Ronald Blythe (1922-2023), our greatest writer about rural life, is the subject of a new biography, Blythe Spirit, by Ian Collins. In 2022, aged 100, he wrote an article for The Oldie, saluting the joys of winter, dark afternoons and the change of the seasons
I walk to Advent Matins in a thin, cold drizzle.
Supermarket shoppers zip past. I can hear our church bells getting into their stride. How pleased Widow Sturdy would have been to know that the bell she created in her foundry was in good ringing order all these centuries later.
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!’
In church, strangers take up an entire pew. Well! I light the Advent candle, say the Advent words, sing the Advent tunes:
‘Ring, bells, ring, ring, ring! Sing, choirs, sing, sing, sing!’
What a dark day it is. Black, shiny lanes, lightless furrows, horses in their gloomy blankets – but my little white cat illuminates the ebony piano, having knocked all the photos down.
Shall we light a fire? Shall we read all afternoon? Shall we garden? ‘Shall we, heck!’ as my friend Gordon would say.
I listen to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, or some of them and, although it would seem impossible, the day grows darker without it actually falling into night.
Returning via the orchard, I had noticed the reluctance of the leaves to reach the ground. More sticks than foliage had shaken out of the oaks, and the walnut was deathly in its sodden, unshed growth.
There were lots of wrens, tiny, feathery balls with tails cocked and, fast as lightning, having supper. The vast ivy on the ancient pear rustled with inmates and had become a bird town. Everywhere, inner Advent light and outer darkness.
The late nature writer Roger Deakin (1943-2006) used to come and discuss wood. Wood as a material – ours being a part of the country (on the Essex-Suffolk border) that lacks stone. We have flint, of course: flinty fields, flint mines, even – but little that one could call stone.
So we have done what we could with wood. East Anglia is for wood architects, wood artists, wood saints, woodland poems and wood crafts.
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.
The dark day polishes the beams of Bottengoms, my house, showing off the adze marks. How many trees were chopped down to make this small farmhouse? Have a guess.
It is Tudor IKEA plus straw stuffing, all the beams slotted into place for eternity, and the brick floors scrubbed hollow.
Visitors coming to it at nightfall, such as the poor vicar, are apt to wander around in a botanical version of outer darkness, shocked by startled pheasants going off like rockets. Or lacerated by yuccas. I comfort them.
Are they not experiencing the genuine 100-per-cent-authentic rural November teatime? They should praise God for it.
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.
Blythe Spirit is out now
