Ronald Blythe

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a writer and countryman. He was educated, he says, in the library, because it was as a reference librarian after he left school that he immersed himself in seventeenth and eighteenth century literature. He wrote short stories and poetry, and then, more than thirty years ago, the book which made his reputation. It's called Akinfield, an imaginary name, but a real enough place. He interviewed people in the part of Suffolk in which he still lives, editing their memories and observations to create a complete and beautifully observed picture of English rural life. As Akinfield has become a classic, so its author has become this country's literary custodian of its rural values. The English year goes round, he says, marking our lives and doing far more than politics to shape our national characteristics. He is Ronald Blythe. Are we still so influenced, are you saying, Ronald, even in this sort of urbanized technological twenty-first century, by what you call the English year?

Ronald Blythe1:33

We would like to be. It's a longing to be influenced. And I think we are influenced to a great degree by the pattern of the year. Perhaps because of the seasons in England, which are very defined. The winter and springs and autumns are very distinctive.

Speaker 41:42

Yeah.

Ronald Blythe1:46

But I think there is a hanging on, really, this to the shape of life as it used to be. People want the old village life, and they do find it in certain institutions, shall we say, the church or a little church school or something like that, or in certain societies, particularly bell ringing societies and horticultural societies. When these things occur, the old thing comes back with a rush.

Presenter2:09

Do you think people come to the countryside? They come and try and live in the countryside, although they still have then to commute to the town to work, but they're actually coming in search?

Ronald Blythe2:19

More, more, and more. And sometimes you wonder why they're there,'cause it must be very expensive and inconvenient. But there is this hankering, I think, for being in a small place.

Presenter2:28

But why do you say that you think it has more effect on us than politics, more effect on the national characteristic than politics?

Ronald Blythe2:35

I think because it's continuous and lasting and politics is episodic. Politics creates laws and comforts and rightnesses and all kinds of things like this, health and education. But there's something underlying this. I suppose you could call it some kind of spirituality to people who are no longer religious.

Presenter2:53

But politics has currently come into the countryside, whether it's legislation to ban fox hunting or the current foot and mouth crisis. The rural rhythms that you hold so dear, that you're describing, must be thoroughly disrupted right now.

Ronald Blythe3:08

They are rather at at the moment because these terrible diseases plagues I call them have happened before. They've happened in cycles all through the nineteenth century and and of course the sixty-seven of which I can't much remember much about and like myxomatosis. And what I feel and what a lot of country people feel is a terrible pity for the animals themselves. In the village we've got some pedigree sheep and two or three herds and things like that. They're safe at the moment. But people would be brokenhearted if they had to be destroyed. And of course it's lambing time too, an Easter, where the lamb is the symbol. And to see these things on television of the destruction of these creatures, so barbarously it seemed, and burning them and putting them in these great pits, it has upset people terribly.

Speaker 13:37

Later

Presenter3:52

But what about you, you who have been there for ever?

Ronald Blythe3:54

Well, not by any I I mean, I just happened to have drifted on in this hopeless way in the same place.

Presenter3:54

But it

Presenter4:00

Still living very close to where you were born, very close to where you were.

Ronald Blythe4:03

Yes, a few miles from where I was born, in an old farmhouse not unlike the one I was born in, which burnt down. It's what they call a long house, thatched with pigsties and a pond.

Ronald Blythe4:15

Until fairly recently I used to pass by and see just the old chimney stack sticking up in the garden.

Presenter4:20

But now you live in something quite similar, as you say, a sort of s I think 1600 or something. You are down the end of a long, long lane.

Ronald Blythe4:25

Yeah.

Ronald Blythe4:27

Very ancient, but it was the home of John Nash, the painter, where I used to go when I was very young lots of times. I now own it.

Presenter4:30

Negative.

Ronald Blythe4:35

And I've

Presenter4:35

He left it to you, did he?

Ronald Blythe4:36

He did.

Presenter4:36

And you live all alone there with your two cats.

Ronald Blythe4:38

And the two cats, that's right.

Presenter4:40

And I gather a friend has accused you already of living on a desert island, so there's not much point in my accusing.

Ronald Blythe4:44

Well, I did did like it. I was so used to it.

Presenter4:47

Yeah.

Presenter4:48

Tell me about your first record.

Ronald Blythe4:50

Well, I want one of Hausmann's poems set.

Ronald Blythe4:54

by Ivor Gurney. They're kind of shadows really in both the poem and the music of the First World War. Gurney was shell-shocked, as they used to call it, and spent most of his life in an asylum. And Hausmann wrote his A Shropshire Lad in the 1890s, and it was almost like a premonition of what would happen, although he could not have known it at that time. But the two things coming together are very tragic in feeling and also immensely English in feeling.

Speaker 45:24

But stuff

Speaker 45:27

The cherry na

Speaker 15:28

Very no.

Speaker 45:31

Is hung with blue along the

Speaker 45:40

And stands about the wooden crime.

Speaker 45:46

Very quiet.

Speaker 45:50

We stood on

Speaker 46:04

Of my three score years attend.

Speaker 46:10

And he will not come again And they from seven days bring us

Presenter6:21

Stephen Varco, singing Loveliest of Trees from A. E. Houseman's A Shropshire Lad, set to music by Ivor Gurney. He was accompanied on the piano by Ian Burnside with the Delmy String Quartet.

Presenter6:31

The words of a Shropshire lad, as as you say, Ronald, which became hugely popular in the First World War. You were born shortly after it, nineteen twenty two. But you obviously have been fascinated, as in Akinfield, by people's memories of that great war.

Speaker 46:39

Yeah.

Ronald Blythe6:40

Uh

Ronald Blythe6:46

My my father came home from Gallipoli in Palestine and didn't talk about the war very much, but I knew quite a lot about it really, because it was it had marked really the villages. Most of the farm workers were in a reserved occupation until nineteen seventeen because of the German submarines. But then after that they needed a great many more, and they called up, and these two world wars are like great walls in the countryside, people either behind them or after them.

Presenter7:13

But the other strong message that comes through in Akinfield from those people again is how worn out they were before the war by the work on the land.

Ronald Blythe7:22

They were pleased to get off the land. It was called the flight from the land before the First World War. And great masses of men would try and get onto the railways or go to the Empire or do something like that. Anyway, get away from these farms where they paid like ten shillings a week.

Presenter7:37

and their backs were broken.

Ronald Blythe7:38

Absolutely killed and terrible rough work it was.

Presenter7:41

Because there's one man in Akinfield who says that when he went off to training camp, having signed up to go to war, suddenly he grew, I think, five inches and put on the bottom of the camp.

Ronald Blythe7:42

I'm sure.

Ronald Blythe7:46

Thanks.

Presenter7:57

Uh

Speaker 17:57

Uh

Presenter8:00

Mm-hmm.

Presenter8:07

Of course they

Presenter8:09

But before that they were just old men at fifty, you know.

Ronald Blythe8:09

But

Ronald Blythe8:12

They broke down. They got arthritis very badly'cause they worked in the wet and things like that. Not all of them, but many people did.

Presenter8:17

Digging the sugar beet and so on.

Ronald Blythe8:19

Yes, sugar beet harvests are one of the worst, I remember that. I can remember as ch my childhood men doing the sugar beet in old army uniforms in the field, old great coats and putties to keep the r because there were no Wellingtons.

Presenter8:31

So when we think of sort of wonderful harvesting and all the village turning out and the fiddle playing leading the bridal procession and so on, it wasn't quite like that, was it?

Ronald Blythe8:40

No, you get it in Hardy, too. It was partly like that. There was a sense of festivity which I think is quite gone.

Ronald Blythe8:47

And one of the most tragic things about modern Harvest is it is one man on a combine in a whirl of dust. You couldn't go near it because of the dust. There's no celebration, and there's no sense at harvest festivals of anyone having done anything towards them.

Presenter9:01

Tell me about your next piece of music.

Ronald Blythe9:03

I like jazz.

Ronald Blythe9:05

And

Ronald Blythe9:06

I watched Ella Fitzgerald at Ronnie Scott's Club on television, and she was then old and I think ill.

Ronald Blythe9:12

Then they she began to sing.

Ronald Blythe9:15

And the perfection of her art the voice dropping exactly correctly on every note and the rhythm and the unaffected grandeur of it I was overpowered by I thought she was absolutely the most wonderful person.

Speaker 49:28

In the still of the night

Speaker 49:35

As I gaze from my window

Speaker 49:43

At the Moon in its flight, My thoughts all stray to you

Presenter9:55

Ella Fitzgerald singing Cold Porters in the still of the night. Where did your family sit then, Ronald, in this rural pecking order, as it were, between the wars? What did your father do for a living? Who were you?

Ronald Blythe10:06

Well, they were, I suppose, endless generations of Suffolk farmers and farm workers really, and shepherds and all kinds of people. But my mother came from London, and they they met because she was a VAD nurse.

Ronald Blythe10:21

My father married and came to S live in Suffolk.

Presenter10:23

And were you one of many children?

Ronald Blythe10:25

Yes, I'm the eldest of six children.

Presenter10:27

And were you a close family, or did you escape from them? What kind of little boy were you? How did you amuse yourself?

Ronald Blythe10:32

I suppose I spent a lot of my boyhood exploring, especially churches and architecture and plants and things like that, and reading, I might say. Like w w when when I was um editing Hazlitt, I found out that he used to lie in the grass and not answer to calls from the house. And I can remember doing that lots of times.

Presenter10:53

One gets those kinds of glimpses of you when reading your books and your short stories and so on. I do see this slightly.

Ronald Blythe10:53

Uh

Ronald Blythe10:55

Yeah, I'll

Ronald Blythe10:57

Yeah, it's very nice.

Presenter11:00

Cuts it seems to be quite a lonely figure, alone on your bicycle, always observing.

Presenter11:05

Always looking at these sort of rows of people. I I saw one little scene uh in a sanatorium where they're sitting in their leather chairs on near the riverbank and you're going by on your bicycle.

Ronald Blythe11:14

I can see this old sanitary from my house. It was put up in the eighteen nineties. But tuberculosis was rife not only in East Anglia, but all over the place, and the only cure was fresh air.

Speaker 111:24

And the

Ronald Blythe11:27

We used to cycle past, and we were shocked to see lying in the snow, with leather aprons over, long prams, but but men in them, not not children, and they used to wave little thin arms at us as we went by.

Presenter11:39

But were you as well as being an observer, which you continue to be to day, were you also a story teller then?

Ronald Blythe11:41

There's a

Ronald Blythe11:45

I think so, a great deal. Yes, in woods and places like that. And uh they told me w when I went to see my

Presenter11:46

Yeah.

Ronald Blythe11:51

Brothers in Australia used to tell them stories, but I can't remember actually.

Presenter11:54

But they went off to Australia, didn't they?

Ronald Blythe11:55

They went to Australia and they're all grandparents now.

Ronald Blythe11:59

Even though

Presenter11:59

You were the one who stayed home.

Ronald Blythe12:00

Stayed at home. They've been home sometimes, yes.

Presenter12:01

Stick in home

Presenter12:02

Yes. Record number three.

Ronald Blythe12:04

This is The Shepherd's Farewell. From Berlias is The Childhood of Christ. And often the Shepherds in paintings are often thought about as very humble people and ignorant and and touching and peasanty sort of thing. But Christ was the descendant of the great shepherd poet David, and also the shepherds named the stars because they were out all night. And so I don't see the shepherds as these yokels. I see them as something quite different. And I think Berlius has capt somehow captured this glory about them.

Speaker 413:13

Prince of the King of Spanish.

Speaker 413:28

Where are we?

Speaker 113:28

Yeah.

Speaker 413:31

Will stand.

Presenter13:39

A Shepherd's Farewell from Balio's The Childhood of Christ, sung by the Academy and Chorus of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner. You read in the library, Ronald, you worked in the library, you wrote book reviews for the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, you wrote your poetry short stories. When did you decide, was there a moment when you thought, I am going to be a writer proper, now I'm going to stop doing everything else and I'm going to write a, you know, some long form stuff?

Ronald Blythe14:03

It really happened on a walk with Christine Nash, John's wife. All of us, I think, bore our friends by saying, I must do this and I must do that, but not doing it. And I was on this walk and she s suddenly stopped and said, Why not do it? And she found me, or helped to find me, this little house on the Suffolk coast. And about five months later, I wrote a novel there. And then I was introduced to Britton, who lived about a couple of miles down the road.

Presenter14:34

Thank you, Brittany.

Ronald Blythe14:34

Benjamin Britton

Presenter14:35

So you'd have just been in your 30s? Yes, yes.

Ronald Blythe14:37

Yes, yes.

Presenter14:38

And you wrote a novel, first of all, as you say. You wrote a a treasonable growth, but quite quickly, it seems to me, you turned to social history. What was it that made you realize that was

Presenter14:49

In a way, your role.

Ronald Blythe14:51

They were really essays. I didn't think of myself as a social historian really. I was really writing about what I understood about the changes in society. And I wrote a book called The Age of Illusion, about the Interwar Period, and I wrote this twenty essays really, from The Burial of the Unknown Warrior to The Coming of Churchill.

Presenter15:09

But it's made you, as it were. It it was the beginning of your being, if you like, keeper of the records and village storyteller in a way. It seemed it seemed to be

Ronald Blythe15:15

Uh

Speaker 415:15

Yes.

Presenter15:19

Was there a moment when you thought

Presenter15:21

This is my role. This is actually what I'm very good at, what I can naturally do. It's almost as if you were putting it in the middle of the day. I did only think of that.

Ronald Blythe15:27

I didn't barely think of that. I.

Ronald Blythe15:30

I stir it.

Ronald Blythe15:32

I suppose keen is the word to write well, to be a kind of an artist, if you know it in that sense, would be a good writer.

Presenter15:37

And in a way, again, of course you've gone on writing, but but these days uh you also um preach, don't you? You're a lay reader. Again, it seems to me that from the pulpit now you

Ronald Blythe15:44

Yeah. Uh

Presenter15:47

You tell stories, you talk to the congregation, and you and you write about it, and you write about them.

Ronald Blythe15:54

I've known them for ever, you see, and and so I do know what they've done and what they are. I'm I'm fascinated by their personalities and by something which is unreachable, which might be called their spirituality or their prayerfulness, and I see them Sunday after Sunday just below me. I suppose it is the writer in me which becomes enthralled by them. I never ask them questions, anything like that. I j can't help but see them and their children or or their backgrounds. They had these kind of beginnings in the fields with the old field work, and if they're very old, sometimes in service, or perhaps not in service but in the big house and rather grand. But there they all are in church, sometimes kneeling at the rail.

Ronald Blythe16:36

take the chalice along, which had the lips of people touching it since the time of Shakespeare. And it's a very poetic thing when you see these sometimes children's mouths, old people's mouths, and th it all goes on in this kind of extraordinary way.

Presenter16:54

Next piece of music, number four.

Ronald Blythe16:56

I thought I must have something connected with the Alborough Festival, because eventually Benjamin Britton became a friend and he gave me a little job and got me to edit the programme books and do bits of translation and all literary things really. I used to see Ben walking when I was walking on the Alborough marshes. He was all music. He seemed to work almost incessantly, but in the afternoons he used to walk with his little dog on the marshes and just wave as he passed. And I thought what summed it up.

Ronald Blythe17:28

Most of all what would be Schubert's Winterisse, which is the journey really of aging.

Speaker 417:46

Fasfenzie na hein Schmeressen. He achieved his dial and rise above.

Speaker 117:52

Finally,

Speaker 417:57

Their wrench meets rain and maid did hans and we all fame dull.

Speaker 418:07

Yeah.

Speaker 418:11

Vlas Fragensi nach meinen Schmerten, Vas fragensi nach meinen Schmerzen, Ir kitty fine raisen rock,

Presenter18:34

That was the weathercock from Schubert's Vinteriser, sung by Peter Pearce, accompanied by Benjamin Britton, both of whom, as you say, Ronald Blythe, you knew, and you knew the Nash as John and Christine Nash. I have the impression that you mixed with a lot of people who were much older than yourself.

Ronald Blythe18:48

They were mostly another generation. For some reason or other a lot of artists and writers and composers were in this in this area. They weren't like a school, as, shall we say, at Newlin. They all knew each other.

Presenter19:02

But they all kind of adopted you somehow, it seems.

Ronald Blythe19:05

Well, I thought I could be an artist. I could draw I c I wasn't an artist at all, I could draw quite well, but but th they were perfectionists in their work and and very disciplined and didn't put up with any nonsense really.

Presenter19:18

But is that also

Presenter19:20

Where you felt you belonged, as it were. Having been born in in this sort of rural working family, as it were, it seems to me again I get this image of you glimpsing other people's lives over the top of hedges from the top of a bus or something and thinking, Yes, that's what I'm I want to sit on the lawn and have tea.

Ronald Blythe19:37

That's right. I used to go to this rectory in my teens. It must have been in the summer, because there are always a man and a woman and a dog, and a little tea table, and books on the grass. And I was convinced that this must be a novelist. Actually writing isn't a bit like that.

Presenter19:52

And of course you've written about age, b you knew so many old people today, but you've also written a about a prize winning book, I think, about age, a view in winter, in which all kinds of elderly people told you about their fears and their experiences in in old age. That was when you were, I think, in your fifties. Now you're the the wrong side of seventy or maybe the right side, I don't know. Does the view look any different now?

Ronald Blythe20:15

No, I haven't much sense of aging at all. But at that time there there was one of the first great gerontological conferences, I think in Chicago, when they began to use the language of old age care. All of it, to my mind, rather barbarous and terrible. And I've always loved old people because of what they could tell me, this kind of sense that they had seen things which were in history books and things like that ever since I was a child. When I was a child, you see, my grandparents were born in the 1860s, before Hardy had written anything. They were straight out of Hardy in a way. And so I thought that old age isn't really about all this. It's a great experience of its own, like youth. And that's what my book was about.

Presenter20:15

Oh no, I haven't

Presenter20:57

Let's have some more music. Record number five.

Ronald Blythe20:58

That's what

Ronald Blythe21:00

I love hymns.

Ronald Blythe21:02

And

Ronald Blythe21:03

In the next village, called Little Henny, there was a seventeenth century clergyman, a young man, who loved the the poetry of George Herbert.

Ronald Blythe21:13

one line of which is my song is love unknown and this clergyman, young clergyman, wrote a poem based on that one line. And then

Ronald Blythe21:24

In the nineteen twenties, I think it was Geoffrey Shaw, took John Ireland out to lunch and said, This is a lovely hymn. Could you set it to some music? And Ireland set it there and then on the back of the menu. So that this is one of my favourites, really. We should certainly be seeing it in our church at Wormingford on Easter Sunday.

Speaker 422:09

Spoon was made.

Speaker 422:12

I want to take

Speaker 422:22

Prophet

Speaker 422:27

Thy page unto this old

Speaker 422:31

What a pleasant

Speaker 422:34

Now they don't want to.

Speaker 422:40

Oh my god.

Speaker 422:44

A friendly team.

Presenter22:47

My Song is Love Unknown sung by the choir of Wills Cathedral directed by Malcolm Archer.

Presenter22:52

Village life, of course, Ronald Blythe, is entirely different today.

Presenter22:58

Two elements that you mentioned that we perhaps don't often think of, because we think about supermarkets and weekenders and commuters and dormitory towns and so on.

Speaker 123:04

And can

Presenter23:07

Two things you've mentioned that uh strike me as unusual. One is you talk about light.

Presenter23:13

The fact that there is now no darkness in villages.

Ronald Blythe23:17

Yes, I'm sorry about this. I I think living in darkness is absolutely wonderful. But now, of course, in the villages, in ours too, you have these outside vast glaring lights on little courtyards, uh and sometimes old fashioned lamp posts set up in the garden.

Speaker 423:35

Yeah.

Presenter23:36

Yeah.

Speaker 423:36

But

Ronald Blythe23:37

One of the pleasures, really, of country life is to have the old real darkness, which isn't very dark at all.

Presenter23:43

And the other thing you mentioned is silence. Not that you crave it, but you say that villages now are much more silent than they were. And forget about the motor car for a second. We're talking about human silence.

Ronald Blythe23:54

Yes, uh and

Ronald Blythe23:56

They used to be full of children's noise and work noise. There's almost no noise goes on, because all the population goes somewhere to work. But once upon a time there had been the blacksmith and all sorts of tradesmen working. There had been the children running to school and shouting and crying. They're all taken in cars now.

Speaker 124:11

Yeah.

Ronald Blythe24:12

There's almost no sound at all unless somebody has got the window and you'll suddenly hear the radio or something like that.

Presenter24:19

Having said all of that, refreshingly it seems to me, you're not at all sentimental. You're not hankering after this rural idyll as

Ronald Blythe24:27

You can't go back and also it was terrible in many ways, the old life. It was poverty stricken. And it had its richness and vitality, which one regrets has gone.

Presenter24:39

But on the whole, people are better fed, better educated, higher standard of living. But there are still, nevertheless, these crises, even in the twenty first century, which threaten the working existence, like the outbreak of foot and mouth.

Ronald Blythe24:41

Oh good, highest comparable audience.

Speaker 124:51

Vice.

Presenter24:54

You talked about observing people. How do you observe the people in your village being affected and changed by what's going on at the moment?

Ronald Blythe25:01

I think they're affected and changed in two ways, emotionally because of what they see, because they farmers actually love animals. And the other change because the the countryside is no now recreational to a very great degree for many people, including the country people themselves, who have a lot of recreation and go and look at houses over to the public or theme parks and or do these kind of things. And this has been upset.

Presenter25:23

So there's a lack of visitors.

Ronald Blythe25:25

Lack of visitors, and a lot of farmers have got this sideline really to do with recreation.

Presenter25:30

So you don't sense fear among the people you know, but you must sense a kind of wariness, because they just don't know. It's the not knowing, isn't it?

Ronald Blythe25:38

There's a kind of misery about it a kind of sadness and dreariness really because of the pictures they've seen, and also perhaps the changing concepts of farming incomes and and things like that.

Presenter25:48

And I

Presenter25:50

But what's your your view uh uh as a rural historian? How lasting an effect do you think the current crisis will have? I mean some people say that the countryside will be changed forever.

Ronald Blythe25:59

No, it never is. I don't think. It re it it's an extraordinary resilient sort of place. And things will be different. But but it picks up rather quickly in some ways.

Presenter26:09

But in terms of the history of the countryside, this is another episode.

Ronald Blythe26:14

That's right. They'll look back on it as they do on Mixomatosis on the sixty-seven. It's it's rather like the set aside fields which some people complain about or pulling out the hedges and not putting them back again. This is a a kind of thing which happens all the time.

Presenter26:27

It's a small paragraph as in in history.

Ronald Blythe26:30

A small paragraph really, that's right. Next piece of music.

Ronald Blythe26:35

I've been to America sometimes. I'm very fond of

Ronald Blythe26:38

Aaron Copeland's Music.

Ronald Blythe26:41

And

Ronald Blythe26:42

I also love the kind of uh simplicity of certain Christian sects, and the Shakers are a kind of Quaker, I suppose.

Ronald Blythe26:53

Form of simplicity, and Copeland's Appalachian Spring contains variations on a shaker melody which is now extremely well known.

Presenter28:01

Variations on a shaker melody from Copeland's Appalachian Spring, played by William Chapman Nyahoe and Susannah Garcia.

Presenter28:09

Of course, Ronald young Tom in Akenfield yearns to escape the village, to go to Australia, not America. And indeed, in the Peter Hall dramatisation of your book, which you scripted, he leaves the village and he leaves his fiancée behind, takes his battered suitcase and off he goes. Is there anything autobiographical in that? Would you have liked to have done that all those years ago?

Ronald Blythe28:32

No, I um I suppose I'm too timid in a way. I I don't know. My world seems to be so enormous where it is. There's so much to work on where you are that you don't have to go anywhere really, I suppose.

Presenter28:44

Who was it who said why should we do half the things we do in life when we could sit under a tree?

Ronald Blythe28:48

Yes, that's Trahern, I think. Yes.

Presenter28:50

And but that's very much your philosophy.

Ronald Blythe28:52

Ye yes. Trahan, who died at thirty six, he said that life was so marvellous he couldn't bear to work even. He must just lie under a tree. He actually did work very hard.

Presenter29:02

I think a lot of people know the feeling. But you walk at night, I think. What is special about walking at night?

Ronald Blythe29:07

The house is rather interesting really. It's an old farmhouse, and you can walk straight out into the wilds, really, without going on the main road. And when you climb the hill opposite, you can see a great stretch of the valley. This is what they call the Constable Country, and um you can see a very long way.

Presenter29:22

Quite. Can you also, perhaps, because darkness has blurred the edges, again get a greater sense of

Presenter29:28

Yeah.

Ronald Blythe29:30

Yes, it it it has this um kind of atavistic feeling. You do suddenly feel without being too fanciful uh you're stepping back into another time. You're no longer in the twentieth, twenty first century. Somehow you're w where people have

Speaker 129:44

But

Ronald Blythe29:46

Troddenfer.

Ronald Blythe29:47

Perhaps thousands of years.

Ronald Blythe29:49

You also hear night birds, a lot of owls round me, and there used to be nightingales around the house, and then they went away.

Ronald Blythe29:57

And then Richard Maby, the naturalist, was staying. He'd just gone to bed when a night ago began to sing in the tree, right near the house, and I shouted upstairs, and he came clumping down, and we sat on the doorstep, and it sang there half the night. It was absolutely wonderful.

Presenter30:13

Tell me about your record number seven.

Ronald Blythe30:15

I suppose the most indigenous of all English rural writers is the poet John Clare, and we decided he ought to be in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, and so we were allowed to do this. And I asked Ted Hughes, who was then the Poet Laureate, to come and read, and I gave the the address. And Ted chose The Nightingale's Nest and read it absolutely marvellously.

Speaker 130:40

Up this green woodland rye let's softly rove, And list the nightingale.

Speaker 130:48

She dwelleth here.

Speaker 130:51

Hush let the wood gate softly clap, for fear The noise may drive her from her home of love.

Speaker 131:00

For here I've heard her many a merry year.

Speaker 131:03

At morn and eve, nay, all the life long day

Speaker 131:07

As though she lived on song.

Speaker 131:10

This very spot, Just where that old man's beard all wildly trails, Rude arbours o'er the road, and stops the way, And where that child its bluebell flowers hath got, Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails

Speaker 131:27

There have I hunted like a very boy, Creeping on hands and knees through mattered thorns, To find her nest and see her feed her young.

Presenter31:39

TED HUGHES, READING PART OF THE NIGHTINGALE'S NEST BY JOHN CLARE, THAT WAS RECORDEN IN POETS'CONER IN WESMINSER ABBEY IN JUNE, NINE EITY NINE.

Presenter31:47

So, Ronald Blythe, you you live on your own desert island, but I'm sure you're much comforted by your knowledge that the village and the villagers are are hard by. How would you be if you were really alone, without any one?

Ronald Blythe32:01

Well, I suppose I can't imagine it, but I mean, I have always been alone in that sense, but with a circle.

Ronald Blythe32:07

I have a little circle of dear friends and I I rely on them tremendously.

Presenter32:09

Uh

Presenter32:12

Hmm. So without them you would definitely be slightly bereft.

Ronald Blythe32:12

So with that

Ronald Blythe32:15

Ab absolutely awful. I couldn't imagine being without Tamrelli.

Presenter32:18

But you're a gardener, so you could dig and make something grow something to grow.

Ronald Blythe32:22

And I'm a bit of a botanist and I know what to eat and uh and things like that and you're

Presenter32:27

And you're a creature of habit.

Ronald Blythe32:28

It's a creature of terrible habits, that's right, severe habits.

Presenter32:31

So you could establish yourself and make a little lean to shadow.

Ronald Blythe32:34

And I suppose fairly philosophical about it, yes. That's right, yes.

Presenter32:37

But would you retain your optimism? Are you one of those people who wakes up every morning with a kind of joie de vive?

Ronald Blythe32:44

I do rather. Not so much that, but I wake up feeling very well usually and do a lot of work in the morning, get up very early, a lot of reading.

Ronald Blythe32:53

Looking.

Presenter32:53

But optimism a strong suit.

Presenter32:56

Perhaps not so much.

Ronald Blythe32:57

optimism, which often gives a kind of uh um wrong impression, but but perhaps a kind of rather strong philosophy about time and things like that, which which controls me in a way, I suppose.

Presenter33:07

You will obviously have a a very quiet but natural joy in life.

Ronald Blythe33:12

I think I do. Yes. I I feel very grateful for life on the whole. I feel that it's um

Ronald Blythe33:17

Exceeded all my expectations.

Presenter33:20

Yeah.

Ronald Blythe33:20

Yes.

Presenter33:20

Yeah.

Presenter33:21

Last piece of music.

Ronald Blythe33:23

I simply love this Ravel Pavant for Dead Infanta.

Ronald Blythe33:27

Because if it's gravity.

Ronald Blythe33:29

It's profound sadness.

Ronald Blythe33:32

I sometimes have to take village funerals.

Ronald Blythe33:36

Often the people I've known for ever.

Ronald Blythe33:38

and I impose a little bit of the old order of mourning into them, without being miserable. I think the end of life is a very important and rather austere and extraordinary occasion. And so I think this exquisite composition rather sums it up for me.

Presenter34:54

Part of Ravel's Pavan for a Dead Infanta, played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abardo. Now if you could only take one of those eight records, Ronald, which one would you choose?

Ronald Blythe35:04

Well, I think I'd take the Vinteraiser by Schubert, partly because I'm rather hoping you'll let me have a whole record with all of

Ronald Blythe35:11

songs in. And of course, because that reminded me of my beginnings really as as a writer.

Presenter35:17

What about your book? You've got the Bible, as you know, and you've got the complete works of Shakespeare.

Ronald Blythe35:21

But I'm going to take

Ronald Blythe35:23

Boswell's Life of Johnson. It's a huge book full of society. It's it's absolutely wonderful. I once

Ronald Blythe35:30

I took it in my twenties all round Scotland walking where they walked on that amazing sort of tour.

Presenter35:35

And the luxury.

Ronald Blythe35:37

And I'm going to be rather boring and simply say I should need a nice lot of ruled full scab, ever so much of it and some pens. I c I can't keep writing with a stick in the sand.

Presenter35:45

Ronald Blythe, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Ronald Blythe35:48

Thank you very much.

Speaker 435:56

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.