Cedric Charlton's extended sick leave

Cedric Charlton’s extended sick leave is the unlikely bridge between an official visit to the Larkin farm and Cedric’s eventual place in the family. At first, Pop Larkin treats illness as another opportunity to outwit the state: he encourages Cedric to claim sick leave, though Cedric is not ill. The arrangement draws him into the farm’s work and domestic life, gives him a new source of income and enjoyment, and helps carry him away from the tax office toward marriage with Mariette Larkin.

From Tax Visit to Sick Leave

Cedric arrives at the Larkin farm as a tax inspector investigating why Sidney Larkin has made no income return for the past year. Pop feigns bewilderment about the return and tries to redirect the encounter into hospitality, inviting Cedric in for dinner and offering tea, coffee, beer, Guinness, and cider. The crowded table reinforces the welcome: pineapples, fish and chips, ice cream, jams, sauces, tea, biscuits, and iced buns surround the young official. The meal and invitation are more than a diversion from paperwork; they begin to make the inspector a guest in the household.

When Cedric considers leaving, the missing evening bus removes his immediate escape, and Pop suggests that he stay the night. The next morning, Pop and Ma Larkin judge him unwell, and Pop urges him to take advantage of what he calls the National Elf lark, arguing that Cedric has already paid into the service through weekly contributions. His advice turns public provision into a comic form of reciprocity: since the state has taken money from Cedric, Pop says, he should use what it offers. Cedric’s attraction to Mariette is already complicating his resistance. She asks him to stay longer, while he frets about office papers, duty, and conscience; she dismisses those objections as silly, and he cannot help conceding the point.

A Leave Without an Illness

The contradiction at the heart of Cedric’s sick leave is made explicit over breakfast. After a substantial meal of fried eggs, liver and bacon, fried bread, and sweet black tea, he says he can honestly report neither sickness nor exhaustion: he has never felt better. Pop’s response is not to reconsider the plan but to suggest that Cedric invent an ailment, such as lumbago, and predict that a day in the strawberry field will make it chronic. The joke captures Pop’s practical, irreverent approach to formal rules, while Cedric’s unease shows that he has not yet shed his office-trained sense of honesty and obligation.

That morning, Cedric goes out with the family in the home-painted truck to pick strawberries. The work belongs to the farm’s seasonal rhythm: the strawberry fields follow the spring orchards, and the harvest forms the opening of a succession of picking jobs, with cherries, apples, plums, pears, hops, and potatoes to follow through the year. Pop says that a large family can earn fifteen pounds a day at strawberries alone. For Cedric, the field makes the leave more than a pretext for staying away from his desk. It offers paid work, company, and an active alternative to the office.

At the weighing tent, Pop introduces him to the foreman as Charley boy, a friend of the family and an office fellow from the tax lark. The foreman, who needs help weighing and recording baskets, offers Cedric the task. The tax inspector thus moves from examining the Larkins’ paperwork to keeping the practical records of their harvest. The episode turns his official expertise into useful farm labour, while the work places him within the household’s daily economy rather than outside it as an investigator.

Staying on, and Choosing the Field

Cedric’s leave does not end after a brief spell. When a doctor asks whether he would like sick benefit for a couple of weeks, Cedric declines. He enjoys the strawberry field, earns money there, and recognizes that sick benefit would mean losing both the earnings and much of the pleasure. He is learning to use his loaf, though the insight grows out of a choice that Pop first framed as a joke. The doctor advises him to keep out of draughts when hot and avoid lying in wet grass, but the narrative stresses Cedric’s own preference for work over a benefit claim.

The household comes to understand that he has extended his leave. Ma Larkin suspects he has written to the tax office to prolong it, and Pop approves when she says he will be staying another week or two. Later, Cedric is still on sick leave, helping Mariette with jobs around the farm, including feeding the donkeys. Pop measures the change in him through his appetite: watching Cedric take a fifth slice of bread thickly spread with Ma’s fresh Jersey butter, he reflects on how much his health appears to have improved in three weeks. The lingering leave is therefore both a comic fiction and a real transition: Cedric’s life and habits are changing, although his supposed illness remains unsupported by what he feels or does.

From the Tax Office to a New Household

Cedric’s time away from the office anticipates a more decisive break. When the question of returning comes up, he says he supposes he will lose his pension if he does not go back. Pop mocks the prospect of spending forty years at a desk to collect a small pension, tells him to use his loaf, and offers to build him and Mariette a bungalow in the meadow near Bluebell Wood from materials salvaged from a mansion. Mariette’s delighted response, and her kisses, leave Cedric with little reason to argue. The leave has brought him close to a future that the office no longer defines.

After marrying Mariette, Cedric does give up his post in the tax inspector’s office. Pop is pleased that his son-in-law has left what he regards as the disreputable tax lark for more sensible employment. He gives the couple five hundred laying pullets, establishing them in egg production; within a year they have made enough profit to buy another five hundred. Cedric continues to make proper income-tax returns, to Pop’s irritation, so the family’s old conflict with official paperwork survives in a new form. The bungalow promised during Cedric’s leave remains unbuilt for the time being, as Pop is occupied with other ventures. Sick leave does not simply excuse an absence: it opens a route from the state’s paperwork into farm labour, domestic belonging, and a livelihood Cedric chooses for himself.