I picked this up because I thought it would make a nice cosy bedtime read. Well it does, a bit. At first it reminded me strongly of Frank Capra's BW film, "You Can't Take It With You". The Larkins live what appears at first to be a hand-to-mouth existence on a ramshackle farm, though Pop Larkin i...
Love for Lydia was the first novel with an English setting that H.E. Bates wrote after the second world war, and it was his own favourite among his Northamptonshire novels. The Northants setting becomes the background both ugly and beautiful for the story of a young girl, the daughter of a decayi...
A year has passed since the conclusion of The Darling Buds of May and Pop and Ma Larkin have added baby Oscar to their family, Charley and Mariette are now married (but no bun in the oven or little one for them yet) but otherwise the family remains the same as ever. Ma is depressed by the summer ...
It was soft autumn weather; the sunlight as mellow and still as Silas’s cowslip wine. As I went up the lane to the house I looked for the old sign of things: smoke rising from the chimney; the old summer bird-scares, age-green hats on sticks and inside-out umbrellas and twirling shuttlecocks; sca...
The waiting room, a high one-windowed room painted a dark green, was empty. And for some time we sat on the bench and did nothing but stare at the opposite wall. It was the bitterest day of the winter, the bitterest day I could ever remember, the streets black rivers of ice, the sky full of the b...
E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse. Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northampton...
All across miles of unbroken pasture there was not another house. Up through the south avenue of elms, where dead trees lifted scraggy bone against spring sky, bluebells grew like thick corn, spreading into the edges of surrounding grass. The wind came softly, in a series of light circles from th...
There had been no rain for many weeks. The wood had been cleared the previous spring, to the last sapling, and where the sawmill had stood a dozen high yellowish pyramids of sawdust were dotted among the disused wooden workmen’s shacks, the piles of empty petrol cans and the odds and ends of rust...
He had no medals. E.G. was small and compact, with cool, light, devilish, imperturbable eyes. His hands were surprisingly large for so small a man. On each hand the muscle between the thumb and forefinger, on the back of the hand, was very powerful. It stood out like a swelling. He had made it ha...
As the last minutes jerked away on the big station clock above wreaths of smoke and steam the city gentlemen sat with jocular expectation on the edges of carriage seats or actually craning necks from carriage windows, as if ready to check with stop watches the end of Harry Barnfield’s race with t...
A flame was darting up and along the blue-black edge of each heap like lamp-wick, leaving smoking ash behind. She stood leaning on the long white handle of a hayfork, arms firm and crooked, hands just below her chin, eyes rather low on the three smoking heaps, as if she was not really watching hi...
It had been there since a month before Christmas. ‘Annual Collection of Christmas Gifts in this Church on Christmas Eve. Help Us to Help Others. No Gift too Large. None too Small. Give generously.’ And then, in very much larger, startling and to him almost angry letters: ‘THIS MEANS YOU!’ He was ...
My uncle Franklin, who was dead, had been a taxidermist. But it is not about either of them that I want to tell you. They had a son, Ephraim Franklin, a sailor. Whenever I went to see my aunt Franklin she was sitting in the room behind the shop. This room and the shop were filled with cases of st...
He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s. My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader w...
She was never to go to London in all her life except in dreams or in imagination, when she lay awake in the top bedroom of the hotel, listening to the sound of wind in the forest boughs. When she first began to work at The Blenheim Arms she was a plump short girl of fourteen, with remarkably pale...
It was that he was lying alone in the centre of a large flat green field. A cold storm was raging about him. Overhead drummed peals of thunder. Agony taught him some minutes later that the thunder rolled from somewhere inside his own head and that the field was the billiard table, from which he w...
