Long-term readers of this blog will be familiar with my enduring passion for Stella Gibbons’ novel Cold Comfort Farm. It has been produced in other forms on several occasions. I’m rather fond of the one I have on tape, read by Kenneth Williams.* My wife spotted the fact that film version was to be broadcast again on TV recently, and recorded it. We watched it together last night. This was the version in which Eileen Atkins plays Judith Starkadder and Freddy Jones plays Adam Lambsbreath …. among several other memorable performances. It’s wonderful stuff!
I have been aware for a long time that there are several reasons for my attachment to it. Among the first of these is the feeling that in fact it recapitulates aspects of my own life, during which I haver often felt that, like Flora Poste, my mission in life has been to tidy up other members of the family. As the film ended last night, however, my wife asked me why I think that I have such a continuing and strong attachment to what is, after all, rather minor work of English literature. Before I had had the opportunity to respond she said, “It’s about redemption, isn’t it?” That, on reflection, is exactly it!
Sometimes I have been asked what I regard as the core of my beliefs about life, and I have settled on the response that there is nothing that, in principle, cannot be redeemed. In her idiosyncratic way I guess that this is precisely the point of Cold Comfort Farm. The Starkadders may be a total disaster area, but a suitable situation is found for them all in the end, in which they flourish.
*Yes: that sort of tape …. in cassettes. And my Hi-fi can still play it.