neighborhood. Blythe started life as a farmhand. Village life was disappearing in the 1960s, when Blythe was interviewing and writing. The characters are fictional, he said. They are also based on real people.
One of my favorites is Terry Lloyd, a 21-year-old pig farmer.
When Lloyd turned 15, his father gave him 4 acres and an old barn. The lad didn’t have a car, so he rode a bicycle to a nearby farm, where he worked for wages. Lloyd saved his money and started with a few pigs. He sold them and put his money into breeding stock. At 21, he had a car and all the pigs he could tend to.
Blythe points out the trends that made a 4-acre farm impractical. But he adds:
… the truth is that the almost sensuous contentment of doing what you like on your own bit of land persists as strongly now as it ever did.
Akenfield is a book about village life, which was once largely a story about the families of farmworkers. Like much of this country, East Anglia was once populated by such folk.
The book is not about the many individual characters who tell this tale. It’s about a place — and a way of life that no longer exists. But I wish another writer would take a crack at Terry Lloyd as a fictional character. Some people can’t be coached, trained or advised by the time they’re 15. I think they make good stories.
• Source: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, p. 261.
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