The novelist and short story writer Herbert Earnest Bates (1905-1974), while a native of Northamptonshire, lived for over forty years from 1931 to his death in the village of Little Chart Forstal, near Ashford. His description of looking around properties with his wife, Marjorie (nicknamed Madge) in the early 1930s just as the depression started is notable:
`‘The rain stopped at lunch-time, and after lunch we walked out to see the house. It was a horror. Much depressed, we were about to walk back when its owner declared that he might have one further possibility to offer. This was a building for conversion, a granary.
We walked across the sodden grass, then only a rough area of pasture with a shaggy brown horse grazing on it, today mown smooth as a bowling green for cricket. It stood in half an acre of flooded farmland: an oblong building of tone, weatherboard and tile, open to the winds on the ground floor, still littered with straw and grain upstairs. We looked, poked about for a little, went upstairs and pondered. We went outside, looked and pondered again.
We stood for a few minutes by the thick, yellow-lichened old stone walls and suddenly, the sun came out. Its rays were the very faintest degree warm and we saw now that we were facing due southwards.
Madge looked at me and I looked at her. We said nothing; but in that moment of sunlight we suddenly knew that this was it.’
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/property/house-inspired-darling-buds-may-open-market-first-time-almost-90-years-179088
Over the next decades, he successfully converted The Granary and its gardens. He was a knowledgeable gardener, and his interests in plants is clear in much of what he wrote. `Through the Woods’, written in 1935 and published a year later, celebrates a generic rural environment. Although Bates starts the book by talking of `The wood… not far from the house’ he never explicitly mentions that this might be Little Chart Forstal – and much of the work draws on his memories of his childhood in the midlands, and the similar countryside there, almost amalgamating the places so they become one. Compared to the more atmospheric and unsettling descriptions of the same kind of landscape by another Kent based writer Jocelyn Brooke, Bates’ vision of the local landscape was largely a gently benign one. `The wood echoes with sounds peculiar to itself; the furtive treading of pheasants among the big papery chestnut leaves, ‘ he wrote, `the clap of pigeon wings, the squawk of blackbirds, the sound of rabbits scuttling to hiding, of jays laughing. The wood magnifies them all, gives them a certain quality of excitement, almost of mystery.’(Bates, `Into the Woods’, reissued 2011, Little Toller Books, Dorset, 29).
This generic, placeless quality of the setting of a work is clear in the stories that were to make him successful after the war – particularly the set of books from the Larkins series. `The Darling Buds of May’ (1958) is ostensibly set in Kent – though it refers to made up places rather than actual ones. Nor is it easy to catch sight in the text of anything that could pin down the place that Bates might be setting his tales in or imagining – beyond that they are rural and often woody. Bluebells, fields, raspberry and strawberry picking places figure – but the main focus is on descriptions of social situations. The main character, Pop Larkin, is irrepressible optimism personified, with a tiny dash of Dionysian mad energy – his copious drinking, and his evidently healthy libido are used to convey this. His partner, Ma, comes across as like an earth mother, while the eldest daughter Mariette embodies raw, instinctive feeling and energy.
What one can construct from the novels is a world after the Second World War where distrust of officialdom and government are strong. `All governments are dishonest’, the book declares at one point (`Darling Buds of May,’, Penguin, London, reissue 2006, 100). Pop Larkin views the recently established National Health Service dimly – an organisation to suck up money and get people hooked on medication they don’t need. This sits alongside his evident disinterest in paying any tax, something which generates most of the humour from the tax collector Cedric Charlton, who presents himself at the start of the book as an official, and ends up staying on and marrying their daughter. Larkin tames the government, rather than the other way around.
The 1950s into the 1960s were probably the high tide of London workers coming to the Kentish fruit and hop farms to pick and work during the harvesting seasons. There is a lot of historical literature about this. The had become like paying holidays for people from the big urban centres, and eventually turned into a mini-migration. With interest in these kind of jobs dwindling over time, by the end of the century it was mostly imported labour, and then increasingly labour from Eastern Europe or further afield that took these jobs up. As a mild example of social commentary, Bates’ work shows something about what was happening in the environment he lived in and wrote his books. And for someone who had spent the war writing material to improve morale in the RAF, this mission was continued with tales that presented a largely uncomplicated, almost upbeat view of life. This was despite the fact that there were some things which were almost subversive about Pop Larkin’s morals – the fact that he had fathered children by Ma but never married her till later, or that Mariette is meant to be having a child, which was why the marriage to the unknowing Mr Charlton had a pragmatic urgency about it (he was, to be clear, not the father. In any case, the pregnancy abruptly disappears in the story).
It was more the dramatization of the Larkin books for a television series in the early 1990s, and the fact that at least for outside scenes they were set close to Little Chart, in places like Pluckley, that tied them more clearly to Kent – something reinforced by use of this hugely popular series for tourism purposes. Bates’ bucolic and largely celebratory style captures something of the rural idyll and prettiness of parts of Kent – and of the idealisation of a period in the first decade of so after the Second World War, which, after it was over, thanks to the influence of works like `The Darling Buds’ got lodged in the public imagination as an innocent and straightforward era. Whether this would stand up to a factual understanding of the harsh conditions in many of the farms and villages in the post-War period as their economies underwent huge changes through mechanisation, employment shifts, and the opening up of the UK to global markets for goods and products that made locally ones often uncompetitive, is another matter. For those who do not want to think too deeply about the meaning of a landscape, and of lives lived on it, H E Bates writes prettily enough. And while of course there should be space for this sort of work, it is by no means the whole story. Just read the far more accomplished, and much less appreciated, work of Bates’ near contemporary, Jocelyn Brooke to understand that.