We walked across to the little boy. The scarlet slash of the sting was vivid on his pale cheek. It must have happened some hours before. She knelt beside him.
‘It isn’t any good,’ I told her, gently.
She looked up, fresh tears in her eyes.
‘Is Tommy dead, too?’
I squatted down beside her, and shook my head.
‘I’m afraid he is.’
After a while she said:
‘Poor Tommy! Will we bury him – like the puppies?’
‘Yes,’ I told her.
In all the overwhelming disaster that was the only grave I dug – and it was a very small one. She gathered a little bunch of flowers, and laid them on top of it. Then we drove away.
Susan was her name. A long time ago, as it seemed to her, something had happened to her father and mother so that they could not see. Her father had gone out to try to get some help, and he had not come back. Her mother went out later, giving the children strict instructions not to leave the house. She had come back crying. The next day she went out again: this time she did not come back. The children had eaten what they could find, and then began to grow hungry. At last Susan was hungry enough to disobey instructions and seek help from Mrs Walton at the shop. The shop itself was open, but Mrs Walton was not there. No one came when Susan called, so she had decided to take some cakes and biscuits and sweets, and tell Mrs Walton about it later.
She had seen some of the things about as she came back. One of them had struck at her, but it had misjudged her height, and the sting had passed over her head. It frightened her, and she ran the rest of the way home. After that she had been very careful about the things, and on further expeditions had taught Tommy to be careful about them, too. But Tommy had been so little, he had not been able to see the one that was hiding in the next garden when he went out to play that morning. Susan had tried half a dozen times to get to him, but each time, however careful she was, she had seen the top of the triffid tremble and stir slightly…
An hour or so later I decided it was time to stop for the night. I left her in the truck while I prospected a cottage or two until I found one that was fit, and then we set about getting a meal together. I did not know much of small girls, but this one seemed to be able to dispose of an astonishing quantity of the result, confessing while she did so that a diet consisting almost entirely of biscuits, cake, and sweets had proved less completely satisfying than she had expected. After we had cleaned her up a bit, and I, under instruction, had wielded her hairbrush, I began to feel rather pleased with the results. She, for her part, seemed able for a time to forget all that had happened in her pleasure at having someone to talk to.
I could understand that. I was feeling exactly the same way myself.
But not long after I had seen her to bed and come downstairs again I heard the sound of sobbing. I went back to her.
‘It’s all right, Susan,’ I said. ‘It’s all right. It didn’t really hurt poor Tommy, you know – it was so quick.’ I sat down on the bed beside her, and took her hand. She stopped crying.
‘It wasn’t just Tommy,’ she said. ‘It was after Tommy – when there was nobody, nobody at all. I was so frightened…’
‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I do know. I was frightened, too.’
She looked up at me.
‘But you aren’t frightened now?’
‘No. And you aren’t, either. So you see we’ll just have to keep together to stop one another being frightened.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, with serious consideration. ‘I think that’ll be all right…’
So we went on to discuss a number of things until she fell asleep.
‘Where are we going?’ Susan asked, as we started off again the following morning.
I said that we were looking for a lady.
‘Where is she?’ asked Susan.
I wasn’t sure of that.
‘When shall we find her?’ asked Susan.
I was pretty unsatisfactory about that, too.
‘Is she a pretty lady?’ asked Susan.
‘Yes,’ I said, glad to be more definite, this time.
It seemed, for some reason, to give Susan satisfaction.
‘Good,’ she remarked, approvingly, and we passed to other subjects.
Because of her I tried to skirt the larger towns, but it was impossible to avoid many unpleasant sights in the country. After a while I gave up pretending that they did not exist. Susan regarded them with the same detached interest as she gave to the normal scenery. They did not alarm her, though they puzzled her, and prompted questions. Reflecting that the world in which she was going to grow up would have little use for the over-niceties and euphemisms that I had learnt as a child, I did my best to treat the various horrors and curiosities in the same objective fashion. That was really very good for me, too.
By midday the clouds had gathered, and the rain began once more. When, at five o’clock, we pulled up on the road just short of Pulborough it was still pouring hard.
‘Where do we go now?’ inquired Susan.
‘That,’ I acknowledged, ‘is just the trouble. It’s somewhere over there.’ I waved my arm towards the misty line of the Downs, to the south.
I had been trying hard to recall just what else Josella had said of the place, but I could remember no more than that the house stood on the north side of the hills, and I had the impression that it faced across the low, marshy country that separated them from Pulborough. Now that I had come so far, it seemed a pretty vague instruction: the Downs stretched away for miles to the east and to the west.
‘Maybe the first thing to do is to see if we can find any smoke across there,’ I suggested.
‘It’s awfully difficult to see anything at all in the rain,’ Susan said, practically, and quite rightly.
Half an hour later the rain obligingly held off for a while. We left the lorry and sat on a wall side by side. We studied the lower slopes of the hills carefully for some time, but neither Susan’s sharp eyes nor my field-glasses could discover any trace of smoke or signs of activity. Then it started to rain again.
‘I’m hungry,’ said Susan.
Food was a matter of trifling interest to me just then. Now that I was so near, my anxiety to know whether my guess had been right overcame everything else. While Susan was still eating I took the lorry a little way up the hill behind us to get a more extensive view. In between showers, and in a worsening light, we scanned the other side of the valley again without result. There was no life or movement in the whole valley save for a few cattle and sheep, and an occasional triffid lurching across the field below.
An idea came to me, and I decided to go down to the village. I was reluctant to take Susan, for I knew the place would be unpleasant, but I could not leave her where she was. When we got there I found that the sights affected her less than they did me; children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at. The depression was all mine. Susan found more to interest than to disgust her. Any sombreness was quite offset by her delight in a scarlet silk mackintosh with which she equipped herself in spite of its being several sizes too large. My search, too, was rewarding. I returned to the lorry laden with a headlamp like a minor searchlight which we had found upon an illustrious-looking Rolls-Royce.
I rigged the thing up on a kind of pivot beside the cab window, and made it ready to plug in. When that was fixed there was nothing to do but wait for darkness, and hope that the rain would let up.
By the time it was fully dark the raindrops had become a mere spatter. I switched on, and sent a magnificent beam piercing the night. Slowly I turned the lamp from side to side, keeping its ray levelled towards the opposite hills, while I anxiously tried to watch the whole line of them simultaneously for an answering light. A dozen times or more I traversed it steadily, switching off for a few seconds at the end of each sweep while we sought the least flicker in the darkness. But each time the night over the hills remained pitchy black. Then the rain came on more heavily again. I set the beam full ahead, and sat waiting, listening to the drumming of the drops on the roof of the cab while Susan fell asleep leaning against my arm. An hour passed before the drumming dwindled to a patter, and ceased. Susan woke up as I started the beam raking across again. I had completed the sixth travel when she called out:
‘Look, Bill! There it is! There’s a light!’
She was pointing a few degrees left of our front. I switched off the lamp, and followed the line of her finger. It was difficult to be sure. If it were not a trick of our eyes, it was something as dim as a distant glow-worm. And even as we were looking as it, the rain came down on us again in sheets. By the time I had my glasses in my hand there was no view at all.
I hesitated to move. It might be that the light, if it had been a light, would not be visible from lower ground. Once more I trained our light forward, and settled down to wait with as much patience as I could manage. Almost another hour passed before the rain cleared again. The moment it did, I switched off our lamp.
‘It is!’ Susan cried, excitedly. ‘Look! Look!’
It was. And bright enough now to banish any doubts, though the glasses showed me no details.
I switched on again, and gave the V-sign in Morse – it is the only Morse I know except SOS, so it had to do. While we watched the other light it blinked, and then began a series of deliberate longs and shorts which unfortunately meant nothing to me. I gave a couple more V’s for good measure, drew the approximate line of the far light on our map, and switched on the driving lights.
‘Is that the lady?’ asked Susan.
‘It’s got to be,’ I said. ‘It’s got to be.’
That was a poorish trip. To cross the low marshland it was necessary to take a road a little to the west of us and then work back to the east along the foot of the hills. Before we had gone more than a mile something cut off the sight of the light from us altogether, and to add to the difficulty of finding our way in the dark lanes the rain began again in earnest. With no one to care for the drainage sluices some fields were already flooded, and the water was over the road in places. I had to drive with a tedious care when all my urge was to put my foot flat down.
Once we reached the further side of the valley we were free of flood water, but we made little better speed, for the lanes were full of primitive wanderings and improbable turns. I had to give the wheel all my attention while the child peered up at the hills beside us, watching for the reappearance of the light. We reached the point where the line on my map intersected with what appeared to be our present road without seeing a sign of it. I tried the next uphill turning. It took about half an hour to get back to the road again from the chalkpit into which it led us.
We ran on further along the lower road. Then Susan caught a glimmer between the branches to our right. The next turning was luckier. It took us back at a slant up the side of the hill until we were able to see a small, brilliantly lit square of window half a mile or more along the slope.
Even then, and with the map to help, it was not easy to find the lane that led to it. We lurched along, still climbing in low gear, but each time we caught sight of the window again it was a little closer. The lane had not been designed for ponderous lorries. In the narrower parts we had to push our way along it between bushes and brambles which scrabbled along the sides as though they were trying to pull us back.
But at last there was a lantern waving in the road ahead. It moved on, swinging to show us the turn through a gate. Then it was set stationary on the ground. I drove to within a yard or two of it, and stopped. As I opened the door a flashlight shone suddenly into my eyes. I had a glimpse of a figure behind it in a raincoat shining with wetness.
A slight break marred the intended calm of the voice that spoke.
‘Hullo, Bill. You’ve been a long time.’
I jumped down.
‘Oh, Bill. I can’t – Oh, my dear, I’ve been hoping so much…Oh, Bill…’ said Josella.
I had forgotten all about Susan until a voice came from above.
‘You are getting wet, you silly. Why don’t you kiss her indoors?’ it asked.
14
Shirning
The sense with which I arrived at Shirning Farm – the one that told me that most of my troubles were now over – is interesting only in showing how wide of the mark a sense can be. The sweeping of Josella into my arms went off pretty well, but its corollary of carrying her away forthwith to join the others at Tynsham did not, for several reasons.
Ever since her possible location had occurred to me I had pictured her in, I must admit, a rather cinematic way, as battling bravely against all the forces of nature, etc., etc. In a fashion I suppose she was, but the set-up was a lot different from my imaginings. My simple plan of saying: ‘Jump aboard. We’re off to join Coker and his little gang,’ had to go by the board. One might have known that things would not turn out so simply – on the other hand it is surprising how often the better thing is disguised as the worse…
Not that I didn’t from the start prefer Shirning to the thought of Tynsham – but to join a larger group was obviously a sounder move. But Shirning was charming. The word ‘farm’ had become a courtesy title for the place. It had been a farm until some twenty-five years before, and it still looked like a farm, but in reality it had become a country house. Sussex and the neighbouring counties were well dotted with such houses and cottages which tired Londoners had found adaptable to their needs. Internally the house had been modernized and reconstructed to a point where it was doubtful whether its previous tenants would be able to recognize a single room. Outside it had become spick. The yards and sheds had a suburban rather than a rural tidiness and had for years known no form of animal life rougher than a few riding horses and ponies. The farmyard showed no utilitarian sights and gave forth no rustic smells; it had been laid over with close green turf like a bowling green. The fields across which the windows of the house gazed from beneath weathered red tiles had long been worked by the occupiers of other and more earthy farmhouses. But the sheds and barns remained in good condition.
It had been the ambition of Josella’s friends, the present owners, to restore the place one day to work on a limited scale, and to this end they had continually refused tempting offers for it in the hope that at some time, and in some manner not clearly perceived, they would acquire enough money to start buying back the land rightfully belonging to it.
With its own well and its own power plant, the place had plenty to recommend it – but as I looked it over I understood Coker’s wisdom in speaking of co-operative effort. I knew nothing of farming, but I could feel that if we had intended to stay there it would take a lot of work to feed six of us.
The other three had been there already when Josella had arrived. They were Dennis and Mary Brent, and Joyce Taylor. Dennis was the owner of the house. Joyce had been there on an indefinite visit, at first to keep Mary company, and then to keep the house running when Mary’s expected baby should be born.
On the night of the green flashes – of the comet you would say if you were one who still believes in that comet – there had been two other guests, Joan and Ted Danton, spending a week’s holiday there. All five of them had gone out into the garden to watch the display. In the morning all five awoke to a world that was perpetually dark. First they had tried to telephone, when they found that impossible they waited hopefully for the arrival of the daily help. She, too, failing them, Ted had volunteered to try to find out what had happened. Dennis would have accompanied him but for his wife’s almost hysterical state. Ted, therefore, had set out alone. He did not come back. At some time later in the day, and without saying a word to anyone, Joan had slipped off, presumably to try to find her husband. She, too, disappeared completely.
Dennis had kept track of time by touching the hands of the clock. By late afternoon it was impossible to sit any longer doing nothing. He wanted to try to get down to the village. Both the women had objected to that. Because of Mary’s state he had yielded, and Joyce determined to try. She went to the door, and began to feel her way with a stick outstretched before her. She was barely over the threshold when something fell with a swish across her left hand, burning like a hot wire. She jumped back with a cry, and collapsed in the hall where Dennis had found her. Luckily she was conscious, and able to moan of the pain in her hand. Dennis, feeling the raised weal, had guessed it for what it was. In spite of their blindness, he and Mary had somehow contrived to apply hot fomentations, she heating the kettle while he put on a tourniquet and did his best to suck out the poison. After that they had had to carry her up to bed where she stayed for several days while the effect of the poison wore off.
Meanwhile Dennis had made tests, first at the front and then at the back of the house. With the door slightly open, he cautiously thrust out a broom at head level. Each time there was the whistle of a sting, and he felt the broom handle tremble slightly in his grip. At one of the garden windows the same thing happened: the others seemed to be clear. He would have tried to leave by one of them but for Mary’s distress. She was sure that if there were triffids close round the house there must be others about, and would not let him take the risk.
Luckily they had food enough to last them some time, though it was difficult to prepare it; also Joyce, in spite of a high temperature, appeared to be holding her own against the triffid poison, so that the situation was less urgent than it might have been. Most of the next day Dennis devoted to contriving a kind of helmet for himself. He had wire net only of large mesh so that he had to construct it of several layers overlapped and tied together. It took him some time, but, equipped with this and a pair of heavy gauntlet gloves, he was able to start out for the village late in the day. A triffid had struck at him before he was three paces away from the house. He groped for it until he found it, and twisted its stem for it. A minute or two later another sting thudded across his helmet. He could not find that triffid to grapple with it, though it made half a dozen slashes before it gave up. He found his way to the toolshed, and thence across to the lane, encumbered now with three large balls of gardening twine which he paid out as he went to guide him back.
Several times in the lane more stings whipped at him. It took an immensely long time for him to cover the mile or so to the village, and, before he reached it, his supply of twine had given out. And all the time he had walked and stumbled through a silence so complete that it frightened him. Now and then he would stop and call, but no one answered. More than once he was afraid that he had lost his way, but when his feet discovered a better laid road surface he knew where he was, and was able to confirm it by locating a signpost. He groped his way further on.
After a seemingly vast distance he had become aware that his footsteps were sounding differently; they had a faint echo. Making to one side he found a footpath, and then a wall. A little further along he discovered a post-box let into the brickwork, and knew that he must be actually in the village at last. He called out once more. A voice, a woman’s voice, called back, but it was some distance ahead, and the words were indistinguishable. He called again, and began to move towards it. Its reply was suddenly cut off by a scream. After that there was silence again. Only then, and still half-incredulously, did he realize that the village was in no better plight than his own household. He sat down on the grassed verge of the path to think out what he should do.
By the feeling in the air he thought that night must have come. He must have been away fully four hours – and there was nothing to do but go back. All the same, there was no reason why he should go back empty-handed…With his stick he rapped his way along the wall until it rang on one of the tinplate advertisements which adorned the village shop. Three times in the last fifty or sixty yards stings had slapped on his helmet. Another struck as he opened the gate, and he tripped over a body lying on the path. A man’s body, quite cold.
He had the impression that there had been others in the shop before him. Nevertheless, he found a sizeable piece of bacon. He dropped it, along with packets of butter or margarine, biscuits, and sugar into a sack, and added an assortment of tins which came from a shelf that, to the best of his recollection, was devoted to food – the sardine tins, at any rate, were unmistakable. Then he sought for, and found, a dozen or more balls of string, shouldered his sack, and set off for home.
He had missed his way once, and it had been hard to keep down panic while he retraced his steps and reorientated himself. But at last he knew that he was again in the familiar lane. By groping right across it he managed to locate the twine of his outward journey, and join it to the string. From there the rest of the journey back had been comparatively easy.
Twice more in the week that followed he had made the journey to the village shop again, and each time the triffids round the house and on the way had seemed more numerous. There had been nothing for the isolated trio to do but wait in hope. And then, like a miracle, Josella had arrived.
It was clear at once, then, that the notion of an immediate move to Tynsham was out. For one thing, Joyce Taylor was still in an extremely weak state – when I looked at her I was surprised that she was alive at all. Dennis’s promptness had saved her life, but their inability to give her the proper restoratives or even suitable food during the following week had slowed down her recovery. It would be folly to try to move her a long distance for a week or two yet. And then, too, Mary’s confinement was close enough to make the journey inadvisable for her, so that the only course seemed to be for us all to remain where we were until these crises should have passed.
Once more it became my task to scrounge and forage. This time I had to work on a more elaborate scale to include not merely food, but petrol for the lighting system, hens that were laying, two cows that had recently calved (and still survived though their ribs were sticking out), medical necessities for Mary, and a surprising list of sundries.
The area was more beset with triffids than any other I had yet seen. Almost every morning revealed one or two new ones lurking close to the house, and the first task of the day was to shoot the tops off them, until I had constructed a netting fence to keep them out of the garden. Even then they would come right up and loiter suggestively against it until something was done about them.
I opened some of the cases of gear, and taught young Susan how to use a triffid-gun. She quite rapidly became an expert at disarming the things as she continued to call them. It became her department to work daily vengeance on them.
From Josella I learnt what had happened to her after the fire alarm at the University Building.
She had been shipped off with her party much as I with mine, but her manner of dealing with the two women to whom she was attached had been summary. She had issued a flat ultimatum: either she became free of all restraints, in which case she would help them as far as she was able; or, if they continued to coerce her, there would be likely to come a time when they would find themselves drinking prussic acid or eating cyanide of potassium on her recommendation. They could take their choice. They had chosen sensibly.
There was little difference in what we had to tell one another about the days that had followed. When her group had in the end dissolved, she had reasoned much as I did. She took a car, and went up to Hampstead to look for me. She had not encountered any survivors from my group, nor run across that led by the quick-triggered, red-headed man. She had kept on there until almost sunset, and then decided to make for the University Building. Not knowing what to expect, she had cautiously stopped the car a couple of streets away, and approached on foot. When she was still some distance from the gates she heard a shot. Wondering what that might indicate, she had taken cover in the garden that had sheltered us before. From there she had observed Coker also making a circumspect advance. Without knowing that I had fired at the triffid in the Square, and that the sound of the shot was the cause of Coker’s caution, she suspected some kind of trap. Determined not to fall into one a second time, she had returned to the car. She had no idea where the rest had gone – if they had gone at all. The only place of refuge she could think of that would be known to anyone at all was the one she had mentioned almost casually to me. She had decided to make for it in the hope that I, if I were still in existence, would remember, and try to find it.
‘I curled up and slept in the back of the car once I was clear of London,’ she said. ‘It was still quite early when I got here the next morning. The sound of the car brought Dennis to an upstairs window warning me to look out for triffids. Then I saw that there were half a dozen or more of them close around the house for all the world as if they were waiting for someone to come out of it. Dennis and I shouted back and forth. The triffids stirred and one of them began to move towards me, so I nipped back into the car for safety. When it kept on coming, I started up the car, and deliberately ran it down. But there were still the others, and I had no kind of weapon but my knife. It was Dennis who solved that difficulty.
‘“If you have a can of petrol to spare, throw some of it their way, and follow it up with a bit of burning rag,” he suggested. “That ought to shift ’em.”
‘It did. Since then I’ve been using a garden syringe. The wonder is that I’ve not set the place on fire.’
With the aid of a cook-book Josella had managed to produce meals of a kind, and had set about putting the place more or less to rights. Working, learning, and improvising had kept her too busy to worry about a future which lay beyond the next few weeks. She had seen no one else at all during those days, but, certain that there must be others somewhere, she had scanned the whole valley for signs of smoke by day or lights by night. She had seen no smoke, and in all the miles within her view there had not been a gleam of light until the evening I came.
In a way, the worst affected of the original trio was Dennis. Joyce was still weak and in a semi-invalid state. Mary held herself withdrawn and seemed capable of finding endless mental occupation and compensation in the contemplation of prospective motherhood. But Dennis was like an animal in a trap. He did not curse in the futile way I had heard so many others do, he resented it with a vicious bitterness as if it had forced him into a cage where he did not intend to stay. Already, before I arrived, he had prevailed upon Josella to find the Braille system in the encyclopedia and make an indented copy of the alphabet for him to learn. He spent dogged hours each day making notes in it, and attempting to read them back. Most of the rest of the time he fretted over his own uselessness, though he scarcely mentioned it. He would keep on trying to do this or that with a grim persistence that was painful to watch, and it required all my self-control to stop me offering him help – one experience of the bitterness which unasked help could arouse in him was quite enough. I began to be astonished at the things he was painfully teaching himself to do, though still the most impressive to me was his construction of an efficient mesh helmet on only the second day of his blindness.
It took him out of himself to accompany me on some of my foraging expeditions, and it pleased him that he could be useful in helping to move the heavier cases. He was anxious for books in Braille, but these, we decided, would have to wait until there was less risk of contamination in towns large enough to be likely sources.
The days began to pass quickly, certainly for the three of us who could see. Josella was kept busy, mostly in the house, and Susan was learning to help her. There were plenty of jobs, too, waiting to be done by me. Joyce recovered sufficiently to make a shaky first appearance, and then began to pick up more rapidly. Soon after that Mary’s pains began.
That was a bad night for everyone. Worst, perhaps, for Dennis in knowing that everything depended on the care of two willing, but in experienced girls. His self-control aroused my helpless admiration.
In the early hours of the morning Josella came down to us, looking very tired:
‘It’s a girl. They’re both all right,’ she said, and led Dennis up.
She returned a few moments later, and took the drink I had ready for her.
‘It was quite simple, thank heaven,’ she said. ‘Poor Mary was horribly afraid it might be blind, too, but of course it’s not. Now she’s crying quite dreadfully because she can’t see it.’
We drank.
‘It’s queer,’ I said, ‘the way things go on, I mean. Like a seed – it looks all shrivelled and finished, you’d think it was dead, but it isn’t. And now a new life starting, coming into all this…’
Josella put her face in her hands.
‘Oh, God! Bill. Does it have to go on being like this? On – and on – and on – ?’
And she, too, collapsed in tears.