I hear blessed echoes from classic countryside chronicles at this time of growing peril for our precious East Anglian rural heritage.

Three favourite volumes in particular provide constantly uplifting antidotes in the face of reckless development, intensive farming, the mass tourism bandwagon, jackbooting pylons and other blatant symptoms of cruel disregard for nature and a rich green-coated legacy.

Adrian Bell’s captivating Men And The Fields, first published in 1939; Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay by oral history pioneer George Ewart Evans (1956) and Ronald Blythe’s widely- celebrated parish portrait of Akenfield )1969) crystallise the charms, challenges  and changes in local country life even while mechanisation began altering it forever.

They wrote many other captivating books between them looking, listening, learning and recording village communities with all their harsh poverty and struggle  as well as rich knowledge and homegrown culture.

These unvarnished pictures  of characters and callings from blacksmith to saddler, school teacher to shepherd,  stand out proudly as beacons of our history and literature

It was good to see and hear a heartwarming tribute to Ronald Blythe recently on BBC Television’s Countryfile. He died in January shortly after his 100th birthday and a prolific career steeped in passion for the countryside with peasant poet John Clare his literary lamplighter.

Akenfield opened the gate to widespread fame, his cavalcade of village personalities and occupations turning into a film by National Theatre director Peter Hall in 1974 with authentic Suffolk voices.

Blythe’s evangelical fervour  for the rural resistance movement remains vibrantly relevant as in the introduction to his most influential volume:

“The townsman envies the villager his certainties and, in Britain, has always regarded urban life as just a temporary necessity. One day he will find a cottage on the green and ‘real values.’

"To accommodate the almost religious intensity of regard for rural life in this country, and to placate the sense of guilt so many people feel about not living on a village pattern, post-war new towns have attempted to incorporate both city and village with, on the whole, disheartening results.

“A number of such towns are spreading into East Anglia, arriving suddenly on the loamy flats where there never was habitation before, and claiming they can offer best of both worlds. Trees are landscaped into the concrete. There are precincts, ways, conurbations, complexes … enlightened civic nouns. There are open spaces, air and every amenity. Yet the inhabitants, many of whom are descendants of the great village exodus of the 19th century, often look bewildered.”

Salient home truths from over half-a-century ago well worth pondering anew.

It’s a delight to welcome fresh batches of intriguing voices and memories to this local social history ledger after a 30-year labour of love called And I Looked Back from Gillian Campbell.

She patiently interviewed and recorded folk from varied walks of life  in Beccles, Waveney Valley villages and some from over the border in Norfolk.

A former pupil of Sir John Leman School, she has a degree in sociology and anthropology and spent time as a social worker in London before returning to Beccles and taking over the Skippings family drapery business when her father retired. It was here that she came to know some of the characters on parade in her welcome first volume

It is adorned by drawings from John Constable Reeve, a self-taught artist who spent most of his life farming at Mettingham but still found scope to enhance his artistic reputation for East Anglian landscapes and Second World War aircraft. He continued painting until his death aged 90 in 2020.

Gillian’s story-loaded cast includes a boy who went ploughing with a horse at the age of eight, another lad off to sea at 16 in a steam drifter and a woman who had her children in the workhouse, A sharp spotlight turns on periods blighted by poverty and war and there’s no hiding sombre experiences at home or away.

The oldest person featured is May, born in 1891, who lived into her 11th decade from a time of horse-drawn transport to the age of  supersonic flight. The others were born in the early 1900s and open up an era when many had no choice but to leave school as early as 13 to find work as soon as possible.

“It’s important to capture these memories before they’re forgotten as people invite us into their homes and onto their farms. They worked hard but nevertheless were more contented than many seem  today” says Gillian.

“We hear about their lives in their own words. They make us laugh and sometimes weep. They are ordinary people – but we learn there are no such things as ordinary lives.”

And I Looked Back is published by Matador at £12.99 and available from Beccles, Halesworth and Southwold bookshops as well as Beccles Museum and Jarrold  store book department in Norwich.

It’s a worthy companion to stand alongside the golden sheaves of memories harvested by treasured triumvirate Adrian Bell, George Ewart Evans and Ronald Blythe.