Three weeks later I went over to Tynsham to see Coker and make arrangements for our move. I took an ordinary car in order to do the double journey in a day. When I got back Josella met me in the hall. She gave one look at my face.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said.
‘Just that we shan’t be going there after all,’ I told her. ‘Tynsham is finished.’
She stared back at me.
‘What happened?’
‘I’m not sure. It looks as if the plague got there.’
I described the state of affairs briefly. It had not needed much investigation. The gates were open when I arrived, and the sight of triffids loose in the park half-warned me what to expect. The smell when I got out of the car confirmed it. I made myself go into the house. By the look of it, it had been deserted two weeks or more before. I put my head into two of the rooms. They were enough for me. I called, and my voice ran right away through the hollowness of the house. I went no further.
There had been a notice of some kind pinned to the front door, but only one blank corner remained. I spent a long time searching for the rest of the sheet that must have blown away. I did not find it. The yard at the back was empty of lorries and cars, and most of the stores had gone with them, but where to I could not tell. There was nothing to be done but get into my car again, and come back.
‘And so – what?’ asked Josella, when I had finished.
‘And so, my dear, we stay here. We learn how to support ourselves. And we go on supporting ourselves – unless help comes. There may be an organization somewhere…’
Josella shook her head.
‘I think we’d better forget all about help. Millions and millions of people have been waiting and hoping for help that hasn’t come.’
‘There’ll be something,’ I said. ‘There must be thousands of little groups like this dotted all over Europe – all over the world. Some of them will get together. They’ll begin to rebuild.’
‘In how long?’ said Josella. ‘Generations? Perhaps not until after our time. No – the world’s gone, and we’re left…We must make our own lives. We’ll have to plan them as though help will never come…’ She paused. There was an odd, blank look on her face that I had never seen before. It puckered.
‘Darling…’ I said.
‘Oh, Bill, Bill, I wasn’t meant for this kind of life. If you weren’t here I’d…’
‘Hush, my sweet,’ I said, gently. ‘Hush,’ I stroked her hair.
A few moments later she recovered herself.
‘I’m sorry, Bill. Self-pity…revolting. Never again.’
She patted her eyes with her handkerchief, and sniffed a little.
‘So I’m to be a farmer’s wife. Anyway, I like being married to you, Bill – even if it isn’t a very proper, authentic kind of marriage.’
Suddenly she gave the smiling chuckle that I had not heard for some time.
‘What is it?’
‘I was only thinking how much I used to dread my wedding.’
‘That was very maidenly and proper of you – if a little unexpected,’ I told her.
‘Well, it wasn’t exactly that. It was my publishers, and the newspapers, and the film people. What fun they would have had with it. There’d have been a new edition of my silly book – probably a new release of the film – and pictures in all the papers. I don’t think you’d have liked that much.’
‘I can think of another thing I’d not have liked much,’ I told her. ‘Do you remember – that night in the moonlight you made a condition?’
She looked at me.
‘Well, maybe some things haven’t fallen out so badly,’ she said.
15
World Narrowing
From then on I kept a journal. It is a mixture of diary, stock-list, and commonplace-book. In it there are notes of the places to which my expeditions took me, particulars of the supplies collected, estimates of quantities available, observations on the states of the premises, with memos on which should be cleared first to avoid deterioration. Foodstuffs, fuel, and seed were constant objects of search, but by no means the only ones. There are entries detailing loads of clothing, tools, household linen, harness, kitchenware, loads of stakes, and wire, wire, and more wire, also books.
I can see there that within a week of my return from Tynsham I had started on the work of erecting a wire fence to keep the triffids out. Already we had barriers to hold them away from the garden and the immediate neighbourhood of the house. Now I began a more ambitious plan of making some hundred acres or so free from them. It involved a stout wire fence which took advantage of the natural features and standing barriers, and inside it a lighter fence to prevent either the stock or ourselves from coming inadvertently within sting range of the main fence. It was a heavy, tedious job which took me a number of months to complete.
At the same time I was endeavouring to learn the a-b-c of farming. It is not the kind of thing that is easily learnt from books. For one thing, it had never occurred to any writer on the subject that any potential farmer could be starting from absolute zero. I found, therefore, that all works began, as it were, in the middle, taking for granted both a basis and a vocabulary that I did not have. My specialized biological knowledge was all but useless to me in the face of practical problems. Much of the theory called for materials and substances which were either unavailable to me, or unrecognizable by me if I could find them. I began to see quite soon that by the time I had dismissed the things that would shortly be unprocurable such as chemical fertilizers, imported feeding-stuffs, and all but the simpler kinds of machinery there was going to be much expenditure of sweat for problematical returns.
Nor is book-instilled knowledge of horse-management, dairy-work, or slaughterhouse procedure by any means an adequate groundwork for these arts. There are so many points where one cannot break off to consult the relative chapter. Moreover, the realities persistently present baffling dissimilarities from the simplicities of print.
Luckily there was plenty of time to make mistakes and to learn from them. The knowledge that several years could pass before we should be thrown anywhere near on our own resources saved us from desperation over our disappointments. There was the reassuring thought, too, that by living on preserved stores we were really being quite provident in preventing them from being wasted.
For safety’s sake I let a whole year pass before I went to London again. It was the most profitable area for my forays, but it was the most depressing. The place still contrived to give the impression that a touch of a magic wand would bring it to life again, though many of the vehicles in the streets were beginning to turn rusty. A year later the change was more noticeable. Large patches of plaster detached from housefronts had begun to litter the pavements. Dislodged tiles and chimney-pots could be found in the streets. Grass and weeds had a good hold in the gutters and were choking the drains. Leaves had blocked downspoutings so that more grass, and even small bushes, grew in cracks and in the silt in the roof gutterings. Almost every building was beginning to wear a green wig beneath which its roofs would damply rot. Through many a window one had glimpses of fallen ceilings, curves of peeling paper, and walls glistening with damp. The gardens of the Parks and Squares were wildernesses creeping out across the bordering streets. Growing things seemed, indeed, to press out everywhere, rooting in the crevices between the paving stones, springing from cracks in concrete, finding lodgements even in the seats of the abandoned cars. On all sides they were encroaching to repossess themselves of the arid spaces that man had created. And curiously, as the living things took charge increasingly, the effect of the place became less oppressive. As it passed beyond the scope of any magic wand, most of the ghosts were going with it, withdrawing slowly into history.
Once – not that year, nor the next, but later on – I stood in Piccadilly Circus again, looking round at the desolation, and trying to recreate in my mind’s eye the crowds that once swarmed there. I could no longer do it. Even in my memory they lacked reality. There was no tincture of them now. They had become as much a backcloth of history as the audiences in the Roman Colosseum or the army of the Assyrians, and somehow, just as far removed. The nostalgia that crept over me sometimes in the quiet hours was able to move me to more regret than the crumbling scene itself. When I was by myself in the country I could recall the pleasantness of the former life: among the scabrous, slowly perishing buildings I seemed able to recall only the muddle, the frustration, the unaimed drive, the all-pervading clangour of empty vessels, and I became uncertain how much we had lost…
My first tentative trip there I took alone, returning with cases of triffid-bolts, paper, engine parts, the Braille books and writing machine that Dennis so much desired, the luxuries of drinks, sweets, records, and yet more books for the rest of us. A week later Josella came with me on a more practical search for clothing, not only, or even chiefly for the adults of the party, so much as for Mary’s baby and the one she herself was now expecting. It upset her, and it remained the only visit she made.
I continued to go there from time to time in search of some scarce necessity, and used to seize the opportunity of a few little luxuries at the same time. Never once did I see any moving thing there save a few sparrows and an occasional triffid. Cats, and dogs, growing wilder at each generation, could be found in the country, but not there. Sometimes, however, I would find evidence that others besides myself were still in the habit of quarrying supplies there, but I never saw them.
It was at the end of the fourth year that I made my last trip, and found that there were now risks which I was not justified in taking. The first intimation of that was a thunderous crash behind me somewhere in the inner suburbs. I stopped the truck and looked back to see the dust rising from a heap of rubble which lay across the road. Evidently my rumbling passage had given the last shake to a tottering housefront. I brought no more buildings down that day, but I spent it in apprehension of a descending torrent of bricks and mortar. Thereafter I confined my attention to smaller towns, and usually went about them on foot.
Brighton, which should have been our largest convenient source of supplies, I let alone. By the time I had thought it fit for a visit, others were in charge there. Who or how many they were I did not know. I simply found a rough wall of stones piled across the road, and painted with the instruction:
KEEP OUT!
The advice was backed up by the crack of a rifle and a spurt of dust just in front of me. There was no one in sight to argue with – besides, it wasn’t an arguing kind of gambit.
I turned the lorry round, and drove away thoughtfully, I wondered if a time would come when the man Stephen’s preparations for defence might turn out to be not so misplaced after all. Just to be on the safe side I laid in several machine guns and mortars from the source which had already provided us with the flame-throwers we used against the triffids.
In the November of that second year Josella’s first baby was born. We called him David. My pleasure in him was at times alloyed with misgivings over the state of things we had created him to face. But that worried Josella much less than it did me. She adored him. He seemed to be a compensation to her for much that she had lost, and, paradoxically, she started to worry less over the condition of the bridges ahead than she had before. Anyway, he had a lustiness which argued well for his future capacity to take care of himself, so I repressed my misgivings and increased the work I was putting into that land which would one day have to support all of us.
It must have been not so very long after that that Josella turned my attention more closely to the triffids. I had for years been so used to taking precautions against them in my work that their becoming a regular part of the landscape was far less noticeable to me than it was to the others. I had been accustomed, too, to wearing meshed masks and gloves when I dealt with them, so that there was little novelty for me in donning these things whenever I drove out. I had, in fact, got into the habit of paying little more attention to them than one would to mosquitoes in a known malarial area. Josella mentioned it as we lay in bed one night when almost the only sound was the intermittent, distant rattling of their hard little sticks against their stems.
‘They’re doing a lot more of that lately,’ she said.
I did not grasp at first what she was talking about. It was a sound that had been a usual background to the places where I had lived and worked for so long, that unless I deliberately listened for it I could not say whether it was going on or not. I listened now.
‘It doesn’t sound any different to me,’ I said.
‘It’s not different. It’s just that there’s a lot more of it – because there are a lot more of them than there used to be.’
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I said, indifferently.
Once I had the fence fixed up, my interest had lain in the ground within it, and I had not bothered what went on beyond it. My impression on my expeditions was that the incidence of triffids in most parts was much the same as before. I recalled that their numbers locally had caught my attention when I had first arrived, and that I had supposed that there must have been several large triffid nurseries in the district.
‘There certainly are. You take a look at them tomorrow,’ she said.
I remembered in the morning, and looked out of the window as I was dressing. I saw that Josella was right. One could count over a hundred of them behind the quite small stretch of fence visible from the window. I mentioned it at breakfast. Susan looked surprised.
‘But they’ve been getting more all the time,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’
‘I’ve got plenty of other things to bother about,’ I said, a little irritated by her tone. ‘They don’t matter outside the fence, anyway. As long as we take care to pull up all the seeds that root in here, they can do what they like outside.’
‘All the same,’ Josella remarked, with a trace of uneasiness, ‘is there any particular reason why they should come to just this part in such numbers? I’m sure they do – and I’d like to know just why it is.’
Susan’s face took on its irritating expression of surprise again.
‘Why, he brings them,’ she said.
‘Don’t point,’ Josella told her, automatically. ‘What do you mean? I’m sure Bill doesn’t bring them.’
‘But he does. He makes all the noises, and they just come.’
‘Look here,’ I said. ‘What are you talking about? Am I supposed to be whistling them here in my sleep, or something?’
Susan looked huffy.
‘All right. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you after breakfast,’ she announced, and withdrew into an offended silence.
When we had finished she slipped from the table, returning with my twelve-bore and field-glasses. We went out on to the lawn. She scoured the view until she found a triffid on the move well beyond our fences, and then handed the glasses to me. I watched the thing lurching slowly across a field. It was more than a mile away from us, and heading east.
‘Now keep on watching it,’ she said.
She fired the gun into the air.
A few seconds later the triffid perceptibly altered course towards the south.
‘See?’ she inquired, rubbing her shoulder.
‘Well, it did look – Are you sure? Try again.’ I suggested.
She shook her head.
‘It wouldn’t be any good. All the triffids that heard it are coming this way now. In about ten minutes they’ll stop and listen. If they’re near enough then to hear the ones by the fence clattering, they’ll come on. Or if they’re too far away for that, but we make another noise, then they’ll come. But if they can’t hear anything at all, they’ll wait a bit, and then just go on wherever they were going before.’
I admit that I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation.
‘Well – er,’ I said. ‘You must have been watching them very closely, Susan?’
‘I always watch them. I hate them,’ she said, as if that were explanation enough.
Dennis had joined us as we stood there.
‘I’m with you, Susan,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it. I’ve not liked it for some time. Those damn things have the drop on us.’
‘Oh, come – ’ I began.
‘I tell you there’s more to them than we think. How did they know? They started to break loose the moment there was no one to stop them. They were around this house the very next day. Can you account for that?’
‘That’s not new for them,’ I said. ‘In jungle country they used to hang around near the tracks. Quite often they would surround a small village and invade it if they weren’t beaten off. They were a dangerous kind of pest in quite a lot of places.’
‘But not here – that’s my point. They couldn’t do that here until conditions made it possible. They didn’t even try. But when they could, they did it at once – almost as if they knew they could.’
‘Come now, be reasonable, Dennis. Just think what you’re implying,’ I told him.
‘I’m quite aware of what I’m implying – some of it, at any rate. I’m making no definite theory, but I do say this: they took advantage of our disadvantages with remarkable speed. I also say that there is something perceptibly like method going on among them right now. You’ve been so wrapped up in your jobs that you’ve not noticed how they’ve been massing up, and waiting out there beyond the fence, but Susan has – I’ve heard her talking about it. And just what do you think they’re waiting for?’
I did not try to answer that just then. I said:
‘You think I’d better lay off using the twelve-bore which attracts them, and use a triffid gun instead?’
‘It’s not just the gun, it’s all noises,’ said Susan. ‘The tractor’s the worst because it is a loud noise, and it keeps on, so that they can easily find where it comes from. But they can hear the lighting-plant engine quite a long way, too. I’ve seen them turn this way when it starts up.’
‘I wish,’ I told her, irritably, ‘you’d not keep on saying “they hear”, as if they were animals. They’re not. They don’t “hear”. They’re just plants.’
‘All the same, they do hear, somehow,’ Susan retorted, stubbornly.
‘Well – anyway, we’ll do something about them,’ I promised.
We did. The first trap was a crude kind of windmill which produced a hearty hammering noise. We fixed it up about half a mile away. It worked. It drew them away from our fence, and from elsewhere. When there were several hundreds of them clustered about it, Susan and I drove over there and turned the flame-throwers on them. It worked fairly well a second time, too – but after that only a very few of them paid any attention to it. Our next move was to build a kind of stout bay inwards from the fence, and then remove part of the main fence itself, replacing it by a gate. We had chosen a point within earshot of the lighting engine, and we left the gate open. After a couple of days we dropped the gate, and destroyed the couple of hundred or so that had come into the pen. That, too, was fairly successful to begin with, but not if we tried it twice in the same place, and even in other places the numbers we netted dropped steadily.
A tour of the boundaries every few days with a flame-thrower could have kept the numbers down effectively, but it would have taken a lot of time and soon have run us out of fuel. A flame-thrower’s consumption is high, and the stocks held for it in the arms depots were not large. Once we finished it, our valuable flame-throwers would become little better than junk, for I knew neither the formula for an efficient fuel nor the method of producing it.
On the two or three occasions we tried mortar-bombs on concentrations of triffids the results were disappointing. Triffids share with trees the ability to take a lot of damage without lethal harm.
As time went on the numbers collected along the fence continued to increase in spite of our traps and occasional holocausts. They didn’t try anything or do anything there. They simply settled down, wriggled their roots into the soil, and remained. At a distance they looked as inactive as any other hedge, and but for the pattering that some few of them were sure to be making, they might have been no more remarkable. But if one doubted their alertness it was only necessary to take a car down the lane. To do so was to run a gauntlet of such viciously slashing stings that it was necessary to stop the car at the main road and wipe the windscreen clear of poison.
Now and then one of us would have a new idea for their discouragement such as spraying the ground beyond the fence with a strong arsenical solution, but the retreats we caused were only temporary.
We’d been trying out a variety of such dodges for a year or more before the day when Susan came running into our room early one morning to tell us that the things had broken in, and were all round the house. She had got up early to do the milking, as usual. The sky outside her bedroom window was grey, but when she went downstairs she found everything there in complete darkness. She realized that should not be so, and turned on the light. The moment she saw leathery green leaves pressed against the windows, she guessed what had happened.
I crossed the bedroom on tiptoe, and pulled the window shut sharply. Even as it closed a sting whipped up from below and smacked against the glass. We looked down on a thicket of triffids standing ten or twelve deep against the wall of the house. The flame-throwers were in one of the outhouses. I took no risks when I went to fetch them. In thick clothing and gloves, with a leather helmet and goggles beneath the mesh mask I hacked a way through the throng of triffids with the largest carving knife I could find. The stings whipped and slapped at the wire mesh so frequently that they wet it, and the poison began to come through in a fine spray. It misted the goggles, and the first thing I did in the outhouse was to wash it off my face. I dared not use more than a brief, low-aimed jet from one of the throwers to clear my way back for fear of setting the door and window frames alight, but it moved and agitated them enough for me to get back unmolested.
Josella and Susan stood by with fire-extinguishers while I, still looking like a cross between a deep-sea diver and a man from Mars, leant from the upper windows on each side of the house in turn and played the thrower over the besieging mob of the brutes. It did not take very long to incinerate a number of them and get the rest on the move. Susan, now dressed for the job, took the second thrower and started on the, to her, highly congenial task of hunting them down while I set off across the fields to find the source of the trouble. That was not difficult. From the first rise I was able to see the spot where triffids were still lurching into our enclosure in a stream of tossing stems and waving leaves. They fanned out a little on the nearer side, but all of them were bound in the direction of the house. It was simple to head them off. A jet in front stopped them; one to either side started them back on the way they had come. An occasional spurt over them and dripping among them hurried them up, and turned back later-comers. Twenty yards or so away a part of the fence was lying flat, with the posts snapped off. I rigged it up temporarily there and then, and played the thrower back and forth, giving the things enough of a scorching to prevent more trouble for a few hours at least.
Josella, Susan, and I spent most of the day repairing the breach. Two more days passed before Susan and I could be sure that we had searched every corner of the enclosure and accounted for the very last of the intruders. We followed that up with an inspection of the whole length of the fence and a reinforcement of all doubtful sections. Four months later they broke in again…
This time a number of broken triffids lay in the gap. Our impression was that they had been crushed in the pressure that had been built up against the fence before it gave way, and that, falling with it, they had been trampled by the rest.
It was clear that we should have to take new defensive measures. No part of our fence was any stronger than that which had given way. Electrification seemed the most likely means of keeping them at a distance. To power it I found an army generator mounted on a trailer, and towed it home. Susan and I set to work on the wiring. Before we had completed it the brutes were through again in another place.
I believe that system would have been completely effective if we could have kept it in action all the time – or even most of the time. But against that there was the fuel consumption. Petrol was one of the most valuable of our stores. Food of some kind we could always hope to grow, but when petrol and diesel oil were no longer available, much more than our mere convenience would be gone with them. There would be no more expeditions, and consequently no more replenishments of supplies. The primitive life would start in earnest. So, from motives of conservation, the barrier wire was only charged for some minutes two or three times a day. It caused the triffids to recoil a few yards, and thereby stopped them building up pressure against the fence. As an additional guard we ran an alarm wire on the inner fence to enable us to deal with any breaks before they became serious.
The weakness lay in the triffids’ apparent ability to learn, in at least a limited way, from experience. We found, for instance, that they grew accustomed to our practice of charging the wire for a while night and morning. We began to notice that they were usually clear of the wire at our customary time for starting the engine, and they began to close in again soon after it had stopped. Whether they actually associated the charged condition of the wire with the sound of the engine was impossible to say then, but later we had little doubt that they did.
It was easy enough to make our running times erratic, but Susan, for whom they were continually a source of inimical study, soon began to maintain that the period for which the shock kept them clear was growing steadily shorter. Nevertheless the electrified wire and occasional attacks upon them in the sections where they were densest kept us free of incursions for over a year, and of those that occurred later we had warning enough to stop them being more than a minor nuisance.
Within the safety of our compound we continued to learn about agriculture, and life settled gradually into a routine.