I didn't have much time to explore Rushden - a Northamptonshire village that mushroomed into a major centre of the boot and shoe trade in the late nineteenth century - so I made straight for an attraction I already knew about.
This plaque is on the Rushden home of the novelist and short-story writer H.E. Bates. He was born in the town and educated at Kettering Grammar School.
Rushden appears in several of his works - notably the novel Love for Lydia - as Evensford, while his Uncle Silas stories are set in the Northamptonshire countryside.
But Bates's best known works, thanks to television adaptions, are the Pop Larkin books, and they are set in rural Kent.
Nice. I grew up in Higham Ferrers and was schooled in the Seventies & Eighties, and not in a single English lesson did we ever study, or were we ever told about H.E. Bates.
ReplyDeleteIt's a huge shame considering how much of our locality features in his books, in fact much of the action in 'The Feast Of July' takes place in and around the street I grew up in.
Too many in(n)s??!