Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (Longmans, 1932)

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns.

Stella Gibbons’s sentence from her delicious comedy of rural life in Sussex, Cold Comfort Farm, is ludicrously busy and wildly inaccurate, a parody of the overly-done style of gothic literature beloved by - let’s be honest - so many of us. Dawn does not creep about like a sinister white animal: the Goddess of Dawn, Aurora, would be most offended. Surely she pads about delicately with a gentle lyre in her hands playing faint and sensitive music through the budding boughs of the trees. She would have nothing to do with snarling winds or black boughs with thorns attached to them.

Gibbon’s dawn is as uncouth and ill-mannered as are the inhabitants of the ancient farmhouse where our heroine, Flora Poste, finds herself following a whimsical relocation from her Aunt’s house in fashionable Lambeth. Flora Poste has no money and neither has she any intention of working for her living. She’d rather set to stirring up the mouldering Sussex homestead where her dead mother’s relatives stubbornly cling to their country ways. And so she goes to live in the country for a while to see what she can do with this bizarre lot.

Gibbons is master and mistress of comic timing and her sentence produces an absurd bucolic parade of early morning events — dawn creeping over the horizon, in her ripped and torn chemise we imagine — followed by an ill-tempered wind that rudely eats away at black boughs. All this as a way of preparing us for the human animals of the farmhouse: her cousin Seth who speaks of eating women as a deliberate affront to Flora’s genteel city manners. But Flora, like any astute woman, allows the man to expose his vulnerabilities - his need to show off his sexual conquests - and then passes over it like a tired tea towel or a thread of cotton: ‘Would you mind passing me that reel of cotton on the mantlepiece, just by your ear?’ she says to her rude relative. Give the man back his body but give it back to him in bits - his cauliflower ears first - because he’s already lost his dignity.