Story of the Seasons: The Countryman’s Notebooks of Adrian Bell

Story of the Seasons | Front Porch Republic

Richard Hawking

The literary journey of Adrian Bell, one of Britain’s greatest farmer-writers, begins with the opening lines of his first and most celebrated book, Corduroy, published in 1930:

I was upon the fringe of Suffolk, a county rich in agricultural detail missed by my untutored eye. It was but scenery to me: nor had I an inkling of what it might become. Farming, to my mind, was as yet the townsman’s glib catalogue of creatures and a symbol of escape. The friendliness of the scene before me lay beneath ardours of which I knew nothing. I was flying from the threat of office life. I was nineteen years old, and the year was 1920.
Bell was born in London in 1901 into a middle-class family and destined for a career in the city. However, after leaving Uppingham School (one of the most prestigious fee-paying schools in Britian)——which he hated——he became an apprentice farmer instead, moving to West Suffolk in England in 1920. He never left: he farmed, lived amongst and wrote about Suffolk’s rural communities for the next 60 years, until his death in 1980. In addition to writing 25 books, he compiled anthologies, reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement, wrote poetry, contributed articles to various publications and, quite wonderfully, compiled the first ever crossword to appear in Britain—in the Times in 1930—and went to compile over 4500 more of them! He also wrote A Countryman’s Notebook every week for over thirty years.

The practical experience as a farmer’s apprentice as portrayed in Corduroy would have a profound impact on his writing; he believed that writing should not be a purely imaginative exercise but should be grounded in physical experience. He felt that to produce writing of genuine value, its roots should be in the land he was now working. Working closely with farmers, labourers, rural craftsman and women—people who had had very different experiences to his—opened his eyes to the possibility of leading a different life: a life that appeared to value the natural world and community in a way he had not seen before. This deep connection between people and the land around them was something he wanted for himself.

But due to increasing food imports and the British agricultural depression that was forcing down prices, farming in the 1920s and 30s was becoming increasingly challenging, and Bell could no longer support himself: he was forced to give up his farm in 1928 and returned home to his parents. This provided the impetus for him to write about the life he had unwillingly left behind. In fact, he was about to witness, firsthand, an agricultural revolution. Over the next fifty years, this led him to produce a body of finely crafted work—with his A Countryman’s Notebook Essays at the heart of it—that observes and documents the increasingly capitalisation of the countryside in the move towards industrial agriculture: a revolution that pushed aside traditional ways of farming forever, leading to a breaking apart of rural culture and communities. As a result, he is our British eyewitness and our recorder, and reading his work helps to shape our understanding of the scope and impact of the many changes on the soil, the land, the produce, the animals, and, of course, the people.

A Countryman’s Notebook was a weekly column which ran from 1950 to 1980 in Suffolk and Norfolk’s (two eastern English counties) long-serving paper, The Eastern Daily Press. These essays, almost 1,600 of them, represent by far the most significant output of his writing in the second half of his life. Throughout them, he develops his argument that a more sympathetic and sustainable relationship between farming and the countryside can be—and should be—achieved.

It’s surprising, therefore, that only a fraction—less than 8%—had been republished since they first appeared. This means over fourteen hundred essays—almost one-and-a-half-million words, or fifteen books-worth—had never been republished until A Countryman’s Winter Notebook was issued by Slightly Foxed in 2021. And it’s in the Notebook essays that, in my view, can be found the finest of Bell’s writing. Like the rural craftsmen and women he worked with and so admired, and who knew intimately how to manipulate their material, he achieved this in his own work, distilling his experiences of rural life into one thousand pitch-perfect words . . .