Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Reviewed by Juliet England

First published almost 75 years ago, and as fresh and as eminently readable now as it was then, Cold Comfort Farm will inspire envy in anyone who has ever contemplated writing a comic novel.

For once, I find myself agreeing with Julie Burchill, who describes it as the funniest novel ever written. Surely the greatest test of a book’s humour is its lack of suitability for reading in public, and this work had me snorting on trains and drawing unwelcome attention from colleagues as I guffawed over it at lunchtime.

The plot centres around the plucky but work-shy heroine Flora Poste, orphaned at 20, who, having considered all the options for family members she could go and live with, plumps for the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, near the wonderfully named fictional Sussex village of Howling.

She finds the farm a shambolically run enterprise, headed by Flora’s cousins Judith and Amos Starkadder, the latter a hellfire preacher at the nearby Church of the Quivering Brethren.

The couple, their sons Reuben and the over-sexed Seth, are joined by a whole string of other cousins and farm labourers, most notably the ancient farmhand Adam Lambsbreath. They are presided over by Ada Doom, Judith's mother, a reclusive, miserly widow, and owner of Cold Comfort, who, famously, complains unrelentlingly of the time she saw “something nasty in the woodshed" when she was a girl. (We never find out what that was, exactly, and it may be that even Gibbons herself never knew, but it runs throughout as a leitmotif and central gag.)

Using her wits and cool-headed citydwelling sophistication, Flora wastes no time in finding ways of helping all the Starkadders to find ways of leaving the farm to start new, more fruitful lives elsewhere, working on all the characters to find solutions as though they were crossword puzzles. Gibbons is adept at getting the reader to sympathise with her heroine, and to cheer her on in her endeavours almost from the first page.

Language aficionados in particular will love this book. The characters speak in rural dialect that is full of delights – for example words like clettering (an impractical method used by Adam for washing dishes, which involves scraping them with a dry twig.) And what’s not to love about a bull called Big Business, not to mention the names Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, in which the farm’s cows rejoice?

As with all good traditional comedies, Cold Comfort Farm ends with a wedding (more than one, in fact), and Flora is then able to return to London, her job done.

This novel deserves its standing as a genuine classic. I first read it 20 years ago, too young to appreciate its deft humour and craftsmanship. So I was glad to have the chance to rediscover its delights recently, thanks to a book group.

Cold Comfort Farm is recognisably a parody, of the doom-laden rural works of the early twentieth century, most notably those by Mary Webb and DH Lawrence. But the satire is gentle and knowing throughout, rather than deeply biting.

But you don’t have to read any of the works it parodies to enjoy this novel. Sheer joy from first page to the last.