“Akenfield” was a book that perhaps only Mr. Blythe could have written. A descendant of tenant farmers, he had little formal schooling and never lived far from his hometown. He read extensively but spent just as much time in the fields and woods of Suffolk.
He felt a deep connection to the land and its history: His daily walk took him past the remnants of successive civilizations reaching back through millenniums to the Iron Age and advancing through Romans, Saxons and Normans.
“The child of a car-less home, I spent half of my boyhood traveling to villages by field paths and what we called gulls, by kissing gates and stiles, and sometimes by stretches of lost roads,” he wrote in The Times in 1986.
Mr. Blythe modeled himself on the artists who had found similar inspiration in the English countryside, including the poet John Clare, the novelist Thomas Hardy and the painters Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, both of whom depicted the hills and streams of Suffolk in their landscapes.
His style was informed but conversational, erudite but never pedantic; he displayed none of the typical autodidact’s flaunting of his own hard-won knowledge. In a typical dispatch for The Church Times, about St. Matthew, Mr. Blythe wrote:
Not for us covetous desires and inordinate love of riches. Nor for us inordinate affection, although quite how one is to keep this within bounds I have failed to understand. Some friends, the cat, some books, this landscape familiar to me since boyhood, are all in receipt of my inordinate affection and the cat would not be pleased with anything less. But if I am not covetous, it is because I have all I need.
Ronald George Blythe was born on Nov. 6, 1922, in Acton, a Suffolk village that had about 400 people and today has fewer than 2,000. His father, Albert, served in World War I, in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, in which nearly 200,000 British soldiers were killed, wounded or captured. His mother, Matilda (Eakins) Blythe, was a homemaker who volunteered as a nurse during the war.
Ronald grew up spending most of his time outdoors, playing and exploring. He was not much for school, and in any case his educational options were limited. But he was a voracious reader, especially of the French literature his mother urged on him.
