After finishing Darkness at Noon I was keen to take on something a little less bleak, although knowing nothing of H.E.Bates more than the name, 'The Darling Buds of May', I picked up a collection of short Stories. One included was The Golden Oriole. It seems most of Bates' work was set describing the rural midlands of his upbringing especially his county, Northamptonshire. This setting also led to his knowledge of gardening, a field i which he was also published. He and his wife lived their lives out in a granary which they converted into a house and the surrounding gardens in Kent. Appointed CBE in 1973 and dying the following year aged 68 he wrote over 100 novels and short stories. His wife, a childhood sweetheart, survived him to the ripe old age of 95, and died in 2004. This information all came as a suprise as all of the shorts I read in the paperback dealt with lust, indescretions, affairs and painted a character of its rural dwellers as stiffled, repressed, practitioners of extracurricular liaisons.
Very readable however.
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