When, in 1950, Adrian Bell was commissioned by his local paper to write a weekly column about life in the Suffolk countryside, where he had settled to farm soon after the First World War, he can hardly have imagined that these little essays would still be enjoyed by readers all over the world more than seventy years later.
But it is extraordinary how clearly Bell’s writing and his concerns still speak to us today. Though he was recording a world that was fast disappearing, giving these beautifully observed little pieces an extra element of nostalgia, they are never sentimental. His approach to the countryside was well ahead of his time, for he saw how the shift towards industrial agriculture – running, as he put it, ‘a factory with the roof off’ – was leading to a decline in natural diversity and the breaking up of rural communities. Reading the Notebooks is like taking a stroll with a man who knows the East Anglian countryside like the back of his hand but always finds something new and interesting to look at, an escape into a lost world and also a call to look around us today and do things differently.
For all those who have loved our editions of Bell’s seasonal writings but missed out on the first book in the series they are now available as a quartet.
A Countryman’s Winter Notebook
As frost snuffs out the brilliant shows of dahlias in cottage gardens, Bell takes pleasure in this season when the world falls quiet, when there is time to plan and to remember, to see the old year out and look forward to the new. He watches the dance of a dead leaf caught in a spider’s web, plucks the last rose from his garden, stirring up thoughts of summers past. He watches skating on a frozen pond and observes how on the ice even a hardworking farmer is ‘endowed with the motion of a bird, the grace of a seagull, the speed of a swallow’. As his son Martin Bell observes in his preface, these pieces are ‘not really journalism but prose poems about the natural life around him’.
A Countryman’s Spring Notebook
Bell captures beautifully the arrival of spring in the East Anglian landscape – the drills and harrows busy on the upland fields, primroses along the lanes, an expedition to buy seeds for the vegetable garden from an old-fashioned seed merchant. As always with Bell the past mingles with the present. He remembers stopping one spring day at a country pub and watching a local farmer halt outside on his cob to drink a mug of ale that the landlord took out to him: ‘There in the sunlight of that warm March, the ale glinting golden in his glass – it was like leisurely old England come again.’ Here are evocations of an East Anglian spring so vivid you can smell the sweet air and hear the far-off call of a cuckoo.
A Countryman’s Summer Notebook
In the third volume of this seasonal quartet, Bell takes us into the summer countryside, to smell the hawthorn in ‘hedges suddenly become cliffs of white’, to linger in quiet churches, wander through country towns, and hear the voices of the craftsmen and women, the farmers and farm labourers, whose lives are rooted in the Suffolk soil. ‘Flowers and conversations are the best pleasures I know,’ he writes. In these lovely glimpses of summer in the Suffolk landscape, he gives us both, from his meeting with an old farmer whose words ‘were like something out of the Bible’ to the sight of daisies ‘glad as confetti in the long grass’.
A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook
‘You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside,’ Bell writes, and it’s that steady, persistent, unchanging heartbeat that we can clearly hear in this final selection from his columns for the Eastern Daily Press. Now it is harvest-time, ‘work is hard while the sun shines and every arm, leg and wheel is wanted’. The evenings are drawing in, the floor of his summer house is carpeted with fallen leaves, while on the lawn a cock pheasant and a rook at the top of a tree engage in a syncopated duet. Bell meets the harvesters at the end of their long day: ‘Something like a ghostly full moon came looming towards me through the dusk. It was a mushroom the size of a dinner plate which the last man was carrying home.’
This bundle contains all four volumes of Adrian Bell’s Countryman’s Notebooks and an elegant slipcase in which to house them.
The Countryman’s Quartet Slipcases are made from strong board and covered in a handsome dark grey book cloth. Each slipcase holds the four volumes neatly.
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 Time 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.