Story of the Seasons: The Countryman’s Notebooks of Adrian Bell

The literary journey of Adrian Bell, one of Britain’s greatest farmer-writers, begins with the opening lines of his first and most celebrated book, Corduroy, published in 1930:

I was upon the fringe of Suffolk, a county rich in agricultural detail missed by my untutored eye. It was but scenery to me: nor had I an inkling of what it might become. Farming, to my mind, was as yet the townsman’s glib catalogue of creatures and a symbol of escape. The friendliness of the scene before me lay beneath ardours of which I knew nothing. I was flying from the threat of office life. I was nineteen years old, and the year was 1920.

Bell was born in London in 1901 into a middle-class family and destined for a career in the city. However, after leaving Uppingham School (one of the most prestigious fee-paying schools in Britian)——which he hated——he became an apprentice farmer instead, moving to West Suffolk in England in 1920. He never left: he farmed, lived amongst and wrote about Suffolk’s rural communities for the next 60 years, until his death in 1980. In addition to writing 25 books, he compiled anthologies, reviewed for the Time Literary Supplement, wrote poetry, contributed articles to various publications and, quite wonderfully, compiled the first ever crossword to appear in Britain—in the Times in 1930—and went to compile over 4500 more of them! He also wrote A Countryman’s Notebook every week for over thirty years.

The practical experience as a farmer’s apprentice as portrayed in Corduroy would have a profound impact on his writing; he believed that writing should not be a purely imaginative exercise but should be grounded in physical experience. He felt that to produce writing of genuine value, its roots should be in the land he was now working. Working closely with farmers, labourers, rural craftsman and women—people who had had very different experiences to his—opened his eyes to the possibility of leading a different life: a life that appeared to value the natural world and community in a way he had not seen before. This deep connection between people and the land around them was something he wanted for himself.

But due to increasing food imports and the British agricultural depression that was forcing down prices, farming in the 1920s and 30s was becoming increasingly challenging, and Bell could no longer support himself: he was forced to give up his farm in 1928 and returned home to his parents. This provided the impetus for him to write about the life he had unwillingly left behind. In fact, he was about to witness, firsthand, an agricultural revolution. Over the next fifty years, this led him to produce a body of finely crafted work—with his A Countryman’s Notebook Essays at the heart of it—that observes and documents the increasingly capitalisation of the countryside in the move towards industrial agriculture: a revolution that pushed aside traditional ways of farming forever, leading to a breaking apart of rural culture and communities. As a result, he is our British eyewitness and our recorder, and reading his work helps to shape our understanding of the scope and impact of the many changes on the soil, the land, the produce, the animals, and, of course, the people.

A Countryman’s Notebook was a weekly column which ran from 1950 to 1980 in Suffolk and Norfolk’s (two eastern English counties) long-serving paper, The Eastern Daily Press. These essays, almost 1,600 of them, represent by far the most significant output of his writing in the second half of his life. Throughout them, he develops his argument that a more sympathetic and sustainable relationship between farming and the countryside can be—and should be—achieved.

It’s surprising, therefore, that only a fraction—less than 8%—had been republished since they first appeared. This means over fourteen hundred essays—almost one-and-a-half-million words, or fifteen books-worth—had never been republished until A Countryman’s Winter Notebook was issued by Slightly Foxed in 2021. And it’s in the Notebook essays that, in my view, can be found the finest of Bell’s writing. Like the rural craftsmen and women he worked with and so admired, and who knew intimately how to manipulate their material, he achieved this in his own work, distilling his experiences of rural life into one thousand pitch-perfect words.

The inspiration for them were the daily dairies Bell kept for much of his life, and they provide a fascinating insight to his writing process, revealing a minute observation of detail, not just of his natural surroundings, but also of his relationships with others. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a farmer, these entries often start with a short observation of the weather before moving on to detail the day’s events. These manuscript notebooks, like an artist’s field sketches, provided the raw material for the essays that followed. When asked about the process of writing the essays, Bell said: ‘I try not to be too facetious or avuncular, and I try to put very little of myself in it. What I try to do is to show a unique moment which will never come again. It is like putting a framework around a moment of life, just as the French Impressionists did.’ In doing so, he connects the rhythms of his life with the people and the land around him, providing unique, weekly snapshots of the massive environmental, social and cultural changes rural Britain underwent in the decades after the Second World War. They make a valuable contribution to our nation’s rural history, as well as a powerful narrative about English individuality.

As he has done in his earlier work, Bell questions the negative impact that modern farming methods were having. He acknowledges that technical progress and economic growth can lead to positive changes in people’s standard of living, but he was concerned with what was being lost in the process of an increasing commodification of the countryside, driven largely by those in business who had a financial but not an environmental, cultural, or emotional investment in it. He was seeing the marginalization of small farmers by the growing influence of processors and supermarkets who, through competitive tendering and lengthening supply chains, were pushing down the price offered for their produce. In this, any real chance of social or environmental sustainability—for the consumer, the farmer or the land itself—is severely compromised. It is this division that he laments when he writes:

At the start of the last war, there were almost half a million farms in Britain. 
The majority were small, mixed units of less than 50 acres. At the same time, 
over a million workers were employed on British farms. Yet it cost the taxpayers
nothing. If politicians had truly understood agriculture they would have recognised 
that the mixed-farm structure ias a national treasure to be nurtured and prized.

Bell questions the economic ideology that places the production of food below that of other material goods: an ideology which has led to the growing disconnect during the second half of the twentieth century between the farmer and the consumer. In The Green Bond, one of only two collections of his Countryman Notebooks essays that were published in his lifetime, he recounts delivering a speech at the opening of a rural museum of old farm tools: ‘Look at all these handles. Do you see how thin they are worn, how shiny they are? Think of all those men and women who turned all these handles, for hours and days and years, that we might stand here, fed and clothed.’ He wants the assembled crowd to appreciate the value of what was being lost in the rush to industrial agriculture. The close relationship with the land—and with those who worked the land for our benefit—is symbolized in the worn handles of these now redundant tools. The old order of farming that had existed and supported the population for generations was being consigned to history and its remains put on show for posterity.

Therefore, his Countryman’s Notebook tells us the story of the huge changes he witnessed: not only a revolution in farming, but also the radical transformation of the structure and culture of rural communities that had agriculture at their heart. And although he may be critical of these developments, he also offers hope for the future by suggesting that we cannot, ultimately, separate ourselves from that which sustains us—a view illustrated in his essay ‘The Homestead,’ published in 1955 and inspired by a walk in the Suffolk countryside in those quiet days between Christmas and New Year:

The set of the buildings and stacks in the view is an emblem of the life that has  
gone on there for centuries, and goes on today. I know the evenings with firelight, 
and the early mornings with wavering candlelight and cold. But the groping work 
before cockcrow was warmth-engendering. There is vegetable life and much animal 
life, and embedded among them is human life, with its beliefs and pieties and loves 
and relationships that develop between the tending of the horses and the cattle 
and the corn; the latter so pressing and important it is almost as though the human 
relationships were a by-product of the guardianship of the Earth. 

Bell did not seek a ‘philosophy of living’ when he left London for Suffolk, but it’s clear that many years working as a farmer had led him to one. His life in the East Anglian countryside showed him that farmers have a duty to the land they work; a duty that should be as highly regarded by society as any other. Rather than being reduced to people that run a ‘factory with the roof off,’ he believed that farmers should instead be flag-bearers who remind us of the environment needed to produce the food we eat:

I now have care of this soil which former men have cherished. I feel such compulsion 
to it: it is the most important thing in life to me, far beyond the level of a paying 
proposition; because, I think, it is the greatest parable of ultimate truth.

He understood that we have a moral and practical duty to the six inches of topsoil upon which all life depends. If we do not value and develop an agriculture that recognises this duty, then we will destroy that on which we all rely. Therefore, the relationship between farming and the natural world lies at the heart of all his work, from the opening pages of Corduroy to his final Eastern Daily Press article. Throughout, he argues that if we farm for the long-term benefit of the land, we will also be for farming for our own long-term benefit: the two aims should be as one. Bell argued that to achieve a more sustainable use of modern farming techniques, a closer examination of our own relationship with the technology associated with it was needed. In this view, he sought a balance between traditional methods and those proposed by government and business as being ‘progressive.’ Throughout his work he offers hope that tradition and progress can co-exist, that harmony between old and new methods of farming can be achieved for the benefit of the land and its people.

This final extract illustrates why, in my view, Adrian Bell is one of Britain’s most significant writers of the land. It is from ‘October Sunlight,’ one of the essays from A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook—the final volume of his seasonal quartet which was published by Slightly Foxed at the end of 2024. Written over thirty years after his first day on a farm, Bell writes:

My education started when I left school, on just such an October day as this, 
to the rattle of a tumbril and a great red sun setting on my first day on a farm. 
The figure of a man sitting lodged on the front of this cart passes along the road, 
his last load deposited. Every day the number of small black mounds of manure 
in the next field increases. When I pause and look at them, I see in them not only 
the labour of the man’s day, but also the forking of new straw, the trampling of 
it by hooves, the heaping, then the carting. So many days, so many flexes of muscle; 
there is time between the forking out of the straw and the forking out of the 
manure for so many thoughts to cross the mind, for children to be born or old 
friends to die. Yet the work of this simple compact with the earth goes steadily on. 

Like the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, Adrian Bell’s desire for a return to a more sympathetic agriculture is not born out of nostalgia. Rather it’s a desire for society to value those that produce as well as those that consume. It’s a desire to re-establish a sense of place and a sense of harmony with our environment, and a shared purpose with each other. There is a practical philosophy throughout thirty years of his A Countryman Notebook—one that, if we pay attention to, can help us recover a vital vision for our culture and our countryside.

Image via: Rawpixel