Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons began her writing career as a journalist in the late 1920s with spells at the Evening Standard and The Lady, reviewing books for the latter and getting something of a reputation as a snarky reviewer. One genre that seemed to particularly irritate her were the then fashionable rural romances, known as 'loam and lovechild' stories, featuring purple prose and overblown plots about love amidst the harsh lives of the simple working folk down on the farm.

For her first (and best known) novel, she created the character of Flora Poste an infuriatingly chipper young gel from London, recently orphaned and wondering what to do with her life given that she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She writes to all of her various relatives, before settling on visiting the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, who seem to have owed an unspecified obligation to her late father.


The initial impressions are not promising - the farmhouse is as bleak as the name and the labour is back breaking and barely profitable. The Starkadders are an eccentric family, to say the least, from Judith (Flora's cousin) and husband Amos (a hellfire preacher), their sons Seth and Reuben (who one imagines spend their live striding around shirtless), Elfine (who lives up to her name) and various other half-brothers, distant relatives and aged farm hands. Most ominous of all is the rarely seen family matriarch Ada Doom, who spends most of her time hidden away in her room complaining of once having seen 'something nasty in the woodshed' that has evidently left her scarred for life. All of them seem to relish the misery of living on the farm scratching a living by scranletting two hundred furrows or clettering the dirty dishes with a twig.

Flora soon settles in and briskly sets about interfering in their lives with a view to improving their respective lots and maybe finding out what the debt incurred to her father might have been. This ranges from offering unsolicited advice on contraception to fecund farm maids, buying a dish mop to make washing up easier than using twigs, attending a hellfire sermon, to arranging a suitable wedding match for Elfine instead of the unpromising sounding cousin Urk. It becomes clear that she is doing this out of a kind hearted nature rather than any ulterior motive, without any thought for her own gain.

Gibbons writes in a nicely observed parody of the florid style of writers like DH Lawrence with scarcely hidden sexual undertones - to quote a passage:

The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his …

She also invents many fictitious terms for rural matters - scranletting, clettering (with a clettering stick), the ubiquitous weed sukebind and the salacious sounding activity of mollocking which usually results in the unplanned pregnancy of some or other unfortunate maiden. Most of the rural characters speak in the sort of accent described by Archers script writers as 'Mummerset' and I imagine that such comedy stalwarts as Joe Grundy and Walter Gabriel would have felt right at home down on Cold Comfort Farm.

The overall effect is generally very funny, albeit occasionally hard going to read involving checking odd looking words with the kindle dictionary to see if they are real or not. Oddly enough this book is technically science fiction - written in 1932 but set some years in the future from that point with personal planes and video phones.