'Sir, I appreciate you must be anxious about the darkness. The official line is to stay put. It's probably an unusually dense cloud layer that has obscured the sun. So, kindly switch off-'
'No… listen to me! I have something else to report. Over.'
'Go ahead, caller,' came the voice, reluctantly.
'My name is David Masen, calling from Bytewater. I wish to report a triffid incursion.'
There was a pause. Static crackled on the ether.
At last HQ responded in a voice that came close to stunned disbelief. 'Say again, Mr Masen. It sounded as if you used the word "triffid". Over.'
Something lashed against the window.
'You heard correctly. And until someone can tell me anything different, I'd say we've just been invaded.'
CHAPTER THREE
EYE OF THE STORM
MORE than twenty years ago my father, Bill Masen, sat down at his desk and during one long, snowbound winter wrote a deeply personal account of what happened to him during the aftermath of the Great Blinding and the coming of the triffids. By now, it must be a familiar-looking book to all colonists, not only on the Isle of Wight but on the Scillies and the Channel Islands as well. That mimeographed quarto publication bound within its bright orange covers is instantly recognizable.
Along with Elspeth Cary's History of a Colony and Matt and Gwynne Lloyd's documentary films that continue to chronicle the day-to-day lives of the colonists, it is an invaluable record of how we came to find ourselves on our island fortresses when the whole world fell under the dreadful sway of the triffid. This was the botanical freak once trumpeted as 'the miracle plant that walks' that in a few short years became Man's nemesis - his destroyer.
Naturally, I read my father's account when I was a boy. How strange to rediscover my father as Bill Masen the complex individual in his own right rather than simply the cheerful, mostly optimistic - if sometimes preoccupied - 'Dad' I'd known since birth.
I never thought I'd write anything to compare with his book. Until now my writings had been restricted to pre-flight notes to do with weather reports, wind-speeds and navigational calculations, jotted on the backs of old envelopes and sandwich wrappers, as often as not picturesquely decorated with an oily fingerprint or two.
Now I find myself sitting here at a table, a dozen blank notepads in front of me. I tap a pencil against my lips. My brow furrows as I wonder just how on Earth I can recapture in the written word all those strange adventures - those sometimes nightmarish adventures - that have dominated my life since that fateful 28 May three decades after the fall of civilization.
That was the day I awoke to a world of darkness. And that was the day the triffids once more invaded our hitherto safe island home.
Some say the second coming of the triffids at that same fateful time when night refused to yield to day was too much to be pure coincidence. Some saw another hand behind it all - perhaps the divine hand of a vengeful god. Alas, I can cast no light on that (if you will excuse an unintentional pun). However, I remember a passage from my father's book wherein he contemplates the sudden blinding of the global population occurring at the same time that countless triffids escaped from farms and gardens. He wrote: 'Of course, coincidences are happening all the time - but it's just now and then you happen to notice them…'
And so, coincidence or not, I now sit here in a very different world from the one in which I grew up.
A colder wind than I have ever known before is blowing against this tower. Again and again the banshee shriek of the gale reminds me that, although I might have no natural literary abilities, I do have all the time in the world to write my book.
Therefore, I shall write down what happened to me.
And I shall begin at the beginning…
***
My childhood was idyllic. I grew up amid the rolling chalk downs and green-clad hills of the Isle of Wight. A tract of fertile land that only became an island some six thousand years ago when the sea level rose to flood a valley that is now known as The Solent. Since then the island has played host to prehistoric hunter-gatherers, to Roman farmers who named the island 'Vectis', to Saxon immigrants, and then eventually to Victorian holidaymakers, including Lord Tennyson who declaimed that 'the air on the Downs is worth sixpence a pint!' And, more recently, we few survivors from the mainland. I'm surprised I remember these facts from some history lesson of long ago when Mr Pinz-Wilks tried so hard to instil into me a little academic learning. In fact, I'm certain Mr Pinz-Wilks (who must surely have gone to his final reward by now) would be astonished, too. I remember only too clearly how he raised his blind eyes in frustration to the ceiling so many, many times. Sadly, I retained historical facts as easily as a sieve holds water.
There, in the heart of the Isle of Wight, I shared a large house in the picturesque village of Arretton (population forty-three) with my mother, father and two younger sisters.
As soon as I was old enough I roved away across the poppy-strewn fields, exploring and looking for 'Mantun'.
This was the name I gave to my imaginary lost fairy city - a childhood fantasy that often perplexed my parents. And when rain or parental punishment for my deeds of natural mischief confined me to my bedroom, I'd grip a pencil in my chubby hand and draw pictures that showed a host of buildings as spindly as bamboo canes. Of course, when my parents asked me what I'd drawn I'd proudly reply 'Mantun'. My imagination was young and supple then. Entertaining for me, yet puzzling to others.
My father worked mainly at home in his glasshouses and laboratory. He grew triffids with scrupulous care, then dissected them with that same painstaking attention to detail. When I was five or six I'd watch him mixing nutrients, which he dissolved in water, before feeding the plants from a watering can. He'd stroke the leaves, as you or I would stroke a cat, and sometimes he would murmur to the plants as if they were his closest friends.
For a long time I believed that he loved the plants - as if they were some cherished branch of our family - so it was something of a shock when, at the age of eight, I learned that he was trying to find a way to kill them. Bewildering stuff indeed. Even more so when he told me he wasn't content just to kill those triffids that were in our glasshouses but that he wanted to destroy every triffid in the world. Running his fingers through a handsome head of greying hair, he'd speak to me of defoliants, growth hormones, cellular degenerators, pollination inhibitors, mutant triffid species with guaranteed nil reproduction capability.
More bewildering stuff. Double Dutch, as the old saying goes.
Then I'd tug the sleeve of his white lab coat, demanding that he come and help me fly my kite. More often than not he'd flash his big good-natured grin and say, 'Give me ten minutes, then meet me up on the hill.'
All this should really have given my father at least a good hint of where my future lay. Viz.: no comprehension of botany (evidenced by my lack of interest therein) plus no head for academic subjects meant that my following in his footsteps was extremely doubtful.
No doubt my father cherished dreams of my pursuing a career in applied botanical science - one specifically devoted to the eradication of the triffid menace. But love him as I did, and try as I might to master the baffling language of botany and the Byzantine complexity of test tube, retort and Bunsen burner, I must have been something of a puzzle to him. But to say I was a disappointment to him would have been putting it too strongly.
Because, quite simply, Bill Masen loved his children. He allowed us to cultivate our own interests; not for a moment did he wish for us to be mere facsimiles of himself or our mother. (Although my sister Lisabeth did inherit my mother's literary abilities - and a mischievous appetite to shock - with her steamy stories of affaires d'amour that appeared in the Freshwater Review when she should, according to her disapproving headmistress, have still been a blushing seventeen-year-old.)
My total ineptitude at laboratory research came to a head one Tuesday evening after school when I was 'helping' my father. I was twelve years old. I
managed, quite inadvertently, to concoct an explosive blend of the familiar pink triffid oil in its raw state with an equal amount of wood alcohol. Father told me to leave the glass beaker somewhere warm for the alcohol to evaporate. I had a brainwave. I'd speed up the process by boiling off the alcohol with the flame of the Bunsen burner.
Then I sat back to watch, beaming proudly at my own brilliance.
The explosion that followed was as impressive as it was loud. It was even heard by the Mothers up at Arreton manor. I lost most of my hair in the fireball. And lost - permanently - my part-time job as my father's lab assistant.
My hair did grow back, although it acquired a pure white fleck in its otherwise jet-black fringe, which earned me the nickname 'Snowdrop' at school. (And, oh, how I'd cringe whenever friends teased me with that one.)
Later, that same day of the explosion, after my father (and his more competent assistants) had remedied much of the damage I'd wrought, he visited me in my bedroom. He stood there, a candle in his hand, the light shining on his greying hair. For a while he gazed down at my bandaged head, thinking I was asleep; I heard him exhale audibly through the white bristles of his moustache.
I had expected an extremely colourful, not to say high-volume description of my inabilities.
Instead, I realized that as he looked down at me he was thanking heaven I hadn't taken my head clean off in the explosion. (After all, Dr Weisser had had to tweezer half a dozen slivers of glass beaker from my face.)
My father pulled the blanket up around my shoulders, then affectionately laid his hand on my arm.
'I didn't mean to wreck the lab, Dad.'
'I'm sorry, David, did I wake you?'
'No. I can't get to sleep.'
'Does it hurt?'
'Not really.' I said this as manfully as I could. 'Just stings a little around my eyes.'
'Don't worry, the stuff Dr Weisser gave you will numb it soon enough. It'll make you sleep, too.'
'Will you ever be able to repair the lab?'
'Good heavens, yes.' He gave a chuckle as he set the candle down on my table. 'It took us a good couple of hours to undo what you managed to do in two seconds, but it's fine now. In fact, I've managed to wangle some replacement equipment from the old general, so it's not only as good as new, it's better than new.'
'I don't think I'll be much use to you as an assistant, will I, Dad? Perhaps Lisabeth or Annie would do a better job?'
'Now don't you worry about that. You're in one piece; that's all that matters. And you're not to bother yourself about your hair: it will grow back, you know?'
'Maybe I'm not cut out to be a scientist, after all.' I sat up in bed. 'Perhaps I ought to think of some other career?'
My father smiled and crinkling lines appeared around his bright blue eyes. 'Now, my father, bless him, was an accountant for the civil service in the old days when the United Kingdom had a much-disliked institution called the Inland Revenue. He took it for granted that I'd follow him into what he called "the family firm".' Still smiling, he shook his grey-haired head. 'Alas, I was no good with figures.'
'Like I'm no good with test tubes and stuff?'
'Quite. I could manage well enough counting on my fingers but if you asked me to divide one hundred and twenty-one by seven I'd make a pitiful sight, scratching my head, counting on my fingers. My father would never criticize me for my ignorance if he sprung a surprise piece of mental arithmetic on me. But as he watched me floundering away his face would go redder and redder and redder. However, I did eventually find my vocation in life. So: believe one who speaks from experience - experto crede, as a certain Roman gentleman put it. You'll find yours one day if-'
At that moment his voice trailed away as he suddenly seemed to notice for the very first time what littered my room. Papering the walls were photographs of aeroplanes and dirigibles, while all over the room were models, from incomplete skeletons to finished aircraft complete with tiny engines, and fuselages and wings covered with tissue paper that had been wonderfully transformed into a hard, lacquered shell by modeller's dope. Hanging by lengths of fishing line from the ceiling was a handsome biplane, painted a brilliant strawberry red. I'd successfully flown this machine from our orchard, over the Mother House to a distant field on the far side of Downend. There were also kites and blueprints, as well as aero-modelling books and ancient aviation magazines printed before the end of the Old World. And on the table by the window was my pride and joy - a plywood rocket plane of my own invention that would boast a seven-foot wingspan when it was fully assembled.
As I said, my father looked at all this as if the scales had fallen from his eyes and he was seeing it for the first time (even though he'd often heard my mother complain about the state of my room).
That was the moment when, as the old saying goes, the penny dropped for my father and for me.
A pilot. That was what I would do with my life.
Of course, I was far too young then to begin training as a pilot for the island's meagre air fleet. But the seed was sown. In my mind's eye I saw myself in the cockpit of a fast jet, soaring through the clouds high above land and sea.
On a more practical level my father encouraged me. He found more aviation books and magazines for me. He also gave me my own workshop where I could work on my beloved model aeroplanes. Wisely, he chose one well away from the house when he learned that my rocket plane was fuelled by a substantial quantity of gunpowder that I stored in a biscuit tin beneath my bed. I singed away the downy black hairs of my adolescent moustache on more than one occasion when test-firing that rocket motor, I can tell you.
Meanwhile, I continued my studies at school - a bit more enthusiastically now that I realized I would need at least a few academic qualifications before enrolling on a pilot's course.
However, one of the core subjects at school was the study of the triffid: its origins, life-cycle, attributes; its dangers.
In the early years of the colony the triffid had been demonized and held responsible for the destruction of the Old World in the middle years of what was then known as the twentieth century. Then the only talk was of how evil the plant was, how it could be kept off the island. How it could be annihilated.
Now a more balanced view had developed. With an irony that any satirist would have found delicious we had come to depend on the triffid for oil, fuel, cattle fodder and about fifty other commodities. While the only triffids grown on the island were a few docked specimens for research purposes, we harvested vast numbers on the British mainland where they grew wild and unchecked in their millions. After being felled by heavily protected 'logging' teams, the plants were shipped to the Isle of Wight for processing. Of course, every child was still taught to recognize the plant from infancy.
As the son of Bill Masen, the world's greatest expert on triffids, schoolmasters would always - or so it seemed to me - ask me all the toughest questions about that peripatetic plant. (As if knowledge of the triffid could be transmitted genetically from father to son. Or perhaps more appropriately, considering the botanical nature of the subject, via some mysterious process of osmosis - some hope!)
'Masen,' Mr Pinz-Wilks might begin in those grave Oxbridge tones that would rumble out from beneath his handlebar moustache. 'Masen, would you please describe the triffid plant to the class?'
(This question was asked repeatedly despite the many posters of the plant that hung on the wall.)
'The mature plant stands around eight feet tall,' I would recite, parrot-fashion. 'A straight stem grows from the woody bole; er, at the top of the stem is a funnel; inside that is a sticky liquid that traps insects upon which the plant feeds by dissolving and drawing the nutrients down through the stem in a solution of sap; its sprays of leaves are green and leathery. The triffid possesses a sting that is curled into a whorl - something like a gigantic pig's tail.' (Laughs from the class; I'd shoot a grin at my friends.) 'This it can uncurl at high speed to whip at its prey. Er… uhm…'
'And what else, Masen?'
br /> '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.'