After his early writing years on the Suffolk coast, Ronald Blythe moved inland to the village of Debach, where he lived for 20 years, and where he wrote Akenfield. But in the mid-1970s — as age rendered the Nashes progressively more frail (they were now in their eighties) — he began to spend even more time at Bottengoms Farm, nursing them in their final months until their deaths in 1977. John Nash left the house to Blythe, who lived there in contented solitude until his own death.

Ronald George Blythe CBE FRSL (6 November 1922 – 14 January 2023) was a British writer, essayist and editor, best known for his work Akenfield (1969), an account of agricultural life in Suffolk from the turn of the century to the 1960s. He wrote a long-running and considerably praised weekly column in the Church Times entitled "Word from Wormingford". [1] [2] [3] Early life and education [ edit ] The old people who thrived in The View in Winter were those, Blythe concluded, who were able to preserve their “spiritual vitality, a vividness, an imaginative sort of energy”. This credo served him well as he grew older, although he was mistaken in another respect. The old, he wrote, are “cared for, surrounded with kindliness, and people are often interested in what they say; but they are not truly loved and they know it”. The footballers are not yet in their stride. Damp, noisy and listless, they trot up and down and keep warm. Their dogs gaze from car windows, telling each other, ‘More fool they!’Blythe was born in Acton, Suffolk, on 6 November 1922, [4] the eldest of six children. His father, Albert, who had seen action in the First World War at Gallipoli and in Palestine, came from generations of East Anglian farmers and farm workers. [5] His London-born mother, Matilda (née Elkins), had worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the war and passed on to her son her passion for books. [6] [5] [7] Blythe could remember as a child seeing the sugar beet being farmed by men in army greatcoats and puttees. [6] Sparks thread their way overhead. Each contains hundreds of folk on their way to New York, Rome, Moscow, those by the windows staring down at my spark. He was almost as reticent about his faith, but his writing was deeply suffused in his Christian beliefs and his knowledge of the scriptures. He was a lay reader – deputising for vicars across several parishes – and became a lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, but turned down the chance to become a priest.

This is a very accurate description which his many books and articles demonstrate," said Lady Cranbrook. Sir Peter Hall, who turned Akenfield into a film (reaching a TV audience of 14 million), in which Blythe played the vicar, recalled: “What Ronnie did was to talk to many, many people, and shaped and formed what he heard, so that it is neither documentary nor fiction. It is a kind of emotional and environmental truth.” You seem very contented with your life and, in Out of the Valley, you say: “To be absorbed in what one has to do, that’s the secret.” Do you have any advice on how to live a happy life? Looking around at the uses we have put it to, you would think there would not be a tree standing – but we remain heavily wooded.

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IN THE late ’40s and early ’50s, Suffolk rivalled Cornwall as a haven for artists, writers, and musicians. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were hatching the Alde­burgh Festival. Sir Cedric Morris and his partner, Arthur Lett-Haines, were running the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting at Benton End, a large house at Had­leigh. They had taught Lucian Freud, and were to teach Maggi Hambling. By 1960, Blythe had himself become a writer, with the publication of his novel, A Treasonable Growth, and, ever since, a steady stream of memoirs, short stories, literary criticism and rural studies has poured forth. Although he doesn’t lament the passing of the tough old farming days, he has continued to document the huge revolution in country life of the past half-century. Not least among those changes is the emptying of the countryside. ‘It’s happened all over Europe — the modern world coming into the old, traditional world,’ he said. ‘When I was a child, hundreds of people worked on the farm; now it’s all done by machinery.’ He has had 90 years of practice at being private, including 20 years in the village of Debach, where he wrote Akenfield, and, now, more than 30 years in this carefully untended two acres, which has provided a mother lode for his whimsical, mystical, earthy observations. Now, like Abraham, he is “full of years”. In the 1970s Blythe nursed John Nash in ill health, leading him to publish his reflections on old age in 1979 in The View in Winter. [9] [16] In 1977 Blythe inherited Bottengoms Farm from Nash, who had bought the Elizabethan yeoman's house in 1944. [7] [18] He later published a book, First Friends (1999), based on a trunk of letters he found in the house that recorded the friendship between the Nash brothers, John's future wife, Christine Külenthal, and the artist Dora Carrington. [19]

He was educated at St Peter's and St Gregory's school in Sudbury, Suffolk, [8] and grew up exploring churches, architecture, plants and books. [6] He left school at 14 [5] but was, he said, "a chronic reader", [7] immersing himself in French literature and writing poetry. [9] Literary career [ edit ] Early cultural connections [ edit ] He has preserved our knowledge of a rich way of life and rural culture that otherwise would have disappeared forever. This knowledge is his legacy to Suffolk and to everyone who lives there," she said.He befriended local writers including the poet James Turner, who helped his passage into a bohemian, creative Suffolk circle that included Sir Cedric Morris, who taught Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling and lived nearby with his partner, Arthur Lett-Haines. Blythe “longed to be a writer”, he said, and he listened and learned – inspired by the example of poet friends including Turner (the unnamed poet in Akenfield) and WR Rodgers of how to live with very little money. “It was a kind of apprenticeship,” he once recalled. HIS Christian faith is another constant thread. As a boy, he cycled miles to visit East Anglian churches. He describes him­self as “naturally” a religious person, although not necessarily very ortho­dox: “It was deep-seated . . . private, but not conventional.” And, quite soon, as he became recognised as a writer, he found himself at the lectern. “You know what the Church of England’s like: they always give you work to do if you’re not wary.” In the Suffolk countryside it was a time when Phantom jets roared overhead, combine harvesters had unbelievably large 12ft headers and the biggest tractor on the land was a four-wheel drive Ford County.