The Blue Field

Brensham Trilogy #3

by John Moore

Old friends and new faces join the scholars, rogues and countrymen of Brensham with its crooked village street and crooked church spire.

Among its rare individuals who share an obstinacy for making life a romantic and
hilarious adventure are those lively landgirls, The Frolick Virgins, Dai, the hymn-singing postman, and William Hart who claimed to be descended from William Shakespeare and loved Pheemy, the young gypsy, not wisely but too well.

Genres: Nonfiction, British Literature

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Author of the Brensham Trilogy.

John Moore (1907-1967) was a British author and pioneer conservationist. He was born in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire in 1907 and died in Bristol in 1967. His most famous work was Portrait of Elmbury, published in 1945, about life in Tewkesbury in the early 20th century. This work, along with Brensham Village and The Blue Field, formed part of the 'Brensham Trilogy'. Most of his books had a rural setting and long before conservation came to mainstream media attention he wrote about the effect of technological advances on the countryside and rural life.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This final volume in John Moore’s Brensham trilogy, his affectionate but clear-eyed series of books about continuity and change in rural Gloucestershire in the Thirties and Forties, narrows the focus to the life of one (admittedly larger than life) character. Where the first book, Portrait of Elmbury, dealt with life and death in the local market town in which Moore grew up (a thinly disguised Tewkesbury) and the second with life in an amalgam of several local villages, The Blue Field tells the story of William Hart, a small farmer with a huge appetite for life who falls foul of the necessary bureaucracy of wartime agricultural planning. It covers some of the same ground explored in more detail in Moore’s 1965 novel, The Waters Under the Earth, specifically, how much scope for individualism there can be in a planned economy, something that the sensitively portrayed Labour MP, elected in the 1945 Labour landslide election victory, and the first non-Tory ever to represent this classic shire seat, also wrestles with. This is a warm-hearted, book, and Moore writes with a fine sense of the comedy of everyday life and human relationships. It’s the sort of book that at time of publication (1948) would probably have been described as ‘middlebrow’ but there are big, serious themes at play here too.

[Mary Warnement · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd questioned when Slightly Foxed reprinted Moore's whole trilogy, more because I was disappointed not to see the later works of other--women--authors than that I didn't think this worth it. Moore's book was jsut the well-written reverie I needed to take me to another place, another time as well, a small village in the Midlands, 1948. Very different from Bryson, but a similarly painted picture. Humorous and indulgent.

17 "My people have poetry in their hearts and dreams in their heads--and, for much of the time, what feels like half the West Midlands on their boots."
21 "No indeed, if you looked at Brensham (Kemerton) in wintertime you wouldn't suspect us of poetry, you wouldn't credit us with dreams."
36 No knowledge of history but acceptance of it