Word from Wormingford- A Parish Year by Ronald Blythe was first published in 1997 with this beautiful edition featuring a title page painting by David Gentleman and illustrated throughout by Blythe’s great friend, John Nash published by Canterbury Press in 2007.
I am a keen reader of Blythe’s diaries, he wrote these entries for The Church Times from 1993 until 1996 which were all set in the heart of Constable and John Nash country, a landscape which had a profound effect on his writing.
These short essays are part personal diary and part nature note with a central theme of living and working within the church community to the rhythms of the seasons. As always, his sense of balance between these elements is remarkable, he manages to delight believer and atheist in equal measure, often with a gentle, sometimes hidden message but never a lecture or an insistence on Godly pursuit.
Whatever season he is writing about you find yourself yearning to be in it, he draws the reader into his gentle life of writing, observing and giving to others and perhaps more than anything else is the sense of community a small group of village church goers can offer. I have never read anyone who better describes old age and death better than he, from the loner to the sprightliest ninety year old he sees value in a long life lived regardless of its success or otherwise.
‘Every now and then it happens, the loner dies and the sociable are made to feel unsociable. Why, how, is it possible for a man on his own to depart on his own? And who was he, apart from being the quiet face at the bungalow window which stared past our waves? Half a dozen of us from the church stood proxy for his non-existent family and friends and falling earth wrote finis to yet one more solitary achievement, miracle even, of keeping oneself to oneself’
Blythe skips from saints to Thomas Hardy, from Richard Mabey to Benjamin Britten, the sound of the harvest to the hoot of an owl. His genius was in his ability to observe, digest and recall the most mundane acts of daily life and turn them into a yearning for a simpler, gentler way of life and for that I return to him whenever the pace of life throws me into a spin.
Further reading:
Categories: The Reading Room
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