My dad’s ode to autumn

My father, Adrian Bell (1901-80), was a bohemian and man about town in London in 1920.

His first ambition was to become a poet in the style of Keats or Swinburne. In the 1930s, he actually had two slim volumes of poetry published, as a gesture of thanks from the publisher of his first and bestselling autobiographical novel, Corduroy (1930), which was about farming in Suffolk before it became mechanised and industrialised.

However, needing to earn a living, and wishing to escape the tyranny of an office life in London, he became an apprentice to Vic Savage, a yeoman farmer in Hundon near Haverhill, and there he lived the experiences that stayed with him through the rest of his life. He went on to own two small, unviable farms, both of less than 100 acres, one in Stradishall in west Suffolk and the