The Night of the Triffids (5 page)

    'And what else, Masen?'

    'Er, the sting is poisonous. Lethal if it strikes the exposed skin of a man or woman.'

    'Indeed, they can fell a cow or a horse. Any other pearls of wisdom, Masen?'

    I could tell that Mr Pinz-Wilks was less than impressed by my pedestrian recitation. By that time, moreover, I'd be shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot.

    'Perhaps, Masen, you could have begun with the plant's origins. After all, was it present when the Emperor Claudius conquered the British Isles in AD 43? Can we be so fanciful as to imagine its discovery was splashed across the front pages of Rome's
Acta Diurna
?'

    'No, sir.'

    'Or did it arrive on this planet from outer space, perhaps hitching a ride on the tail of a comet?'

    'No, sir. Er… it is thought that triffids were developed by scientists in Russia, after, er, World War Two, sir.'

    'That is correct, Masen. A hybrid created from many different species. But have I ever mentioned that Ur is the ancient Sumerian city in Iraq that flourished two and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ?'

    'Sir?' I was confused.

    'It is just that you have such a fondness for punctuating your sentences with the name "Ur" that I thought you might be contemplating some deep and rigorous study of that fabled city of Sumer.'

    My confusion got a whole lot worse. The schoolmaster's legendary wit was often as impenetrable as it was sarcastic.

    As I said, botany was a weak point, a very weak point in my somewhat lacklustre portfolio of academic abilities. Often, at times like this, the schoolmaster would point unerringly with his white stick at a boy he could not even see, then ask that so much brighter individual to continue.

    Crisply the boy would canter through the facts. 'The triffid, or more properly
pseudopodia,
takes around two years to develop the lashlike sting that can strike at a victim ten to fifteen feet away from itself. The sting is generally fatal to humans unless an antidote can be administered by hypodermic to the carotid artery. What is most unusual about the triffid, compared with other plants, isn't that it is a flesh eater - the Venus flytrap feeds in a roughly similar way - it is that the plant can walk. It walks by using three bluntly tapered projections that extend from its lower part. At first thought, mistakenly, to be roots, these support the main body of the plant and raise it perhaps a foot above the ground. It walks rather like a man on crutches. Two of the blunt legs slide forward, then the whole plant lurches forward as the rear one draws level with them. At each step the stem whips violently backward and forward. As William Masen, the expert on triffids, put it, "it gave one a kind of seasick feeling to watch it". The effect of the motion is irregular and jerky but the plant can cover the ground at an average walking pace.'

    'Excellent, Merryweather. Excellent. Anything else of note?'

    'From the plants we extract oil that can be used in the manufacture of certain foods and refined to make fuel for motors. From them we also get raw ingredients for plastics and for a variety of drugs. We use their fibres for rope, and the dried remains of processed plants, mashed into cakes, are fed to cattle.'

    'Well done.'

    'The plant can produce a rattling noise by striking small sticklike growths against its own stem. William Masen considered that they might be communicating with each other but, as yet, there is no evidence to support this.'

    'Superb, Merryweather. Please sit down. Now, to history, noble history…'

    

    

    Occasionally it did irritate me to hear my father being quoted as if he were some long-dead scientist. But, more often than not as the bright students efficiently gave their condensed lectures, my eyes would be drawn to the window where I'd gaze dreamily at the clouds floating through a deep blue sky as lightly as feathers. Then I'd imagine myself sitting snugly in the cockpit of an aeroplane, listening to the sweet hum of a pair of Merlin engines and feeling the vibration of those throbbing cylinders running through the joystick to tickle the palm of my hands. Yes. Adventure was in my blood.

    And so, as always, my daydreams would take me far away from the classroom to a world beyond my safe but mundane island home.

    Speaking of home, it might be interesting for anyone who should happen to read this to know something about the island community. When my family arrived on the Isle of Wight some twenty-five years ago, after their dramatic flight from Shirning in a triffid-infested England, the island's population stood at a mere few hundred.

    The population, however, steadily increased as more refugees reached the island from the Irish Republic, the British mainland and even from the continent of Europe where waves of triffids spreading from the Russian steppes drove human survivors westward until their backs were to the Atlantic.

    In Western Europe the most sizeable communities were based in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight and the larger Scottish Isles, while the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic formed the northernmost community. Mainland Britain and Europe were largely no-go areas. Triffids extended in vast ambulatory forests, choking open fields and city streets alike.

    From exploratory flights and careful monitoring of radio broadcasts we learned of a few small communities hanging on by the skin of their teeth on the mainland, permanently besieged by the triffid armies. Besides the Western European groups, there were other communities throughout the world, all as fragile as one another. Many were lost to the triffids, natural disasters, disease, famine - even, ludicrously, to wars that pitted man against man.

    The great bulk of the world's population died in those first few months of Year One of the catastrophe. It was estimated that the entire population of the globe now might not number above one million men, women and children. Perhaps a third of those were unsighted.

    In the light of such a dizzying drop in the population it was no wonder, then, that our island council placed such a priority on repopulation. After all, those first few hundred who had made their home on the Isle of Wight all those years ago must have been rattling round its one hundred and forty-seven square miles like the proverbial pea in an oil drum.

    Women of childbearing age were encouraged to have as many children as possible. Half a dozen was considered the minimum. But Mother Nature herself would often override with ease any plans made by humans.

    My mother, for instance, lost the ability to have any more children with the birth of my youngest sister by Caesarean. (This left my mother and father with a total of three offspring.)

    The most radical initiative was the creation of the Mother Houses. Even though I'd been born on the mainland, I'd come to the island as a very young boy. So I was really a child of the colony myself, didn't care a fig about the morals and social conventions of the Old World, and didn't find the idea of the Mother Houses at all strange.

    But when the idea was mooted more than twenty years ago there was outrage; many left the island to join communities on Jersey and Guernsey that adhered to what some considered a stricter moral code. Simply, the plan was that unsighted women of childbearing age would be invited (some said coaxed, others claimed coerced) into becoming professional mothers.

    Initially, the project stipulated that a sighted man would have a 'harem' of unsighted women as well as a sighted wife.

    Uproar!

    But the idea didn't go away.

    Instead, under the guidance of 'Matrons' (these were older women, mainly unsighted and all above childbearing age) professional mothers took over many of the larger country houses. They made it quite clear that these would be governed democratically, yet with strictly no involvement by men - administrative involvement, that was: human biology hadn't yet reached a stage where the female of the species could reproduce without needing at least the bare necessities from the male.

    In a nutshell, Mother Houses functioned as self-governing communities of women who were dedicated to producing babies fathered by men
they
chose. Soon the Mother Houses overflowed with new babies. Buildings nearby were converted to nurseries, then, as the children grew, yet more buildings were turned over to schools. Mother Houses, without a doubt, were here to stay. And I must say I rather liked them. They were always cheerful places, if a bit noisy. And they produced happy, robust children who counted every child in the Mother House as their brother or sister and every woman as 'Mother'.

    One development that caught even the Council by surprise was that rather than becoming ghettos for unhappy blind women who couldn't find a sighted husband, the Mother Houses and their occupants were treated with the same kind of respect and admiration as holy orders of nuns had been in the Old World. So much so that many sighted girls who were born on the island elected to join them, even at certain times symbolically 'blinding' themselves by covering their eyes with scarves.

    Some of the older members of the community, particularly the narrow-minded, grumbled darkly about the Mother Houses, referring to the Mothers as 'those bloody reverse nuns' or the local House on its hill as 'Mothering Heights', while hinting that the places were hotbeds of sex. But, oddly, that wasn't true. In a strange way the Mothers were mainly perceived as extremely pure and chaste (even though they might bear ten children fathered by ten different men). And they certainly didn't sponge off the rest of the community; in fact, they soon became 'exporters' of produce. My old schoolteacher Mr Pinz-Wilks (who I rather suspect considered that the only civilization of note fell with the departure of the last Roman emperor) commented rather admiringly that the Mothers appeared to him as earthly embodiments of the classical goddess Artemis who was revered not only as the goddess of hunting but also incorporated the apparent dichotomy of opposites in the fact she was worshipped as both divine protector of chastity and of motherhood.

    The Mother system worked. It worked beautifully.

    The birth rate on the island was strong. Together with the welcome flow of immigrants it helped to swell the island's population to a healthy twenty-six thousand. This was perhaps a quarter of the island's original population before Year One.

    Pretty good work, you'd allow, all things considered.

    

    

    There comes a time, at least once, when father and son speak to each other not as parent and child but man to man. As equals.

    For me, this came just a few hours before the whole world was plunged into darkness on that fateful 28 May.

    It began as many conversations with my father began. In his greenhouse, as he took a break from those things that had rooted themselves so firmly, and inextricably, into his life.

    He poured me a coffee from the thermos, asking 'Tin or china?' while indicating two cups on the work bench. 'Tin.'

    'Good choice.' Then he poured the dark liquid, shaking his head wistfully. 'Oh, for the aroma of Colombian coffee beans once more, or maybe a smooth Kenyan blend. Roast acorns… whatever new tricks we might learn to flavour them they'll never taste like real coffee.' He filled his pipe with a few shreds of that pale brown Jersey tobacco grown on our largest Channel Island, gazing dreamily at the triffid plants growing in line in their brick troughs, the sunlight shining through the glass onto their leaves. These triffids had had their stingers safely docked and they'd been chained to stakes to prevent them from walking. Even so, they would still give an occasional experimental tug on their chains. Every now and again, a
chink-chink
could be heard as steel links rattled.

    As a child I had sensed that there was something thrilling about this place - the smell of the plants under the glass, the warm, almost tropical atmosphere even in winter. I liked to come here and watch my father handling a sharp knife with all the dexterity of a surgeon as he pruned branches, or nicked the stem to gauge the quality of triffid oil that would 'bleed' from the bark like blood that had been diluted to a pale pink.

    After a moment spent contemplating the plants he scratched one of his bushy white eyebrows and said, 'You should have heard them talking last night.'

    'The triffids?'

    My father nodded, and shot me a sidelong smile. 'I've not heard them so active in a long, long while; their sticks were rap-rapping away against their stems like some botanical version of Morse code.'

    'Do you think they really can talk? Intelligently, I mean, not just like birds calling to each other?'

    'Well, birds and other animals
do
communicate with their own kind - send messages, squawk warnings, whatever.'

    'But in a purely instinctual way: they're either sounding a predator alert or trying to attract a mate.'

    'True. But I do wonder whether triffids have mastered the art of conveying more complex messages to their own kind.' He pulled deeply on his pipe before exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that swirled up into the sunlight. 'Perhaps they can even explain concepts and ideas to their neighbours.'

    'You mean, that triffid over by the door might be passing on a message to one at the other end of the greenhouse along the lines of "Just listen to those two humans, they're talking about us again".'

    My father chuckled. 'Maybe, maybe. But I did once work with a man called Lucknor who seemed to develop an intuitive understanding of triffids. He was convinced that they did actually talk to each other and, moreover, that they had a highly developed intelligence.'

    'You think he was right?'

    'I think he was damn close.' He scratched that white eyebrow again, an old habit when he was in a contemplative mood. 'But, you know, David… I must have dissected thousands of those things and I've yet to find any trace of a nervous system, and I've certainly not had so much as a whiff of anything that could remotely be described as a brain. Still… I
have
watched how those plants operate, watched for the last forty years. They move with purpose. They communicate by tapping their sticks against their stems. When they lash out with their stings they "know" to aim for a human's unprotected face. And I've watched them move across the countryside, whole legions of them like infantry on the march; I've seen how they home in on a community, how they lay siege to it.' He sipped his coffee. 'Well, maybe I am stopping short of saying that they are intelligent, but if something has four legs, wags its tail and barks you'd say it was a dog, right? Now those plants there act and react and plan and attack and kill just as if there was some cool intellect hiding somewhere inside them.'