The entire family is gargantuan of appetite, unenslaved by conventions, blissfully happy. He regards it as sort of immoral even to think of doing so. He, the junkdealer, his pockets stuffed with fat rolls of pound notes, is revealed as never paying income tax.

Does it matter? Not on your life – ‘perfick’, says Pop. The eldest and most beautiful girl, unmarried, is revealed as being pregnant, but exactly by whom she doesn’t know. Next morning, in a fever of excitement and laughter, I set the family going in a short story called The Darling Buds of May, in which the unconventional natures of Pop, Ma and their children are unashamedly revealed. This, I suddenly knew, was my positive here were the inhabitants of my junk-yard. Wild laughter rang through the village street and the whole scene might have come out of Merrie England. As they piled into the lorry there was an air of gay and uninhibited abandon about it all. All were sucking at colossal multi-coloured ice creams and at the same time crunching potato crisps. Two or three minutes later there came out of the shop, in high spirits, a remarkable family: father a perky, sprightly character with dark side-burnings, Ma a youngish handsome woman of enormous girth, wearing a bright salmon jumper and shaking with laughter like a jelly, and six children, the eldest of them a beautiful dark-haired girl of twenty or so. As I sat waiting for her in the car I noticed, outside the shop, a ramshackle lorry that had been recently painted a violent electric blue. One early summer evening Madge and I were driving through a Kentish village twenty-five miles east of us, in apple orchard country, when she suddenly had reason to stop and make a few purchases at the village shop. I did not, however, go round consciously searching for a positive experience teaches that these things happen by accident, unexpectedly.

Here, in fact, was the perfect example of a negative needing a positive to wake it to life. The more I thought about it, however, the farther I seemed to get from any kind of accomplishment. Here, it seemed to me, was something that had to be written about. Its crazy mess of old iron, rusting implements, pigs, horses, geese, turkeys, haystacks and useless junk of every kind sat incongruously next to the most beautiful of bluebell woods, the junk mocking the beauty, the bluebells mocking the junk.

I had long been fascinated by a rural junk-yard I used to pass two or three times a week. Somewhere in the mid-fifties, I began restlessly nursing a new idea. The Larkin Family © Simon Coulson, Darling Buds Farm

The darling buds of may author