The village school

 Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield paints a picture of a village school in East Anglia that hit me as eerily familiar.

The files in the school office contain a letter, dated 1916, stating that it was impossible to get the temperature of the classroom above 38 degrees. The official diaries are full of complaints about farmers pulling the children of hired hands out of class to work the fields.

East Anglia is a long way from home. But I grew up hearing similar stories from people in the South.

In Blythe’s book, an educator talks about the cost of this allegedly idyllic life on the students. The children are intensely interested in the village but not in things outside it. They don’t want things they can have only in imagination — toys, careers, studies, ways of life. Even small children have a remarkable power to resist influences from outside that small, narrow village.

I know that trait. It’s so common it’s hard to see. A lot of people would say it’s normal.

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Akenfield; New York: New York Review Books, 2015, p. 179-87.