I’ve been reading “Cold Comfort Farm” by Stella Gibbons. And Missy tagged me — several days ago, actually, with a book meme. So these two things go together, you see.
I’m supposed to:
1) Turn to page 123 of a book I’m reading.
Okay. Done.
2) And find the 5th sentence.
Wait a sec. Done.
3) Oh, and post it here. Okay. Here ’tis:
Her voice had a breathless, broken quality that suggested the fluty sexless timbre of a choir-boy’s notes (only choir-boys are seldom sexless, as many a harassed vicaress knows to her cost.)
Oh, I am in love with Stella Gibbons!
I fell in love with the movie Cold Comfort Farm several years ago, blabbed about it incessantly to anyone who’d listen, had one male friend, I remember, rent the movie and then complain about it to me, saying, “It was funnier watching you act it out,” thought slightly less of said male friend forever afterwards, and promptly put the movie into my regular rotation of Movies That Never Fail to Cheer Me, Tracey, Up.
I mean, look. You have Kate Beckinsale before repeated surgeries gave her all those sharp angles. She’s so lovely in this: soft and round and real. It was actually my first exposure to her and when I saw her in something a few years later — I don’t remember what — she was just so sparse and geometrical. I do remember gasping, though, and whispering to My Beloved, “Is that Kate Beckinsale from Cold Comfort Farm??” and then seconds later, “What have they DONE to her??” She was “cut” to look more like a star. And I guess it worked, but I SO prefer her earlier incarnation. Everything about it. Her pudgy nose. Her curvy shape. Her acting, even.
She plays Flora Poste, a young lady who “likes to make things tidy.” After the death of her parents, she receives offers of various appalling living arrangements from various appalling relatives. She chooses Cold Comfort Farm, where the situation with her relatives there — the Starkadders — sounds at least “interesting and appalling.”
So the sensible, cool-headed Flora marches headlong into the dung heap of eccentricity and backwardness that is her extended family at Cold Comfort Farm. They’re a rotting mess and she likes things tidy. Naturally, it’s the perfect project.
I mean, there’s poor old Adam, who cletters (um, washes) the dishes with a twig.
There’s Elfine, who wanders about the countryside in her green cloak like “a Pharisee of the woods.”
There’s Cousin Judith, gloomily obsessed with her son Seth — who’s only obsessed with the talkies.
There’s Cousin Amos (hilariously played by Ian McKellan in the movie), a preacher at The Church of the Quivering Brethren, who preaches hellfire, hellfire — nothing to cool that burnin’! — with the cheery reminder, “THERE’LL BE NO BUTTER IN HELL!!”
And then there’s Aunt Ada Doom, the wizened matriarch of this grim and smelly clan, who stays in her room — has for years and years — forever proclaiming she “saw something nasty in the woodshed” when she was a child. Um, 70 years ago, gammie. But still, she holds them all in thrall because of it.
So, you see, there’s a LOT to tidy up here.
This is all rambly, I know. But I’m gonna post an excerpt here from the book — because I am in love with Stella Gibbons, now. Her writing. The humor. Her descriptions. This excerpt — if you’re paying attention, just gets funnier and funnier. I keep rereading it — all because of the love I now have for a dead woman.
This is our first glimpse inside the head of Aunt Ada Doom (ellipses are the author’s, asterisks mine — my cuts are small, really just a couple sentences where she catalogs the entire family, name by name. I didn’t feel like typing it.):
Aunt Ada Doom sat in her room upstairs …. alone.
There was something almost symbolic in her solitude. She was the core, the matrix, the focusing point of the house …. and she was, like all cores, utterly alone. You never heard of two cores to a thing, did you? Well, then. Yet all the wandering waves of desire, passion, jealousy, lust, that throbbed through the house converged, web-like, upon her core-solitude. She felt herself to be a core …. and utterly, irrevocably alone.
The weakening winds of spring fawned against the old house. The old woman’s thoughts cowered in the hot room where she sat in solitude ….. She would not see her niece …. Keep her away ….
Make some excuse. Shut her out. She had been here a month and you had not seen her. She thought it strange, did she? She dropped hints that she would like to see you. You did not want to see her. You felt … you felt some strange emotion at the thought of her. You would not see her. Your thoughts wound slowly round the room like beasts rubbing against the drowsy walls. And outside the walls the winds rubbed like drowsy beasts. Half-way between the inside and outside walls, winds and thoughts were both drowsy. How enervating was the warm wind of the coming spring ….
When you were very small — so small that the lightest puff of breeze blew your little crinoline skirt over your head — you had seen something nasty in the woodshed.
You’d never forgotten it.
You’d never spoken of it to Mamma — but you’d remembered all your life.
That was what had made you …. different. That — what you had seen in the tool-shed — had mad your marriage a prolonged nightmare to you.
Somehow you had never bothered about what it had been like for your husband ….
That was shy you had brought your children into the world with loathing. Even now, when you were seventy-nine, you could never see a bicycle go past your bedroom window without a sick plunge at the apex of your stomach … in the bicycle shed you’d seen it, something nasty, when you were very small.
That was shy you stayed here in this room. You had been here for twenty years, ever since Judith had married and he husband had come to live on the farm. You had run away from the huge, terrifying world outside these four walls against which your thought rubbed themselves like drowsy yaks. Yes, that was what they were like. Yaks. Exactly like yaks.
Outside in the world there were potting-sheds where nasty things could happen. But nothing could happen here. You saw to that. None of your grandchildren might leave the farm. **** None of them must go out into the great dirty world where there were cowsheds in which nasty things could happen and be seen by little girls.
You had them all. You curved your old wrinkled hand into a brown shell, and laughed to yourself. You held them like that … in the hollow of your hand, as the Lord held Israel. None of them had any money except what you gave them. ***You had your heel on them all. They were your washpot, and you had cast your shoe out over them.
**** How like yaks were your drowsy thought, slowly winding round in the dim air of your quiet room. The winter landscape, breaking under spring’s pressure, beat urgently against the panes.
So you sat there, living from meal to meal (Monday, pork; Tuesday, beef; Wednesday, toad-in-the-hole; Thursday, mutton; Friday, veal; Saturday, curry; Sunday, cutlets). Sometimes …. you were so old …. how could you know? …. you dropped soup on yourself …. you whimpered …. Once Judith brought up the kidneys for your breakfast and they were too hot and they burned your tongue …. Day slipped into day, season into season, year into year. And you sat here, alone. You …. Cold Comfort Farm.
Sometimes Urk came to see you, the second child of your sister’s man by marriage, and told you that the farm was rotting away.
No matter. There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm.
Wow, that was quite the enjoyable rabbit trail.
Movies That Never Fail To Cheer Me…
I’ll take Notting Hill for $500, Alex.
Deliciously London.
I love that movie, too.
Give “Cold Comfort” a try sometime. I know it’s not for everyone; it’s a bit quirky, but I just love it.
I’ll take Big Fish for $800, please.
Oh, that was wonderful.
Hmm, it ate my earlier comment.
I concur on Beckinsale’s plastic surgery. She was so fresh and charming in “Much Ado About Nothing” – on my list – and now she’s just a cookie cutter.
Tracey, et al.- put Angela Thirkell on your to-read list. Kipling’s cousin, who wrote a lot of novels about an imaginary English county between the wars, during WWII and afterwards.