‘There is a fortnight when England seems to have every- thing – the flowers of a northern June and the fruits of the warm south, and that fortnight is now. You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside.’ Bell’s autumn essays, from which this observation is drawn, evoke a season of colour and activity before the quiet and reflection of winter, and they complete our journey through the year with him in this, the final volume of the seasonal quartet of his Countryman’s Notebook.
Bell was commissioned in 1950 by Suffolk and Norfolk’s long-standing newspaper – the Eastern Daily Press – to write about his community for his community. These essays are collected from this commission, which led to a tremendous archive of over 1,500,000 words and which represents the best of local journalism. The importance of such journalism and the role it plays – particularly within rural areas – should not be underestimated. Not only does it reflect life at a local level that national media cannot hope to achieve, providing an invaluable historical and cultural archive for specific regions, it also connects individuals within communities and contributes to a sense of local identity and cohesion. This is why his son, Martin Bell, wrote in his preface to the Winter Notebook that these columns are ‘history as much as literature’. And how true this is: with the eye not only of a farmer, but also of a naturalist and a social historian, for over thirty years Adrian Bell witnessed and documented things that changed or disappeared – flora, fauna, farming, rural communities and culture.
The themes that Bell presents and explores in over 1,500 essays are as relevant to us today as they have ever been: not least because we no longer have an agriculture that is sustain able for both the land and those who farm it. Since all these columns were written after Bell had turned 50, there is a significant element of reflection on times passed in them. But this does not mean he is a nostalgic writer. He is not wishing himself back to a particular period, simply lamenting what has disappeared from rural life; rather, he is valuing the particular experience of time and what can be learnt from it. He conflates the past and the present in order to draw out aspects of lasting value: local culture, diversity and a sympathetic husbandry of the land.
As a result, there is a practical philosophy throughout A Countryman’s Notebook. It is one that, if we pay attention to it, can help us recover a vital vision for our culture and our countryside in the twenty-first century. Living in rural East Anglia showed Bell that farmers have a duty towards the land they work; a duty that should be as highly regarded by society as any other. Instead of being reduced to people who run ‘a factory with the roof off’, countrymen and women should instead be flag-bearers who remind us of the environment needed to produce the food we eat. Or, as he puts it, ‘I now have care of this soil which former men have cherished. I feel such compulsion to it: it is the most important thing in life to me, because, I think, it is the greatest parable of ultimate truth.’
Bell reflects on this ‘compulsion’ in his autobiography (My Own Master, 1961), stating that he would not have become a writer if he had not first become a farmer, and he came to view them as inseparable creative and cultural acts. His long farming and writing life showed him that our interaction with the natural world should be an interdependent one, and that is why – from the opening pages of his first memoir Corduroy to his final Eastern Daily Press article – the relationship between agriculture and the countryside is at the heart of all his work. Throughout, he argues that if we farm for the long-term benefit of the land, we will also be farming for our own long-term benefit: the two aims should be as one.
The ardour he had for the ‘good earth’ guided me in arranging the essays across the four volumes: I wanted to capture his love of farming, the countryside and the changing seasons rather than reflect Bell as an ageing man. He finds as much joy in the sights of a harvest in his late seventies as he did in his early fifties, or when a farmer’s apprentice of 20. The sense of wonder that he retained throughout his life is why his writing, rather like painters and their more mature artworks, is not only undimmed but often more vivid.
Before Bell left London at the age of 19 to begin his farming apprenticeship, he had aspirations to become a poet. Although he may have taken an unusual path, he nevertheless achieved this in his Countryman’s Notebook. I wrote in the opening volume that these essays are like prose-poems: after reading, rereading and selecting the pieces that comprise the quartet I hold to this view more strongly than ever. It is their poetic nature that allows them to be revisited and enjoyed again and again; season by season, year after year. These finely crafted vignettes, like the best of creative expression – be it poetry, music, drama, dance or painting – capture moments that resonate across the years. It has been wonderful to see his writing of the seasons – most of which has not seen the light of day for over fifty years – being read and enjoyed by a new and wider audience. Bell may not have travelled far or often from his beloved Suffolk during his lifetime, but over forty years after his final Notebook essay was published, his writing certainly has. In England and many countries beyond, his words are opening our eyes to different views and different times. In doing so, they also help us appreciate a little more the places and the people of our lives today.
About the contributor
Richard Hawking is the author of At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside and chairman of the Adrian Bell Society, and he has introduced and selected a collection of Adrian Bell’s Eastern Daily Press newspaper columns, published by Slightly Foxed as A Countryman’s Winter Notebook.
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