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A review by girlwithherheadinabook
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
4.0
As a departure from tradition, this year I have picked Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm as my December read rather than A Christmas Carol. I love Stella Gibbons and not just for the Starkadder-related shenanigans, I read Starlight last year over Hallowe’en and it alternately unnerved and enthralled me. Although only one of the stories relates to Cold Comfort Farm, the collection still has a cosy and familiar feel, perfect fare for nippy December mornings on the bus or indeed chilly evenings snuggled under a blanket. In many ways, this is a piece of social history; first published in 1940, the war is never mentioned even once but instead Gibbons’ stories celebrate the traditional values which were being fought for, underlining with each the importance of domestic harmony. With many of the entries first having been published in magazines such as The Lady, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm may appear hopelessly old-fashioned to some but for fans of 1940s literature, this is book is like a hot cup of tea on a cold day.
The flagship story features a prequel look at Cold Comfort Farm on Christmas Eve, with Adam going round in three of the mistress’ old shawls so that he can act as Father Christmas. I have always imagined Adam as a slightly more decrepit kind of Filch from Harry Potter, so the image of him doling out the swedes and turnips as Christmas presents to the indignant Starkadders is one to treasure. The episode of the Christmas pudding accompanied with the question of who found the coffin-nail in their portion (the marker of impending doom) also made me laugh out loud. Unlike the other stories however, this felt like something ‘for the fans’ – like a mini-movie accompaniment to a Pixar film rather than something that can stand up on its own merits. It was lovely though to glimpse the child Elfine and her budding attachment to Dick Hawk-Monitor – we know that Flora will soon be on her way to set everything to rights.
After leaving Howling, Sussex, the tone dials down from the uproarious to the more small-c conservative but each feature ties itself up with such neatness and completeness that it would be easy to miss the artistry at work. Having studied the film and literature of the 1940s at university, I already knew that this had been a true golden era for short fiction but there is one thing to have read something repeatedly, it is quite another to experience quite what that meant. In the era of the internet, there is a glut of short story material – literally anyone can get published (I include myself in this, I have been writing this for four years with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever), but while this is wonderful in many ways, it is nice to read short fiction from an era where editors practice more discernment. I have been sent several short story collections over the past few years and none have I enjoyed as much as this.
There is The Little Christmas Tree where the single woman suddenly gains a family on Christmas Day, To Love And To Cherish where an embittered wife delights in her preparations to leave her husband until she realises over the course of the day that she is unqualified to live alone and rushes to undo her decision, Poor, Poor Black Sheep where a man returning from abroad finds himself out of place back at home – each presents a character at the point of a dilemma and each finishes with a tightly sewn together conclusion. In several stories, Gibbons takes a young woman in a dilemma over how to catch/select a husband and while the ultimate conclusion may be predictable, there is a snugness and security in how she guides them to their happy resolution. In The Friend of Man, Pandora finally sees through the terribly charming man she has believed herself in love with, realising the blank selfishness that lies beneath – and so runs to the roughly-spoken man who wants to truly love her and make her happy. In another, a young librarian sees past her infatuation for a fictional author and reaches towards a true relationship. There are more. These are pure escapist stories written for a time when people had a lot of waiting around – on trains, in air raid shelters, on night shifts – there is little that is experimental here, what we have are hearty and satisfying narratives designed to reassure.
Of course, not all of the stories are happy. In Sisters, the kindly spinster Elaine Garfield tries to show charity to the affected Ivy, a teenage unwed mother, by giving her a job as maid. Ridiculed by the rest of the village for her sweetness, Elaine works hard to show kindness and to ignore Ivy’s irritating habits but upon reaching out to the girl about her own long-lost love affair, she finds herself instead branded with society’s disapproval. One of my personal favourites was More Than Kind, where second wife Lilian dreads the arrival of her husband’s loud ex-wife, come to stay in the house to visit the children. Despite being called-upon by Ian to be ‘civilised’ and modern about the arrangement, eventually old values rear up and Lilian determines to stand up for herself with a true battle cry for the middle class woman. I could practically hear Gibbons’ female readership cheering.
What really interested me was how the key dilemmas facing women remain constant. In The Walled Garden, Susie quietly laments how she has lost her old life of travelling far and wide upon marriage, until her husband reassures her responsibilities have simply shifted and that what she has is more satisfying. In Cake, the cold career-obsessed wife Jenny learns the error of her ways via an interview with an ageing Suffragette and decides to embrace domesticity. Having just finished I Call Myself A Feminist, it was interesting to see how alien these values were to the stout women of the 1940s; the term ‘feminist’ is acknowledged and dismissed in the same breath. Jenny looks down her nose at the militant suffragettes who had had no idea about ‘having their cake and eating it’ while her own generation had ‘man-jobs, man-salaries, and all the fun of being a woman’ – and then realises her mistake and runs back to her ne’er-do-well husband’s side where he strikes her and she proclaims herself to have deserved it. Cake was a story which I thought had dated too far – the incidence of violence in particular making it a discordant note in an otherwise lovely book. However, more than anything, this collection does read like a love letter from a passing era – the survivors of the fast 1920s are at a loss at how to cope in the earnest 1940s; the middle-aged louche Basil Merryn is appalled to be told by young girls to mend his ways’ or provide information on the dietary habits of Mexico while his peer ‘Pompey’ laughs in commiseration that ‘everyone’ is like that ‘these days’. Even in More Than Kind, Lilian may proclaim that she wishes to show ‘charity’, but deep down her values are those of her own mother’s ‘severe’ generation – the past is something to be clung to.
As a piece of social history alone, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is a book to treasure, but despite its vintage style and morality, many of the situations described are not so very different to those faced by women today, meaning that, for the most part, this is a buoyant short story anthology designed to bring a lift to anyone’s day – in short it is an ideal gift for Christmas!
For my full review: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2015/12/review-christmas-at-cold-comfort-farm-and-other-stories-stella-gibbons.html
The flagship story features a prequel look at Cold Comfort Farm on Christmas Eve, with Adam going round in three of the mistress’ old shawls so that he can act as Father Christmas. I have always imagined Adam as a slightly more decrepit kind of Filch from Harry Potter, so the image of him doling out the swedes and turnips as Christmas presents to the indignant Starkadders is one to treasure. The episode of the Christmas pudding accompanied with the question of who found the coffin-nail in their portion (the marker of impending doom) also made me laugh out loud. Unlike the other stories however, this felt like something ‘for the fans’ – like a mini-movie accompaniment to a Pixar film rather than something that can stand up on its own merits. It was lovely though to glimpse the child Elfine and her budding attachment to Dick Hawk-Monitor – we know that Flora will soon be on her way to set everything to rights.
After leaving Howling, Sussex, the tone dials down from the uproarious to the more small-c conservative but each feature ties itself up with such neatness and completeness that it would be easy to miss the artistry at work. Having studied the film and literature of the 1940s at university, I already knew that this had been a true golden era for short fiction but there is one thing to have read something repeatedly, it is quite another to experience quite what that meant. In the era of the internet, there is a glut of short story material – literally anyone can get published (I include myself in this, I have been writing this for four years with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever), but while this is wonderful in many ways, it is nice to read short fiction from an era where editors practice more discernment. I have been sent several short story collections over the past few years and none have I enjoyed as much as this.
There is The Little Christmas Tree where the single woman suddenly gains a family on Christmas Day, To Love And To Cherish where an embittered wife delights in her preparations to leave her husband until she realises over the course of the day that she is unqualified to live alone and rushes to undo her decision, Poor, Poor Black Sheep where a man returning from abroad finds himself out of place back at home – each presents a character at the point of a dilemma and each finishes with a tightly sewn together conclusion. In several stories, Gibbons takes a young woman in a dilemma over how to catch/select a husband and while the ultimate conclusion may be predictable, there is a snugness and security in how she guides them to their happy resolution. In The Friend of Man, Pandora finally sees through the terribly charming man she has believed herself in love with, realising the blank selfishness that lies beneath – and so runs to the roughly-spoken man who wants to truly love her and make her happy. In another, a young librarian sees past her infatuation for a fictional author and reaches towards a true relationship. There are more. These are pure escapist stories written for a time when people had a lot of waiting around – on trains, in air raid shelters, on night shifts – there is little that is experimental here, what we have are hearty and satisfying narratives designed to reassure.
Of course, not all of the stories are happy. In Sisters, the kindly spinster Elaine Garfield tries to show charity to the affected Ivy, a teenage unwed mother, by giving her a job as maid. Ridiculed by the rest of the village for her sweetness, Elaine works hard to show kindness and to ignore Ivy’s irritating habits but upon reaching out to the girl about her own long-lost love affair, she finds herself instead branded with society’s disapproval. One of my personal favourites was More Than Kind, where second wife Lilian dreads the arrival of her husband’s loud ex-wife, come to stay in the house to visit the children. Despite being called-upon by Ian to be ‘civilised’ and modern about the arrangement, eventually old values rear up and Lilian determines to stand up for herself with a true battle cry for the middle class woman. I could practically hear Gibbons’ female readership cheering.
What really interested me was how the key dilemmas facing women remain constant. In The Walled Garden, Susie quietly laments how she has lost her old life of travelling far and wide upon marriage, until her husband reassures her responsibilities have simply shifted and that what she has is more satisfying. In Cake, the cold career-obsessed wife Jenny learns the error of her ways via an interview with an ageing Suffragette and decides to embrace domesticity. Having just finished I Call Myself A Feminist, it was interesting to see how alien these values were to the stout women of the 1940s; the term ‘feminist’ is acknowledged and dismissed in the same breath. Jenny looks down her nose at the militant suffragettes who had had no idea about ‘having their cake and eating it’ while her own generation had ‘man-jobs, man-salaries, and all the fun of being a woman’ – and then realises her mistake and runs back to her ne’er-do-well husband’s side where he strikes her and she proclaims herself to have deserved it. Cake was a story which I thought had dated too far – the incidence of violence in particular making it a discordant note in an otherwise lovely book. However, more than anything, this collection does read like a love letter from a passing era – the survivors of the fast 1920s are at a loss at how to cope in the earnest 1940s; the middle-aged louche Basil Merryn is appalled to be told by young girls to mend his ways’ or provide information on the dietary habits of Mexico while his peer ‘Pompey’ laughs in commiseration that ‘everyone’ is like that ‘these days’. Even in More Than Kind, Lilian may proclaim that she wishes to show ‘charity’, but deep down her values are those of her own mother’s ‘severe’ generation – the past is something to be clung to.
As a piece of social history alone, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm is a book to treasure, but despite its vintage style and morality, many of the situations described are not so very different to those faced by women today, meaning that, for the most part, this is a buoyant short story anthology designed to bring a lift to anyone’s day – in short it is an ideal gift for Christmas!
For my full review: http://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2015/12/review-christmas-at-cold-comfort-farm-and-other-stories-stella-gibbons.html