Bates was influenced by Chekhov in particular, and his knowledge of the history of the short story is obvious from the famous study he produced on the subject. The Darling Buds of May is the first book in the Pop Larkin Chronicles, a series of five books that joyfully tell the stories of the Larkins. The Larkins live what appears at first to be a hand-to-mouth existence on a ramshackle farm, though Pop Larkin is never seen to do any actual farmwork like feeding the animals, milking or mucking out.

Charlton from a malnourished and timid tax clerk to a full member of the Larkin family -- Ma and Pa Larkin and their many children -- and its easygoing celebration of nature, food, drink, and family. After leaving school, he was briefly a newspaper reporter and a warehouse clerk, but his heart was always in writing and his dream to be able to make a living by his pen.Just like tax inspector Cedric Charlton, you’ll find yourself drawn into the orbit of Pop and Ma Larkin and their six children – indomitably cheery hedonists, the lot of them. I have read lot of his books over number of years and this classic series it has not aged like other books of its type it's the sort of P. It should not be overlooked, however, that he also wrote some outstanding novels, starting with The Two Sisters through to A Moment in Time, with such works as Love For Lydia, Fair Stood the Wind for France and The Scarlet Sword earning high praise from the critics. Waiting for them is a young man: Mr Cedric Charlton, an upstanding inspector of taxes, come to discover why they haven't paid any.

The book looks at the family of Pop and Ma Larkin and the various shenanigans they get up to in idyllic rural Kent. Take the Larkins out of the beautiful countryside and put them into inner city London of the 1970s and you’d have a very different and much darker feel to the story. Written and published almost exactly ten years after Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Darling Buds Of May is, peculiarly and probably quite unintentionally, more accurately prophetic of modern British Society than that nightmare: here are a family who constantly eat crisps and ice-cream, who leave the television on through all daylight hours, whose parents are unmarried and drink heavily and who think nothing of their teen-aged daughter being single and pregnant.If the folks from Green Acres and Petticoat Junction lived in England, the Larkins would be their neighbors. Stopped reading three chapters in, because the characters were so unappealing that I was getting terribly depressed. It’s the kind of novella you can polish off in a sitting or two, and The Novel Cure prescribes it as a tonic for cynicism.