Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your next book, Akenfield, is doing something very similar. Tell us about it.
Akenfield is another kind of oral history, and it’s also based in East Anglia. The difference is that the author did not go out with a tape-recorder. What he did was to just ask people about what had happened, and write up his recollections of people at a later date. Of course, the implications of this are quite significant. Rather than directly quoting people there is this mediation through a creative writing process. The result, however, is that you get this incredibly vivid picture of country life in a period of rapid change. He is talking about the changes to rural life up to the 1950s and 60s, which in many ways I’d argue were the most crucial periods of change, and the book gains its strength from Blythe’s total immersion in the area and society, and the fact that he is a superb writer.
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Paul Brassley is a Research Fellow at Exeter University and a former chair of the British Agricultural History Society. His academic interests are in rural history and economics, with current research projects involving the history of technical change in 20th-century agriculture and the history of rural Europe in the Second World War.
