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A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook
This final Autumn selection from Adrian Bell’s weekly essays, written between 1950 and 1980 for his local newspaper the Eastern Daily Press, completes our seasonal quartet. ‘You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside,’ Bell writes, and it’s that steady, persistent, unchanging heartbeat that we can hear in these beautifully observed little pieces.
In the last decades of Bell’s life, when he produced his weekly Notebook, he recorded with a farmer’s keen eye the many changes that were taking place around him, but his writing, though poetic, is not nostalgic or sentimental. He is not simply lamenting what has disappeared from rural life but considering what can be learnt from the process. He saw that farming was gradually being reduced to running a ‘factory with the roof off’ and wrote passionately of the need to farm for the long-term benefit of the land – a call that seems even more pressing today.
‘I now have care of this soil which former men have cherished,’ he wrote. ‘I feel such a compulsion to it: it is the most important thing in life to me.’ These little essays which so vividly evoke the arrival of autumn, are both a breath of fresh Suffolk air, and a call to look around us at the countryside and do things differently.
In the last decades of Bell’s life, when he produced his weekly Notebook, he recorded with a farmer’s keen eye the many changes that were taking place around him, but his writing, though poetic, is not nostalgic or sentimental. He is not simply lamenting what has disappeared from rural life but considering what can be learnt from the process. He saw that farming was gradually being reduced to running a ‘factory with the roof off’ and wrote passionately of the need to farm for the long-term benefit of the land – a call that seems even more pressing today.
‘I now have care of this soil which former men have cherished,’ he wrote. ‘I feel such a compulsion to it: it is the most important thing in life to me.’ These little essays which so vividly evoke the arrival of autumn, are both a breath of fresh Suffolk air, and a call to look around us at the countryside and do things differently.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published September 15, 2024
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About the author
Adrian Bell
59 books13 followersAdrian Bell is one of the best-known of modern writers dealing with the countryside. His books are noted for their close observations of country life.
The son of a newspaper editor, Bell was born in London and educated at Uppingham School in Rutland. At the age of 19 he ventured into the countryside in Hundon, Suffolk, to learn about agriculture, and he farmed in various locations over the next sixty years, including the rebuilding of a near-derelict 89-acre smallholding at Redisham.
The son of a newspaper editor, Bell was born in London and educated at Uppingham School in Rutland. At the age of 19 he ventured into the countryside in Hundon, Suffolk, to learn about agriculture, and he farmed in various locations over the next sixty years, including the rebuilding of a near-derelict 89-acre smallholding at Redisham.
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February 18, 2025
Just adding my review from last October's read, as the book was not added to Goodreads until today (February)
A wonderful conclusion (and my favorite season as well) to an outstanding four-volume collection of Bell's essays by Slightly Foxed and Richard Hawking. As with the others, it is both a treasure for the eye and the hand, as well as to read and savour. The harvest season may begin with the rigours of work, but by its end there are moments conducive to reflection and remembrance as the daylight shortens, which produce Bell's most enjoyable, and poignant, thoughts.
A wonderful conclusion (and my favorite season as well) to an outstanding four-volume collection of Bell's essays by Slightly Foxed and Richard Hawking. As with the others, it is both a treasure for the eye and the hand, as well as to read and savour. The harvest season may begin with the rigours of work, but by its end there are moments conducive to reflection and remembrance as the daylight shortens, which produce Bell's most enjoyable, and poignant, thoughts.
Displaying 1 of 1 review