ADRIAN BELL 1901-1980 by Martin Bell
from Father & Son, from the Penguin Collectors' Society Press
Very little that happened to me was
ever planned. Most of it was accidental and even serendipitous. That certainly
goes for my short career as an author. Even while the Bosnian war was still
raging, in the summer of 1995, I completed a personal account of it, entitled
In Harm's Way. I remember writing the final chapter by candlelight in Sarajevo's
embattled Holiday Inn, as the snipers' bullets were cracking past the window.
There was no point in living through all this without attempting to make some
sense of it. The book was published in the autumn of that year by Hamish Hamilton,
under the guidance of its Editorial Director Kate Jones. Kate later became
my agent in the Tatton election campaign: but that's another story and the
subject of another book, An Accidental MP. The Tatton campaign was itself
a war zone, requiring a certain steadiness under fire.
Because Hamish Hamilton is one of
the imprints which rest under the Penguin's wings, In Harm's Way was duly
published a year later, with a couple of added chapters in the Penguin edition.
It actually did quite well, especially when I was pitch-forked into politics.
People bought it to find out who this odd fellow was who dared take on the
formidable Hamiltons and then to try to chart a course, for the term of a
single Parliament only, as an Independent MP.
My father's career as an author was much more distinguished. He
could write in a more arresting manner about the pond life in his back garden
than I could about the world's conflicts and commotions that I chronicled
for the BBC.
Adrian Bell was entirely one of a
kind. At the age of 20, then a rather Bohemian young man about Battersea,
he heard the call of the land as an almost religious vocation. His dream was
agricultural. He was apprenticed to Vic Savage, a yeoman farmer in Carlton
Colville near Bury St Edmunds, who taught him all he knew in the best agricultural
college of all, which is a working farm. Out of that experience, my father
wrote a book, Corduroy, which prospered greatly by word of mouth and became
a countryside classic. When he graduated to a small farm of his own he wrote
two more, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, to complete the trilogy. All three
books ran to many editions - the grandest of them an illustrated version with
perfectly matching pictures by Harry Becker. They are hoarded to this day,
and traded, by the many devotees of my father's work. There even exists an
Adrian Bell Society.
The most important edition of all, without doubt, was the Penguin.
It was published in 1940 in a small format and on paper of distinctly war-time
quality. A Penguin could fit into a soldier's pocket or his kit-bag, and often
did. It thus found a place wherever British forces served, by land, sea and
air, in the war zones of the Second World War. It was especially prized in
the prison camps.
I became fully aware of the effect he had only after his death.
At the bottom of a drawer we found a collection of the letters sent to him
by servicemen who had read his books in their bivouacs and tank turrets, and
drawn from them comfort and hope in their lives' hardest times. He provided
a life-line to another world, a world of peace and sanity, of enduring values
and country rhythms remote from the war's destruction.
In a now almost forgotten magazine, Everybody's, he wrote an open
letter to one of the members of this far-flung constituency, an RAF fighter
pilot. 'You wrote to me from Malta, from a Malta pounded by air from Sicily,
from North Africa, ringed by U-Boats, all but cut off. You wrote to me (heaven
knows how the letter got through) that when the war was finished, you and
your girl wanted to marry and have a little farm in England. You have a vision
of England. Wherever you are, it has been your consolation and hope. Keep
that vision, because it's true. It may be the key to your life. I am anxious
that you should know this; because if you follow your impulses and live your
farming life, with all its ups and downs, at the end of it you will sit back
and recall that first vision of it that you had in the desert or the jungle.
And you will know then that all in all it was a true vision.'
My father's vision was shared and communicated through that little
paperback edition. Mr Penguin has many achievements to his credit, but in
my view his wartime work was the most valuable of all. I would even call it
heroic. It sustained the faith and fortitude of men who had lost touch with
friends and family, and the country for which they were fighting. When it
was all over and the survivors returned, it is my view that Penguin should
have been decorated - with the DPM (Distinguished Publications Medal) or some
such. He had surely earned it.
Corduroy has just been republished in a large print version. A
production company has acquired the rights to it, with a view to turning it
into a TV series - a sort of agricultural Ballykissangel. If the project comes
to fruition, I would like to see someone like Colin Firth in the lead role,
as the poet-turned-farmer. But the real stars of the show will be the sheaves
and stacks, and the steam-powered threshing machines of the 1920s - great
engines which my father saw as poetry in motion.
Nothing matters to me more - certainly not my short spell in politics
- than the present revival of interest in his writing. He has as many admirers
today as in his lifetime. Much credit must go to that Penguin edition. Mr
Penguin also has reason to be grateful.
Taken from Father & Son, published by the Penguin Collector's Society.
