Food rationing, blackouts and the threat of invasion became part of everyday life in Britain during the Second World War. Yet despite the wartime austerity and growing mood of unease, Adrian Bell and his wife went about their business in the Suffolk farming community where they lived, happily absorbed in the daily tasks of rearing their three children and struggling against the more ancient enemies of weather and unyielding clay.
Theirs was a world of modest self-sufficiency, of the home-grown and the home-made. It was a way of life shaped by the seasonal rhythms of planting, cutting hay, apple picking, cider-making, the harvest festival, and the midwinter lifting of sugar beet. Apple Acre is an intimate portrait of a hamlet content to draw its strength from the land.