Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics)

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In Cold Comfort Farm, Flora Poste is orphaned as a 20-year-old woman. When her friend suggests that she get a job, she replies that she would rather bum off her unknown relations. Then, when Flora writes to her relatives, she has certain expectations about her accommodations—she wants her own room and someone to meet her at the train. Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (actually a collection of short stories, of which Christmas was the first) was published in 1940. It is a prequel of sorts, set before Flora's arrival at the farm, and is a parody of a typical family Christmas. [13]

How d’ye do, Aunt Ada?” said Flora, pleasantly, putting out her hand. But Aunt Ada made no effort to take it … and observed in a low toneless voice: ”I saw something nasty in the woodshed”’ ”Mother … it’s Judith. I have brought Flora Poste to see you … ” ”Nay – I saw something nasty in the woodshed”, said Aunt Ada Doom, fretfully moving her great head from side to side. ‘Twas a burning noonday, sixty-nine years ago. And me no bigger than a titty-wren. And I saw something … ”’ (p. 171) Gibbons also displays a tender side. There is real sadness in some of her characters, instead of deliberately heightened rural dolour – and it winds up as a love story that would please Jane Austen.

Judith Starkadder: Amos’s wife whose main mission in life appeared to be moping around and being depressed. The phrase under her portrait on the front cover was “leave her to her misery”. Well, just kidding. All of my trying-to-move-in-and-permanently-inhabit-a-fictional-world energies are currently taken up by the film Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again (2018). I am really tryna become Lily James as a young Meryl Streep Donna. I am purely certain that I could handle the whole Sam situation much better and end up with him in the end but also still get with Harry and Bill in the interval. When young socialite Flora Poste is orphaned, she decides to move to her cousin Judith Starkadder’s farm in Sussex where her Aunt Ada Doom, who saw “something nasty in the woodshed” as a girl and has not been right in the head ever since, rules over the family with an iron hand, and everyone seems to live in abject misery. She immediately decides to help her relatives escape their squalid and dreary existence by “tidying up” the place and its inhabitants. Insistent Appellation: Everyone at Cold Comfort refers to Flora as "Robert Poste's child." Eventually she's forced to call herself that, as Aunt Ada doesn't know her by any other name.

But Flora is a tidy person: "Unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes." So she promptly sets about tidying things - tidying things for Hardyan rake Seth, Pygmalion-ready Elfine, brimstone-breathing Amos, and even for poor Aunt Ada Doom (name your cat that) who saw something nasty in the woodshed*, which does beg the question, has there ever been anything in a woodshed that was not nasty? Don't say wood. Leave wood in a woodshed for ten minutes and it's teeming with centipedes. Cold Comfort Farm overshadows most other novels from the 20th century too, so it doesn't seem entirely unfair that it should have had a similar effect on the rest of Gibbons' oeuvre. But reading about her uneasy relationship with this book – and her fondness for her others – piqued my curiosity, and so I thought I'd look at a few more things she's written.But Flora loves nothing better than to organise other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and ruthless parody of rural melodramas and purple prose,Cold Comfort Farmis one of the best-loved comic novels of all time. There were a number of times while reading that I laughed out loud. So so funny how those people living on the farm behaved and the interactions between them and Flora. I recommend this book for a light enjoyable read to get away from your cares of the world. Greenberg, Jonathan (15 September 2011). Modernism, Satire and the Novel. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-50151-4. For, if she lived at Cold Comfort as a guest, it would be unpardonable impertinence were she to interfere with the family's mode of living; but if she were paying her way, she could interfere as much as she pleased."

The only parts that I liked were Ada Doom was in her room, and the first portion of the book made me laugh out loud. Adam Lambsbreath, the ninety-year-old farmhand, meets Flora at the station. He tells Flora that a curse on Cold Comfort Farm prevents it from flourishing and any of the family from leaving. Flora suspects, however, that Mrs. Ada Doom Starkadder, her deceased mother’s sister, is the real curse. Aunt Ada Doom stays in her room and rules the family with a will of iron. She has not left the farm in twenty years. Appalled by the condition of the farm and by the many violent and brooding Starkadders, Flora determines to tidy up life at Cold Comfort Farm. The psychiatrist immediately recognises this situation, and I have been relying on Aunt Ada Doom for many years for an example of traumatic fallacy. Spread by post-war Hollywood, owing something to battle neurosis and more to psychoanalysis in the USA, the notion that all long-standing psychiatric symptoms must have been initiated by a traumatic incident in early childhood is so embedded in our culture that most patients, at least those with anxiety symptoms, take it for granted. Behind their distress, their language reveals the plea to find the ‘real’ cause, after which everything will magically improve. It may also relate to the depressive nature of some symptoms, that the sufferer is in some way bad in their essence, with their own original sin, and throws an emphasis on the past. It also reveals the passive and pessimistic nature of these patients, since the past cannot be changed.

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My favorite parts of the book are when Flora decides to give her wispy, poetry-loving cousin Elfine a makeover that improves her love life, and when Flora helps her cousin Seth become a movie star. Flora even comes up with the perfect way of dealing with her Aunt Ada, thanks to a well-timed Jane Austen quote. As always I enjoyed the ‘Inquisitor clues’ and was happy to be led round the grid in a particular way according to what clues I could solve. I ended with the six words in the 7 x 3 sector that included SCRAWNY, NEWCOME and the two blank cells. Looking on the Aunt Ada Doom bright side, some of the stories are awful. One in particular stinks: The Murder Mark contains the flimsiest denouement to a story about killing I've encountered for a long while, as well as one that is foreshadowed with all the subtlety of these drunk elephants.

Cold Comfort Farm is the amusing story of Flora Poste, a sensible young woman from London who goes to live with relatives in Sussex, the eccentric Starkadders. Last week, I described Cold Comfort Farm as a virtuoso send-up of early 20th century "loam and love child" books. But this isn't how most people read it. Mary Webb and friends are increasingly distant memories, after all, and you don't need to read a parody to see the funny side of DH Lawrence's novels. There are other reasons Cold Comfort Farm endures, as a contributor called Dowland pointed out: arts Australia & New Zealand etymology French/English linguistics literature media music public affairs religion symbolisms United Kingdom & Ireland USA & Canada Main Tags animals Australia Christianity dictionaries drinks economics food human body Ireland judicial Latin military newspapers & magazines phrases politics slang sports & games theatre United Kingdom USA links Amos Starkadder: patriarch of the family at the farm who was deeply religious and believed everybody was going to hell and it was his mission to preach this inside and outside the house. In his fire-and-brimstone rants, he described the flames of hell, and said that normally when you get a burn putting butter on it would help lessen the pain but “there’ll be no butter in hell!”I do recommend the film. And the book. Rarely do I see a film much better than a really good book, but this is it. John Schlesinger and Stella Gibbons, author and director, geniuses both. Pretty in Mink: Elfine has a short fur cape. Aunt Ada wears a fur trimmed coat, in the style of Queen Mary, when she goes on a trip. Miss Stella Gibbons’s novel has been most favourably reviewed. It is a well-sustained parody of the Loam-and-Love-child school of fiction. The Northern-Irish singer-songwriter Neil Hannon (born 1970) used the phrase something in the woodshed in Something for the Weekend (1996), which he interpreted with his band, the Divine Comedy: