Cold Comfort Farm (3 page)

In the end, the most important aspect of
Cold Comfort Farm
is how modern it is. The narrative voice is direct, the plot is simple, the comedy is completely undamaged by the passage of time, and the literary playfulness is awesome. Meanwhile, its underlying serious point about people invoking childhood misery – ‘I saw something nasty in the woodshed!’ – and using it as a means to exempt them from normal life, and have power over their families, is utterly relevant to the modern world, in which Dave Pelzer is patron saint of victimhood, and the genre now has its own special section in the bookshops. Reggie Oliver called the biography of his aunt
Out of the Woodshed
for a reason: Stella once wrote that she had not only created the woodshed, but was ‘practically born in the place’. But fortunately, she added, ‘The door happened to be ajar.’
⁶
In the biography, Oliver recalls with pleasure a stage production of
Cold Comfort Farm
in which the biggest laugh went to the moment when the Hollywood producer, Mr Neck, is removing Seth from the farm, and runs into Aunt Ada Doom. ‘I saw
something nasty in the woodshed!’ she cries. ‘Did it see you?’ he asks.

Lynne Truss

NOTES

1
. Reggie Oliver,
Out of the Woodshed: The Life of Stella Gibbons
(London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 37.

2
. Ibid., p. 85.

3
. Ibid., p. 123.

4
. Faye Hammill, ‘Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars’,
Modern Fiction Studies
47: 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 831–54.

5
. Oliver,
Out of the Woodshed
, p. 129.

6
. Ibid., epigraph.

This Penguin Classics volume of
Cold Comfort Farm
has been set from the Allen Lane edition of 1938. It had first been published by Longman’s in 1932.

Some minor housestyling to match Classics style has been applied. For punctuation, double quotation marks have been made singles (with doubles inside these as needed); un-spaced em-dashes have become spaced en-dashes and 2-em dashes are em-dashes; no full stop after personal titles (Mr, Mrs, Dr, St) or names at the end of letters; four-dot ellipsis become three; end punctuation follows end quotation marks when not a complete sentence or dialogue (e.g. pp. 11 l.1 and 12 l.33). For spelling, -is- words become -iz- (e.g., realize); hyphenated words now spelled as one (to-night, to-day, tomorrow, good-night, good-bye) are modernized but ‘good-morning’ becomes two words; ‘judgment’ becomes ‘judgement’; and the ligature is removed (‘Phœbe’ becomes ‘Phoebe’). A very few minor errors have been corrected: two commas removed from lists before ‘and’; ‘cow-shed’ standardized to ‘cowshed’ twice; the comma added after a house number twice and the hyphen to ‘Hawk-Monitor’ once. All else has been left in Stella Gibbons’s inimitable style.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

                           –M
ANSFIELD
P
ARK
.

NOTE

The action of the story takes place in the near future.

To
ALLAN AND INA

T
O
A
NTHONY
P
OOKWORTHY
, E
SQ
., A.B.S., L.L.R.

M
Y DEAR
T
ONY
,

It is with something more than the natural deference of a tyro at the loveliest, most arduous and perverse of the arts in the presence of a master-craftsman that I lay this book before you. You know (none better) the joys of the clean hearth and the rigour of the game. But perhaps I may be permitted to take this opportunity of explaining to you, a little more fully than I have hitherto hinted, something of the disabilities under which I have laboured to produce the pages now open beneath your hand.

As you know, I have spent some ten years of my creative life in the meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices. God alone knows what the effect has been on my output of pure literature; I dare not think too much about it – even now. There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.

The effect of these locust years on my style (if I may lay claim to that lovely quality in the presence of a writer whose grave and lucid prose has permanently enriched our literature) has been perhaps even more serious.

The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were
not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

Far be it from me to pretend that the following pages achieve what first burned in my mind with pure lambency ten years ago. Which of us does? But the thing’s done!
Ecco! É finito!
And such as it is, and for what it is worth, it is yours.

You see, Tony, I have a debt to pay. Your books have been something more to me, in the last ten years, than books. They have been springs of refreshment, loafings for the soul, eyes in the dark. They have given me (in the midst of the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices) joy. It is just possible that it was not quite the kind of joy you intended them to give, for which of us is infallible? But it was joy all right.

I must confess, too, that I have more than once hesitated before the thought of trying to repay some fraction of my debt to you by offering you a book that was meant to be … funny.

For your own books are not … funny. They are records of intense spiritual struggles, staged in the wild setting of mere, berg or fen. Your characters are ageless and elemental beings, tossed like straws on the seas of passion. You paint Nature at her rawest, in man and in landscapes. The only beauty that lights your pages is the grave peace of fulfilled passion, and the ripe humour that lies over your minor characters like a mellow light. You can paint everyday domestic tragedies (are not the entire first hundred pages of ‘The Fulfilment of Martin Hoare’ a masterly analysis of a bilious attack?) as vividly as you paint soul cataclysms. Shall I ever forget Mattie Elginbrod? I shall not. Your books are more like thunderstorms than books. I can only say, in all simplicity, ‘Thank you, Tony.’

But funny … No.

However, I am sure you are big enough, in every sense of the word, to forgive my book its imperfections.

And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and
paintings by men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to passages in novels.

It ought to help the reviewers, too.

Talking of men of genius, what a constellation burns in our midst at the moment! Even to a tyro as unpractised as myself, who has spent the best creative years of her life in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices, there is some consolation, some sudden exaltation into a serener and more ardent air, in subscribing herself,

Ever, my dear Tony,                  

Your grateful debtor,          

S
TELLA
G
IBBONS
     

W
ATFORD
.

L
YONS
’ C
ORNER
H
OUSE
.

B
OULOGNE-SUR
-M
ER
.

January
1931
–
February
1932
.

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

Her father had always been spoken of as a wealthy man, but on his death his executors were disconcerted to find him a poor one. After death duties had been paid and the demands of creditors satisfied, his child was left with an income of one hundred pounds a year, and no property.

Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.

She decided, therefore, to stay with a friend, a Mrs Smiling, at her house in Lambeth until she could decide where to bestow herself and her hundred pounds a year.

The death of her parents did not cause Flora much grief, for she had barely known them. They were addicted to travel, and spent only a month or so of each year in England. Flora, from her tenth year, had passed her school holidays at the house of Mrs Smiling’s mother; and when Mrs Smiling married, Flora spent them at her friend’s house instead. It was therefore with the feelings of one who returns home that she entered the
precincts of Lambeth upon a gloomy afternoon in February, a fortnight after her father’s funeral.

Mrs Smiling was fortunate in that she had inherited house property in Lambeth before the rents in that district soared to ludicrous heights, following the tide of fashion as it swung away from Mayfair to the other side of the river, and the stone parapets bordering the Thames became, as a consequence, the sauntering ground of Argentinian women and their bullterriers. Her husband (she was a widow) had owned three houses in Lambeth which he had bequeathed to her. One, in Mouse Place, was the pleasantest of the three, and faced with its shell fanlight the changing Thames; here Mrs Smiling lived, while of the other two, one had been pulled down and a garage perpetrated upon its site, and the third, which was too small and inconvenient for any other purpose, had been made into the Old Diplomacy Club.

The white porcelain geraniums which hung in baskets from the little iron balconies of 1, Mouse Place, did much to cheer Flora’s spirits as her taxi stopped before its door.

Turning from the taxi to the house, she saw that the door had already been opened by Mrs Smiling’s butler, Sneller, who was looking down upon her with dim approval. He was, she reflected, almost
rudely
like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.

Mrs Smiling was awaiting her in the drawing-room overlooking the river. She was a small Irishwoman of twenty-six years, with a fair complexion, large grey eyes and a little crooked nose. She had two interests in life. One was the imposing of reason and moderation into the bosoms of some fifteen gentlemen of birth and fortune who were madly in love with her, and who had flown to such remote places as the Jhonsong La, Lake M’Luba-M’Luba and the Kwanhattons because of her refusal to marry them. She wrote to them all once a week, and they (as her friends knew to their cost, for she was for ever reading aloud long, boring bits from their letters) wrote to her.

These gentlemen, because of the hard work they did in savage foreign parts and of their devotion to Mrs Smiling, were known
collectively as ‘Mary’s Pioneers-O’, a quotation from the spirited poem by Walt Whitman.

Mrs Smiling’s second interest was her collection of brassières, and her search for a perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.

She was an authority on the cut, fit, colour, construction and proper functioning of brassières; and her friends had learned that her interest, even in moments of extreme emotional or physical distress, could be aroused and her composure restored by the hasty utterance of the phrase:

‘I saw a brassière today, Mary, that would have interested you …’

Mrs Smiling’s character was firm and her tastes civilized. Her method of dealing with wayward human nature when it insisted on obtruding its grossness upon her scheme of life was short and effective; she pretended things were not so: and usually, after a time, they were not. Christian Science is perhaps a larger organization, but seldom so successful.

‘Of
course
, if you
encourage
people to think they’re messy, they
will
be messy,’ was one of Mrs Smiling’s favourite maxims. Another was, ‘
Nonsense
, Flora. You
imagine
things.’

Yet Mrs Smiling herself was not without the softer graces of imagination.

‘Well, darling,’ said Mrs Smiling – and Flora, who was tall, bent and kissed her cheek – ‘will you have tea, or a cocktail?’

Flora said that she would have tea. She folded her gloves and put her coat over the back of a chair, and took the tea and a cinnamon wafer.

‘Was the funeral awful?’ enquired Mrs Smiling. She knew that Mr Poste, that large man who had been serious about games and contemptuous of the arts, was not regretted by his child. Nor was Mrs Poste, who had wished people to live beautiful lives and yet be ladies and gentlemen.

Flora replied that it had been horrid. She added that she was bound to say all the older relatives seemed to have enjoyed it no end.

‘Did any of them ask you to go and live with them? I meant
to warn you about that. Relatives are always wanting you to go and live with them,’ said Mrs Smiling.

‘No. Remember, Mary, I have only a hundred pounds a year now; and I cannot play Bridge.’

‘Bridge? What is that?’ enquired Mrs Smiling, glancing vaguely out of the window at the river. ‘What curious ways people have of passing their time, to be sure. I think you are very fortunate, darling, to have got through all those dreadful years at school and college, where you had to play all those games, without getting to like them yourself. How did you manage it?’