Pop Larkin

Pop Larkin, whose full name is Sidney Charles Larkin, is the expansive, entrepreneurial centre of the Larkin family. He meets official scrutiny with a joke, answers uncertainty with food and hospitality, and treats work, family life, and opportunity as parts of the same bustling enterprise. His exuberance is not simply a refusal of responsibility: he works constantly, makes practical decisions for those he loves, and adapts readily when a new venture presents itself. But his instinctive distrust of government, paperwork, and conventional careers gives that energy its comic edge and makes him a persistent challenger to the institutions around him.

Identity and the rhythms of family life

The first impression of Pop is physical and exuberant. After distributing eight large striped ice-creams, he climbs into the cab of the home-painted, gentian-blue truck laughing, checks that the children are all right at the back, and calls to Ma to hitch up. His affectionate, unceremonious manner turns even the mechanics of setting off into a family occasion. The truck is not a symbol of polished respectability; it is an extension of Pop’s busy, homemade world, where pleasure and work travel together.

That world is also ordered by the seasons. In May, Pop looks happily across the orchards and strawberry fields, where the straw is already on the rows, and anticipates the family’s next work. June brings strawberries and cherries; cherries continue through July; apples may begin before August, with early plums and pears, while August and September bring apples, September hops, and October potatoes. In a good summer, the strawberries alone can bring in fifteen pounds a day for a large family. Pop slows the truck beside the rows to ask whether anyone wants to go picking, treating the landscape not as a backdrop but as a calendar of possible work and income.

His pleasure in the countryside is inseparable from his pride in his household. Driving past cherries, apples, and strawberry fields in the May sunlight, he thinks with satisfaction of his six children and the names he and Ma gave them, each with its own reason: Montgomery after the general, Primrose for the spring, the twins Zinnia and Petunia for Ma’s favourite flowers, and Victoria because she was born in plum-time. He cannot, in that moment, remember why they called the eldest Mariette. The small lapse punctures his confident account of family naming without diminishing the tenderness of the scene: Pop’s sense of family is vivid, affectionate, and grounded in the ordinary particulars of shared life.

The tax visit and the art of welcome

The conflict between Pop’s domestic ease and official demands becomes explicit when a young, pale-faced man with spectacles, a trilby, a small brown moustache, and a black briefcase asks for Mr Sidney Larkin. Pop confirms that he is the man, laughingly identifying himself as Larkin by name and nature, and welcomes the visitor as if the encounter were a social call. The young man is from the office of the Inspector of Taxes. He explains that official records show Pop has made no return of income for the past year; when told he should have received a form, Pop asks what return and why, insisting that nobody asked him.

The exchange establishes a defining asymmetry. The visitor arrives with a briefcase and a yellow-buff form, carrying the authority of records and procedure; Pop answers with improvisation, humour, and an insistence on ordinary personal contact. When the matter of the form resurfaces, Pop redirects the discussion into an invitation to dinner, assuring the visitor there is plenty to eat and offering tea, coffee, beer, Guinness, and cider. The change of subject is characteristic, but it also reveals Pop’s method: he makes the official an individual guest before allowing him to remain merely an emissary of the state.

The welcome is material as well as rhetorical. At the crowded table, the young man, now identified as Mr Charlton, nurses a cup of tea amid three pineapples, fish-and-chips, coloured blocks of ice-cream, jam, ketchup, Guinness, Worcester sauce, chocolate biscuits, and icy buns. Pop offers sardines as well, prompting Montgomery to fetch them, though Mr Charlton faintly protests that he does not like sardines. The extravagant spread makes Pop’s hospitality hard to separate from his resistance: instead of answering the tax question on its own terms, he surrounds the representative with the abundance of the household.

That hospitality extends to accommodation and time. When Mr Charlton tries to leave for the eight o’clock bus, Montgomery and Ma explain that the service was discontinued soon after petrol rationing began and was never restored. Pop invites him to stay the night, with Ma’s agreement, and proposes a bed made up on the billiard table. The lost bus turns an attempted departure into an overnight stay, while Pop’s welcome converts a practical inconvenience into a further opening for companionship. Later, when the Brigadier is facing Sunday dinner alone, Ma is shocked at the thought of anyone having a cold meal on Sunday; Pop joins her in urging him to stay, and the invitation is again presented as a matter of course. In Pop’s household, welcome is an active force that repeatedly alters what visitors do next.

Work, authority, and practical opportunity

Pop’s resistance to official life is not passive. When Mr Charlton is unwell, Pop urges him to take advantage of what he calls the National Elf lark, arguing that he has paid into the service through weekly contributions and should not be a mug about using it. Pop’s account is his own comic, self-interested way of describing the state’s provision, not a neutral explanation of the system. Its importance lies in the way he turns the official idea of sick leave into an opportunity: if a man has paid, Pop reasons, he should benefit rather than obediently return to work.

The farm offers a practical alternative. At the strawberry-weighing tent, Pop introduces Mr Charlton to the foreman as Charley boy, a friend of theirs and an office fellow from the tax lark. The foreman, Mr Jennings, sees the novelty of finding an office worker in the field and offers him a job weighing and booking baskets, explaining that he has too many other tasks to check the women’s work himself. Pop’s introduction helps bring the two worlds into contact: the man who had arrived to pursue paperwork is now being offered a place in the seasonal operation. The episode captures Pop’s talent for making a new person useful, while also making room for him within the household’s expanding circle.

His approach to opportunity is equally direct in larger dealings. When Sir George Bluff-Gore asks whether Pop is thinking of buying the estate, Pop confirms that he is and treats the question as almost self-evident: he had asked to speak because he wanted to buy the place. The exchange shows how little he is impressed by the distance between the established gentry and himself. He negotiates from the assumption that a useful opportunity is there to be taken, rather than from deference to rank.

Mariette, Mr Charlton, and family responsibility

Pop’s decisiveness is most tenderly visible in his concern for Mariette. With the family gymkhana only a fortnight away, he remembers that it may be her last chance to ride in the jumps before she has the baby. He knows that she is mad on jumping and has set her heart on horses, so when the Brigadier discusses where to hold the event, Pop offers his meadow. There is no prolonged calculation: he says the event can be held there, and that all he needs to do is have the grass cut that week. His hospitality to the Brigadier thus becomes a concrete act of support for his daughter, shaped around what she cares about.

His bond with Mr Charlton grows through similar shifts between welcome, work, and family feeling. The visitor who first appears with a tax briefcase gradually becomes Charley, a familiar guest and participant in farm life. One intimate encounter makes the emotional change explicit: Mariette touches Mr Charlton’s cheeks, and the sensation unsettles him like the earlier brush of geese against his legs under the table. Pop is not presented as the narrator of their developing relationship, but the novel’s domestic world gives that relationship space to unfold amid the household’s meals, work, and shared routines.

Later, Pop’s advice about Mr Charlton’s career follows the same practical logic as his support for the farm. When the question arises of whether Charley will return to the tax inspector’s office, Mr Charlton says that he supposes he will lose his pension if he does not. Pop laughs at the prospect of working for forty years to collect a pension that, in his view, will have lost much of its value, and urges him to use his loaf. He offers a concrete alternative: materials from a large mansion due for demolition could be used to build Mariette and Charley a bungalow in the meadow near Bluebell Wood. Mariette responds with delighted affection, and Mr Charlton understands that there is nothing more to say. Pop’s proposal does more than provide a house in prospect; it declares that the couple belong within his vision of the family’s future.

Resistance, change, and the open-ended future

Pop’s hostility to the tax system remains a through-line, but his dealings with it become more complicated as the family changes. He is pleased that Charley, after marrying Mariette, has left his job at the tax inspector’s office for what Pop considers more respectable and sensible employment. To Pop, having someone in the family connected with the tax lark would be worse than having somebody who had been doing time. His extravagant comparison exposes the scale of his aversion, while also showing that he judges careers by personal loyalty and practical usefulness rather than institutional prestige.

In recognition of Charley’s change of direction, Pop gives him and Mariette five hundred laying pullets, setting them up in the egg business. The enterprise prospers: in less than a year they have made enough profit to buy another five hundred hens. Yet Charley insists on making proper income-tax returns. Pop considers this a very bad habit, regardless of how one looks at it. The contrast is revealing: Pop welcomes productive work and helps create it, but he does not accept that success must be accompanied by the paperwork that Charley regards as proper. His resistance is not simply a refusal to participate in the economy; it is a continuing argument over who should account for its gains and to whom.

The bungalow promise remains unfinished. Pop has been too busy with other ventures even to get around to demolishing the mansion whose materials he intended to use, so the building must wait. His attention has turned to a large army-surplus deal involving such unlikely goods as beetroot in vinegar, rat-traps, body belts, brass collar studs, gherkins in mustard, rubber shoe heels, and caper sauce. Pop believes there is always somebody somewhere who wants something, though he admits that the beetroot and gherkins are proving difficult to sell. The delayed house and the sticky stock give his resourcefulness an imperfect, open-ended shape: a promise can be sincere even when the next scheme repeatedly takes precedence.

Near the end, his capacity to move from domestic life back into work remains intact. After a conversation about the Beau Rivage and the French seaside, Ma puts little Oscar back into his pram; Pop remembers the day’s business, stands erect and perky at the door, and says he must see Joe Rawlings about the straw deal at half past nine. He bows, offers a playful farewell in French, and leaves Mr Charlton and Mariette laughing as they answer him. The scene returns him to the brisk, mobile energy with which he began: family, affection, seasonal materials, and business are not competing identities but adjoining parts of Pop’s life.

Narrative role and significance

Pop’s character holds the novel’s episodes together through repeated acts of conversion. A tax inspection becomes a meal; a missed bus becomes a bed on the billiard table; a sick leave becomes a route into strawberry work; an estate purchase becomes a possible source of building materials; and a gift of pullets becomes a new family enterprise. The particulars vary, but the pattern is consistent: Pop meets disruption not by waiting for formal solutions but by finding something useful to do with the people and resources at hand.

The comedy depends on the gap between Pop’s confidence and the systems he dismisses. He speaks of the National Elf lark as a service he has already paid for, ridicules the prospect of relying on a future pension, and regards Charley’s tax returns as an unnecessary bad habit. Yet he is neither idle nor merely evasive. His days are shaped by crops, deals, hospitality, and obligations to his family, and his offers have real consequences for the people around him. By placing official forms and pensions beside strawberries, pullets, meals, and a prospective bungalow, the narrative makes Pop’s outlook a practical alternative to conventional respectability—one that is generous and inventive, but also persistently at odds with formal accountability.