Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Stella Gibbons
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
The Little Christmas Tree
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
To Love and To Cherish
The Murder Mark
The Hoofer and the Lady
Sisters
The Walled Garden
A Charming Man
Golden Vanity
Poor, Poor Black Sheep
More Than Kind
The Friend of Man
Tame Wild Party
A Young Man in Rags
Cake
Mr Amberly’s Brother
Note
Copyright
About the Book
A glorious collection of stories from the author of Cold Comfort Farm. The title story tells of a typical Christmas at the farm before the coming of Flora Poste. It is a parody of the worst sort of family Christmas: Adam Lambsbreath dresses up as Father Christmas in two of Judith’s red shawls. There are unsuitable presents, unpleasant insertions into the pudding and some good Starkadder table talk over. Aunt Ada Doom orders Amos to carve the turkey, adding: ‘Ay, would it were a vulture, ’twere more fitting!’
About the Author
Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She worked for various newspapers including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories, and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS
Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Enbury Heath
Nightingale Wood
My American
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
Westwood
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort Farm
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
The Charmers
Starlight
To
Allan
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
With an Introduction by Alexander McCall Smith
Introduction
Stella Gibbons is one of those writers who had the misfortune to write one wonderful book. Cold Comfort Farm is a classic – it satisfies the simple test of being a story that simply had to be told. Harper Lee did the same thing with To Kill a Mockingbird, a great work that burst from an author who then declined to say anything more; there are many other examples. The misfortune of such writers is that unless they are very lucky, any other books that they may write run the risk of either being ignored – on the grounds that we cannot imagine the author managing to do it twice – or are compared adversely with what went before.
Sometimes this affects impressively prolific writers. E. F. Benson, who was of a period with Stella Gibbons and who wrote about a roughly similar world, was the author of numerous novels but is now remembered mainly for one series, the Mapp and Lucia books, his other works being relatively unread today. Stella Gibbons is in the same position: she published over thirty books between 1930 and 1970, and yet it is really only Cold Comfort Farm that survives, and it is on one title that her reputation rests. This is the one fact that people seem to know about Stella Gibbons and it is perhaps time to stop mentioning it. But it is important, and will continue to be important until the work of this interesting and amusing writer is restored to its proper place.
