#20BooksofSummer: A Breath of French Air by HE Bates

 

Published in 1959, A Breath of French Air is the sequel to The Darling Buds of May, Bates’s famous novel about the Larkin family. It is almost completely lacking in political, or indeed any other kind of, correctness, but if the reader can put this to one side it is a very cheerful jaunt with lots to entertain and amuse.

Ma Larkin, now the proud mother of her seventh child, baby Oscar, is fed up with the weather in Kent. It may be July but the rain has been pouring down for weeks, and despite Pop Larkin proclaiming, with his usual optimism, that it’ll be;

‘Perfick by midday. Beautiful.’

Ma is not to be deterred; she wants a holiday (which is hardly surprising given the circumstances – Pop may be an ace wheeler-dealer but he still expects a full fry every morning, baby or no baby.) And Pop has to admit that he’s a bit worried about Mariette, his glamorous teenage daughter, now married to ex-taxman Charley;

‘…Charley…had had sense enough to throw up his job at the tax inspector’s office to take up more respectable, more sensible, employment. It was worse than awful to think of having anybody in the family connected to the tax lark.’

Pa’s been hoping for an announcement ever since they got back from honeymoon, and now that a year has passed he’s beginning to wonder about Charley’s ‘technique’ – though as Ma points out

‘everybody wasn’t like him – “You’ve only got to start eyeing me across a forty-acre field…and I start wondering whether I’m going to have twins or triplets” …she thought that if there was anything Charley didn’t know by this time Mariette would soon teach him.’

When Charley spots a picture of St Pierre Le Port in his copy of The Times he is immediately transported back to the holidays of his youth, his trips on the little trains, blue seas, sunshine, peaches, grapes and snails, and before long Pop has recovered from the surprise of anyone ever having gone abroad and decided that a month in Brittany is just what everyone needs – especially Charley and Mariette

‘Perhaps it was, after all, the sun that she and Charley had been missing?’

So off they all go, in the monogrammed (not their monogram, but who cares? Not Pop.) Rolls Royce, to the Hotel Beau Rivage. They arrive in a raging Atlantic storm, the hotel is now dilapidated and ‘dismal, dark and poky’, the beds are hard and the tea undrinkable. But being Larkins they make the best of it, and by the end of their stay they’ve endeared themselves to everyone. 

And that, of course, is one of the most appealing qualities of this rumbustious, jolly lot; Pop’s enthusiasm for life, and his endless curiosity about the world and everything in it (always excited to learn a new word, he even gets Charley to give him French lessons), filter down to all of his progeny, just like Ma’s carefree willingness to see the funny side of just about everything. We know no-one could really live like this, even in 1959, but the idea that one family just might is immensely cheering. The Larkins love their children and have no middle-class hang-ups about 'spoiling them'; Pop may be a stickler for table manners, but he can never say no to Mariette, nor even to Primrose (aged 11!) when the latter wants to stay in France with the family of her new boyfriend. (A branch of my own family is in fact quite like the Larkins, and oh how jealous I was of my cousin's gazillion Easter eggs and vast collection of Action Men.)

Bates’ description of the hotel is vivid – one can picture the waitress operating the

 ‘patent wooden-handled bread slicer… a cross between a guillotine and a chaff-cutter’,

the manager, Monsieur Mollet, all pince-nez and irritability, and the owner, Mademoiselle Dupont, with her black dresses, white collars and perpetual nerves. Small French hotels really were like this, even years later. The Larkins may live in rural Kent, but they’re used to luxuries like TV and tomato ketchup; it’s fair to say there’s a bit of a culture clash here.

Pop Larkin dominates the story. He is irrepressibly flirtatious, drinks like a fish (as does Ma, breastfeeding or not) and always on the lookout for a business opportunity – even on holiday he manages to sell a hundred cases of tinned beetroot in vinegar to a French sea captain. The way he carries on with other women would not, I think, even have been acceptable in 1959, although Bates goes to great lengths to show that he’s never serious, never goes very far, and always tells Ma all about it. She, for her part, seems quite happy to let this happen and even tells him to share his attentions fairly between his various female admirers. Her reasons for this could be many – perhaps she knows Pop will only be happy if he can flirt, or maybe it’s just her way of getting a bit of peace and quiet. A character who behaved like Pop now might well be arrested. As I said, you won’t enjoy this book if you apply today’s standards.  But both Chaucer and Shakespeare have characters like Pop, and we still like them.

In a very interesting article in The Guardian*, author Peter J Conradi explains that Bates came from a working-class background in Rushden, Northamptonshire, started work in a boot factory, and struggled to get published until he was spotted by writer, editor and literary critic Edward Garnett. Bates, says Conradi, held literary London, the intelligentsia and its then-fashionable Modernism in disdain. He wanted to write about the countryside (through which he took long night-time walks); he and his friend VS Pritchett were;

‘cultivated Georgians: journeymen-writers or craftsmen, interested in those everyday idylls that enliven the long littleness of life, concerned with love and friendship….content with the gift of being able to "put the English countryside down on paper" '

Conradi points out that Pop Larkin both pities and humours the down-at-heel gentry who, in post-war England, cling on to their status despite living in financial circumstances that are ‘reduced’ to say the least (shades here of Marghanita Laski’s The Village, and especially of her Wendy Trevor.)

In France Pop runs into his old friend, the dashing and elegant Angela Snow, and her dowdy, culture-obsessed, sister Iris. The latter, Conradi explains, is a parody of Iris Murdoch**, new wife of John Bayley, son of Bates’ neighbours. The Brigadier, seen mournfully tottering up the rain-soaked road in his shabby overcoat, is based on Bayley’s father. Pop is always generous – he invites the Brigadier to come to France with the family - ‘Return trip won’t cost you a penny.’ But the Brigadier is too proud to accept the offer, or even a lift up the road in Pop’s Rolls, and goes off to buy his cheap ‘mousetrap’ cheese, musing that if he has it on toast;

 'he could fool himself, perhaps, that it was really Camembert.’

Conradi suggests that Bates (who was also known at home as ‘Pop’) identified with Pop in many ways. Bates succeeded as a writer despite having neither family wealth nor education.  He was happily married to Madge and loved their life in the Kentish village of Little Chart. (This is his former house.) 

Whether he carried on as Pop does, groping every woman in sight, is unknown – maybe he just liked the idea (apparently he did once say 'Gardens should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises...') or maybe it was his way of creating a character with a huge and carefree appetite for food, drink, family and women. A man who embraces life itself, and for whom just about every day is ‘Perfick.’

*Peter J Conradi The Man from Nowhere – The Guardian 3 February 2007

**Peter J Conradi is the author of the authorised biography of Dame Iris Murdoch – Iris Murdoch: A Life (Harper Collins)

A Breath of French Air by HE Bates is published by Penguin.