With the sad news of Ronald Blythe’s death comes an interesting question. What happens to Wormingford’s Bottengoms Farm? Blythes estate has been settled up and I am now the owner of some of Christine Nash’s works. For many years, Blythe was a lay reader for his local parish, often performing the de facto job of vicar without a stipend. Collins feels Blythe was slightly taken advantage of by the Church of England, despite the Church Times giving him the weekly column that arguably delivered his best work. Mabey, an atheist, admits he has never discussed with Blythe his “quite unselfconscious, unquestioning, sometimes irreverent, and just occasionally pagan-tinged Christian faith”. Bottengoms is such a special place and you write about it in many of your books. Can you tell us how it got its name? DR BLYTHE was born in the Suffolk village of Acton, in 1922, and grew up in the south of the county. “I was a very quiet sort of boy, with a bike,” he says. He was also “a watcher and listener”, and “a terrific reader”. This combination of mobility and writerly qualities meant that he observed lovingly the details of village life, the minutiae of seasonal change, and the “glory and bitter­ness” of hands-on, horse-drawn agricultural toil, at a time of seismic change. You seem very contented with your life and, in Out of the Valley, you say: “To be absorbed in what one has to do, that’s the secret.” Do you have any advice on how to live a happy life?

The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940 (Hamish Hamilton, 1963) - republished by The Folio Society, 2015Looking around at the uses we have put it to, you would think there would not be a tree standing – but we remain heavily wooded.

One of your most well-loved books is Akenfield. Did you think the stories were important to record for the nation or did you write them purely out of interest in your own community? He was almost as reticent about his faith, but his writing was deeply suffused in his Christian beliefs and his knowledge of the scriptures. He was a lay reader – deputising for vicars across several parishes – and became a lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, but turned down the chance to become a priest.His willingness to help and his readiness to learn, combined with his youth (he was considerably younger than most of the already established creative coterie in this corner of East Anglia), were seized upon with alacrity. “They all made me do lots of jobs. I’d dig the garden, clear the ponds, run errands. . . There were hundreds of things.” He was every inch the Suffolk man. What is more, whether it is Easton or Glemham or Charsfield or Wormingford, each of these villages where he lived claim him as their own in the proud recollections from his passing. Blythe turned down a film offer from the BBC but eventually accepted a pitch from the theatre director Peter Hall, a fellow Suffolk man. Blythe wrote a new synopsis inspired by the unfilmable book, and Hall asked ordinary rural people to improvise scenes with no script. Blythe oversaw every day of filming and played an apt cameo as a vicar. Nearly 15 million people watched Akenfield when it was broadcast on London Weekend Television in early 1975. And yet Blythe does represent a way of life that has all but disappeared and Williams detects a gentle moral in his writing. “He’s certainly saying to us, ‘This may be a way of life that’s passing, and it’s not perfect, but you’re going to be much worse off if you’re not ready to learn from it, so let me help you learn from it.’ He’s saying, ‘Society is moving on – don’t forget this.”