Given that Akenfield was not conceived as an oral history but as a literary work, such criticism now appears harsh.(39) Recently Blythe elucidated both the spirit and the method of his approach. ‘The literary aspect of the book comes from my being a kind of poet-historian and the “spiritual” side of it derives from my lifetime association with the rural church.’ And as for how Blythe conducted his interviews: ‘Some of the talk was taped, some of it was taken down as notes, some of it was recalled from childhood onwards.’(40) It was – and still is – rare to find the transparent and unadulterated use of the spoken word in published texts. Even Ewart Evans, whose work is praised as much as Blythe’s is criticised, does not appear to reproduce his informants’ speech entirely faithfully.(41) He does make some attempt to retain dialect words (though usually with a translation) and reproduces in part the Suffolk accent or pronunciation as with this quotation from shepherd Robert Savage: ‘Us shepherd chaps had to be serious serous chaps. The farmers would let us git on by ourselves. You were independent and you had to think forrard.’(42) But one might contrast this with an account that appears in Ask the Fellows that Cut the Hay of shepherd Liney Riches by a contemporary, the artist and naturalist George Rope (1846-1929). Rope writes that ‘it is impossible in writing to give any idea of his fine rendering of the pure Suffolk dialect; or the true pronunciation of certain vowels ands dipthongs’. ‘In pointing out the position of some particular member of his flock he would say: “Hin owd on laid agin the hid o’ the trow”’.(43) Clearly too much phonetic spelling may be a hindrance to the reader’s comprehension - in Thompson’s words it can ‘reduce a quotation to absurdity’(44) - but can we really say that the insertion of the odd dialect word or accented pronunciation always helps to retain the meaning of a passage or statement?

I beg to differ. Indeed, there is a sense in which Blythe’s tidied-up, elegant prose manages to convey meaning at least as well as a faithfully reproduced transcription with all its ragged edges. Take this extract from the reminiscences of the afore-mentioned farm-worker Leonard Thompson, a man memorably described by Blythe as ‘a little brown bull of a man with hard blue eyes and limbs so stretched by the toil that they seem incapable of relaxing into retirement.’ On what he termed the war between farmers and their men in the years before the First World War, Thompson said:
These employers were famous for their meanness. They took all they could from the men and boys who worked their land. They bought their life’s strength for as little as they could. They wore us out without a thought because, with the big families, there was a continuous supply of labour. Fourteen young men left the village in 1909-11 to join the army. There wasn’t a recruiting drive, they just escaped. And some people just changed their sky, as they say, and I was one of them.(45)

The reader is certainly able to discern precisely the import of Leonard Thompson’s words without the aid of dialect or faithfully reproduced syntax. And to further amplify this point one is drawn to Blythe’s remarkable portrayal of his encounter with Davie, the oldest of his respondents, a man who ‘insists he has nothing to say.’ Davie has mentioned the practice of gangs of men and boys singing together as they scythed the corn. ‘What was the song Davie?’ asks Blythe. ‘Never you mind the song – it was the singing that counted’ was Davie’s reply.(46) Davie’s sparse words do more than any faithful reproduction of meter, syntax and dialect to remind oral historians that sometimes it is not the words themselves that convey the meaning but the action, the performance of telling or communicating. It is a message that Blythe has taken to heart, telling his readers that ‘I decided to keep to what was being said, and to a certain rhythm in each speaker, using a story, “Tom-tit-Tot” from the Suffolk Folklore Society’s collection to give a wonderfully accurate example of our dialect.’(47) It was not Blythe’s intention to produce an ethnology of dialect or a record of what he termed the quaintness of village life. It was a ‘quest for the voice of Akenfield’ at a point in time.48 For Blythe that voice was not the faithfully reproduced spoken word but the meaning and sentiment expressed by his respondents.
Clearly then, Akenfield does not conform to some academics’ notion of what an oral history study should look like. Yet Akenfield still represents an early example of oral history that many oral historians would strive to emulate and not merely because of its continuing popularity. In Ron Grele’s Envelopes of Sound, a group of eminent oral historians highlight Akenfield as an iconic work, Studs Terkel, himself not an academic historian, enthused, ‘Oh gosh yes, that’s a great book’.49 Why then, in spite of all the criticisms leveled at it, does Akenfield still inspire affection and why is it still identified as a seminal work in the field? Why has Akenfield become the model by which certain kinds of local or rural studies, particularly those employing oral history, are measured?(50)

At a basic level Akenfield remains important simply because it was one of the first studies to use oral history and because by interviewing elderly people in the 1960s Blythe could reach back to the decades before the Great War. Indeed it is this section of the book where Blythe relates the stories of the ‘survivors’ (survivors of the pre-First World War feudal conditions in agriculture and of the war itself to which many fled to escape) that has the greatest impact on the reader. Secondly, Akenfield manages to convey the harshness and the inequalities of rural life through the unsentimental and unromantic recollections of its speakers. One remembers as particularly striking the words of the former gardener at the ‘big house’ who described the petty humiliations of the class system such as staff having to turn to face the wall if they encountered their superiors unexpectedly in a passageway. ‘It was terrible. You felt like somebody with a disease.’(51) At the same time it perhaps taps into a longstanding English romanticism for the countryside and all that it symbolically represents. Blythe manages to convey the changing times as a matter of regret, even when channeling the words of a young farm-worker who was critical of the ‘old boys’ on the farm:

They’ll talk all day about what they did years ago. You’ll occasionally meet men who’ll say, ‘Thank God – those days have gone!’ but you’ll still meet quite a few who, if they had their way, would be back with the horses tomorrow… They have to touch everything with their hands – they dislike the idea of not touching things. They must handle, touch…They would do the sugar-beeting perfectly – the worst damn job on the farm – even if their fingers were half-dropping off with the cold.(52)

In the context of present day historical practice though, Akenfield is a comfortable bedfellow. Since the 1970s when oral history practitioners were still experimenting with technique and were having to continually defend their methodology from their critics, practice and theory has moved on markedly, demonstrating confidence and maturity. At the same time historical writing more generally has come to embrace a diversity of approaches. Oral history has developed into a distinct methodology with guides to best practice and it has become intensely theorised. Debates about faithful transcription, representativeness and authenticity have been mostly superseded by deliberations about intersubjectivity, memory, composure, narrative construction and other theoretical perspectives. In this context Akenfield might initially appear outdated, a relic of a time when oral history was still a newcomer on the scene, when it offered what many believed was a more democratic view of the past. And it might appear as a rather romantic piece of work that was quickly overtaken by technically and theoretically more sophisticated studies. But I would argue that the opposite is true for a number of reasons.

Firstly, oral history has retained its interdisciplinary character which means that as a methodology it is constantly drawing upon practices and interpretive models developed across a range of disciplines, including literature but also linguistics, psychology, sociology and anthropology, and there is room within this broad church for a variety of approaches. Oral history practice today is as diverse as the number of disciplines in which it is used. At the same time, the use of life history narratives – or the turn to biographical methods – has been particularly embraced by the social-science disciplines as a means of engaging with subjectivity and the self and of relating the personal to the social.(53) Second, what might be called community history has recently undergone a revival, albeit in a different guise from the community studies pioneered in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, clearly documented in the pages of this journal.(54) Akenfield stands as an exemplar of a community history that succeeds in saying something meaningful about personal experience as well as broader social change. The book was quickly embraced by the communities featured so that when Peter Hall made the 1974 film the inhabitants eagerly participated in the re-telling of their community history.(55) Thirdly, the popularity of a historical practice – at least within social and cultural history - which acknowledges and even celebrates the place of subjectivity and of narrative analysis, has opened up the field to a diverse set of methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Blythe’s attempt to capture the spirit of a community through the stories it tells about itself is, dare one say it, fashionable, in tune with the historical times.

In the preface to the second edition of the book in 1999 Blythe wrote: ‘My only real credentials for having written it were that I was native to its situation in nearly every way and had only to listen to my own world talking.’(56) He continued, ‘There are various ways to describe a time, a place, a condition. One can come to them from outside and say what one saw. Or one can emerge from within a community … and be at a particular moment its indigenous voice.’(57) With these words Blythe was reflecting the turn to a focus on the social construction of the interview that was happening within oral history more generally. Oral historians were increasingly interested in the dynamics of the interview process, analysing not just the intersubjective relations between the interviewer and the respondent but also the context-specific variables that impact upon the story that is eventually told.(58) Blythe’s place within the community was seemingly crucial to the kind of responses he received.

Having been born between the wars during the last years of the great agricultural depression, I was in a kind of natural conversation with all three generations who spoke to me in the mid-sixties, and I was able to structure their talk over farming, education, welfare, class, religion and indeed life and death in terms such as I myself was experiencing these things, although now with a writer’s version of them.(59)

He was an insider in many ways. There was never any pretence at objectivity in Akenfield. Indeed, Blythe’s own voice and his sympathy for his subject matter, maybe even his evident sense of regret at a disappearing way of life, shape the book. The introductory sections to each chapter and the selection of excerpts from the interviews place the author in our line of sight – or hearing. Far from undermining the authenticity of the book, our ability to hear the author/interviewer fits with current practice which accepts the presence of the author, and is interested in the intersubjectivities arising from the relationship between researcher and respondents and the impact on the outcomes.(60) And in one chapter, that in which Blythe presents Lana Webb and her grandmother, he actively places himself in the narrative and, as David Faris has observed, overtly adopts the techniques of storytelling as opposed to allowing Lana to tell her own story.(61) This is the only chapter in which Blythe does this but the fact that he does so alerts the reader to his narrative presence throughout the book.

Thus, Akenfield is a narrative about the rural past shaped by the respondents but also by Blythe himself. Of course we all take our own prejudices and expectations into an interview situation and, if we are working within an academic environment, we also are aware of having to conform to certain dominant academic conventions. An early critic of Akenfield described Blythe’s technique as producing ‘imaginative truth’, a term which would not have been embraced by historians in the 1960s and 70s.(62) In the context of much current historical practice however, and especially that shaped by poststructural theory, we are more willing to accept that imaginative accuracy is perhaps all a historian can hope to achieve. The piecing together of landscapes of the past is undertaken by all of us by enveloping our evidence within a persuasive narrative and the gaps are often filled in with our imagination. It is the researcher, the author who eventually shapes the story out of the narratives of his or her respondents and we bring our own agendas to this practice. In my own work, most recently constructing the past as imagined and represented by women in Shetland, utilising a combination of written and oral sources, the resulting narrative takes the form of a dialogue between Shetland women of the past and the present articulated within a framework of myths or ideas about women’s place in Shetland’s history.63 The disparate voices located in the written record as well as oral narratives are woven by the historian into a material landscape, the result being a tapestry combining material traces (such as statistical and census data, documentary evidence and so on) and mythical traces (oral narratives, stories, folktales etc).

In oral history this process of imaginative mediation is even more marked. Few, if any, oral historians would argue that the spoken word should not be mediated by the researcher if the material is to be presented for public consumption. Whilst recognising the fact that there is a qualitative difference between the oral interview and the written transcript – even when strenuous attempts have been made to reproduce the spoken words as accurately as possible - the majority of oral historians adopt a more pragmatic stance.64 For all our genuine attempts to reproduce an oral history interview in textual form, and our insistence that oral history is a different kind of evidence, nevertheless we often treat it rather roughly: selecting, editing and cutting where it suits us, rarely Even Alessandro Portelli, perhaps the most fervent advocate of orality, intervenes in his respondents’ narratives, selecting appropriate passages and surrounding them with interpretive prose. ‘The importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact’, writes Portelli, ‘but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge.’ presenting our audience with an unadulterated transcript.(65) Rebecca Jones describes the space between the oral interview and the written manuscript as ‘a long, meandering journey in which a narrative is crafted. The oral history interview is the starting point in the process of creating the narrative, but the journey continues through transcribing and editing to publication.’(66) Even Alessandro Portelli, perhaps the most fervent advocate of orality, intervenes in his respondents’ narratives, selecting appropriate passages and surrounding them with interpretive prose. ‘The importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact’, writes Portelli, ‘but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge.’(67) In this light, Blythe’s representation of his respondents’ words appears less worrisome.

It is partly Blythe’s editorial interventions that make Akenfield such an engaging and thought-provoking read. He combines the spoken word with acute observation to make an editorial comment on the nature of rural society, on the changes that have occurred and which are still occurring and the relationship between the past and the present. As he converses with the old man Davie, Blythe encircles this encounter with observations and literary description that may not belong in a traditional scholarly analysis but which undoubtedly adds something to our understanding of the man. As Blythe tempts answers out of Davie he notes that:
High up on the wall of the biggest barn in the village, almost at the apex of the east wall’s pediment, on the inside and armorial beneath its mantling of cobwebs, there is a deep and perfect impression of a small hand with the fingers fanned out. It is Davie’s hand, pressed into the wet plaster when he was fourteen, after he had helped to mend the barn. A chink in the roof spotlights the clean lines of this dusty answer. ‘There – that’s something,’ says Davie. ‘Or you could say, “that’s all”.’(68)

Moreover, Blythe paints a portrait of his respondent for the reader, immediately and memorably fixing him or her in our mind’s eye: the orchard foreman Alan Mitton is described as ‘tall. Viking-looking, the biggest man in Akenfield, a natural leader and king-pin of the apple workers.’ Orchard-worker Michael Poole is described as ‘sharp-featured and fair. There is no rest in the “simple” face, it has the alertness of forest- creature, eyes seizing at every object.’(69) Blythe’s introductions position him both as an observer and evaluator but also a creator of a story.
Another trend in current oral history practice is attention to the analysis of narrative form; indeed it often regards the respondent’s production of a narrative as a desirable outcome of the interview. Narrative analysis is underpinned by the proposition that individuals produce accounts of themselves and their past that are ‘storied’, meaning the accounts are in the form of stories or narratives.(70) The production of an oral history narrative operates on several levels: the narrator constructs a story or narrative to make sense of the world but in order to do this he or she draws on stories or narratives that circulate in culture. The researcher subsequently also crafts a narrative from the accumulation of oral histories. Hayden White concisely defines narrative as a solution to the problem of how to translate knowing into telling’.(71) Narrative analysis, then, may be applied to individual texts or oral histories by means of carrying out a detailed examination of the narrative structures and devices deployed by people. But the theory can also be applied more widely, for instance to help us understand how people strive to understand and articulate their place in the past and the present. The content of what is said is still important but so is the way in which it is said. In Akenfield Blythe’s respondents all construct narratives in which they position themselves within the community and the world more generally. For example, Gregory Gladwell, the blacksmith, tells us his family’s ancestry, politics and religion before describing his childhood days and then moving on to a thoughtful peroration on the past. Reflecting on the 1930s, a time when his grandfather was forced to close the forge and everyone was looking for work, he remarked:

I hear people run the gentry down now but they were better than the farmers in a crisis. Theirs was the only hand that fed us which we could see. So we bowed a bit; it cost nothing, even if it wasn’t all courtesy. Nobody left, nobody went away. People were content. However hard up they were, they stayed content. The boys had their arse out of their trousers, no socks and the toes out of their boots. My brothers and myself were life this, yet so happy. I think other families were the same. The village kept close.(72)

In this extract we can identify some clear themes: a benign acceptance of social class differences, a harking back to the ‘good old days’, the value of a close community. Later in this man’s narrative we find a pride in hard work and a job well done and a reflection on change in the village manifested in less face-to-face contact. The story told by the blacksmith is one of change and transition and worry about the impact of that change on the individual, the community and the nature of rural life more generally. The blacksmith’s narrative is also Blythe’s.
Akenfield then, always popular amongst the public readership, has come full circle as it finds itself in alignment with the current historical fashion for the acknowledgement of the interplay of subjectivities, the turn to biographical method and the analysis of narrative. Blythe uses the stories of rural change as the narrative solution in Akenfield. It is the means of bridging the interpretive gap between the interviewees’ voices and a composite picture of English rural life. This is not cutting corners or sacrificing authenticity for a good story. Rather the story is what it is all about. Blythe’s story or narrative is the result of his personal journey into the lives of the Akenfield inhabitants. It would be inauthentic if it was anything else.
What all the critical reviews of Akenfield have shared is an acknowledgement – sometimes begrudging – that this book is a delight to read, a literary masterpiece. And it is this quality of the book that accounts in part for its continued popularity amongst the public and oral historians alike. Craig Taylor, whose Return to Akenfield has revived interest in Blythe’s original, remarked that ‘the world that did the talking was vivid in the detail it accorded everyday tasks and poignant in its evocation of a disappearing past.’73 In these respects Akenfield represents the best that oral history can achieve: it might not be a model in terms of its methodology but it records the detail of the past that otherwise would be lost and at the same time it tells a story of broad historical change fashioned from the voices of the people and shaped by the experiences and personal perspectives of the author.

Notes:
38 Blythe, Akenfield, pp 32-44.
39 Taylor, Return to Akenfield, p 6.
40 Ronald Blythe correspondence with the author, 8 Aug. 2008.
41 Ewart Evans, Ask the Fellows, p 30.
42 Ewart Evans, Ask the Fellows, p 28.
43 Ewart Evans, Ask the Fellows, p 30.
44 Thompson, Voice of the Past, p 262
45 Blythe, Akenfield, p 37.
46 Blythe, Akenfield, p 21
47 Blythe, Akenfield, p 10
48 Blythe, Akenfield, p 18.
49 Ronald J Grele with Studs Terkel et al, Envelopes of Sound: the Art of Oral History (New York, 1991), pp 80-1
20
50 A ‘Google scholar’ search reveals Akenfield is regularly referred to by reviewers of such books, in the main in a positive light.
51 Blythe, Akenfield, p 103.
52 Blythe, Akenfield, p 98.
53 See, for instance, Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat and Tony Wengraf (eds), The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science (London, 2000)
54 For a summary of the developments in community history see Paul Thompson and Brenda Corti, ‘Whose Community?: the Shaping of Collective Memory in a Volunteer Project’, Oral History 36:2 (2008), pp.89-98. The authors recount how Ronald Blythe spoke at the launch of a community oral history project in Wivenhoe, Essex in 2004 thus linking community history past and present (p.94).
55 See the 2004 BBC documentary ‘Akenfield Re-visited’ about the making of the of the original 1974 film. Hhttp://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/829583H and Hhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/akenfield.shtmlH (28.11.08). On the continuing use of ‘Akenfield’ see Peggy Cole, Charsfield and Surrounding District in Pictures (Ipswich, 1999).
56 Blythe, Akenfield, p 8.
57 Blythe, Akenfield p 10.
58 See Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester, 1998), pp.9-20. On the subjectivities implicit in the interview relationship see Valerie Yow, ‘Do I Like Them Too Much? Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice-versa’, in Oral History Review 24:1 (1997), pp.55-79.
59 Blythe, Akenfield, p.8.
60 Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Middletown, Conn., 1996) is an extreme example of the author inserting her own subjectivity into the text in a deliberate way, combining Passerini’s personal memories, the stories of her interviewees and an account of the analytical process.
61 David E. Faris, ‘Narrative Form and Oral history: Some Problems and Possibilities’, International Journal of Oral History vol 1, no 3 (1980), pp 159-80, here p. 175-6.
21
62 Marsh, ‘Miraculous Relic’, p.75.
63 Lynn Abrams, Myth and Materiality in a Woman’s World: Shetland 1800-2000 (Manchester, 2005).
64 See Francis Good, ‘Voice, Ear and Text: Words, Meaning and Transcription’, in R.Perks and A. Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (2nd edition, Abingdon, 2006), pp.362-73.
65 See Charles T. Morrissey, ‘Oral history and the Boundaries of Fiction’, The Public Historian, vol 7, no 2 (1985), pp 41-6.
66 Rebecca Jones, ‘Blended Voices: Crafting a Narrative from Oral History Interviews’, The Oral History Review vol 31, no 1 (2004), p 23. See also Michael Frisch, ‘Preparing interview transcripts for documentary publication’, in Frisch, A Shared Authority (New York, 1990), pp 81-146.
67 See Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, 1991), pp. 46-8; and Portelli, The Order has been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Massacre in Rome (Basingstoke, 2003).
68 Blythe, Akenfield, p 21.
69 Blythe, Akenfield, pp. 187 and 194.
70 For a guide to the method of narrative analysis see Catherine Kohler Riessman, Narrative Analysis (London, 1993).
71 Hayden White cited in Catherine Kohler Riessman, Narrative Analysis (London, 1993), p 3.
72 Blythe, Akenfield, pp 112-3.
73 Taylor, Return to Akenfield, p xii.

Lynn Abrams

Source: eprints.gla.ac.uk



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