But none of this helped me get a grip on this Cuba place. I did know that the Americans were having trouble in the south with their Negroes rioting and those evil monsters of the Ku Klux Klan burning their crosses in their hooded robes. Was there a connection? The pictures of cigar chomping Castro, if that was his name, were so indistinct that it was hard to tell if he was a Negro or not. In their silos, all over the world, the missiles bristled.

 

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
    So began the writing career of John Wyndham, a man I am unable to find out much about. He seems to have retired from whatever it was he did with his life and taken up writing at 48 but no one thought The Day of the Triffids interesting at first. A condensed version was published in Collier’s Magazine, and then, because that seemed to go all right, Doubleday published it in book form in 1951. I have a first edition and a very cheap crummy one it is too. His next two books were first published in his native England but he was still so unfamous that the Americans republished them under more exciting titles—The Kraken Wakes became Terror from the Deep and The Chrysalids was called Children of the Future. Yet within ten years of the first modest publication of Triffids, it joined Wells, Huxley and Orwell as rare examples of science fiction on school curriculums. Then, in 1962, the movies discovered him, although, after doing Triffids, they still felt the need to change The Midwich Cuckoos into The Village of the Damned. However, in that particular case, there might have been some justification.
    But back to the beginning. The first few chapters are by far the best. A new plant has been developed called a Triffid, a human sized carnivore that can walk about and has a nasty venomous tendril and strikes like a bullwhip and can kill. Our narrator has had his eyes damaged by such a sting, and waits in hospital to have the bandages removed after successful treatment. This causes him to miss a spectacular meteor shower the night before.
    Now he awakes and finds himself alone in the quiet hospital. The splendidly written scenes in which he gropes about, trying to understand what is happening about him, set us up beautifully for what follows—for the meteor shower has blinded everyone else and, when he removes his bandages himself, he is one of the few people left who can see.
    The disorder that results in the blinded world tips the balance in favour of the previously well-controlled Triffids, who now seize their chance and start to take over…
I had spotted the triffid now. It was lurking among the bushes well within striking range of the sprawled figure.
“Back! Quick!” I said.
Still looking at the man on the ground, she hesitated.
“But I must—” she began, turning toward me. Then she stopped. Her eyes widened and she screamed.
I whipped around to find a triffid towering only a few feet behind me.
In one automatic movement I had my hands over my eyes, I heard the sting whistle as it slashed at me—but there was no knock-out, no agonising burning, even. One’s mind can move like lightning at such a moment; nevertheless it was more instinct than reason which sent me leaping at it before it had time to strike again. I collided with it, overturning it, and even as I went down with it my hands were on the upper part of the stem, trying to pull off the cup and the sting. Triffid stems do not snap—but they can be mangled. This one was mangled thoroughly before I stood up.
Joselle was standing at the same spot, transfixed.
“Come here,” I told her. “There’s another one in the bushes behind you.”
She glanced fearfully over her shoulder and came.
“But it hit you,” she said incredulously. "Why aren’t you—”
“I don’t know. I ought to be,” I said.
I looked down at the fallen triffid. Suddenly remembering the knives that we’d acquired with some other enemies in mind, I used mine to cut off the sting at its base.
“That explains it,” I said, pointing to the poison sacks. “See, they’re collapsed, exhausted. If they’d been full, or even part full…” I turned a thumb down.
I had that, and my acquired resistance to the poison to thank. Nevertheless, there were pale red marks across the backs of my hands and my neck that were itching like the devil.
“I’ve never seen one with the poison sacs quite empty like this before. It must have been doing a hell of a lot of stinging.”
    Marvellous stuff !