Autumn in the Suffolk countryside seen through the eyes of renowned writer Adrian Bell

“You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside.” If ever a voice captured the soul of rural Suffolk in the mid-20th century it was that of Adrian Bell.

His writing, spanning more than 50 years, contains some of the most evocative and beautifully-written descriptions of Suffolk farming life ever to appear in print.

The author and farmer wrote more than 20 books. But nowhere was his unique voice better heard than in the newspaper columns he wrote every week from 1950 until his death 44 years ago this week.

Now more of them can be read again with the publication this month of A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook, the final book in a series covering all four seasons chosen from over 1,500 pieces he wrote.

They have been selected by Richard Hawking, a long-time enthusiast who edits the Adrian Bell website for the writer’s 21st century devotees, and who has written his own book about him, At the Field’s Edge.

“He has a very poetic voice and in many ways the essays distil that more than other ways,” Richard says.

Adrian Bell, who called Suffolk home for 60 years, had a gift for noticing and pondering on the small things that others might overlook - an old gatepost, even an earwig.

The Autumn Notebook is full of the sights and sounds of his everyday life as summer ends and winter approaches, some now gone forever, others still very much there if we care to look.

In 1958 he wrote: “Every morning a gossamer snaps against my forehead as I go out into my garden. Every evening some spider thinks, ‘This door will never be opened again’ and promptly at nine a.m. his night’s work is ruined.”

The following year, on his way to harvest festival, he observes: “The churchyard was full of knapweed, clover, hogweed - a wildflower garden stuck about with headstones wearing gold medals of lichen. A hen was looking through the fence opposite, where the farmyard was.”

During the service he sees an earwig drop from a flower and watches it progress up the aisle - somehow escaping the tramp of passing feet - saying a prayer for its survival until, a tiny black speck, it disappears to safety under the altar hangings.

Ten years later he writes about the gate in a hedge laden with elderberries. “And then there is the gatepost. It is grey with age and lined like an old face. It is channelled with the tears of wet harvests, wizened with freezings and thawings of fifty winters. But it is still sound.”

Adrian Bell was born in 1901. He was brought up in London, but aged 19 and an aspiring poet, he fled the prospect of an office career for a farming apprenticeship in Suffolk. He did his apprenticeship in Hundon near Haverhill, and took on his first farm in Bradfield St George near Bury St Edmunds.

But the agricultural slump forced him to give up farming and by the late 1920s he was living with his parents who had by then bought a house in Sudbury.

While there he wrote his first books, the trilogy Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, novelised memoirs of his early farming experiences. They have been described as some of the most poetic yet down-to-earth accounts ever written of life in the English countryside.

But there was another side to Adrian Bell that those who knew him as a farmer and writer might not have suspected. In 1930 he set the first Times crossword, developing its distinctive cryptic style, and compiled nearly 5,000 of them, until shortly before his death 50 years later.

He married his wife Marjorie in 1931 and the couple set up home in the Stour Valley near Nayland, where famous artist John Nash was a friend and neighbour. They then moved to a farm near Beccles where their three children, including renowned former BBC journalist and independent MP Martin Bell, grew up.

In 1950 he began writing his Countryman’s Notebook for the Norwich-based Eastern Daily Press and faithfully submitted his column every week for 30 years.

“He did his last one in September 1980, the week before he died,” said Richard. “He hand wrote with a quill pen when he was living in Barsham, near Beccles. He wrote it on a Sunday, then either he or his son Martin would bike to the postbox, and it would go in the paper the following Saturday. Someone would have had to type it up.”

Even being out of the country didn’t interrupt the flow. “He also wrote A Countryman’s Notebook from Ontario when he was on holiday in Canada in the 1970. The final piece that appeared is one which Martin wrote about his funeral.”

In the introduction to the Autumn Notebook, which is illustrated with drawings by Beth Knight, Richard writes: “He finds as much joy in the sights of a harvest in his late 70s as he did in his early 50s, or when a farmer’s apprentice of 20.

“The sense of wonder that he retained throughout his life is why his writing, rather like painters and their more mature artworks, is not only undimmed but often more vivid.

“He does write so beautifully. It was during my research for At the Field’s Edge book I discovered there were these archives (in Norwich). Reading them I just felt it needed to be seen by a wider audience.

“What I realised was that so many had never been republished. There were 1.500 in all, and only five percent had been republished. There was a lovely archivist at the Eastern Daily Press when I first went just before Covid.

“Someone had cut out every article and stuck them into notebooks. That is the only full archive of his work. When I began researching At the Field’s Edge I went to visit Anthea Bell, Adrian’s daughter, and she kindly lent me some of his own original notebooks.”

Richard, an English teacher and head of year at the Royal Worcester Grammar School, discovered the work of Adrian Bell in a bookshop on a rainy November afternoon. “I was getting into rural literature and countryside writing and there was a little book called Men in the Fields. I read the opening page and was transfixed. That led to me reading the Trilogy.

“In 2013 I joined the Adrian Bell society and went to one of their meetings where Martin Bell was speaking. I proposed doing a website and spoke to Martin about it. He was very supportive of the idea. Through that I was contacted by a commissioning editor about writing a book. The society no longer actually exists, but there is still a website, now called the Adrian Bell website. I do a lot of talks and there is quite a lot of interest in him.”

He praised publishers Slightly Foxed who have also produced the series of Countryman’s Notebooks. The Winter Notebook sold out, It has now been reprinted, but only as part of a limited edition boxed set of all the books.

“I don’t have a favourite notebook, I have favourite pieces within each one,” he said. “In the summer book there is one which sounds quite trivial called The Red Ladder, where he and a friend when he was younger noticed a ladder standing up against a straw stook.

“They thought nothing of it at the time, but when they were much older they both said they remembered that. It was the last conversation they had. It was about friendship, growing old, and tradition.”

He added that more sympathetic farming practices, of the kind that would have been familiar to Adrian Bell, were now being supported by the government and policy makers, and were happening in East Anglia.

Adrian Bell died on 5 September 1980 and is buried with Marjorie in the churchyard at Barsham.

Richard, who recently visited the church during a visit to Sufolk, is speaking about At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside, at the Leiston book festival at Leiston Film Theatre on Saturday September 7.

For tickets go to leistonbookfestival.co.uk

To order a copy of A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook, or the quartet of all four, go to foxedquarterly.com