Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, book of a lifetime: Wonderful, hilarious and uplifting

The book has a timeless quality that can't fail to amuse you, says Lesley Pearse

My stepmother gave me Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons to read when I was about 15. She told me a doctor had given it to her when she was a young nurse and she read it while on night duty and had a job not to laugh out loud and wake her sleeping patients. She explained that when it was published back in the Thirties there was something of a craze for worthy dark stories about brooding country folk, and Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm to gently send them all up.

I laughed and laughed at how the young and very pushy Flora Poste decides, on the death of her parents, that she will contact all her relatives in the hope that one of them will offer her a home rather than be forced to find work.

An Ada Doom, one of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, Howling in Sussex replies, saying rather mysteriously that "she must do right by Robert Poste's daughter". Ada Doom is also the author of the expression "She saw something nasty in the woodshed".

Flora hot-foots it to Cold Comfort Farm, a ramshackle place crammed with a whole family of weird and wonderfully comic people who she decides to transform. Ada is always shut up in her room because she saw something nasty in the woodshed but there are plenty of others ready for her particular form of worthy interference, including handsome Seth who impregnates a village girl each time the Suke Vine is in flower, Urk, who likes Water Voles and Elfeen, who stands at Ticklepenny Corner and spouts peculiar poetry.

It is a wonderful, hilarious and uplifting book. I have re-read it many times over the years and bought copies for friends to introduce them to my favourite characters. I especially like Big Business the bull, Mr Mybug who fancies Flora, and I delight in the idea of The Quivering Brethren who meet weekly in the village to Quiver with religious fervour.

I've found that most humorous books are of their time. You may laugh out loud and insist on reading chunks of it to your family and friends, but pick it up a few years later and the magic has gone. Not so Cold Comfort Farm, it has become a classic because it has a timeless quality that can't fail to amuse you. Furthermore you are left entirely satisfied at the end. The Farm is now a haven of light, warmth and colour and Flora has shown the way for each of its residents to get what he or she wants, even if they didn't know it themselves.

Lesley Pearse's new novel, "Without a Trace", is published by Michael Joseph (£18.99)