Happy Birthday Young Tom
My favourite film is a grand old 40 this year, Peter Hall’s 1974 free form adaptation of Suffolk born Ronald Blythe’s portrait of the vanishing English village culture, Akenfield (1969).
It is a masterpiece of rural social commentary, an improvised folkscape of a county long gone from the turn of the century to the beginning of the second agricultural revolution. Akenfield was Blythe’s fictional dovetail of real life Charsfield, the surrounding Suffolk villages and their inhabitants – the school master, blacksmith, labourer, nurse and saddler, Blythe even makes a cameo as the vicar – a community scarred by the wars and nervous of what power the future field machines might hold over the land.
Hall’s film uses Blythe’s book as an abstract springboard for improvised screen play and collected its cast from the real world villagers with no formal script or training, just a basic outline sketch with no colour wash. The result is a work of magic with a gritty realism that would have been lost with professional planning and polishing.
Akenfield is not a comfortable bucolic watch (or listen, thanks to Michael Tippetts hauntological soundtrack), you feel like an intruder at times, spying in on an unwinding world of farmhand fear and a doomed longing for escape outside of the clutches of the lord of the land. It was shot over a year and the wheel of the seasons turns through the film like a folk prog concept album, gatefold sleeve in tow. It’s a complex layered near silent piece, mother, maiden crone, master, son and servant with generations of conflicting ancestral attitudes and aspirations clashing and colliding.
The story revolves around young Tom, played by local farm lad Garrow Shand, living in isolation with his mother (none other than Peggy Cole). Tom follows in his (recently buried) Grandfather ‘Old Toms’ shoes and longs for escape from the trap of the land. This is a tale of never ending return, haunting memories of the two wars and the groundhog day grip of the village and the masters estate. Newmarket has never seemd so far away. A tied cottage is for life.
Akenfield is an unusual mix of the beautiful and the primitive and loves the detail of the big screen, a dark meditation and a warning for those that want to take the risk of moving on. It’s the country boy, tip your cap and keep walking, no questions.
There’s also a great bookend to the story with Craig Taylor’s ‘Return to Akenfield’, published in 2006 with an updated portrait of Suffolks good old boys. It’s fascinating to see just how much (and how little) some things have changed. Mrs Fortés old Grandfather even gets a mention, rest his soul.
If you like a wander, you can walk the fields and furrows of Akenfield yourself.
Akenfield made it to the small screen in 75 and was watched by an audience of 14 million. If you’re interested in disappearing village life and the evolution of folk attitudes try and hunt down a copy on DVD, you’ll not regret it.
Posted by: Forte