The Larkin family hosts a country gymkhana

The Larkin family hosts a country gymkhana as both a public spectacle and a family occasion, bringing its disparate social worlds onto the meadow for a day of riding, improvised organization, food, and fireworks. Its comic disorder is part of its meaning: the event follows the familiar forms of a country show, but Pop’s expansive hospitality and the family’s priorities repeatedly loosen the rules. Against this festive background, Mariette’s accomplished riding makes visible the mixture of aristocratic poise and unruly energy that has long captivated Charley, while the day’s ending turns the gathering into the setting for their marriage decision.

Arrival and Organization

The preparations are already in motion when Edith Pilchester finally reaches the meadow. Almost half past ten, four hours late, she falls bodily out of a taxi hired in desperation. Her equipment suggests painstaking readiness: a shooting stick, a rolled mackintosh, a leather hold-all with a spare cardigan, lunch and a red vacuum flask, an attaché case with judging lists and The Times, several books, and a basket of pot-eggs for a pony event. As she sits on the ground, the eggs roll about her, making her look like a hen that has suddenly laid them all. The comic image arrives before she has organized a thing.

Pop and The Brigadier are stringing square and triangular flags among the tents when Edith appears. She looks to Pop like a tired mountaineer descending from a peak, and the two men are so stupefied that neither goes over to help her or gather the eggs. The Brigadier supplies the only immediate comment, dryly wondering whether she is drunk or egg-bound. The event’s first spectacle is thus not a riding performance but the collapse of its great organizer into a miniature pastoral farce.

Within five minutes, Edith is working at a half canter. She rushes from tent to tent asking whether people have seen this or that, whether the caterers have arrived, and, above all, whether it is ghastly. The caterers have in fact been on the field since seven and have already stopped for tea. She asks about the loudspeaker, which has arrived, though she trips over its wires; she also frets over cancelled entries, insisting that they should all have been cancelled by nine. The Brigadier’s reminder that it is now half past ten makes the gap between her rules and the day’s actual progress the organizing joke of the morning.

The Meadow and the Riding

Outside, the meadow is transformed by flags of yellow, scarlet, blue, and emerald. Tents and marquees stand on the new green grass like white haystacks, and, as Pop emerges, the sun is shining brilliantly. The scene gathers the bustle of the show into a deliberately open-air setting, with the river beyond the ring and the Bluebell Wood nearby. The family’s arrangements are practical and festive at once: the field is dressed for a public event, but food and family life remain close at hand.

Mariette is already having a practice canter by the river, changed into a yellow shirt and jodhpurs, her bare head appearing to Pop as a curly black kitten against the distant blue sky. Charley is with her. The sight recalls the baby Mariette is carrying, which Pop has momentarily forgotten; he wonders whether she will have to stop riding soon and whether Charley knows. The passing thought sets the physical demands of the day beside an important family change, without interrupting the meet itself.

Throughout the afternoon, Charley watches Mariette compete in the riding and jumping events she has chosen. She takes her pony through walk, trot, canter, and run with faultless control. He can scarcely reconcile this poised rider, yellow, fawn, and black on her bay pony, with the same woman who has undressed him on the billiard table, fought Pauline Jackson, and worked beside him in the strawberry field. In the ring she looks so aristocratic that he can imagine her the niece of Lady Planson-Forbes; in memory she remains unmistakably the forceful, intimate Mariette he knows from the farm. Watching her, he feels happier than he has ever been.

Family, Food, and Public Celebration

The occasion is a family display as well as a sporting one. Ma is happy to see the children properly dressed for it, in riding habits, jodhpurs, and riding caps, although only Mariette and Montgomery will ride. The children circulate with enormous pink-and-yellow ice-creams; the twins, who resemble Ma, have crackling bags of popcorn and potato crisps. Ma herself has put care into her appearance: a pale turquoise silk costume with darker vertical stripes, a large dark-blue straw hat, matching blue shoes, and hair set in stiffish waves. Her turquoise rings are the one discomfort; they have started cutting into her fingers again, and she will have to remove them. Such sharply particular details keep the grand show rooted in the Larkins’ domestic world.

That domestic life announces itself across the meadow when Ma beats a wooden spoon on a large jam saucepan: it is time to eat. The sound cuts through the formal business of the ring, and Pop responds to the hot midday sun and the scent of bruised grass with his characteristic sense that everything is just right. The gymkhana is not treated as a sealed civic event. The family’s appetite, noise, and habits keep making the show an extension of home.

The gathering grows still more unruly when Pop discovers that he is not sure who has been invited to the party and who has not. For much of the afternoon he hails acquaintances, claps them generously on the back, and tells them to come at eight. By half past eight, the billiard room is a clamorous, fighting mass of fifty or sixty people, about half of whom have never received a formal invitation. Ma worries that they did not ask this many and that there may not be enough food or drink. Pop’s answer is to let them all come. The gymkhana’s public hospitality thus expands into the evening, with numbers and formal invitations giving way to Pop’s instinctive welcome.

Fireworks and the Marriage Decision

The day’s celebration continues after dark with rockets fired from empty champagne bottles. Primrose, Victoria, and the twins lean out of upstairs bedroom windows, shouting, laughing, and eating the last ice-cream, crisps, and apple tart. Pop sets off fireworks around the flower beds, including one beneath Edith, who shrieks that she has been burned. Mariette is among those selecting victims; the sky fills with silver stars, rockets, and Golden Rain, while a Roman Candle explodes behind the walnut tree. The effect is not an orderly finale so much as the gymkhana’s exuberance spilling into the house and garden.

In the middle of this commotion, Charley tries again to speak to Pop. He tells him that Ma says he may marry Mariette if Pop will let her. Pop answers at once that he will, and the fireworks continue around them. The brief exchange makes the celebration a turning point in the family’s story: the approval Charley and Mariette need is granted not in a private, solemn interview but amid the noise of Pop’s party. The gymkhana brings riding, family spectacle, and the couple’s future together, while preserving the loose, generous social world in which the Larkins make room for one more guest—and, now, a son-in-law.