Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons, UK, 1932
Flora Poste at 19 has had a benevolent upbringing, wanting for nothing, and when her parents die in the Spanish ‘flu, leaving her a yearly sum that is (unfortunately) much less than she had anticipated, she decides that she needs to be able to continue with a gentle existence without (need I add) the alarming prospect of having to work for a living. Forthwith she writes to several distant relations, hoping that one of them will offer her board and lodging, at least for the immediate future. A couple of them reply politely but evasively, and then a fairly grubby letter arrives from a cousin, one of the Starkadders living at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex: she is more than welcome to stay with them.
Of course, the very name – Cold Comfort Farm – sums up the place. It is rundown and backward. The people living there (Flora’s relations) are dirty, ignorant and completely without ambition, all of them under the thumb of the tyrannical Aunt Ada Doom. When Flora has re-collected herself, she decides that something needs to be done for the farm and for the Starkadders who live there, and that she is the person who is going to do it.
While Gibbons is doubtlessly making a ‘tongue-in-cheek’ comment on the politically correct, sanitised rural novels that were very much in vogue at the time (D.H.Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen and others), she is also, intentionally or otherwise, illuminating the class structure that still exists in present-day England.
The characters are all eccentric (in their own way): 90-year-old Adam with his four cows, Judith with her tears and many photos of her son Seth, Seth with his overly active sex-drive, Elfine with her poetry, Amos with his religion and his need to impart it to the world, and Aunt Ada, who saw something horrible in the woodshed more than sixty years ago.
It is soon made totally clear for Flora that ‘there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort’, and Flora sets out to turn this belief on its head, for the good of all. Well written with believable characters, Cold Comfort Farm is often delightfully funny while at all times, perceptive and intelligent. This is definitely a book that can be enjoyed and even re-read.