Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm was Stella Gibbons’ first novel and is the only one by her that most people have heard of. It is the story of Flora Poste, a young woman whose parents have recently died. As she has only £100 a year to live on, she decides to stay with some of her relatives. After rejecting some relatives who expect her to share a room, and an old uncle who lives too far from anywhere, she decides to live with the Starkadders on their farm in Sussex. On arrival she finds the family far from satisfactory and decides to make some changes.

Cold Comfort Farm was written as a parody of the rural genre that was popular at the time it was published. The Starkadders speak in a strange made-up dialect: Adam ‘cletters’ the dishes, Reuben says he ‘scranleted’ two hundred furrows, and there are frequent references to a flower called sukebind (possibly a cross between honeysuckle and bindweed). The farm is run in a strange way, too. The bull is always kept in the barn, till Flora takes it on herself to let him out into the pasture. There’s a well that is always being built, but never completed. And the cows, Aimless, Feckless, Graceless and Pointless, keep losing bits of their anatomy – a leg or a hoof, for example.

At the start of the book there’s a note: ‘The action of the story takes place in the near future’. Gibbons had a vision of the future that didn’t come about. She foresaw video-phones long before the technology existed, and air-taxis (one lands in the pasture of Cold Comfort Farm), which have yet to exist. She mentions an Anglo-Nicaraguan war that ‘happened’ in 1946, so the book is probably set in the late 1940s or early 1950s. (It was written in 1932.)

You could see Flora Poste as an interfering busybody, but the changes she makes to Cold Comfort Farm and its residents are well-intentioned and arguably necessary. In some cases she makes suggestions, in others she just does as she sees fit. In every case there’s an improvement, and not just from Flora’s point of view. Even old Aunt Ada Doom is drawn from her self-imposed confinement.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Cold Comfort Farm as it sounded like a very strange book. It is strange, in some ways, but I enjoyed it and will definitely read it again.

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