![]() ![]() This is Cedric Charlton, a painfully awkward taxman who has arrived to find out why no tax returns have been submitted by the family. When the sprawling Larkin family return from a trip to fetch ice creams in their truck (said family being Ma, Pa and their six bonny, bouncing children), they find a stranger loitering in their farmyard. ![]() Warm, generous, sun-drenched: a world of strawberry-picking and white tablecloths in orchards on warm evenings where all guests are welcome and, if you like it well enough, you don’t ever have to leave. As the first tenuous signs of spring try to force their way through the rain and sharp winds here in London, I decided I needed a bit of bucolic escapism and bought myself the book (and its sequels). But plot? I honestly couldn’t remember much. I also grew to assume that my paternal grandmother, a farmer’s wife who died when I was small, must have been pretty much like Pam Ferris’s Ma Larkin. ![]() The word ‘perfick’ made an impression, of course, and I remember that, every time Catherine Zeta-Jones came on screen as Mariette, my dad would shake his head and say, “I don’t know what they see in her”. I have vague memories of watching the Darling Buds of May TV series in the early 1990s, although I was too young for much to register. ![]()
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