β
One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favorite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
I saw something nasty in the woodshed.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
That would be delightful,' agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Mary, you know I hate parties. My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room where everybody has to play hockey properly.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Like all really strong-minded women, on whom everybody flops, she adored being bossed about. It was so restful.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation?
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.
β
β
Stella Gibbons
β
You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling.
It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit...
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Nightingale Wood)
β
Haven't you enough money?'
For she knew that this is what is the matter with nearly everybody over twenty-five.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Women are all alike-- aye fussin' over their fal-lals and bedazin' a man's eyes, when all they really want is man's blood and his heart out of his body and his soul and his pride....
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Well,' said Mrs Smiling, 'it sounds an appalling place, but in a different way from all the others. I mean, it does sound interesting and appalling, while the others just sound appalling.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
On the whole, Flora liked it better when they were silent, though it did rather give her the feeling that she was acting in one of the less cheerful German highbrow films.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence:
"I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute."
It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious'.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
I do not object to the phenomena, but I do object to the parrot.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Curious how Love destroys every vestige of that politeness which the human race, in its years of evolution, has so painfully acquired.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
There are some things (like first love and oneβs first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm
β
β
Stella Gibbons
β
He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
This may not be much, but it is something. Tomorrow we die; but at least we danced in silver shoes.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Nightingale Wood)
β
Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
He stood at the table facing Flora and blowing heavily on his tea and staring at her. Flora did not mind. It was quite interesting: like having tea with a rhinoceros.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
...The Abbe's warning: 'Never confront an enemy at the end of a journey, unless it happens to be his journey'.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
She glanced upwards for a second at the soft blue vault of the midsummer night sky. Not a cloud misted its solemn depths. Tomorrow would be a beautiful day.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Ah but' 'there'll be no butter in hell!
β
β
Stella Gibbons
β
. . . What a pleasant life could be had in this world by a handsome, sensible old lady of good fortune, blessed with a sound constitution and a firm will
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
By the way, I adore my bedroom, but do you think I could have the curtains washed? I believe they are red; and I should so like to make sure.'
Judith had sunk into a reverie.
'Curtains?' she asked, vacantly, lifting her magnificent head. 'Child, child, it is many years since such trifles broke across the web of my solitude'.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Richard had realized, not that Elfine was beautiful, but that he loved Elfine. (Young men frequently need this fact pointing out to them, as Flora knew by observing the antics of her friends.)
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
No one had seen anything of Urk since he had gone galloping out into the night carrying Meriam, the hired girl. It was generally assumed that he had drowned her and then himself. Who cared, anyway?
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
... on the whole I thought I liked having everything very tidy and calm all around me, and not being bothered to do things, and laughing at the kind of joke other people didn't think at all funny, and going for country walks, and not being asked to express opinions about things (like love, and isn't so-and-so peculiar?)
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Daisies opened in sly lust to the sun-rays and rain-spears, and eft-flies, locked in a blind embrace, spun radiantly through the glutinous light to their ordained death.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
But she had a lively acquaintaince with confinement through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
She could feel magic in the quiet spring day, like a sorcererβs far-off voice, and lines of poetry floated over her mind as if they were strands of spider-web.
β
β
Stella Gibbons
β
Ye know, doan't ye, what it feels like when ye burn yer hand in takin' a cake out of the oven or wi'a match when ye're lightin' one of they godless cigarettes? Ay. It stings wi' a fearful pain, doan't it? And ye run away to clap a bit o' butter on it to take the pain away. Ah, but' (an impressive pause) 'there'll be no butter in hell!
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
He was enmeshed in his grief. He did not notice that Graceless's leg had come off and that she was managing as best she could with three.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Mrs Poste, who had wished people to live beautiful lives and yet be ladies and gentlemen.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Is there a rug?' she asked, hanging fire.
'Nay. The sins burnin' in yer marrow will keep yer warm.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
The audience had run to beards and magenta shirts and original ways of arranging its neckwear; and not content with the ravages produced in its over-excitable nervous system by the remorseless workings of its critical intelligence, it had sat through a film of Japanese life called 'Yes,' made by a Norwegian film company in 1915 with Japanese actors, which lasted an hour and three-quarters and contained twelve close-ups of water-lilies lying perfectly still on a scummy pond and four suicides, all done extremely slowly.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute.'
It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply. Was it a complaint? If so, one might say, 'My dear, how too sickening for you!' But then, it might be a boast, in which case the correct reply would be, 'Attaboy!' or more simply, 'Come, that's capital.' Weakly she fell back on the comparatively safe remark: 'Did you?' in a bright, interested voice.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Cautious as a camera-man engaged in shooting a family of fourteen lions
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Coward! Liar! Libertine! Who were you with last night? Moll at the mill or Violet at the vicarage? Or Ivy, perhaps, at the ironmongery?
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Mrs Smiling's character was firm and her tastes civilized. Her method of dealing with wayward human nature when it insisted on obtruding its grossness upon her scheme of life was short and effective; she pretended things were not so: and usually, after a time, they were not. Christian Science is perhaps a larger organization, but seldom so successful.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Mrs. Smiling's second interest was her collection of brassieres, and her search for the perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
For it is a peculiarity of persons who lead rich, emotional lives, and who (as the saying is) live intensely and with a wild poetry, that they read all kind of meanings into comparatively simple actions, especially the actions of other people who do not live intensely and with a wild poetry. Thus you may find them weeping passionately on their bed, and be told that you - you alone - are the cause because you said that awful thing to them at lunch. Or they wonder why you like going to concerts; there must be more to it than meets the eye.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
The flies buzzed in answer above the dirty water standing in the washbasin, in which floated a solitary black hair. It, too, was like life-- and as meaningless.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
I did all that with my little hatchet.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
On the whole, Cold Comfort was not without its promise of mystery and excitement.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
the Starkadders rarely did what was obvious though they were only too embarrassingly ready to do what was natural.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Send clean socks. Love to all except Micah.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence: βI haβ scranleted two hundred furrows come five oβclock down iβ the bute.β It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply. Was
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
I think it's degrading of you, Flora,' cried Mrs Smiling at breakfast. 'Do you truly mean that you don't ever want to work at anything?'
Her friend replied after some thought: 'Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as "Persuasion", but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say "Collecting material." No one can object to that. Besides, I shall be.'
Mrs Smiling drank some coffee in silent disapproval.
'If you ask me,' continued Flora, 'I think I have much in common with Miss Austen. She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable around her, and so do I. You see Mary,' - and here Flora began to grow earnest and to wave one finger about - 'unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
The trouble about Mr Mybug was that ordinary subjects, which are not usually associated with sex even by our best minds, did suggest sex to Mr Mybug, and he pointed them out and made comparisons and asked Flora what she thought about it all.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
While she lay there with these old worn thoughts coming obediently into her mind, called there by habit and the familiar quiet of early morning, she was aware that at the back of her mind there was another thought that was not at all stale, but so fresh that it was nearly a feeling, with all a feeling's delicious power to kill thought.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Nightingale Wood)
β
Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists call a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
(Seth's) voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
It is rather frightening to be able to write so revoltingly, yet so successfully. All these letters are works of art, except, perhaps, the last. They are positively oily.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Some people believe that an attractive woman cannot stop men falling in love with her; but she can. If she really, in her deepest heart, does not want it, neither will they.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm)
β
You know how dreadful intelligent people are when you take them to dances.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Her voice had a breathless, broken quality that suggested the fluty sexless timbre of a choir-boyβs notes (only choir-boys are seldom sexless, as many a harassed vicaress knows to her cost).
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
His young man's limbs, sleek in their dark male pride, seemed to disdain the covering offered them by the brief shorts and striped jersey. His body might have been naked, like his full, muscled throat, which rose, round and proud as the male organ of a flower, from the neck of his sweater.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
For it is a peculiarity of persons who lead rich, emotional lives, and who (as the saying is) live intensely and with a wild poetry, that they read all kinds of meanings into comparatively simple actions, especially the actions of other people, who do not live intensely and with a wild poetry.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
But Julia thought it would be a much better idea if they went to see Mr Dan Langham in 'On Your Toes!' at the New Hippodrome, so they went there instead and had a nice time instead of a nasty one.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Tina, finding herself and her husband on a sandbank, so to speak, between two classes, had gone to the artists. The artists do not mind if one is gentry or a common cad so long as one is neither a snob nor a bore
β
β
Stella Gibbons
β
Ye know, doanβt ye, what it feels like when ye burn yer hand in takinβ a cake out of the oven or wiβ a match when yeβre lightinβ one of they godless cigarettes? Ay. It stings wiβ a fearful pain, doanβt it? And ye run away to clap a bit oβ butter on it to take the pain away. Ah, butβ (an impressive pause) βthere βll be no butter in hell!
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Dear, Missus, Mister - I beg you never to give thoughts to war, in no way, not to work for it, not by writing nor by reading about it nor by looking at the pictures nor on the television about it. Not in any way ever, at all. Not by being a soldier, sailor, airman, work in factory or above all at atom bombs. Above all at atom bombs. No obligation for this, dear fellow creature. Signed Your Fellow Creature.'
'P.S.,' said Gerald slowly, without turning from the window, 'If we all do this, we shall succeed.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Starlight)
β
Everything I am is based on this ugly building on its lonely lawnβlit up during winter darkness; open in the slashing rainβwhich allowed a girl so poor she didnβt even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic: traveling through time, making contact with the deadβDorothy Parker, Stella Gibbons, Charlotte BrontΓ«, Spike Milligan.
A library in the middle of a community is a cross be-tween an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate βneedβ for βstuff.β A mallβthe shopsβare places where your money makes the wealthy wealthier. But a library is where the wealthyβs taxes pay for you to become a little more extraordinary, instead. A satisfying reversal. A balancing of the power.
β
β
Caitlin Moran (Moranthology)
β
The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking that things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.)
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
She detested rows and scenes, but enjoyed quietly pitting her cool will against opposition. It amused her; and when she was defeated, she withdrew in good order and lost interest in the campaign. She had little or no sporting spirit. Bloody battles to the death bored her, nor did she like other people to win.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good asΒ Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, βCollecting materialβ. No one can object to that. Besides, so I shall be.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
It was the loveliest hour of the English year: seven o'clock on Midsummer Night.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
By now Flora was really cross. Surely she had endured enough for one evening without having to listen to intelligent conversation? Here
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Green fingers was the country name for time, patience and love working together.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Marie Laurencin.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
An interesting survival of mediaeval superstition," commented Flora.
β
β
Stella Gibbons
β
...though it was too true that life as she is lived has a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
she came to the conclusion that if Aunt Ada was mad, then she, Flora, was one of the Marx Brothers.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman β¦ Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes, but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Flora pressed Rennettβs hand graciously, and congratulated her upon her striking toilette, which had been borrowed from one of Mr Mybugβs girl friends who drank rather a lot in one way and another and kept a tame boxer in her studio for the sheer love of the thing.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
He had told Flora all about his slim, expensive mistress, Lily, who made boring scenes and took up the time and energy which he would much sooner have spent with his wife, but he had to have Lily, because in Beverly Hills, if you did not have a mistress, people thought you were rather queer, and if, on the other hand, you spent all your time with your wife, and were quite firm about it, and said that you liked your wife, and, anyway, why the hell shouldnβt you, the papers came out with repulsive articles headed βHollywood Czarβs Domestic Blissβ, and you had to supply them with pictures of your wife pouring your morning chocolate and watering the ferns.
So there was no way out of it, Mr Neck said.
Anyway, his wife quite understood, and they played a game called βDodging Lilyβ, which gave them yet another interest in common.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Her mind must match the properly groomed head in which it was housed. Her movements must be made less frequent, and her conversation less artless. She must write no more poetry nor go for any more long walks unless accompanied by the proper sort of dog to take on long walks. She must learn to be serious about horses. She must learn to laugh when a book or a string quartet was mentioned, and to confess that she was not brainy. She must learn to be long-limbed and clear-eyed and inhibited. The first two qualities she possessed already, and the last she must set to work to acquire at once.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Twice, in half an hour, Hetty had held up Miss Barlow's plans, and prevented her from moving as quickly as possible on to the next pleasure. Miss Barlow liked her life to be a steady movement towards pleasure. While she was having one, she was thinking about the next and what she should wear while she had that.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Nightingale Wood)
β
. . . And she said it was a pity, because my father was so βkeenβ, and what did I care about?
So I said, well, I was not quite sure, but on the whole I thought I liked having everything very tidy and calm all around me, and not being bothered to do things, and laughing at the kind of joke other people didnβt think at all funny, and going for country walks, and not being asked to express opinions about things (like love, and isnβt so-and-so peculiar?). So then she said, oh, well, didnβt I think I could try to be a little less slack, because of Father, and I said no, I was I afraid I couldnβt; and after that she left me alone. But all the others still said I was no good.
β
β
Stella Gibbons
β
No β for themselves. They were all drunkards, but Anne was the worst of the lot. Branwell, who adored her, used to pretend to get drunk at the Black Bull in order to get gin for Anne. The landlord wouldnβt have let him have it if Branwell hadnβt built up β with what devotion, only God knows β that false reputation as a brilliant, reckless, idle drunkard. The landlord was proud to have young Mr BrontΓ« in his tavern; it attracted custom to the place, and Branwell could get gin for Anne on tick β as much as Anne wanted. Secretly, he worked twelve hours a day writing βShirleyβ, and βVilletteβ β and, of course, βWuthering Heightsβ. Iβve proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs Prunty.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
How can you eat that sawdust, Father?' she inquired, beginning on eggs and bacon and speaking cheerfully because it was a fine morning and only ten minutes past nine; and somehow, at the beginning of every new day, there was always a chance that this one might be different from all the rest. Something might happen; and then everything would be jollier all round.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Nightingale Wood)
β
Flora was pleasantly surprised to hear this, and for a second wondered if the women novelists had been misinformed about confinements? But no: she recollected that they usually left themselves a loophole by occasionally creating a primitive woman, a creature who was as close to the earth as a bloomy greengage and rather like one to look at and talk to, and this greengage creature never had any bother with her confinements, but just took them in her stride, as it were.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Persons of Aunt Adaβs temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings, and interferings, and spyings, and, above all, managing and intriguing. Oh, they did enjoy themselves!
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
The buildings of the farm, a shade darker than the sky, could now be distinguished in the gloom, a little distance on, and as Flora and Adam were slowly approaching them, a door suddenly opened and a beam of light shone out. Adam gave a joyful cry.
ββTes the cowshed! βTes our Feckless openinβ the door fer me!β And Flora saw that it was indeed; the door of the shed, which was lit by a lantern, was being anxiously pushed open by the nose of a gaunt cow.
This was not promising.
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
In the evening, she proposed that the three of them should visit the Pit Theatre, in Stench Street, Seven Dials, to see a new play by Brandt Slurb called βManallalive-O!β, a Neo-Expressionist attempt to give dramatic form to the mental reactions of a man employed as a waiter in a restaurant who dreams that he is the double of another man who is employed as a steward on a liner, and who, on awakening and realizing that he is still a waiter employed in a restaurant and not a steward employed on a liner, goes mad and shoots his reflection in a mirror and dies. It had seventeen scenes and only one character
β
β
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
β
Persons of Aunt Ada's temperament were not fond of a tidy life. Storms were what they liked; plenty of rows, and doors being slammed, and jaws sticking out, and faces white with fury, and faces brooding in corners, and faces making unnecessary fuss at breakfast, and plenty of opportunities for gorgeous emotional wallowings, and partings for ever, and misunderstandings, and interferings, and spyings, and, above all, managing and intriguing. Oh, they did enjoy themselves! They were the sort that went trampling all over your pet stamp collection, or whatever it was, and then spent the rest of their lives atoning for it. But you would rather have had your stamp collection.
β
β
Stella Gibbons