I AM dipping in and out of Ian Collins’s beautiful book, Blythe Spirit, a celebration of the remarkable life of my great predecessor in this back-page column: Ronald Blythe (Books, 29 November 2024). Naturally, I was especially interested in the chapter on his column “Word From Wormingford”, which was such a feature of this page for so many years. Collins has the stats: “Ronnie would pen 500,000 words from Wormingford in 1,200 essays over twenty four years.”
How did he manage it? As a comparative apprentice in this art, I was anxious to pick up any tips that I could. He was clearly a man who had succeeded in getting habit on his side. So Collins tells us: “Written in long hand on Monday, each column was typed on Tuesday, and then walked, a two mile round trek, to the post box.” I can only aspire to such routine, though, when it works, when travel allows, and other things do not intervene, I do have a kind of weekly rhythm.
I try to draft of my piece a week Thursday before publication, sleep on it, and then go through it again on Friday morning, tidying, amending, pruning for the word-count. Then I send it off, not with Ronnie’s long walk to the postbox, but with the soft whoosh of the email to which my piece is attached. I wondered whether it was on his walks to or from the postbox that the first ideas began to stir in Ronnie’s mind, for the next week’s column.
I also take my Poet’s Corner pieces for a walk, not typed up and in the envelope as Ronnie did, but half-formed and still stirring in my head. I walk every morning before breakfast, and again after lunch, exploring the local footpaths: the Weavers Way, the Paston Way, or making my little circuit of Sadler’s Wood — alas, no longer with either George or Zara, our two amiable greyhounds, though, so often the only walker without a dog in those woods, I sometimes sense that I am holding an invisible lead and some joyful spirit-animal is exulting at its other end.
I have also sometimes imagined Ronnie walking with me, and wondered what he would observe that I am overlooking. I am able to imagine his presence with some confidence because I did once walk with him from Leighton Bromswold to Little Gidding, when we were both speakers on a Little Gidding pilgrimage. I wrote about that in this column (27 January 2023), and was surprised and delighted to find that my cherished memory of him had, in fact, been quoted and included in Blythe Spirit: the memory of a walk in which, as the quotations flowed between us, we seemed to be accompanied by John Clare on one side and George Herbert on the other.
Because he lived such a long and fruitful life, because he was so close to the very earth and air of Suffolk, because his story and the story of his whole generation compasses so many historic turning points, so many tragedies, and recoveries, so many losses and redresses, the story of Ronnie Blythe, which is so faithfully and deftly told in Blythe Spirit, turns out to be the story of England: the story of the century through which Ronnie lived, told not in the abstracts, and the dates and statistics, but in the flesh and blood, the words and works of one gifted man whose life was so local and particular that it still has the power to express something universal and permanent.
