RANDOM JOTTINGS

As a teenager I tried to read this but did not 'get' it, found it curiously uninteresting and could not understand why everyone thought it was so wonderful.  Well, of course, years of reading now make me realise how funny and satirical this book is, taking the pith out of the country novel full of earthy characters, and picturesque farm folk.  I loved it this time around.

Flora Poste finds herself orphaned and poverty stricken at the age of twenty.  She has an income of £100 a year and decides to try living with relatives rather than getting herself a job and after sending letters to them all and sifting the replies, she decides to stay with the Starkadder family at Cold Comfort Farm, near the village of Howling in Sussex.

The farm is dirty, glowering and peopled by the most extraordinary collection of characters you could ever hope to find.  Judith ("she looked a woman without boundaries as she stood wrapped in a crimson shawl to protect her bitter, magnificent shoulders from the splintery cold of the early air"), mother of Seth who she adores:

"Her eyes burned under their penthouses sometimes straying towards Seth as he sat sprawling in the lusty pride of casual manhood, with a good many buttons and tapes undone"

Seth is quite magnificent: "Seth came in silently with his graceful, pantherish tread to the door of the room………The young man stood in the warm light of the declining sun, his bare throat and boldly moulded features looking as though they were bathed in gold. His pose was easy and graceful. A superb self confidence radiated from him as it does from any healthy animal."

Hardly surprising that off he goes to become a film star where he is wildly successful.

I won't go through every single character in this book because if you have already read it, you know them all, and if you haven't, then I want you to go out and get a copy and read it and I don't want to spoil it for you. However,  I must just mention Aunt Ada Doom, who years ago say 'something nasty in the woodshed' and has never been right since.  We never discovered what she saw and this is left to the reader's imagination. She now spends her days living a hermit like existence in her room rarely venturing out but exerting an iron clad authority on her family who think she is mad and are petrified of making her worse by any form of argument.

Flora arrives and decides that the entire family needs sorting out and marrying off and tackles the task with gusto.  She is very Emma like in her absolute certainty that she knows best and, in this case, there is no Mr Knightley  to rein her in and, unlike Jane Austen's heroine, she succeeds against all the odds, even finding happiness herself at the end.

I simply loved this book after approaching it with slight trepidation with my earlier memories of it hovering in my mind, but I need not have worried.  As I said in the opening paragraph, I originally did not 'get it' but I do now.  I mean how can you not like a book that has four cows named Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless? 

Wonderful.