“You’re quite wrong,” she interrupted him firmly. “I’m Josella Masen, author of David Masen.”
“Ah, yes. I’ve been looking at the original edition, and a very creditable bit of craftsmanship, too, if I may say so.”
“Hold on a bit,” I said. “That fire——”
“It’s safe enough. Blowing away from the house. Though I’m afraid most of your stock of wood has gone up.”
“What happened?”
“That was Susan. She didn’t mean me to miss the place. When she heard my engine she grabbed a flame thrower and bounded out to start a signal as quickly as she could. The woodpile was handiest—no one could have missed what she did to that.”
We went inside and joined the others.
“By the way,” Simpson said to me, “Michael said I was to be sure to start off with his apologies.”
“To me?” I said, wondering.
“You were the only one who saw any danger in the triffids, and he didn’t believe you.”
“But—do you mean to say you knew I was here?”
“We found out very roughly your probable location a few days ago—from a fellow we all have cause to remember: one Coker.”
“So Coker came through too,” I said. “After the shambles I saw at Tynsham, I’d an idea the plague might have got him.”
Later on, when we had had a meal and produced our best brandy, we got the story out of him.
When Michael Beadley and his party had gone on, leaving Tynsham to the mercies and principles of Miss Durrant, they had not made for Beaminster, nor anywhere near it. They had gone northeast, into Oxfordshire. Miss Durrant’s misdirection to us must have been deliberate, for Beaminster had never been mentioned.
They had found there an estate which seemed at first to offer the group all it required, and no doubt they could have entrenched themselves there as we had entrenched ourselves at Shirning; but as the menace of the triffids increased, the disadvantages of the place became more obvious. In a year both Michael and the Colonel were highly dissatisfied with the longer-term prospects there. A great deal of work had already been put into the place, but by the end of the second summer there was general agreement that it would be better to cut their losses. To build a community they had to think in terms of years—a considerable number of years. They also had to bear in mind that the longer they delayed, the more difficult any move would be. What they needed was a place where they would have room to expand and develop: an area with natural defenses, which, once it had been cleared of triffids, could economically be kept clear of them. Where they now were a high proportion of their labor was occupied with maintaining fences. And as their numbers increased, the length of fence line would have to be increased. Clearly, the best self-maintaining defense line would be water. To that end they had held a discussion on the relative merits of various islands. It had been chiefly climate that had decided them in favor of the Isle of Wight, despite some misgivings over the area that would have to be cleared. Accordingly, in the following March they had packed up again and moved on.
“When we got there,” Ivan said, “the triffids seemed even thicker than where we’d left. No sooner had we begun to settle ourselves into a big country house near Godshill than they started collecting along the walls in thousands. We let ’em come for a couple of weeks or so, then we went for ’em with the flame throwers.
“After we’d wiped that lot out, we let them accumulate again, and then we blitzed ’em once more—and so on. We could afford to do it properly there, because once we were clear of them we’d not need to use the throwers any more. There could only be a limited number on the island, and the more of them that came round us to be wiped out, the better we liked it.
“We had to do it a dozen times before there was any appreciable effect. All round the walls we had a belt of charred stumps before they began to get shy. There were a devil of a lot more of them than we had expected.”