RONALD BLYTHE (Ronnie to his friends) was an enigma. Much of his writing was autobiographical, but he kept a great deal to himself. He was charming, friendly, and sociable, but lived a kind of monastic existence. His writing style was very particular: peculiar to himself, but almost impossible to define. His faith was evidently profound, but ultimately not something he talked about. Quite a challenge to a biographer.
But if anyone was designed to tell his story, it was Ian Collins. His connections go back to before he was born: “My maternal grandmother was the postmistress in the village of Charlsfield, which became the basis for Akenfield, Ronnie’s most famous book.” Many years later, Mr Collins made his own way up the track to Bottengoms, the ancient farmhouse that figured in David Gentleman’s illustration above Blythe’s celebrated Church Times columns: a house that had been left to him by the artists John and Christine Nash, who had been his “adopted” family for decades.
Mr Collins was then arts correspondent for the Eastern Daily Press and was a great admirer of Blythe. He had written a book about East Anglia, and hoped that Blythe would write a foreword. “I went into the garden room which was like being outdoors. . . This was in 1988, and there was a row of gardening tools which looked like they’d come from some sort of Victorian museum. Ronnie’s typewriter keys were clattering upstairs. I called, and he came running down — 65 he was — and we became instant friends. He did my foreword, and I kept going back.”
Mr Collins would drop by en route from Suffolk to London, and later would look after the house (and the cat) when Blythe was away. Blythe couldn’t drive, and Mr Collins became one of a number of chauffeurs who would take him where he needed to go. This was no chore, he insists. “Ronnie didn’t like cars, was car sick; so it was a delicate operation, but he was the best person to take in a car, because he knew the landscape and could tell you amazing stories about where you were and where you were travelling to.”
The Nashes had invented a term, the “dear ones”, for their close circle of friends and supporters. Blythe inherited the notion, and it became a reference point for the team of friends and admirers, like Mr Collins and his partner, Joachim, who kept an eye out for him, particularly in later life.
Mr Collins, from the beginning, hoped that he would one day write his mentor’s biography. “I kept notes from those very early days, and Ronnie would never ask for anything; so he would never ask me to write it, and I could never ask him in return. There was an etiquette to our friendship.” For some years, Mr Collins was engaged in writing the biography of the East Anglian painter John Craxton, born the same year as Blythe. “They both admired each other. And while this book was evolving, I was talking to Ronnie about it. It was pretty clear that he would have liked the same treatment, but he would think it impertinent.”
But, ultimately, it became clear that this was going to be Mr Collins’s task. “He set it all up for me to do it. There was a will which made me executor and literary executor as well; so I had freedom of manoeuvre.” But, even after the writer’s death at the age of 100, Mr Collins felt overawed at the prospect of writing about his hero. “We had 35 years of friendship, and then 20 months since he died, before I could do it.”
KEITH ROBERTSIan Collins
Despite Mr Collins’s eminent suitability, there remained issues that needed to be surmounted: “There were things he didn’t tell me, which I had to find out separately. It was a delicate dance.”
First, there was Blythe’s upbringing. It was evident that he had grown up in considerable rural poverty, but this was something that he refused to speak about. And, second, he had been conscripted during the Second World War, about which he was silent.
“Because that would have been special pleading,” Mr Collins says. “He wouldn’t say that he’d had a difficult time. What he’d say is that he had such a wonderful life; so to say he’d had difficulties would be ungrateful. And, for a biographer, that was a bit tricky.”
Mr Collins had to undertake his own research with surviving members of the Blythe family. Ronnie was the eldest of six children born to George, a Suffolk boy, and Tillie, from the Victorian slums of Covent Garden. There had been an enduring agricultural slump from the mid-19th century until the 1940s, and the Blythes scraped the sparest of livings. George tried his hand at various menial tasks on the land, ultimately settling for the relative independence of life as a gravedigger. Tillie had left London with a romantic vision of rural life, which persisted despite the family’s penury.
Blythe’s intellect as a child went unrecognised, Mr Collins discovered. In fact, it was sometimes mistaken as some kind of “backwardness”. “Ronnie’s curious mind, far from being nurtured, was perceived as an impediment to getting on and fitting in.” He was unable to concentrate on the more mechanical elements of education, apparently incapable of carrying out instructions, and appeared lost in a world of his own making. He left school at 14 with no qualifications.
When the war came, this gentle, dreamy, slightly androgynous young man found no greater success in the army. “Ronnie couldn’t hurt a fly. He was like St Francis. He was an absolute and total pacifist, but he also wouldn’t make a public stand. He wanted to be obliging, but he simply couldn’t help, and at some point this became obvious.
“It was going so badly when he was training as a Private that they tried to put him on an officers’ training course — that was even worse, because he couldn’t give orders. He couldn’t take orders or give them. In the end, he had some sort of nervous breakdown. . . When I finally got him to say something about this, he said: “I was invalided out in a way.”
In contrast to this secrecy about his past, it came as a surprise — to me at least — that Blythe Spirit was so candid about Blythe’s sexuality. Mr Collins is openly gay, which may have helped these conversations. “Yes, we were very open about that,” Mr Collins says. “Ronnie was very open in his circle. It wasn’t just that Ronnie was gay: he had an unabashed physicality. He came from this puritan background, his mother defected from Anglican to Plymouth Brethren — very puritanical. But he was completely untouched by that. He was just at ease in his own skin, which is a wonderful thing.
“Ronnie was a naturist. He would never go to a nudist camp — he would just be naked in his garden, like Adam in Eden. . . So being gay was just part of his nature; not the key part, but just there, though he was never going to be ambushed by that. He was a perfect combination of mind, spirit, and body.”
From the age of 17, Blythe was sure of his homosexuality, but — despite the times and his upbringing — he never felt any guilt about it. Partly, Collins believes, his sexuality was rendered a secondary issue, because his main focus, from the age of 13 was his absolute determination, above all else, to be a writer. Blythe said: “I would go with anyone, really; sex meant nothing to me. Being a writer was everything.” There was an inner steel — a drive that romantic relationships could never compete with.
“Ronnie seemed very pliable, and he wasn’t at all,” Mr Collins says. In Blythe Spirit, he writes: “Most of the men drawn to him were older and controlling, mistaking his gentle demeanour for malleability, if not a positive desire to be dominated. They . . . failed to see that inner steel.” Blythe consciously realised that he had to guard against being drawn into relationships, recognising that “I would be the one who ended up washing the socks.”
Blythe’s commitment to his primary calling is key to his ultimate elusiveness. In a sense, he reinvented himself. Those who met him assumed that he was university-educated, and his cut-glass accent disguised his Suffolk antecedents. Mr Collins says: “He did have a Suffolk accent, and it disappeared. It wasn’t because of snobbery. He didn’t want to be placed: he wanted the invisibility of the writer. . .
“I think the key thing was getting the radio and hearing this amazing received English. He developed this very clipped enunciation, which had completely gone when I saw him in 1998. . . His success as a writer gave him this incredible sense of security. He found his own voice in the end, but he wasn’t going to be patronised or dismissed, in the way that working-class boys in the countryside were.”
Finding his voice as a writer was a longer-term process, because Blythe was an autodidact. He was what he read, which was why, in his late twenties, his first proper job as a reference librarian, in Colchester, was a godsend. And this was where Christine Nash found him, and launched him into the burgeoning artistic community of East Anglia, which included figures such as Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, Patricia Highsmith, and Cedric Morris.
He found books liberating. He once wrote: “To enter a book is to escape from a prison or an emptiness.” But this sponge-like absorption of literature was supplemented by an acute facility for observation and accurate recall, particularly for the nuance of conversation. He watched, listened, read, and wrote.
In order to write Blythe Spirit, Mr Collins inevitable re-read Blythe’s entire oeuvre, together with diaries and correspondence. He says that this is “deliberately” not a critical literary biography, believing that there will be room for that, in time. From a literary perspective “[Ronnie] was hard to pin down; so I don’t want to put him in a pigeonhole, or limit him.”
He wrote poetry, criticism, novels, and more, but Mr Collins believes that the first work that really “declares his genius” was The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940, which was published in Blythe’s early forties. “It’s very sweeping: it’s a panoramic picture. But it’s episodic, in the essay form which is his best way of writing. . . That’s where he felt comfortable. Akenfield was 49 essays, 49 witnesses. A View in Winter: Reflections on old age was also the same. He was a kind of miniaturist, in which he could pack in everything, in this magical way.”
Blythe was a late developer, as Mr Collins points out: “In fact, almost half of his books [he wrote more than 40] were published after his 79th year.” He reserves particular praise for Ronnie’s columns in the Church Times, which he began in 1993 at the age of 71, and which are quoted liberally throughout Blythe Spirit. Perhaps surprisingly, Collins maintains that the 1200 ‘Word from Wormingford’ essays constitute his best writing of his career, “because they’re a distillation of all the things he’d come to know”.
In Blythe’s own words, these pieces unravelled “the muddle that is in the writer’s head, the criss-crossing of its existence, its beliefs and heresies, its strange convictions and sudden truths”. Mr Collins says: “Gems of observation, memory, meditation, quotation, appreciation, and acceptance illuminated lyrical prose zooming from personal to universal in a sentence and time travelling in a short paragraph.”
As ever, Blythe’s precise belief or theology was elusive. Frances Ward, a former Dean of St Edmundsbury, and a close friend of the writer, places him in the tradition of natural theology, reading “the reality of God in the sunshine and light, in the darkness of turned soil or the sludge of a pond, in the trumpet of a daffodil, in the song of the nightingale”.
Mr Collins says that he was angry when he started writing Blythe Spirit. “I was angry, because he was clearly brilliant, but his brilliance was unrecognised. Worse than that, it was regarded as a handicap. . . He learned far more from walking to school than when he got there. . . Also, in church, he just loved the reverie, not attending to what was being said, but flowing his own thoughts. He said he had a mind like a dragonfly. . .
“But I suddenly realised that he was the beneficiary of everything that he lacked. His writing is untrained and unconstrained. There’s such a parallel with [the poet, and Blythe’s hero] John Clare. They were noble brothers, really. He found his voice in the fields, thank goodness. Had he gone through conventional education, through proper secondary education on to university, he perhaps wouldn’t have been the writer that we love. My anger faded, and I ended up being thankful that it was like it was.”
And thankfulness, Mr Collins says, was a feature of Blythe’s life until the very end. “When the ‘Word from Wormingford’ columns tailed off in his 95th year, it was clear that some help was needed. I became one of his executors, and looked after his finances as part of his care. He’d chosen a group of people who he thought would interfere least. . . The final circle was so marvellous — mostly women, but not all. . . They were all loving, caring, bookish people. And the whole point latterly was to get Ronnie into his armchair with his sherry, so someone could read to him.
“He had no regrets. It was such a lesson on how to live and how to die, and we were all marked and moved by it. . . He had the protection of philosophy and no sense of entitlement or resentment. He felt immensely lucky and interested and amused. And grateful. The last words he said were ‘Thank you.’”
The Revd Malcolm Doney is a writer, broadcaster, and Anglican priest, who lives in Suffolk.
Read Paul Handley’s review of Blythe Spirit here.
On 4 December, 4-5.30 p.m., there is to be a Zoom discussion of the book hosted by the Michael Ramsey Centre for Anglican Studies at the University of Durham. The panel will be Ian Collins, Frances Ward, Angela Tilby, and David Holt.
Ian Collins will be speaking with Paul Handley about Blythe Spirit at the 2025 Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. Tickets are available at: faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk