H. E. Bates Lydia". His most popular creation was the Larkin family in "The Darling Buds of May". Pop Larkin and his family were inspired by a colourful character seen in a local shop in Kent by Bates and his family when on holiday. The man (probably Wiltshire trader William Dell, also on holiday) turned up to the shop with a huge wad of rubber-banded bank notes and proceeded to spoil his trailer load of children with Easter eggs and ice creams. The television adaptation, produced after his death by his son Richard and based on these stories, was a tremendous success. It
Harry Bates (author) be a market for a well-written magazine on the "Amazing" themes." Bates wrote that the "science fiction of the early writers had little relation to science of the scientists." What science fiction writers did was to "extrapolate" and not "relate" because "almost all of what is called science fiction is fantasy and nothing else but." In 1964, Bates recalled his editorship of "Astounding": "Long ago I was a party to the genesis of a magazine which persisted through thirty years and thirty millions of words. ... "Astounding" was a living being. I served it in its infancy and childhood, Orlin