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
When the Lion Feeds enough ivory to pay for a farm, as he and Katrina had talked about doing. Before publishing "The Lion Feeds", Smith was working as an accountant and had already written a novel, "The Gods First Make Mad", for which he had been unable to find a publisher. After his first marriage failed, he tried again with a different story: I wrote about my own father and my darling mother. I wove into the story chunks of early African history. I wrote about black people and white. I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women. I wrote about