A Pair of Countryman’s Notebooks
A Countryman’s Spring Notebook
A seasonal selection from the weekly column Bell wrote from 1950 to 1980 for the Eastern Daily Press catches beautifully the arrival of Spring in the East Anglian landscape he loved and knew so well. Each essay is a little masterpiece, a fleeting moment captured with a painterly eye and the down-to-earth observation of the farmer Bell became after he left his fashionable life in Chelsea shortly after the First World War. Read one every morning and it will set you up for the day. With illustrations by Beth Knight
A Countryman’s Summer Notebook
In this third volume of our seasonal quartet, Adrian Bell takes us into the summer countryside, to smell the may blossom 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. Joining him in his wanderings is a magical experience, as it must have been for the readers of the Eastern Daily Press, who followed Bell’s regular column between 1950 and 1980.‘Flowers and conversations are the best pleasures I know,’ Bell wrote. In these lovely evocations 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’. With illustrations by Beth Knight
