So, ‘The Darling Buds of May’ is not a great classic then, despite its huge popularity for decades after publication in 1958. He’s not done an awful lot to create that himself. Pa Larkin finds everything ‘perfick’ because he’s lucky enough to live in such an environment. 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. We laugh at Pa because he’s a bumbling, confused alcoholic who’s a bit too free with his hands and the ladies, and leads a borderline parasitical amoral life. These people are caricatures, stereotypes of the time. As I complained of ‘Love for Lydia’ the Larkin stories hark back to a time that didn’t really exist. Looking back, thirty years later, and I think of those times fondly and maybe a little bit sadly so I am predisposed to think well of this book.Īnd I do indeed, think well of it, but that doesn’t mean I think it is very good, per se.

Although I didn’t watch the series myself, I knew of it and my parents regular watched the show, so I often saw scenes as I came and went. Indeed, I first learned of this book – which has long fallen from favour as a ‘classic’ – from the early 90s TV series of the same name, starring the rather wonderful David Jason as Pa Larkin. It is fun, irreverent and ‘means no harm’ in any of the gentle fun-poking of various characters who would be easily recognised to anyone living between 19. Living ‘off the grid’, as it were.Įccentric and good-humoured throughout, the story is really homage to the best of what it means to be English in the early 1950s, as the effects of the Second World War faded but before the advance of technology really began. They are a simple family with simple life values, ostensibly ‘poor’ but, more accurately, just not playing by the taxman’s rules.

The book looks at the family of Pop and Ma Larkin and the various shenanigans they get up to in idyllic rural Kent. It also helps that Bates is on much firmer ground with comedy than he is with drama. ‘The Darling Buds of May’ scores considerably higher from this point of view.

Rich people being boringly melodramatic doesn’t fill me with a great deal of sympathy for the characters, to be honest. I read Bates’ ‘ Love For Lydia‘ last year and was not especially entranced by either the writing or the whole raison d’etre of the story.

The darling buds of may by he bates