‘I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June,’ exclaims Anne Shirley, L. M. Montgomery’s delightful character from the Anne of Green Gables novels. In these Summer Notebook essays, the third volume of the seasonal quartet published by Slightly Foxed, Adrian Bell gives us an idea of what it might be like. Writing across thirty of his own summers, together with his memories of earlier ones, Bell expresses the natural exuberance of the English landscape during the summer months; in particular, the ones he enjoyed in the eastern county of Suffolk, where he arrived as a young man to start a farming apprenticeship in 1920. His subsequent travels around the fields and villages of East Anglia – physically and in memory – result in a rich tapestry of past and present visions, creating indelible portraits of a countryside in summer.
At the heart of these portraits is Bell’s deep appreciation of a rural culture evolving over generations, and an awareness of the close relationship communities had with their immediate countryside. This appreciation was keenly felt during the years in which he was writing his weekly column ‘A Countryman’s Notebook’, as he was witnessing a rapid shift towards mechanized, industrial agriculture; a shift that led to declining environmental diversity and increasing fragmentation of rural communities. As a result, his column – written for the Eastern Daily Press between 1950 and 1980 – provides a unique insight into not only many beautiful summer moments but also a changing landscape and rural culture. These various observations were engaging, thoughtful prompts to wider issues, linking people to their immediate natural environment as well as illustrating the value Bell had for the rural life he had chosen to lead: ‘Flowers and conversations are still the best pleasures I know. Sitting in the orchards musing on those contentments, I felt that there was a truth behind them to which country life grew as a bough grows, quaint and crooked, but persistent.’
Therefore, as well as framing visions of summertime in which ‘ragged hedges suddenly became cliffs of white’, fields transform into ‘rolled gold’ and ‘wild roses tinge midsummer’s day with wonder’, Bell also relates the experiences of those often overlooked or forgotten by predominantly city-centric writers: the rural craftsmen and women, farmers, farm labourers and their families, amongst others. In one telling passage he recounts how he once used the wisdom of an old farmer in one of his books. His words, Bell writes, were ‘like something out of the Bible’:
It filled just a page. It is the best page in the book, and it is not my writing at all, but that of a man speaking, a horse-keeper’s son who left school when he was about ten years old. It still moves me to read it, because the man spoke so naturally, without conscious art: it was his life.
Bell is rather like the farmer whose words and perspective he so values, understanding the close economic, physical and emotional ties small rural communities had to the land around them. His local perspective also led him to challenge the romanticized view of the rural figure often depicted in art and literature: a view that perpetuated the stereotype of rural workers as intellectually or culturally inferior to townspeople.
Beginning with his most well-known work, Corduroy (1930), and continuing through all his writings, Bell instead suggests that there is ‘something about a countryman that is like the weather, something that, in a word with him on the commonest subject, gives you a vista of generations. The spark of true culture is there, which has fed the language, the music and all the arts of English life.’ For Bell, agriculture is a creative act like no other: ‘How often we have to thank the sense of beauty of some former country worker for sparing a sapling when cutting a hedge, or taking a slip of some doomed tree and setting it “quick i’ the earth” to bloom for those who come after.’ The country worker’s aesthetic and practical act is ‘true culture’ – a culture born of our fundamental interdependence with the natural environment. Whether found in oral traditions, such as the old farmer’s testimony, or witnessed in the field, these acts of rural culture are ones that Bell valued above his own literary work.
Throughout Bell’s ‘Notebook’ pieces, the importance of oral testimony, sympathetic husbandry and the local are recur rent themes. Happily, it is an appreciation increasingly shared by twenty-first-century writers of the land. As the poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder writes, quite wonderfully, ‘Be famous for fifteen miles.’ Bound up in this statement is a philosophy of life that Bell embodied: he farmed, wrote, married, raised a family, and is laid to rest in the Suffolk countryside. His thoughtful understanding of agriculture, of his place in the world, and of those who have come before and those who will come after, enabled him to capture moments with a sensitivity that makes his writing not only evocative, but also timeless. Bell is justly famous in the county his writing immortalizes, and nowhere is that more apparent than in these lovely portraits of East Anglian summers.
When rereading, selecting and arranging Bell’s summer ‘Notebook’ essays it became clear to me, a farmer’s son, that they are as close to his farming heart as it is possible to get. In them, he presents a working countryside full of life and a vibrant culture, albeit tinged with a poignancy at their changing. With the eye of a farmer as well as a naturalist, his focus is very much on the countryside as the season unfolds: crops grow, nature ripens, familiar landscapes change, and summer builds towards its crescendo. There is anticipation of the harvest to come, of the rush of purpose and the work that it will bring. But for now, for these precious months, there is still time to remember summers past, observe the natural wonders of the present, and appreciate the fundamental connection we all have to the land and to the lives of others.
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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