In 1942 the author, eighteen at the time, found a diary in the attic of a house in Essex where his family was staying. Full of vague references and hard to decipher misspellings, it included the words (translated from the original) "If I should be poisoned at last, and this book is found, it will explain everything. What bad fellows Tommy took up with, and encouraged him to poison his father and now trying to poison me."

It was the diary of Jimmy Mason the hermit, who had lived in that house until moving to a tiny hut[book:Cold Comfort Farm|92780] on a small patch of land he and his brother owned. He had died that year. Jimmy seems to have had some kind of social anxiety disorder. He lived alone and kept bees, though he was interested in local children and left them fruit and coins on the fence outside the property.

Trevelyan became obsessed by the diary and Jimmy's life. Over the years he transcribed the diary, interviewed everyone he could find who had known him or whose parents had known him, even consulting a psychic. At some point he happened to read a salacious story in a paper about how James Mason had been a farmer who, when rejected by his only love, vowed to never see another woman's face and became a hermit, living alone for the next fifty years. Trevelyan examines this too.

The forward by William Golding describes him as "observing Cold Comfort Farm from ground level" which certainly caught my interest, but ultimately Jimmy and village life weren't terribly interesting and I didn't finish. A blurb by Angus Wilson points out that it is "most fascinating as a chronicle of the growing obsession of a very enlightened, individual person, the author, with the life of a nearly illiterate, insanely individualistic obsessionist...a document both of psychology and of social history."

It was initially entertaining but ultimately I wasn't that obsessed and didn't finish. If anyone wants this, my copy is available.