Pop's “larks”

Pop's “larks” name a way of life as much as a set of businesses: practical, opportunistic schemes that make ordinary work and domestic arrangements serve Pop’s resistance to official and economic convention. The phrase gathers together his advice to Charley, the poultry business he helps establish, and his own dealings in surplus goods, revealing a household economy built on improvisation and the conviction that there is always a buyer somewhere.

Meaning and Method

The word appears as Pop asks Charley whether he will return to the tax inspector’s office, calling the job a “lark.” Charley worries that leaving would cost him his pension; Pop mocks the prospect of forty years of work followed by a pension worth only four pounds a week, with purchasing power reduced by inflation. His answer is not simply to reject salaried employment, but to redirect Charley’s practical intelligence toward a venture of their own: he proposes using salvaged materials from a mansion demolition to build a bungalow for Charley and Mariette in the meadow near the bluebell wood.

That proposal joins business to family provision. Pop presents the prospective demolition as an opportunity to obtain building materials, and the house as a useful outcome of his commercial activity. The bungalow does not materialize promptly, however: other larks take precedence, and the demolition remains undone. The gap between the confident offer and its postponement is characteristic of Pop’s enterprise, where possibility is abundant but attention moves quickly to the next deal.

From Tax Work to Eggs

After Charley marries Mariette, he leaves his tax-inspector job for what Pop regards as more respectable and sensible work. Pop’s distaste for having anyone in the family connected with the “tax lark” makes this change more than a career decision: it removes Charley from the institution Pop dislikes and brings him into a family enterprise instead.

Pop gives the couple five hundred laying pullets, setting them up in the egg business. Within a year, Charley and Mariette have made enough profit to buy another five hundred birds, and the venture is doing well. The numbers mark a concrete expansion from a gift of stock to a larger operation; Pop describes the eggs as another means of getting money from the government before it can take money from them.

The arrangement also exposes a difference between Pop’s methods and Charley’s. Charley insists on making proper income-tax returns on the egg profits, a practice Pop considers a bad habit. The business therefore carries forward Pop’s resistance to taxation even as Charley’s conscientious reporting limits how far he shares that approach. The lark is a family undertaking, but not a complete agreement about how its gains should be handled.

Pop’s Wider Ventures

Pop’s own activity ranges beyond the proposed demolition and the poultry business. He spends much of his time on a large army-surplus deal, buying or selling an assortment of goods that other people might not expect to find a market for: beetroot in vinegar, rat-traps, body belts, brass collar studs, gherkins in mustard, rubber shoe heels, and caper sauce. Pop’s governing principle is that someone, somewhere, will want something. Yet even this confidence has limits: the beetroot and gherkins are proving difficult to shift.

Taken together, these episodes make “larks” an elastic name for enterprise conducted outside conventional career paths. A pension, a tax office, poultry, building materials, and obscure surplus provisions all become parts of the same practical world. Its energy lies in converting overlooked goods and circumstances into possible value; its comic edge lies in the contrast between Pop’s sweeping confidence and the particular goods that do not sell, or the house he has not yet found time to demolish.