Can giving voice to the horrors of the past re-traumatise?

It is 50 years since Ronald Blythe published Akenfield, his melancholy portrait of a Suffolk village on the cusp of dramatic change. Akenfield was actually a composite of two real villages, Charsfield and Debach, and Blythe’s oral history was a patchwork created from about 50 conversations — with figures including a pig-farming colonel, the over-stretched blacksmith and a rural dean who reported residents being ‘blunted and crushed by toil’. It was an unsparing vision of rural poverty, yet also a homage to disappearing ways of life and the virtues of small communities.

Last Saturday’s Akenfield Now, on Radio 4, followed local sixth-former Anna Davies as she surveyed the landscape afresh. The highlight of this richly textured, hour-long documentary (produced by Ned Carter Miles) was her conversation with Blythe himself, now 96. Blythe could remember tootling around on his bike, collecting snippets of the poetry of privation — which reviewers were quick to claim he’d invented. ‘A lot has been lost,’ he told Davies with priestly confidentiality. Like what? ‘Beauties, wonders and things,’ he said, politely tentative. But his powers of recall were still strong, and he took us back to an age when a tenant could be turfed out of a tied house simply for being ‘rude’, and a housewife was expected to collect 24 bottles of stones from the fields every day.

Anna Davies commented poignantly on the ghostliness of Charsfield’s streets. Half a century ago few residents worked far away, and scarcely any of them had cars, but now Charsfield is post-agricultural, a dormitory for commuters seduced by images of bucolic calm. ‘The nearest we get to working on the land is mowing the lawn,’ said one. A sparky academic made it clear that the community is now less class-bound — and lo, he pronounced the painful word ‘stratification’ as if it had only three syllables.