Spring, for many, is a hopeful time of year. As the days lengthen with a warming sun, the natural world stirs with an energy that enlivens us. The immediate pleasure that Wordsworth felt when seeing ‘a host, of golden daffodils’ has been shared by many. For Emily Dickinson, ‘A Light exists in Spring’ that ‘Almost speaks to you’. Shakespeare writes of the arrival of spring as ‘The sweet o’ the year’, while for William Howlitt the season has a ‘freshness that perhaps we have felt only in childhood’. Adrian Bell lived the life of a countryman for sixty years, and his ability to capture and articulate an essence of spring in his work bears comparison with any writer in this tradition.
Bell was well-versed in such traditions. Born in London in 1901, he attended a distinguished independent school, and harboured ambitions of being a poet. However, in a determined rejection of his middle-class urban upbringing, he moved to Suffolk at the age of 19 to become an apprentice farmer. His evocative and humorous debut, Corduroy, recounts the challenges and rewards of his first year working with the land and its people. He would go on to write about rural life for 50 years, publishing 25 books and contributing many articles to magazines and anthologies. The vast majority of these articles – nearly 1,600 of them – appeared between 1950 and 1980 as a weekly feature in the Eastern Daily Press called ‘A Countryman’s Notebook’. Most of them had never been republished until the first volume in Slightly Foxed’s seasonal quartet, A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, was released in 2021. His adopted, beloved East Anglia remained his inspiration throughout.
Bell’s experience working with the land and living in rural communities gives his work a vernacular truthfulness that many other writers struggle to find. His writing was based on a demotic process: it started with minutely observed daily details recorded in manuscript notebooks, including weather logs, farming notes and personal reflections. He kept these records for most of his life and here we can begin to see how closely he observed the world around him. These manuscript notebooks, like an artist’s field sketches, provided the raw material for the essays that followed. Indeed, because he had such a practical connection to the land, he did not want artful, ‘literary’ construction to compromise a sense of authenticity in his work. Writing meant very little to him if it was not rooted in the fundamental reality that we are part of the natural world, not separate from it.
‘The Farmer’s Boy’, one of the essays in this volume, provides an insight into what he strove for in his work. In this piece, Bell recounts a view of a water meadow reminiscent of a pastoral scene depicted in Robert Bloomfield’s famous poem of the same name. Bell writes in admiration of the perceptive ness of this labouring-class poet: ‘He had the eye for rural de tail; the quick bird-like eye of the professional husbandman.’ Bell, a fellow husbandman, sought to extend such visions for a wider audience: ‘One does not always want the company of great poets, nor their panegyrics. Spring is a time of earth- gazing labour in East Anglia, and Bloomfield was just right for a day such as this.’ For Bell, the ‘farming details’ he includes are at the heart of his observations and ‘are just the things that a later farmer’s boy pointed out to my young eyes once, and so taught me to see more than scenery in the country scene’.
In seeing ‘more than scenery in the scene’, Bell’s approach to his subject matter is akin to that of the rural artist. He greatly admired the ability of Harry Becker, a Suffolk painter, to capture evocative yet realistic scenes of East Anglian farming life. Such scenes were etched in Bell’s memory as he embarked on farming in 1920, expressed so wonderfully in his rural trilogy, of which Corduroy is the opening volume. He was drawn to artists all his life: two of his closest friends were painters who lived in Suffolk: John Nash and Alfred Munnings. He accompanied them on their sketching trips, often taking in spiration from the same aspects of the Suffolk and Norfolk countryside that they loved. In Unquiet Landscape, an engaging book based on conversations with many twentieth-century artists (including Nash), Christopher Neve observes that ‘Landscape painting has always been about what it is like to be in the world and in a particular condition. It catches at those unexpected ideas and emotions that come, and so easily go, on days of no particular importance.’ Like those painters of the countryside he so admired, Bell greatly valued those days of ‘no particular importance’ and sought to capture moments of what he called ‘the inconsequences of life’. As a result, these essays have a beautiful expressiveness, imbuing his observations of a small part of the world, of ordinary things, with a timeless quality that resonates across the decades.
Like the first sight of spring daffodils, it has been a joy and a privilege to gather together this collection from the extensive archives of Bell’s ‘Countryman’s Notebook’ articles. I’ve discovered anew many moments Bell captured from the spring times of his own life. For a farmer-writer who had such a close relationship with the land, it is a season of both subtle and dramatic changes. Anyone who has experienced more than one English spring will know that no two are ever the same: April can sometimes feel like January, May like high summer. The tulips may explode in a profusion of colour one year, or the magnolia blossoms get blasted by frost, and drop. Therefore, the arrangement of these essays aims to reflect the unfolding of a season that is often unpredictable, but always hopeful with the promise of new life. With these pieces, our journey through the year with Adrian Bell continues, a journey that reminds us that we should cherish the days when the countryside comes alive again.
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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