Shed Sheds", which argues that a "place of retreat" is a "male necessity" which provides men with solace, especially during their retirement. In contrast, in the novel "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons, Aunt Ada Doom saw "something nasty in the woodshed" and retreated to her bed for half a century. To woodshed, or 'shed, in jazz jargon, is "to shut oneself up, away from the world, and practice long and hard, as in 'going to the woodshed'." The word is recorded in English since 1481, as "shadde", possibly a variant of shade. The word shade comes from the Old English
Stella Gibbons Second World War was perhaps the wrong time to satirise ... the ridiculous and dangerous rituals that surround the male aggressive instinct". "The Bachelor" won critical praise for its revealing account of life in war-torn Britain—as did several of Gibbons's postwar novels. Gibbons's first postwar novel was "Westwood" (1946). The book incorporates a comic depiction of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose novel "The Fountain" Gibbons had reviewed before the war and found "offensive as well as wearisome". In "Westwood", Morgan appears in the guise of the novelist "Gerald Challis", a pompous, humourless bore. Oliver considers this characterisation to be one