Cold Comfort Farm Read Free

advised readers (among other things) on the best way to wear a scarf, and started noticing the fashion for lurid rural novels.
    From the
Evening Standard
, she moved in 1930 to
The Lady
to ‘one plum of a job’, where she wrote on an array of subjectsand controlled the books page. The continuing fashion for rural novels started to get annoying. Her brief summaries of these books are gems. Take
Gay Agony
by H. A. Manhood. ‘This is about a young man called Micah born in a place called Thrust,’ wrote Stella. Edward Charles’s
Sand and the Blue Moss
evidently contained the tediously repetitive Lawrentian passage:
    ‘Go out, my lad – go out, my lad – turn your face to the sun and when it’s brown and the girls can love you, love them all, and the sun be with you. They’ll have children every one, and bless you and love you. They’ll have children and bless you and love you so long as you leave ’em alone in the sun – in the sun.’ 2
    To which Stella added, tartly, ‘We are only too willing to leave ’em alone.’
    *
    Masterpieces are hard to account for, of course. Even armed with some understanding of Stella Gibbons’s background, sensibility and skill, we can’t explain away the genius of
Cold Comfort Farm
. For its author, the astonishing impact of her first book was a mixed blessing. Few people nowadays know that she wrote anything else; in fact, they assume that she wrote one perfect comic novel and then just retired to prune roses. Reggie Oliver tells us that his aunt preferred not to name the book aloud, and in later life would refer to it as either ‘That Book’ or ‘You Know What’, or would just hum the words as ‘Hmm, Hmm-Hmm, Hmm’. In 1966, she wrote an essay, ‘Genesis of a Novel’, in
Punch
, and likened
Cold Comfort Farm
to ‘some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but who is often an embarrassment and a bore; skipping about, and reminding you of the days when you were a bright young thing. To him, and to his admirers, you have never grown up … The old monster has also overlain all my other books, and if I do happen to glance at him occasionally, I am filled by an incredulous wonder that I could once have been so light-hearted – but so light-hearted.’ 3
    It’s the light-heartedness that is perhaps the key. But it is also the sheer comic confidence of the authorial voice that makes this book a joy.
    Judith’s breath came in long shudders. She thrust her arms deeper into her shawl. The porridge gave an ominous, leering heave; it might almost have been endowed with life, so uncannily did its movements keep pace with the human passions that throbbed above it. ( Chapter III )
    The trout-sperm in the muddy hollow under Nettle Flitch Weir were agitated, and well they might be. The long screams of the hunting owls tore across the night, scarlet lines on black. In the pauses, every ten minutes, they mated. It seemed chaotic, but it was more methodically arranged than you might think. ( Chapter IV )
    Adam laughed: a strange sound like the whickering snicker of a teazle in anger. ( Chapter V )
    Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists call a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake. ( Chapter VI )
    A thin wind snivelled among the rotting stacks of Cold Comfort, spreading itself in a sheet of flowing sound across the mossed tiles. Darkness whined with the soundless urge of growth in the hedges, but that did not help any. ( Chapter XVI )
    This is fabulous, unparalleled stuff. Of all the glories above, it’s the throwaway phrase ‘and well they might be’ in the bit about the agitated trout-sperm that cracks me up each time. I can’t explain it. But I do know that it’s because she was herself such a good, detailed descriptive writer – the ‘long’ screams of the owls; the mossed tiles – that Stella Gibbons earned the right to draw the line between the pure and