The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

‘Coker,’ I said, as we completed the meal sitting on a store counter and spreading marmalade on biscuits, ‘you beat me. What are you? The first time I meet you I find you ranting – if you will forgive the appropriate word – in a kind of dockside lingo. Now you quote Marvell to me. It doesn’t make sense.’ He grinned. ‘It never did to me, either,’ he said. ‘It comes of being a hybrid – you never really know what you are. My mother never really knew what I was, either – at least, she never could prove it, and she always held it against me that on account of that she could not get an allowance for me. It made me kind of sour about things when I was a kid; and when I left school I used to go to meetings – more or less any kind of meetings as long as they were protesting against something. And that led to me getting mixed up with the lot that used to come to them. I suppose they found me kind of amusing. Anyway, they used to take me along to arty-political sorts of parties. After a bit I got tired of being amusing and seeing them give a kind of double laugh, half with me and half at me, whenever I said what I thought. I reckoned I needed some of the background knowledge they had, and then I’d be able to laugh at them a bit, maybe, so I started going to evening classes, and I practised talking the way they did, for use when necessary. There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you t...