The first book I picked up for the 1930 Club was Adrian Bell’s memoir Corduroy, the first in a trilogy all of which – I think – have now been reprinted in beautiful Slightly Foxed editions. That’s quite hard to track down now, but there are plenty of other editions kicking around – and I’d certainly recommend getting your hands on a copy, because it’s lovely.
The premise is that Bell didn’t really know what to do with his life when was 19 – which was in 1920. Between them, he and his father decided that he might become a farmer – and Corduroy is his account of getting some experience to this end. Before putting all his eggs in one basket, he had to find out how the farming malarkey went.
So off he went to Bradfield St George in Suffolk – known as Benfield St George in Corduroy – accepted by the Colville family. From here, he plays a slightly odd role in the social strata of the farm. He is clearly on the level of the farm owner and family, in terms of accommodation and society, but he is among the working men for the tasks.
The majority of the book is Bell being introduced to a task, doing it badly, and getting better. What makes Corduroy such an enjoyable book is the way he writes about the experience. He is never patronising about the labourers, and nor does he idolise them in with the eye of a Romantic poet. He recognises their expertise, and they recognise his eagerness to learn – not mocking him when he is useless at milking a cow or ploughing a straight furrow or being able to tell one pig from another. At least they don’t in Bell’s memories of his year as a farmhand – it’s worth remembering that their perspectives are, of course, given in Bell’s narrative and not their own.
As with his depictions of the workers, Bell has a great eye for the natural world. Again, it is observational rather than a paean. I enjoyed this vivid description of pigs at feeding time. Don’t say you don’t get variety from Stuck in a Book:
I wandered out again, and watched Jack feeding the pigs, helped him by carrying slopping pails of barley-meal, which gave my boots a less genteel appearance. At the first rattle of a pail the pigs set up a pathetic squealing, and, when one pen was temporarily lulled with a pailful, the laments of the others rose to a hysteria of anxiety at the sight of their brothers being fed before them. By the time we had brought the refilled buckets to the second pen, the first had finished theirs and were wailing for more. Thus the chorus went on, in strophe and anti-strophe, till all were filled and slept.
Fun, no?
I’ve realised what I want in people who write about villages. Either gossipy fun, like Beverley Nichols, or the sort of writing Bell does. People who respect the countryside and village life without romanticising it. And many things haven’t changed – like the sense of community. And many things have, of course. I’ve lived in three different villages all with working farms, but there is no longer any sense that everyone in the community is involved in the life of the farm. Even more than all the mechanisation of farming, I think that’s the thing that’s changed the most. Back in 1920, when Bell started farming and my great-grandad was a farm labourer, it was the whole world for almost everyone who lived nearby. The city was another world. As exemplified when Bell asks a farmhand what his brother does, and is told ‘nothing, just some writing’ – only to learn that he has an office job with the water board!
Corduroy looks at a period a decade before the book was published, so this isn’t an absolutely accurate reflection of 1930 – but I think it gives a good sense of the sort of semi-nostalgic writing that was coming out as the dizzy hope of the 20s started to turn to the nervous misgivings of the 30s… Was war already looming on the horizon? Perhaps not quite, but Bell writes with already a sense of a world that was disappearing.
Sometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it’s hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.
One of my favourite places in the world is Hay-on-Wye. Bibliophiles in the UK have probably been there, for it is a town of secondhand bookshops. Some are enormous, some are very niche, and the whole place is nestled in the beautiful Welsh/English border countryside. There’s that famous festival each year, but that doesn’t really hold a candle to the BOOKSHOPS.
