And did the goat die?

Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons, 1932. Echoes of Dickens and P.G Wodehouse (who was a contemporary of course). Beautifully written, wonderfully evocative and extremely funny. Give it a go!

The fire was now burning brightly. Flora lit a candle which she had brought down form her bedroom, and took up some sewing with which to beguile the time until supper in her own room. She was making a petticoat and decorating it with drawn threadwork.

A little later, as she sat peacefully sewing, Adam came in from the yard. He wore, as a protection from the rain, a hat which had lost - in who knows what dim hintermath of time - the usual attributes of shape, colour, and size, and those more subtle race-memory associations which identify hats as hats, and now resembled some obscure natural growth, some moss or sponge or fungus, which had attached itself to a host.

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At this moment the trap came to a halt outside a public house, in a small yard opening off the High Street, and Flora was relieved, for the conversation seemed to have entered one of those vicious circles to which only the death or collapse from exhaustion of one of the participants can put an end.

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'I am going to take her lunch up to aunt Ada,' she announced. 'If I have not come down by three o'clock, Mrs Beetle, will you kindly bring up some lemonade. At half past four you may bring up tea and some of the currant cake Phoebe made last week. If I am not down by seven o'clock, please bring up a tray with supper for two, and we will have hot milk and biscuits at ten. Now good-bye, all of you. I beg of you not to worry. All will be well.'

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The Big Field was covered with long, fresh grass which threw millions of tiny lengthening shadows.  There was not a breath of wind. It was the loveliest hour of the English year: seven o'clock on Midsummer Night.

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The air cooled slowly. Flowers shut before Flora's very eyes, but gave out fragrance still. Now there were more shadows than light. The last blackbird that always flies chattering across a summer evening's quiet came dashing down the meadow and vanished in the may-hedge.

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Cold Comfort Farm