Mariette Larkin

Hers was the joyous family on a trip to Margate who inspired HE Bates to write The Darling Buds Of May. Now, for the first time, Marion Rogers reveals...

The sight of the family leaving the village shop in Kent was extraordinary. Six children and their parents, chatting noisily, each sucking on huge multicoloured ice creams and, at the same time, munching from bags of crisps. And then they all piled onto a ramshackle old lorry that had been painted an unmistakable electric blue.

The writer HE Bates, waiting for his wife to finish shopping in the same store, knew they were exactly what he’d been looking for. He’d been mulling the idea of writing a different book to the serious novels he was known for, and now he’d found a family he could dream up stories about.

‘A remarkable family,’ Bates later wrote about the people who inspired The Darling Buds Of May. ‘Father, a perky, sprightly character with dark side-burnings, Ma, a youngish handsome woman of enormous girth, wearing a bright salmon jumper and shaking with laughter like a jelly, and six children, the eldest of them a beautiful dark-haired girl of 20 or so.

‘As they piled into the lorry there was an air of gay and uninhibited abandon about it all. Wild laughter rang through the village street and the whole scene might have come out of Merrie England.’

The book about the rambunctious Larkins – wily Pop, food-loving Ma and their lovely daughter Mariette – was a hit around the world when it was published in 1958 and Bates went on to write another four novels about them. But it was only after the hit TV series based on the books which starred David Jason, Pam Ferris and Catherine Zeta-jones aired in 1991 that the Dell family who were the inspiration had an inkling that they’d been immortalised in print.

Now, with a new ITV adaptation airing on Sunday nights, Marion Rogers, 82, a great-grandmother of nine and the beautiful young daughter spotted that day by Bates, is speaking about the connection for the first time. ‘My mother Win’s favourite colour was blue and that’s why we painted the lorry that colour,’ recalls Marion. ‘And there certainly were a lot of us – there were 11 children altogether – although we rarely all went out together at the same time.

‘I loved the show The Darling Buds Of May and David Jason was a lot like my father William. He wasn’t like other dads – he was someone who lived on his wits. And just like Pop in the original show, Dad would keep cash rolled up and tied with an elastic band. As to whether I was the pretty young woman of the family, that is for others to say. I know I never looked like Catherine Zeta-jones!’

It was Marion’s younger brother David Dell who first realised his family may have been Bates’s inspiration, but it took several decades for him to piece it all together. A builder in his 30s, he’d enrolled on a course of evening classes in creative writing. The first essay he was set was about a childhood holiday, and David remembered his first trip to Margate in the family lorry, eating brightly coloured ice creams and packets of crisps, and the serious looking man waiting in his car who had stared at them and who they’d laughed at. The day burned bright in his memory.

He wrote the story for his class and thought nothing more of it. Ten years later he settled down to watch the new TV hit The Darling Buds Of May. It didn’t just feel like an era he remembered, but the people, and their lorry, all looked very familiar. So David started to research HE Bates to find out if there was a chance he could have come across the family while they were on one of their adventures.

And then he read about Bates’s recollection of the encounter outside a village shop, and was convinced the Dells were the family Bates had spotted. David wrote about it to his local paper. Inexplicably, they ignored him. It was only a decade later that he mentioned the story to one of his sisters. A local historian was informed, and the whole story became public.

There were six children there that day for the trip to Margate, including Marion who was one of the middle children. The four eldest were already

married (the fifth had died a few months after being born) – so Marion was the eldest that day, aged about 18. David was around seven or eight. ‘We did used to go to Margate in the lorry,’ recalls Marion. ‘We were such a big family we couldn’t get around in a car. My dad had put tarpaulin up as a roof and a mattress on the floor – Mum would have made sure it was comfortable – and off we’d go.’

At the time the family were living in Buckinghamshire on a farm. William had bought a house in the village and turned it into a shop where Marion worked. While it sold food produced on the farm, it also sold whatever he picked up on his travels. ‘He used to go to furniture sales and buy pieces,’ recalls Marion. ‘Sometimes there wasn’t room in the shop so he’d take it home and put it all on the lawn and people would come to see it.’

Despite her enormous brood, Win ruled the home and the kitchen with a firm but loving hand. ‘Mum always used to say that you only needed to hear two words from her; because no meant no and yes meant yes and there was no point nagging. She was the loveliest lady. Mum loved children and when she couldn’t have any more babies she started fostering. At one summer fete she won a prize for having the best kept family.’

Like Ma Larkin, she was also a brilliant cook. ‘She would make pies and all that, but her speciality was toffee, I can still smell it,’ laughs Marion. ‘She also made wine, which the neighbours would come and enjoy.’

By the time of the Margate trip, it’s likely that Marion was already in love. While Mariette falls for tax inspector Cedric ‘Charley’ Charlton, Marion met engineer John Rogers in a cinema queue and it was love at first sight. ‘He is the love of my life,’ she says. ‘From

the moment I saw him I wanted to marry him. We’ve had a lovely life; we had two sons, four grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.’

Just before the Margate trip, William bought a dilapidated hotel called Avoncliff in Wiltshire, and it was there that the story the Dells turned a bit

William left Win for another woman, who became his second wife, and barely saw his children for ten years. When

second wife died a decade later, he returned to Win. Marion was by then living in Poole. ‘I don’t want to upset myself by thinking about it,’ she admits. ‘It was hard on my mum but my dad came back and they remarried.’

Today seven of the Dell children survive and they talk to each other regularly on the phone. ‘If something happens in the family everyone knows about it within hours,’ says Marion. ‘We don’t get to see each other much but we do love each other.’

She is already a big fan of the new show. ‘It’s just lovely,’ she says. ‘I was getting a bit fed up with all the unpleasant things that are on the TV. This show is something you can have a little laugh to. The girl who plays Mariette is very good – they all are.

‘It was a very long time ago but it does feel like the Larkins have more money floating about than we had. It was quite a difficult, frugal time, but I don’t look back, only forward – what I do like doing is smiling.’

‘I never looked like Catherine Zeta-jones!’