Born and brought up in rural Suffolk, Ronald Blythe was fascinated by the rhythms of country life and the stories of the people he had known since childhood. In this perceptive and moving evocation of his home, the villagers speak candidly about their lives, from the reminiscences of survivors of the First World War to a younger generation of farm workers, as well as the personal recollections of a school teacher, blacksmith, saddler, bellringer and district nurse. Together they give us the voice of a village, and of a vanished rural England.Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside -- but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land -- as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and...

Woven from the words of the inhabitants of a small Suffolk village in the 1960s, Akenfield is a masterpiece of twentieth-century English literature, a scrupulously observed and deeply affecting portrait of a place and people and a now vanished way of life. Ronald Blythe's wonderful book raises enduring questions about the relations between memory and modernity, nature and human nature, silence and speech.