Akenfield, The Imaginary Suffolk Village.

 

 I have just seen the film, Akenfield, made in 1974, since when I have managed to miss seeing it over the years, several times. Viewing this little classic, oral history at its best, at last, did not disappoint. I appreciated it, perhaps even more than I enjoyed it. Despite my gallant efforts, the Suffolkian dialect was challenging; available in snatches, generally, sufficient for a well-intentioned observer to comprehend the broader picture but sometimes lacking in understanding the detailed information about a character’s intention. So, I struggled from time to time but overall, I watched with awe the consummate skills of Roland Blythe, the writer, and Peter Hall, the director, demonstrated onscreen. Blythe recorded interviews with forty-nine men and women, from a blacksmith and a bell ringer to the local vet and a gravedigger, all people who lived in Charsfield, near his own Suffolk home.

Charsfield village sign

He chose to name his fictitious village, Akenfield, after the Old English ‘acer’ for ‘oak’ of which plenty grew nearby, though he based the name on two actual villages: Akenham and Charsfield.Through his interviews, he  seemed to enter the villagers’ minds as they freely reminisced about their lives, in honest and evocative monologues reflecting on their worlds, past and present. The narrative of the film merges the individual details into the reality of a whole class of people, who lived lives of great poverty and exploitation coupled with the everyday stoical acceptance of life for working class men in the first decades of the early twentieth century. Written in the late 1960’s, Blythe’s book paints a vivid picture of a community in which the vast changes of the twentieth century are matched by deep continuities of history, tradition and nature.

D.V.D. cover

The opening interview is with Leonard Thompson whom Blythe describes as “a survivor” and who was, in fact, Blythe’s own father. He had had to support his seven children on a weekly wage of thirteen shillings, reduced at random when the farmer hit hard times, to ten shillings a week. A labourer could be sacked for poaching a rabbit and when that happened, it was local news and neighbouring farmers took care not to involve themselves by hiring an available poacher! But losing your job was a disaster; it meant also losing the rent-free, tied cottage which came with the job as well as the wherewithal to buy the apples, potatoes, bread and swedes which chiefly formed the daily diet. Children were taken from school at the age of eight to work for a few pence at stone-picking for use in repairing roads, and other low-paid menial jobs. Leonard had caught his fingers in a cattle-cake machine when very young and the tips of three fingers had been amputated without anaesthetic. In those days there was no question of compensation for what was regarded as a normal hazard of many farming activities.

As a young man, Leonard saw the start of WW1 war as an opportunity to escape from a hard life of drudgery and somehow, he managed to survive the war. On his return, he became politicaly active and he helped set up the Agricultural Labourers' Union which eventually led to agricultural wages rising to 38 shillings and sixpence a week. Sadly, the slump awaited during the long, hot, prosperous summer of 1921 and poverty and difficult times resumed.

Akenfield church with nearby cotttage.

 

The plot of Akenfield has Tom, a young working class man living in a cottage in Akensfield, with his widowed mother. The film depicts the few days surrounding the funeral of Tom's grandfathe who was born and grew  up in the village in the early 1900s, experienced much poverty and hard work, fought in the First World War, when he lost most of his comrades,and then returned home. He made a failed attempt to escape the village by walking to Newmarket for a job which he didn't get; then looked for, and found, a wife in the village and lived in a tied cottage on the farmer's estate for the rest of his life. Everyone says what a good old boy his grandfather was and his story is typical of his class and time. 

His son, Tom's father, was killed in the Second World War and Tom has grown up hearing many family stories, particularly about his father, from his grandfather. Meanwhile, in 1974,Tom is planning to get away from village life, with, or without, his teacher girlfriend and so the cycle goes round continuing with the hovering menaces of poverty and rural entrapment set in a landscape of beauty. Will Tom escape or be defeated by the land and the hard work, just as his grandfather was?

Reaper by Thomas Bewick
Peter Hall's film Akenfield made use of a scene
depicted in Thomas Bewick's 1797 A History of British Birds.
A reaper finds he has just killed a partridge sitting on her nest.

 

•