The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

‘We can afford to support a limited number of women who cannot see, because they will have babies who can see. We cannot afford to support men who cannot see. In our new world, then, babies become very much more important than husbands.’

I sat silently for a time. I had not a moment’s doubt that Josella meant every word she said. I ruminated a little on the ways of purposeful, subversive-minded women like Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry. You can’t do anything with such women – and they so often turn out to have been right after all.

Death is just the shocking end of animation: it is dissolution that is final.

Moreover, I was beginning to experience something new – the fear of being alone. I had not been alone since I walked from the hospital along Piccadilly, and then there had been bewildering novelty in all I saw. Now, for the first time I began to feel the horror that real loneliness holds for a species that is by nature gregarious. I felt naked, exposed to all the fears that prowled …

‘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...

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive – yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk – the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

‘I’ll differ there,’ Coker told her. ‘It’s not only your fault – it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty, and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him – and even her – brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised: even in women it is a gap to be deplored.’

‘You know perfectly well that women can and do – or rather did – handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they’re too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to. Why should they bother when the tradition of appealing helplessness can be rationalized as a womanly virtue – and the job just shoved off on to somebody else? Ordinarily it’s a pose that it’s not worth anyone’s while to debunk. In fact, it has been fostered. Men have played up to it by stoutly repairing the poor darling’s vacuum cleaner, and capably replacing the blown fuse. The whole charade has been acceptable to both parties. Tough practicality complements spiritual delicacy and charming dependence – and he is the mug who gets his hands dirty.’

but when a war came and brought with it a social obligation and sanction both could be trained into competent engineers.’ ‘They weren’t good engineers,’ she remarked. ‘Everybody says that.’ ‘Ah, the defensive mechanism in action. Let me point out that it was in nearly everybody’s interest to say so. All the same,’ he admitted, ‘to some extent that was true. And why? Because nearly all of them not only had to learn hurriedly and without proper groundwork, but they had also to unlearn the habits carefully fostered for years of thinking such interests alien to them, and too gross for their delicate natures.’

Nor is ignorance going to be cute or funny any more. It is going to be dangerous, very dangerous. Unless all of us get around as soon as we can to understanding a lot of things in which we had no previous interest, neither we nor those who depend on us are going to get through this lot.’

‘You’d expect her to see reason,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t see why. Most of us don’t – we see habit. She’ll oppose any modification, reasonable or not, that conflicts with her previously trained feelings of what is right and polite – and be quite honestly convinced that

It’s queer, isn’t it? Decent intentions seem to be the most dangerous things around just now. It’s a damned shame because this place could be managed, in spite of the proportion of blind. Everything it needs is lying about for the taking, and will be for a while yet. It’s only organizing that’s wanted.’

saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created and which the rest of us in our careless greed had cultured all over the world. One could not even blame nature for them. Somehow they had been bred – just as we bred ourselves beautiful flowers, or grotesque parodies of dogs … I began to loathe them now for more than their carrion-eating habits – they, more than anything else, seemed able to profit and flourish on our disaster …

Mrs Forcett acknowledged us with dignity, advanced with confidence, seated herself with circumspection, and consented to be pressed to a glass of port, followed by another glass of port.

country. Nevertheless, and in spite of this Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers, we left each party with a map showing them the approximate positions of groups we had already discovered in case they should change their minds, and think about getting together for self-help.

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative – an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary … That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary, and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly – that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do …

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

Once – not that year, nor the next, but later on – I stood in Piccadilly Circus again, looking round at the desolation, and trying to recreate in my mind’s eye the crowds that once swarmed there. I could no longer do it. Even in my memory they lacked reality. There was no tincture of them now. They had become as much a backcloth of history as the audiences in the Roman Colosseum or the army of the Assyrians, and somehow, just as far removed. The nostalgia that crept over me sometimes in the quiet hours was able to move me to more regret than the crumbling scene itself. When I was by myself in the country I could recall the pleasantness of the former life: among the scabrous, slowly perishing buildings I seemed able to recall only the muddle, the frustration, the unaimed drive, the all-pervading clangour of empty vessels, and I became uncertain how much we had lost …

Cats, and dogs, growing wilder at each generation, could be found in the country, but not there. Sometimes, however, I would find evidence that others besides myself were still in the habit of quarrying supplies there, but I never saw them. It

‘They used to say that man’s really serious rivals were the insects. It seems to me that the triffids have something in common with some kinds of insects. Oh, I know that biologically they’re plants. What I mean is they don’t bother about their individuals, and the individuals don’t bother about themselves. Separately they have something which looks slightly like intelligence; collectively it looks a great deal more like it. They sort of work together for a purpose the way ants or bees do – yet you could say that not one of them is aware of any purpose or scheme although he’s part of it. It’s all very queer – probably impossible for us to understand, anyway. They’re so different. It seems to me to go against all our ideas of inheritable characteristics. Is there something in a bee or a triffid which is a gene of social organization, or does an ant have a gene of architecture? And if they have these things why haven’t we in all this time developed a gene for language, or cooking? Anyway, whatever it is, the triffids do seem to have something like it. It may be that no single individual knows why it keeps hanging around our fence, but the whole lot together knows that its purpose is to get us – and that sooner or later it will.’

‘I find that it’s just the wrong side of coincidence for me to believe that out of all the thousands of years in which a destructive comet could arrive, it happens to do so just a few years after we have succeeded in establishing satellite weapons – don’t you? No, I think that we kept on that tight-rope quite a while, considering the things that might have happened – but sooner or later the foot had to slip.’