After that I kept to a more cautious pace, except for a few minutes soon after I entered the New Forest. The cause of that was a glimpse through the trees of a helicopter cruising at no great height. It was set to cross my course some way ahead. By ill luck the trees there grew close to the side of the road, and must have hidden it almost completely from the air. I put on a spurt, but by the time I reached more open ground the machine was no more than a speck floating away in the distance to the north. Nevertheless, even the sight of it seemed to give me some support.
A few miles farther on I ran through a small village which was disposed neatly about a triangular green. At first sight it was as charming in its mixture of thatched and red-tiled cottages with their flowering gardens as something out of a picture book. But I did not look closely into the gardens as I passed; too many of them showed the alien shape of a triffid towering incongruously among the flowers. I was almost clear of the place when a small figure bounded out of one of the last garden gates and came running up the road toward me, waving both arms. I pulled up, looked around for triffids in a way that was becoming instinctive, picked up my gun and climbed down.
The child was dressed in a blue cotton frock, white socks, and sandals. She looked about nine or ten years old. A pretty little girl—I could see that, even though her dark brown curls were now uncared for and her face dirtied with smeared tears. She pulled at my sleeve.
“Please, please,” she said urgently, “please come and see what’s happened to Tommy.”
I stood staring down at her. The awful loneliness of the day lifted. My mind seemed to break out of the case I had made for it. I wanted to pick her up and hold her close to me. I could feel tears behind my eyes. I held out my hand to her, and she took it. Together we walked back to the gate through which she had come.
“Tommy’s there,” she said, pointing.
A little boy about four years of age lay on the diminutive patch of lawn between the flower beds. It was quite obvious at a glance why he was there.
“The thing hit him,” she said. “It hit him and he fell down. And it wanted to hit me when I tried to help him. Horrible thing!”
I looked up and saw the top of a triffid rising above the fence that bordered the garden.
“Put your hands over your ears. I’m going to make a bang,” I said.
She did so, and I blasted the top off the triffid.
“Horrible thing!” she repeated. “Is it dead now?”
I was about to assure her that it was, when it began to rattle the little sticks against its stem, just as the one at Steeple Honey had done. As then, I gave it the other barrel to shut it up.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s dead now.”
We walked across to the little boy. The scarlet slash of the sting was vivid on his pale cheek. It must have happened some hours before. She knelt beside him.
“It isn’t any good,” I told her gently.
She looked up, fresh tears in her eyes.
“Is Tommy dead too?”
I squatted down beside her and shook my head.
“I’m afraid he is.”
After a while she said:
“Poor Tommy! Will we bury him—like the puppies?”
“Yes,” I told her.
In all the overwhelming disaster, that was the only grave I dug—and it was a very small one. She gathered a little bunch of flowers and laid them on top of it. Then we drove away.
* * *
—
Susan was her name. A long time ago, as it seemed to her, something had happened to her father and mother so that they could not see. Her father had gone out to try to get some help, and he had not come back. Her mother went out later, leaving the children with strict instructions not to leave the house. She had come back crying. The next day she went out again: this time she did not come back. The children had eaten what they could find, and then began to grow hungry. At last Susan was hungry enough to disobey instructions and seek help from Mrs. Walton at the shop. The shop itself was open, but Mrs. Walton was not there. No one came when Susan called, so she had decided to take some cakes and biscuits and candies and tell Mrs. Walton about it later.