In the summer of 1967, the essayist Ronald Blythe pedalled his bike around the Suffolk village of Charsfield, a quiet rural community 10 miles north of Ipswich. Blythe spoke to pretty much everyone he could find: the blacksmith and the farrier, the dairyman and the district nurse. They in turn told him how to best thatch a roof, how to shape a corn dolly, and why cowhide was the ideal material when making the harness for a horse. “The village keeps the same pattern,” explained Alan Mitton, the orchard foreman. “You get more or less the same groups of people keeping the same ideas. They don’t mean to get out of their ruts.”
Blythe’s interviews were later immortalised in Akenfield, an oral history that renamed the setting and many of its inhabitants, while ensuring their testimonies were preserved for the ages. At the time of publication in 1969, Akenfield was read as a poignant elegy to a feudal England, clinging on by its fingernails. These days the book could have blown in from another planet.
Source : theguardian
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