Darling Buds and doodlebugs
Above: Parish church of St Nicholas, Pluckley (Kent Life Magazine)
Above: The Larkin family, as portrayed in the original 1990s ITV drama, with David Jason as Pop, Pam Ferris as Ma, Philip Franks as Cedric ‘Charlie’ Charlton and Catherine Zeta Jones as Mariette (Kent Life Magazine)
Above: Remains of St Mary's Church, destroyed by a Doodlebug (Kent Life Magazine)
Above: The butcher’s shop (Kent Life Magazine)
‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.’
It hardly seems possible that it is 50 years since H.E. Bates wrote that fondly-remembered classic The Darling Buds of May – its title inspired by the words of a Shakespeare sonnet.
Thirty-three years later, in 1991, the story was adapted for television and Bates’ gloriously sentimental depiction of the English countryside touched the hearts of a new generation.
Starring David Jason and Pam Ferris as Pop and Ma Larkin, and Catherine Zeta Jones in her first major role as their daughter, Mariette, the series was pure escapism; undemanding viewing bathed in the rosy glow of nostalgia.
In reality, life, of course, was very different, but it didn’t seem to matter. Readers and viewers were happily transported into this bucolic dream world and most of us envied the Larkins their carefree, unconventional lives and the way they lived off the fat of the land. Through his brilliant work, Bates had created a ‘perfick’ picture of rural England in the years following the Second World War.
But what of the man behind the Larkin magic? Herbert Ernest Bates was born in Northamptonshire in May 1905. He was the eldest of three children and he came from a family of shoemakers.
The books are as English as puns, steak and kidney pudding and The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer
Later, Bates wrote of growing up in an atmosphere of intense respectability.“My parents were never a farthing in debt; great was the pride they took, as my grandparents did, in paying their way. My father pursued his passion for nature and the countryside, and incidentally fostered my own.”
His family’s values and their strong-willed desire to be financially independent reflects a long-vanished world at the heart of Bates’s writing.While attending grammar school, Bates was encouraged to consider writing as a career. He later dedicated two books to his English master.
After school, Bates followed his instincts and became a junior reporter on a local newspaper, then a warehouse clerk. Regarding himself primarily as a poet, Bates’s first novel The Two Sisters was finally published in 1926, having been rejected nine times. The publisher, Jonathan Cape, assumed Bates, who was 20 at the time, was a woman.
In 1931 Bates married Marjorie (Madge) Cox and the couple moved to Little Chart, near Ashford. Kent became his adopted home for the rest of his life. The previous summer Bates and his bride-to-be trekked across large tracts of Kent countryside in their search for somewhere to live.
A bracing walk
In his autobiography, he writes of one memorable occasion when they walked almost 20 miles from Canterbury to the village of Pluckley “which stands on the very edge of that ridge that lies, like a long step, between the North Downs that the Pilgrims to Canterbury once trod and the vast Weald that stretches away in its wide magnificence to the South Downs of Sussex.”
The couple climbed to the ridge, passing a small church on a gentle hillside with a stream running just below it. Madge stopped to take a picture. “We didn’t know until later that that church, with its safely grazing sheep, was to become a closer part of our lives… This then was Little Chart and to it we finally came, newly married, unable to afford a honeymoon, on a July afternoon in 1931.”
Bates describes the village as small..”the centre contains a few dozen houses, a church, a pub, a shop and two small lakes.” It was the couple’s friend, Violet Dean, who came to the rescue and found them a home in the area.
The Granary at Little Chart overlooked “a village green of great charm, called the Forstal, surrounded by a dozen houses of stone, half timber and that soft bronzy red brick seen at its loveliest in villages such as Goudhurst, away towards Sussex, westwards.”
Within hours of seeing it, Bates and Madge had decided to buy the Granary. For the princely sum of £600, they converted the old farm building into a family home with four bedrooms and a study. In those days, long before gentrification, modern comforts and the era of consumerism, granary conversions were almost unheard of.
Within hours of seeing it, Bates and Madge had decided to buy the Granary.
The Granary gave Bates the stability he craved as a writer and soon the couple started a family. They had two daughters and two sons, one of whom, Richard, became a television producer and adapted several of his father’s more successful publications for the small screen, including The Darling Buds of May. Staying true to the spirit of the book, much of the series was filmed in and around neighbouring Pluckley.
Not surprisingly, the Second World War signalled a change in Bates’ career and fortunes. In 1941 he joined the RAF and was given the unprecedented task of writing short stories to boost morale in the services. He subsequently became a squadron leader. One of his best-known works, Fair Stood the Wind for France, was published in 1944, the year that a doodlebug drifted over the Granary and destroyed the little hilltop church Bates and Madge had stumbled on all those years before. It remains a ghostly ruin and a stark reminder of the futility of war.
Bates’s output during this time was prodigious and there followed an impressive list of bestsellers. Among the titles were The Purple Plain, The Scarlet Sword and Love for Lydia. Hailed at the time as a writer of considerable merit, it is sad that much of H.E. Bates’s work has been forgotten. It might have been the same for The Darling Buds of May had it not been adapted for a prime-time slot on national television.
The book, published in 1958, was the first in a series of five titles dealing with the irrepressible Larkins. The critics were harsh but Bates leapt to their defence, maintaining “the books are as English as puns, steak and kidney pudding and Canterbury Tales of Chaucer.”
Over the years, many people have asked what gave H.E. Bates the inspiration for the Larkin stories. Again, the answer lies in his memoirs. For some time, the author had been fascinated by a rural junkyard he used to pass several times a week. A haphazard collection of rusting machinery, haystacks and wandering geese caught Bates’ eye and stirred his imagination.
Around this time Bates and his wife stopped their car at a village shop 25 miles from home. He writes: “As I sat waiting for her in the car I noticed, outside the shop, a ramshackle lorry that had been painted a violent electric blue. Two or three minutes later there came out of the shop, in high spirits, a remarkable family: father a perky, sprightly character with dark sideburnings, Ma a youngish handsome woman of enormous girth, wearing a bright salmon jumper and shaking with laughter like a jelly, and six children, the eldest of them a beautiful dark-haired girl of 20 or so..
Over the years, many people have asked what gave H.E. Bates the inspiration for the Larkin stories
“As they piled into the lorry there was an air of gay and uninhabited abandon about it all… here were the inhabitants of my junk-yard.”
H.E. Bates died in 1974 and is remembered today as a novelist and a key exponent of the short story. He cared passionately about the English countryside and he was a keen and dedicated horticulturalist. He travelled extensively and met many famous and extraordinary characters – among them Graham Greene and Lawrence of Arabia. Thirty-four years after his death and 50 years after he wrote about the Larkins and their lusty love of life, The Darling Buds of May is acknowledged as a major part of his lasting literary legacy.