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Country Tales
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- GenresShort StoriesClassics
312 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1938
66 people want to read
About the author
H.E. Bates
278 books194 followersHerbert Ernest Bates, CBE is widely recognised as one of the finest short story writers of his generation, with more than 20 story collections published in his lifetime. It should not be overlooked, however, that he also wrote some outstanding novels, starting with The Two Sisters through to A Moment in Time, with such works as Love For Lydia, Fair Stood the Wind for France and The Scarlet Sword earning high praise from the critics. His study of the Modern Short Story is considered one of the best ever written on the subject.
He was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire and was educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he was briefly a newspaper reporter and a warehouse clerk, but his heart was always in writing and his dream to be able to make a living by his pen.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands of England, particularly his native Northamptonshire. Bates was partial to taking long midnight walks around the Northamptonshire countryside - and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and its people and this is exemplified in two volumes of essays entitled Through the Woods and Down the River.
In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. It was in this phase of his life that he found the inspiration for the Larkins series of novels -The Darling Buds of May, A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh, etc. - and the Uncle Silas tales. Not surprisingly, these highly successful novels inspired television series that were immensely popular.
His collection of stories written while serving in the RAF during World War II, best known by the title The Stories of Flying Officer X, but previously published as Something in the Air (a compilation of his two wartime collections under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X' and titled The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave), deserve particular attention. By the end of the war he had achieved the rank of Squadron Leader.
Bates was influenced by Chekhov in particular, and his knowledge of the history of the short story is obvious from the famous study he produced on the subject. He also wrote his autobiography in three volumes (each delightfully illustrated) which were subsequently published in a one-volume Autobiography.
Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener and wrote numerous books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life. After the death of H. E Bates, Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at age 95. They raised two sons and two daughters.
primarily from Wikipedia, with additions by Keith Farnsworth
He was born in Rushden, Northamptonshire and was educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he was briefly a newspaper reporter and a warehouse clerk, but his heart was always in writing and his dream to be able to make a living by his pen.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands of England, particularly his native Northamptonshire. Bates was partial to taking long midnight walks around the Northamptonshire countryside - and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and its people and this is exemplified in two volumes of essays entitled Through the Woods and Down the River.
In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kent and bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. It was in this phase of his life that he found the inspiration for the Larkins series of novels -The Darling Buds of May, A Breath of French Air, When the Green Woods Laugh, etc. - and the Uncle Silas tales. Not surprisingly, these highly successful novels inspired television series that were immensely popular.
His collection of stories written while serving in the RAF during World War II, best known by the title The Stories of Flying Officer X, but previously published as Something in the Air (a compilation of his two wartime collections under the pseudonym 'Flying Officer X' and titled The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave), deserve particular attention. By the end of the war he had achieved the rank of Squadron Leader.
Bates was influenced by Chekhov in particular, and his knowledge of the history of the short story is obvious from the famous study he produced on the subject. He also wrote his autobiography in three volumes (each delightfully illustrated) which were subsequently published in a one-volume Autobiography.
Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener and wrote numerous books on flowers. The Granary remained their home for the whole of their married life. After the death of H. E Bates, Madge moved to a bungalow, which had originally been a cow byre, next to the Granary. She died in 2004 at age 95. They raised two sons and two daughters.
primarily from Wikipedia, with additions by Keith Farnsworth
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 26, 2023
Country Tales of 1938 collects selections from a number of publications of Bates's short stories of the late Twenties and the Thirties: Day's End and Other Stories (1928), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), The Story Without An End and The Country Doctor (1932), The House With The Apricot and Two Other Tales (1933), The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934), Cut And Come Again (1935), and Something Short And Sweet (1937), with some appearing in later collections, like H.E. Bates: Selected Stories (1957), The Poison Ladies and Other Stories (1976) and Love In A Wych Elm and Other Stories (2009).
In his preface to this early collection, in The Writer Explains (which actually belongs to a 1934 release, Thirty Tales, thus some of the references to stories not in this collection), Bates explains his path to writing the short story, from his earliest examples here of the 1920s to the later of the '30s, and defends the short story as a form subject to extinction at the time. Whilst he had great later success with publication of the form for which he is largely remembered and respected, through magazines, at the time, apart from only one in Britain devoted to that form, it was through the newspapers that he found a reliable outlet, and at times, rejection, through some seemingly inappropriate - and ironic - prudishness of taste, he explains.
Of this early collection, certain stand out as exceptional, the best being 'The Waterfall' (1933), which appeared in Byatt's edition of The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), and was indeed one the best of that - in the main - superb collection. It virtually paints the landscape and the curving movements within it, it has an integrity in its small captured world, and seems to encapsulate the short story form in its circumscribed space, complete.
Another complete, almost perfect short story that may well have been an interesting novel was 'The Palace' (1936). Set in wartime, this had echoes of Bates's finest novels to come - Fair Stood The Wind For France (1944) and Love For Lydia (1952) - and while not strictly a country tale, I guess that part of London was more countryside than urban at the time. Yes, I could imagine this as the novel Bates never wrote. 'Innocence' (1932) is simply the perfect shortest of short stories, and 'The Pink Cart' (1933) is a touching tale of compassion and atmosphere that, like 'Cloudburst' (1936), shows just how hard rural life must have been for many.
'Death In Spring' (1931) is Bates near his best. It evokes a peaceful moment in the heart of an English wood and brings something of an essence of Englishness in the character of the old man, bedded in the romanticism of the young couple out to see the fox cubs. It is complete and integral and needs go nowhere but where it goes, and echoes of moments of a deep penetrating awareness we have all felt in woodland, in the high fresh spring, when out on walks peopled by no one else, coming upon a little surprise that steals the episode. Good stuff.
'The House With The Apricot' (1933), Bates's longest, almost novella-length short story in this collection, begins with the man walking in the country as though he were describing paradise, that lost world of meadows and walled roadsides and woodland edges smothered with wild flowers. His stay at the house with the apricot introduces both a promise and a waste, the garden a series of profusions of flowers, tobacco plant, roses and an orchard. The woman, timid and relieved by degrees, not yet forty, yet burdened with a half-idiot father, seems both attractive and lost. But the introduction of her long-time fiancé, the drunken farmer Skinner, living alone on a dirty dilapidated pile, reveals a subsurface of petty intimacy from which the walker must escape, its almost-hopelessness the result of rural isolation, the endlessly ageing father, and dashed hopes just kept alive. A tale of paradise sours into a tale of desperate need, and almost becomes a tale of depravity.
Bates walked out in the English countryside long before Laurie Lee's tales of the same, and, as with Lee later, evokes the beauty of the English countryside unspoiled as yet from insecticide and herbicide spraying and the agrarian revolution which economically-thriftily took up every space in a field but for a small grass margin now devoid of all country flowers - which Bates knows so well and so widely in all their glorious hues - because of the spraying. This world is virtually lost to us, now, but for patches where conscientious farmers of late have restored permanently fallow fields to all their wildness, which teem with wild flowers and restore small lots of natural habitat back to us. You see them occasionally on programmes devoted to the countryside or farming or Nature. But in Bates's short stories, particularly, as well as in his country novels, he brings that lost world to us in froths of beauty.
This sadness of loss, this wistfulness of waste, sews Bates's stories collectively alongside a sense of futility, the predominant tone in most of his works. If Bates was a melancholic - and there's plenty of scatterings of humour in some of these stories - it is partly because he acknowledges that sense of futility in the hard poverty of lives which predominate his Country Tales. And if, each time I read him, I come away most often with a sense of the fading summer's day, the light buttery, mellow, deepening a sense of something beautiful disappearing, it is also a recognition that the English countryside no longer looks as splendid as it did in my own youth, and the evening of that fading summer's day is mingled with the regret of the silent solitary onlooker. Perhaps that's why I love reading him, and continue to read him, despite the variability of his short fiction.
In his preface to this early collection, in The Writer Explains (which actually belongs to a 1934 release, Thirty Tales, thus some of the references to stories not in this collection), Bates explains his path to writing the short story, from his earliest examples here of the 1920s to the later of the '30s, and defends the short story as a form subject to extinction at the time. Whilst he had great later success with publication of the form for which he is largely remembered and respected, through magazines, at the time, apart from only one in Britain devoted to that form, it was through the newspapers that he found a reliable outlet, and at times, rejection, through some seemingly inappropriate - and ironic - prudishness of taste, he explains.
Of this early collection, certain stand out as exceptional, the best being 'The Waterfall' (1933), which appeared in Byatt's edition of The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), and was indeed one the best of that - in the main - superb collection. It virtually paints the landscape and the curving movements within it, it has an integrity in its small captured world, and seems to encapsulate the short story form in its circumscribed space, complete.
Another complete, almost perfect short story that may well have been an interesting novel was 'The Palace' (1936). Set in wartime, this had echoes of Bates's finest novels to come - Fair Stood The Wind For France (1944) and Love For Lydia (1952) - and while not strictly a country tale, I guess that part of London was more countryside than urban at the time. Yes, I could imagine this as the novel Bates never wrote. 'Innocence' (1932) is simply the perfect shortest of short stories, and 'The Pink Cart' (1933) is a touching tale of compassion and atmosphere that, like 'Cloudburst' (1936), shows just how hard rural life must have been for many.
'Death In Spring' (1931) is Bates near his best. It evokes a peaceful moment in the heart of an English wood and brings something of an essence of Englishness in the character of the old man, bedded in the romanticism of the young couple out to see the fox cubs. It is complete and integral and needs go nowhere but where it goes, and echoes of moments of a deep penetrating awareness we have all felt in woodland, in the high fresh spring, when out on walks peopled by no one else, coming upon a little surprise that steals the episode. Good stuff.
'The House With The Apricot' (1933), Bates's longest, almost novella-length short story in this collection, begins with the man walking in the country as though he were describing paradise, that lost world of meadows and walled roadsides and woodland edges smothered with wild flowers. His stay at the house with the apricot introduces both a promise and a waste, the garden a series of profusions of flowers, tobacco plant, roses and an orchard. The woman, timid and relieved by degrees, not yet forty, yet burdened with a half-idiot father, seems both attractive and lost. But the introduction of her long-time fiancé, the drunken farmer Skinner, living alone on a dirty dilapidated pile, reveals a subsurface of petty intimacy from which the walker must escape, its almost-hopelessness the result of rural isolation, the endlessly ageing father, and dashed hopes just kept alive. A tale of paradise sours into a tale of desperate need, and almost becomes a tale of depravity.
Bates walked out in the English countryside long before Laurie Lee's tales of the same, and, as with Lee later, evokes the beauty of the English countryside unspoiled as yet from insecticide and herbicide spraying and the agrarian revolution which economically-thriftily took up every space in a field but for a small grass margin now devoid of all country flowers - which Bates knows so well and so widely in all their glorious hues - because of the spraying. This world is virtually lost to us, now, but for patches where conscientious farmers of late have restored permanently fallow fields to all their wildness, which teem with wild flowers and restore small lots of natural habitat back to us. You see them occasionally on programmes devoted to the countryside or farming or Nature. But in Bates's short stories, particularly, as well as in his country novels, he brings that lost world to us in froths of beauty.
This sadness of loss, this wistfulness of waste, sews Bates's stories collectively alongside a sense of futility, the predominant tone in most of his works. If Bates was a melancholic - and there's plenty of scatterings of humour in some of these stories - it is partly because he acknowledges that sense of futility in the hard poverty of lives which predominate his Country Tales. And if, each time I read him, I come away most often with a sense of the fading summer's day, the light buttery, mellow, deepening a sense of something beautiful disappearing, it is also a recognition that the English countryside no longer looks as splendid as it did in my own youth, and the evening of that fading summer's day is mingled with the regret of the silent solitary onlooker. Perhaps that's why I love reading him, and continue to read him, despite the variability of his short fiction.
Want to read
December 30, 2025Read so far:
from Day's End and Other Stories (1928):
The Easter blessing--3
Never--2
***
Fear--3
The flame--2
from The Black Boxer Tales (1932):
The black boxer--2
Death in spring--3
***
On the road--3
A flower piece--2
The mower--2
from The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934):
The story without an end--
*The gleaner--
The woman who had imagination--
Time--3
*The waterfall--
Innocence--
*Sally go round the moon--
The brothers--
***
A German idyll--
For the dead--
from Cut and Come Again and Other Stories (1935):
Beauty's daughters--2
Cut and come again--
*The mill--
Waiting room--
*The little fishes--
The station--3
The house with the apricot--
The plough--
Jonah and Bruno--
The bath--
Harvest moon--
The pink cart--
***
*The revelation--
from Something Short and Sweet and Other Stories (1937):
*Cloudburst--
Italian haircut--
The palace--
The kimono--
The landlady--
Breeze Anstey--
***
Spring snow--
The man who loved cats--
No country--
***
from Seven Tales and Alexander (1929):
*The child--
*The comic actor--
from The Flying Goat (1939):
*A funny thing --
*The ox--
from The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940):
*The bridge--
from The Daffodil Sky (1955):
The daffodil sky--3
from Day's End and Other Stories (1928):
The Easter blessing--3
Never--2
***
Fear--3
The flame--2
from The Black Boxer Tales (1932):
The black boxer--2
Death in spring--3
***
On the road--3
A flower piece--2
The mower--2
from The Woman Who Had Imagination and Other Stories (1934):
The story without an end--
*The gleaner--
The woman who had imagination--
Time--3
*The waterfall--
Innocence--
*Sally go round the moon--
The brothers--
***
A German idyll--
For the dead--
from Cut and Come Again and Other Stories (1935):
Beauty's daughters--2
Cut and come again--
*The mill--
Waiting room--
*The little fishes--
The station--3
The house with the apricot--
The plough--
Jonah and Bruno--
The bath--
Harvest moon--
The pink cart--
***
*The revelation--
from Something Short and Sweet and Other Stories (1937):
*Cloudburst--
Italian haircut--
The palace--
The kimono--
The landlady--
Breeze Anstey--
***
Spring snow--
The man who loved cats--
No country--
***
from Seven Tales and Alexander (1929):
*The child--
*The comic actor--
from The Flying Goat (1939):
*A funny thing --
*The ox--
from The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940):
*The bridge--
from The Daffodil Sky (1955):
The daffodil sky--3
March 6, 2014
Abridged and read by David Neal.
Broadcast on:
BBC Radio 7, 10:15am Sunday 18th April 2010
Category:
Drama
Broadcast on:
BBC Radio 7, 10:15am Sunday 18th April 2010
Category:
Drama
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 21, 2008
25 tales set in villages and market towns
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews