Ronnie Balls, 67
Churchyard caretaker

I started working when I left school at 15. I would lead horses, muck pigs out, drive tractors, anything like that. We all mucked in with the men, doing things such as topping the sugar beet. There weren't the clippers like there are now. They used to do it all by hand. We'd be topping the beet one day and if you cut your finger, you wouldn't know you had done it. The beet had ice all over it that froze your hand, and if you cut your finger you wouldn't know until you stopped for food and saw your finger all covered with blood. Now they use the machines. That's all modernised. There's one skilled man on a farm doing everything now, ploughing and combining with a tractor.

When I first went on there, there used to be about nine to 10 men. We'd all sit together when we ate. Sometimes we'd come home if we lived near, but sometimes we'd just take our food with us. The old men used to suck their old clay pipes. "Carry on," they'd say, "carry on." I learned a lot from those men. We'd come home for our real dinner and then come home again at five. You'd finish for the day and you'd have to be ready the next morning at seven o'clock.

It took a long time for me to learn to harness a horse, but I could do that. I had a favourite horse. Valley, I used to call it, a mare, about 20 years old, lovely old mare, you could do anything with it. When I used to go get it off the meadow I would lead it back to the gate by the hair. It never stamped its feet, never had a temper. It stood there, looking just beautiful.

Jonathan Pirkis, 59
Farmer

The great difference between Akenfield a generation ago and now is that even on a small farm then you had three or four men; now there's only one. I can give him jobs like painting fuel tanks, but he's not going to want to be here in the winter with very little to do when it's all a bit cold. You have to keep them interested. It would be great if we had something like turkeys or Christmas trees or some other small crop, but there's enough people doing that as it is. I've thought of things for the winter months but nothing new. On a small scale, I had visions of growing really hot peppers, but there just isn't the market for them. People like the conventional peppers; they don't really go for the hot. Even our taste is a little bit staid in Suffolk.

Malcolm Peck, 57
Orchard foreman

There used to be 140 acres of apples and pears. Now I reckon we've got about 25 acres of them. All our Bramleys go for what we call peeling. They're peeled and put into Mr Kipling pies and things like that. All the apples the supermarkets want now are Coxes and Bramleys. We used to have Worcesters and they were lovely and sweet, a real tasting apple. [They were] a lot redder than Coxes or Bramleys, [they were] red all round. We used to have George Caves, Scarlet Pimpernels, Laxton's, but we haven't got them any more. The supermarkets don't sell them small and they don't sell them big. The apples have to be a perfect size and they have to be a perfect colour too.

Years ago, they used to pick everything. The orchard was picked clean, and they used to pick the ones up off the floor - those were used for cider. But no one wants them now.

I think in years to come the English apple will be gone. So far this year we've cut down five acres of them, and we're cutting another eight down, so we'll have cut down [more than] 10 again this year. We get rid of the orchard tree by tree. I burn the trees at home as well. That's what's on the fire right now. We get two warms out of it, you see: we get a nice warm as we're cutting it down and we get a warm as it burns.

Bernard Catchpole, 74
Former orchard worker

There used to be social evenings in villages like Akenfield. Now the most people get together is when we have the flower show, which has kept on. It must have been going [for] well over 50 years now. There used to always be the church fete, a big occasion in June. Well, now they haven't got a vicar in the village. The lady vicar they've got now has to see over five different churches and there hasn't been a fete for four, five years now. We used to have the old Suffolk horses. We used to have herds of cows, pigs. They're all gone now. On the way to Akenfield now there's a pig farm there, but they're all shut up in the buildings. You can go right by in the car and nobody would even know it's a pig farm there.

And the way people look has changed. Workers' hands have changed no end. The old boys - we used to call them that when we went on the farm - their hands were big rough, hoary hands, horny hands. I mean, my hands are worker's hands. I even lost a finger when I was working on the soil bench at the back of a combine. Their hands now are completely different.

Machinery has advanced tremendously well. I said they'd never get a machine to do the blackcurrants. They were so soft, they'd squash when we used to pick 'em. Now they've got a machine that do it better than the women. I was proved wrong after all my years' experience on the farm. The machines are doing a better job than what the hand-pickers do.

Arthur Peck, 90
Former orchard foreman

I was born in 1915 at Hoo. We moved to Akenfield when I was three years old. My father used to work on the farm. I was only six when my father died, and I can't honestly say how he died, but they say it was bronchitis. When I was eight, the farmer's wife said, "If you'd like to come down and work on a Saturday morning, you can have a little job getting the sticks and wood in," so I used to walk down there nearly two mile and get the sticks in. Somebody tried to persuade my mother to put us into a Dr Barnardo's home, but my mother said no. While she could scrape anything together she wouldn't want to part with her children. When I left school I just done farmwork. I did what jobs needed to be done. I was on a fruit farm doing apple picking. Otherwise I used to work with the horses. We'd got seven horses on our farm, three horsemen. Sometimes two of the horsemen would do the drilling and us youngsters would do the harrowing with a pair of horses. I'd walk miles harrowing the land. My feet used to get so sore.

Keith Gipp, 57
Retiree

I was born in London, in Wandsworth. I met my wife, Jill, 31½ years ago and we settled in Surrey. I met Jill in a bank in Surbiton, a Barclays. I went in to install a telephone and I made it take five hours. I said to the senior technician, "I've seen this girl - give me more time."

We moved here because we'd had enough of the rat race. We didn't like the graffiti, the manners of the kids. It used to be lovely. But the traffic got worse and the whole idea was rush, rush, rush.

When we moved up here we had criteria: we wanted to have access to a main town but we wanted to be rural. This place was well within our price range. When we moved in, the village newsletter said, "We wish to welcome Keith and Jill to the village." You wouldn't get a hello in Surrey.

I enjoy the country. It smells different. We keep the windows open at night. There were one or two stars we used to see in Surrey; we see them all here. There are those who move out here and say, "Oh, we need street lights." Not us. We try to blend in. Certain people are more afraid of townies like us coming here and changing them into townies. No, no, we're the opposite. We want to be like the country people.

Patrick Bishopp, 32
Entrepreneur

However lovely Suffolk is, the biggest flaw about Suffolk is jobs. There's just hardly any well-paid jobs in Suffolk. It's at the end of the road. You only come to Suffolk because you're going there. I was really struggling. I joined lots of recruitment companies. Not one phone call.

We did it the wrong way round. We should have found a career before moving instead of just moving and thinking, "Right, we're here now, what next?"

We want to be part of the village but there's so much life outside the village now. And there's no shop here, and there's no post office. The village hasn't got that central meeting point that other villages have. It's also in prime commuting territory. I don't see the point of living in a place like this and never seeing it.

So I started thinking, "What do I really want to do? What's my passion?" It's food. I'm a real foodie, and I came across the idea that it's really hard to source local produce. What I'm offering is really good local food: come to me and, instead of having to drive to all these places to pick it up, I'll come to you.

I don't have a van yet. I will. The worst outcome is that no one orders from it. But I'm going to stick with it. Even if it means doing night shifts at Tesco's to make it work.

Rev Betty Mockford, 60
Vicar

I am the first woman to hold this role in this benefice. It doesn't seem to have been a problem. I am responsible for six villages, five churches. One of the churches in Akenfield was closed in the 1970s. It is not an old building compared to the others, which are medieval in origin; it is, I think, a Victorian church. It was in a very bad state of disrepair and the decision was made to close it, which must have caused a lot of heartbreak at the time.

It's very difficult to know when to close a church. I suppose there should be a level where the congregation is so small, but then some of our congregations are already small. Sometimes there will be five or six of us at the 8.30am communion; sometimes, we get as many as 12. I don't mind if I'm just looking out at two or three people. I never mind.

I suppose there's still something of the old kind of faith around. It's a belief in God rather than in Jesus and the spirit. So it's not a very Trinitarian faith in some cases. Maybe that's because it's rural and you get the sense of the creator God - God the one who provides the good earth and the rain and the sunshine.

Jackie Lomas, 39
Primary school headteacher

There are a couple of children at the school who come from farming backgrounds, but I would say their parents own the farm; they're more the affluent side. There aren't the farm workers' children because there aren't the farm workers any more. Most of the children who come to this school have parents who are professionals - they work at BT, work at the hospital. We've got lawyers' children. There's a wide spread of professional capacities within the parents.

I can teach netball and rounders, but I know my skills are quite limited, so we've also got a yoga teacher. The teacher is a parent but she's a trained yoga teacher. The impact it has on young children is quite significant. They're all quite flexible little people.

If you took the school out of this community, there would be another nice house, but there would be a huge gap. People in the community say that there's nothing better than being out pegging your washing and hearing the sound of kids in the distance, that shrill laughter.

Chris Green, 41
Dairy farmer

I left school in Akenfield in 1980. Thatcher was in and it was a turbulent time, so being unemployed then was quite common, particularly for school leavers. Also, being disillusioned was in fashion because the punk thing had been going on, so to profess to be a toilet cleaner was a badge of honour. "I've got a really crap job." "Hey, I'm very impressed."

Punk made it to Akenfield, in fact. We had a few people walking around with mohicans. I remember one punk band from Woodbridge, I can't remember their name - they weren't that good - but I remember they used to play at the Sea Scout hut down by the river, singing the "no future" bit. I dare say they're all doctors and solicitors now. I don't think I knew a true solid punk around here who really bought into the nihilism. It would be hard to be a rural nihilist. Life is too good! You know, you walk out and see the birds flying in the sky, the trees swaying in the breeze and think, "Anarchy, what?"

Eventually, I went to college at Portsmouth Polytechnic. I attended a few lectures, played a lot of cards. I honestly don't know what I did. I only stayed a year before coming back to Akenfield.

People expect things to stay the same, particularly people who come to or retire to a village with a dream of what village life is like. They put up with a lot of smells from us - we're quite a good thing from their point of view; it makes their houses worth more money. The bigger houses in the press - somehow they always manage to snap a picture with a cow munching grass somewhere near them. Around here, I should say there's probably eight farmhouses and this is the only full-time farm business.

I think these are the best days of my life. I know every ... well, not every blade of grass, but I know the land very well. It's just dirt, but it's what I see every day. This is one of the great privileges of doing what farmers do. You've got a hell of a lot more of the planet than most people.

· Return to Akenfield by Craig Taylor is published by Granta at £14.99. To order a copy for £13.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.