From the East Anglian Daily Times -- Sat-2nd November
I first read Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield in the early 1980s when I was in my 20s. I knew nothing back then of the writer but I liked his book, a barely-fictionalised autobiographical account of English village life and how it had changed for three generations of Suffolk country-folk between 1900 and the early 70s.
The director Peter Hall’s 1973 televised version of Akenfield was affectionately received. Interestingly, there followed a spate of other ‘old days’ country dramas tailored for cosy Sunday night viewing. Such series were guzzled down only too eagerly by audiences for whom the genuine poverty, hardship and unfairness of those times were already a fading memory.
Certain grittier sections of Akenfield the book, however, reminded me of stories which my own father had recounted of life in the rural hamlet where he’d grown up. Like Ronnie Blythe he’d known the 1930s depression years: a pre NHS era, with 2.5 million unemployed and little in the way of social security. They were times in which despairing farmers sometimes committed suicide, when childhood illnesses like polio and diptheria were prevalent and when unmarried teenage mothers might have their babies taken away from them, before being incarcerated, sometimes for life, in mental hospitals.
When I first met Ronald Blythe, despite a rather delicate, almost vicarish exterior, I already sensed, from reading Akenfield, that there was a steely core to him, as well as a formidable intellect.
In 1991, Dr Joe Allard, the genial American academic who first helped me to get published, introduced me to ‘Ronnie’ as everyone knew him. We drove over to Bottengoms Farm, the Wormingford house which Ronnie had been bequeathed by the artist John Nash and his wife Christine. The first thing I observed was a display of unusual-looking hollyhocks growing beside the house. Ronnie, a keen gardener, informed me that they were a very old variety, which had flourished there since at least the 18th century. The next thing I noticed was a grand piano in the living room. It was out-of-tune. Un-playably so. I guessed that nobody had used it since John and Christine had gone.
The house, was also replete with books, as one would expect of a writer who’d once been a librarian. In India, they have a saying. “When a great man dies, we lose a library.” Of no-one I’ve met could this be more true than of Ronald Blythe.
One year, when BBC Radio 3 were broadcasting the Aldeburgh Festival they asked me if I’d like to present a short programme from Blythburgh church in order to bridge a gap between concerts. I told the producer, “It’s not me you want, it’s Ronald Blythe -- he knows everything about everything.” They came back, saying that they still wanted me to do it, but asked whether I would also interview Ronnie. I met him at Ipswich station and together we caught a train to Darsham where the Beeb picked us up. After recording the programme without a hitch, the producer asked me to quickly dub on an introduction speech.
It was pure Roger Mellie. “Good evening. I’m Martin Newell. With me is the author Ronald Blythe. We’re standing by the Cathedral of the Marshes as it’s known locally. And we’re facing the ancient… oh f***… what’s the name of that bit at the front of a church, Ronnie?” He replied, deadpan. “It is called the ‘porch’ Martin.” The producer asked. “Can we do one that once more, please?” They should have just booked Ronnie, really. I did try to warn them.
Like all real stars, from the time I first met him, Ronnie had this way of making you feel that you were already as eminent as he was. As I got to know him, I gathered the impression that underneath the gentle charm, Ronnie had, in an earlier life, known something of the demi-monde, along with its naughtiness. Ronnie, though, was a Suffolk boy, a proper countryman who rarely strayed too far, or for too long, from those fields of home. I had that much in common with him.
I’m currently reading Blythe Spirit the Suffolk author Ian Collins’ new biography of Ronnie. I don’t often say this, but so far I’ve found Blythe Spirit unputdownable. Like certain other writers, I have appalling reading habits. I’ll frequently start books in the middle, working outwards. But no matter. Every chapter here is a stand-alone wardrobe of fascinating stuff. Ronnie Blythe was a young gay man, during a buttoned-up era, when to seen as such could be a career-wrecking, even, imprisonable offence. For much of his young adulthood, he seems to have skated almost demurely on that wafer-thin ice. But he would do. People loved him. They looked after him. His century on this earth culminated in a long golden sunset. Blythe Spirit, beautifully-written, also deftly sidesteps the type of academic aridity which often mars such accounts. Buy it for your favourite boho relative this Christmas. They’ll like that.
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