VIRAGO
MODERN CLASSICS
539
Stella Dorothea Gibbons
Stella Dorothea Gibbons, a novelist, poet and short-story writer, was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College London. She then worked for ten years on various papers, including the Evening Standard. 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. Amongst her other novels are Miss Linsey and Pa (1936), Nightingale Wood (1938), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1949), The Shadow of a Sorcerer (1955), The Snow Woman (1969) and The Woods in Winter (1970). In 1933 she married the actor and singer Alan Webb, who died in 1959. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.
Also by Stella Gibbons
Novels
Cold Comfort Farm
Bassett
Enbury Heath
Miss Linsey and Pa
Nightingale Wood
My American
The Rich House
Ticky
The Bachelor
Westwood
The Matchmaker
Conference at Cold Comfort
Farm
The Swiss Summer
Fort of the Bear
The Shadow of a Sorcerer
Here Be Dragons
White Sand and Grey Sand
A Pink Front Door
The Weather at Tregulla
The Wolves Were in the
Sledge
The Charmers
Starlight
The Snow Woman
The Woods in Winter
Poetry
The Mountain Beast
The Priestess
The Lowland Venus
Collected Poems
Short Stories
Roaring Tower and Other
Stories
Christmas at Cold Comfort
Farm
Beside the Pearly Water
Children’s Books
The Untidy Gnome
Copyright
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-12753-5
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Stella Gibbons 1938
Introduction copyright © Sophie Dahl 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
A Romantic Comedy for Renée and Ruth
‘… all those endearing young charms.’
Note
The occasional words of Essex dialect in the story are
taken from Mr H. Cranmer-Byng’s Dialect and Songs of
Essex and Essex Speech and Humour.
All the places and people are imagined.
Contents
VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS 539
ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS
COPYRIGHT
NOTE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER THE LAST
GOOD BEHAVIOUR
JANE AND PRUDENCE
INTRODUCTION
‘She did not look quite a lady, which was natural; as she was not one.’ So wrote Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm, as she introduced the heroine of her ninth book, the latterly forgotten treasure, Nightingale Wood. The not quite a lady is grey-eyed Viola Wither, née Thompson, a beguiling widow of twenty-one. Viola is a victim of circumstance, like so many of Gibbons’ female protagonists; a shop girl orphan, married briefly to a bumbling, bullying older man, to whom she felt unable to say no at precisely the wrong moment. In his death she is similarly muted, and when, with a sigh of middle-class duty, her in-laws, the aptly named Withers, summon her from London to live with them in their dour house in Essex, she hops on a train in her cheap black coat and pink satin blouse, meek as a sacrificial lamb.
Their house, ‘The Eagles’, runs thick with thwarted longing. Dwelling there are two daughters, spinsters (in 1930s parlance): the lumpen, unfortunate, thirty-nine-year-old Madge; and Tina, who at thirty-five, with an extreme penchant for dieting, is wasting away in every sense. Their mother, Mrs Wither, seemingly has no fight left in her after four decades with the petty, pedantic patriarch of the family, the hateful Mr Wither. Mr Wither delights in the casual putdown, stamping the most fragile hope in his pitiful daughters with a quick lash of the tongue, forbidding Marge her one desire of a puppy, and tormenting Tina at every opportunity:
‘What time did you say Viola’s train gets in?’ Tina asked her mother; she sometimes found the Wither silences unendurable.
‘Half-past twelve, dear.’
‘Just in nice time for lunch .’
‘Yes.’
‘You know perfectly well that Viola’s train gets in at half-past twelve,’ intoned Mr Wither slowly, raising his eyelids to look at Tina, ‘so why ask your mother? You talk for the sake of talking; it’s a silly habit.’
It is in this bleak household, in which the clocks are constantly checked to see whether the day is ending, that poor Viola is deposited. And yet …
On the other side of the valley is an entirely different house, a house that sings with comfort and luxury, a house that has the feeling of ‘moving a little faster than other places, as though it were always on the brink of a party’. This is ‘Grassmere’, a polished nouveau paradise, home to the dashing Victor Spring. Victor lives with his mother, Mrs Spring, who only employs the comely because, quite simply, ‘She hated plain maids; they depressed her’, and bookish cousin Hetty, who despises the inertia of a moneyed life, believing ‘The Eagles’ across the way to contain a life full of ‘muted melancholy beauty’. Oh, the grass is always greener.
Add to the cast, amongst others, a ravishing chauffeur living above the Withers’ garage, his mother, a faded village beauty with slatternly ways, a Machiavellian millionaire, a fast fairy godmother named Shirley, and a voyeuristic chorus of sorts in the form of a tramp known as ‘the Hermit’, and you have a sense of the proceedings, because Nightingale Wood is, in essence, a sprawling, delightful, eccentric fairy tale.
Gibbons loved this medium, and wrote three books conjuring it in her lifetime: My American (1939) borrows from ‘The Snow Queen’; White Sand and Grey Sand (1958) is influenced by ‘Beauty and the Beast’; and Nightingale Wood, her first endeavour, makes a great curtsy to ‘Cinderella’. Where she strays from the classic fairy tale in these books, and brilliantly so, is that there is no such thing as staid, straightforward good and evil. Prince Charming is charming, yes, but he’s also a little dull, vulgar and complacent. Her Cinderella is beautiful and true, yet a tad apathetic. Each social
stratum in Nightingale Wood is capable of its own brand of snobbery, which is a theme that permeates all of her books. A greying of characters that are otherwise empathetic stretches to their occasional bigotry, which is deeply jarring to the modern reader. Casual antisemitism and racism is insidious in much of the fiction from this period, and it serves as a stark commentary on the time. Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Agatha Christie and W. B. Yeats have all been accused of perpetuating this in their work. It is difficult to fathom whether Gibbons herself held such beliefs, or if she was casting judgement (and satirical scorn) upon her culture by making reference to them in her fiction. It is worth noting that these examples are used in conversation, perhaps as a narrative example of the characters’ own narrow-mindedness. To edit them out would be a denial, and so, uncomfortable as it is to stumble upon them, they remain as a harrowing reminder of what went before.
It is staggering for a writer with an archive spanning twenty-five novels, four volumes of poetry and three volumes of short stories, to be best (and sometimes solely) known for one work. Cold Comfort Farm was Stella Gibbons’ first novel, published in 1932, when she was thirty. She had grown up in a family similar to the ones she parodied so well: she was middle class, educated, and her father was a doctor. In their local community of Kentish Town he was publicly lauded for his humanity; in private, he was a domineering and violent man. Such roots must have had a profound impact on her, regardless of her career trajectory, but to my mind they also tattoo her writing: the men in her books are regarded somewhat warily, whatever their station, and she writes of a woman’s plight with sensitivity, buckets of humour, and ceaseless compassion. The women of Nightingale Wood each suffer suffocating consequences of their sex. Perhaps the most succinct surmisal of the 1930s female lot comes from Viola’s best friend, Shirley, who says wryly, ‘Vote, Marie [Stopes], perms, and all, we can’t do anything.’
But with the shadows we have light, and, again, it is testament to the wily talent of Gibbons to dance between the two with her light touch. One realises that Nightingale Wood doesn’t have just one heroine; it has many, and each is duly rewarded for her pains. There is romance galore: a transformative dress and a ball; much dizzy kissing in hedgerows and beyond; spying, retribution and runaways; fights and a fire; poetry and heartbreak; a few weddings and a funeral; and a fairy-tale ending with a twist.
What luxury to stumble upon this quirky book, and the fascinating modern woman who wrote it. It is a rare unadulterated pleasure, and high time for its encore.
Without further ado – I give you Nightingale Wood.
Sophie Dahl, 2008
CHAPTER I
It is difficult to make a dull garden, but old Mr Wither had succeeded.
He himself did no work in the grounds of his house near Chesterbourne in Essex, but his lack of interest in them and his dislike of spending money influenced the gardener. The result was a poorish lawn and a plaster rockery with very little in it extending as far as the eye could reach, and a lot of boring shrubs which Mr Wither liked because they filled up space and gave little trouble. He also liked the garden to look tidy, and on a fine April morning he stood at the breakfast-room window thinking what a nuisance the daisies were. There were eleven of them, out in the middle of the lawn. Saxon must be told to get them up.
Mrs Wither came in, but he took no notice of her because he had seen her before. She sat down behind the cups as a gong sounded in the hall, and Mr Wither heavily crossed the room and took his place at the other end, opening the Morning Post. Mrs Wither passed him a cup of tea and a bowl of patent cereal smelling and tasting exactly like all the other patent cereals, and three minutes passed. Mrs Wither sipped her tea, gazing over Mr Wither’s bald head streaked with two bands of hair at a blackbird strutting under the monkey-puzzle tree.
Mr Wither looked slowly up.
‘The girls are late.’
‘They’re just coming, dear.’
‘They’re late. They know perfectly well I don’t like them to be late for meals.’
‘I know, dear, but Madge overslept, she was so stiff after the tennis yesterday, and Tina’s just trying—’
‘Fiddling about with her hair as usual, I suppose.’
Mr Wither returned to his paper and Mrs Wither went on gazing and sipping.
‘Morning, Mum. Sorry I’m late, Father.’
Mr Wither did not reply, and she sat down. She was thirty-nine years old, a big woman in a tweed coat and skirt with strong features, a closely shingled head and fresh yet insipid colouring.
‘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.
Madge did not see clearly into her feelings; she only knew that she always felt cheerier at breakfast than at tea.
Mrs Wither smiled faintly. Mr Wither said nothing.
Footsteps came draggingly yet hastily across the tiled hall, and in hurried Tina, her eyelids pink, her dull hair arranged in its usual downward wave on her forehead. She was a little person, with eyes and mouth too big for her thin face. She was thirty-five; and dressed with evident pleasure to herself in a green suit and a white ruffled blouse. The nails of her small fingers were painted pale pink.
‘Morning, everybody; I’m sorry I’m late, Father.’
Mr Wither uncrossed his plump legs in unexpected trousers of a natty checked cloth, and crossed them again, but did not look up. Her mother smiled at Tina, murmuring:
‘Very nice, dear.’
‘What is?’ Mr Wither suddenly fixed Tina with a bloodshot, drooping and pale-blue eye.
‘Only my new – only my suit, Father.’
‘New, is it?’
‘Yes – I – yes.’
‘What do you want to go buying more clothes for? You’ve got plenty.’ And Mr Wither returned to the City page.
‘Bacon, Tina?’
‘Please.’
‘One, or two, dear?’
‘Oh, one, please. No – that little one. Thank you.’
‘You don’t eat enough. It doesn’t suit you to be thin,’ observed Madge, buttering toast. ‘Can’t think why you want to diet at all; you look washed-out.’
‘Well, you can only go by how you feel, and I know I feel miles better—’
‘Miles better? How can you feel miles better?’ loudly demanded Mr Wither, putting down the Morning Post and staring severely at his younger daughter. ‘A mile is a measure of length. It cannot be used to describe a condition of the human body. You can be much better, or considerably better, or noticeably better. You cannot be miles better, because such a thing is impossible.’
‘Well then,’ Tina’s dry hands slowly ground over each other in her lap as she tremulously smiled, ‘I feel considerably better since I started the Brash Diet.’
Her smile showed irregular teeth, but sweetened her face surprisingly and made her look younger.
‘Well, all I can say is you don’t look it, does she, Father?’
Silence. The blackbird gave a loud sweet squawk and flew away.
‘Are you playing golf today, dear?’ presently murmured Mrs Wither to Madge. Madge, with her mouth full, nodded.
‘Shall you be in to lunch?’ pursued her mother – cautiously.
‘Depends.’
‘You must know whether you will be in to lunch or not, Madge,’ interrupted Mr Wither, who had suddenly observed in the City page a piece of news which had blackened for him a world that was never very fair. ‘Can you not definitely tell your mother whether you will, or will not, be in?’
‘ ’Fraid not, Father’ said Madge firmly, wiping her mouth. ‘Give us the sporting page, will you, if you’ve finished with it.’
Mr Wither d
etached the sporting page and passed it to her in silence, letting the rest of the paper drift listlessly to the floor.
No one said anything. The blackbird came back.
A purple-black and louring mantle of gloom now lay over Mr Wither. Before reading that piece in the paper, he had been as he always was at breakfast, and at luncheon and tea and dinner as well. But now (thought Mrs Wither and Madge and Tina) Father was Worrying; and the rest of the day would be darkened.
Mr Wither’s chief worry was his money, of which he had some two thousand eight hundred pounds a year. This was the interest upon a handsome capital left to him by his father from a private gas company, established towards the middle of the last century, in which the late Mr Wither had held most of the shares.
During his own working life, Mr Wither the younger, knowing little about gas but a good deal about frightening people and getting his own way, had bossed the gas company with some success: and at the age of sixty-five (five years ago) he sold his shares, invested the proceeds, and retired to relish his leisure at The Eagles, near Chesterbourne, Essex, where he had already lived for thirty years.
Mr Wither’s investments were as safe as investments ever are in this world; but that was not safe enough for Mr Wither. He wanted them to be quite safe; immovably productive, stable as rock and certain as nightfall.
It was no use; up and down they went, influenced by wars and births, abdications and airports. He never could be sure what his money was up to. He would wake up in the night and lie in the dark wondering what was happening to it, and during the day he prowled uneasily after it in the financial columns of the Press.
He was not mean (he often told himself) but he detested to see money wasted. It gave him strong pain to spend money without a strong cause. Money was not Given to us to spend; it was Given to us to save.
Now, as he sat gazing hopelessly at his half-finished cereal, he remembered all the good money he had been persuaded into wasting. How he had disliked paying away all those fees for the girls, during the ten years when they had tried to have careers! Pounds and pounds and pounds thrown away, good money sent after bad. Art schools and domestic schools, barbola work and secretarial college elocution lessons and journalism courses, kennel-work and weaving. None of it any use, of course; all of it wickedly expensive, and what could the girls do, as a result of all the money that he had spent upon them?