It eventually was discovered by Bob Ogley and published during 1994 with the title Flying Bombs over England. He was also commissioned by the Air Ministry to write The Battle of the Flying Bomb, but because of various disagreements within the government, it was cancelled, and then publication was banned for 30 years.
After a posting to the Far East, this was followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain in 1947 and The Jacaranda Tree, and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France. Later they were published in book form as The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories and How Sleep the Brave and Other Stories. The stories were published originally in the News Chronicle with the pseudonym "Flying Officer X". The Air Ministry realised that it might create more favorable public sentiment by emphasizing stories about the people fighting the war, rather than facts. More novels, collections of short stories, essays, and articles followed, but did not pay well.ĭuring World War II, he was commissioned into the Royal Air Force solely to write short stories. This was sent to, and rejected by, eight or nine publishers until Jonathan Cape accepted it on the advice of its respected Reader, Edward Garnett. At this time, he was working briefly for the local newspaper in Wellingborough, a job which he hated, and then later at a local shoe-making warehouse, where he had time to write in fact the whole of this first novel was written there. There, late at night, he saw a light burning in a cottage window and it was this that triggered the story.
Both have been reprinted numerous times.īates discarded his first novel, written when he was in his late teenage years, but his second, and the first to be published, The Two Sisters, was inspired by one of his midnight walks, which took him to the small village of Farndish. His love for the countryside is exemplified in two volumes of essays, Through the Woods and Down the River. Bates was partial to taking long walks around the Northamptonshire countryside and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Typically, Bates' best-known works describe, often in bucolic, romanticised terms, life in the English countryside, particularly the Midlands including his native Northamptonshire and the 'Garden of England', Kent, the setting for The Darling Buds of May. After the end of school, he worked as a reporter and a warehouse clerk. Bates was born on in Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School.
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