John Christopher - The Death Of Grass

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Synopsis:

This novel is perhaps one of the best treatments of the ecological disaster theme, written with both

intelligence and a clear understanding of the human condition when faced with life-threatening

circumstances. The storyline starts out with the news that a deadly, resilient plant virus known as the

Chung-Li virus has virtually wiped all cereal crops, including rice, in China. Due to an initial Chinese

government decision to suppress details of the ensuing famine, the full scale of the disaster is not made

known until it is quite too late. Vaccine developed hastily by Western countries proves ultimately to be

ineffective and before long, the virus has rapidly spread, reaching Europe including England and wiping

out all the cereal crops (with the exception of potatoes) and grass of that particular region. Life in

England starts breaking down with catastrophic consequences and the story then focuses on the attempts

of the protagonist John Custance, his family and close friends, to reach safety in northern England where

his brother has a farm newly set up for potato farming.

Every sci-fi reader should read this book. The novel is a subdued warning against complacency and the

possible consequences of such complacency. This is very much relevant in today's world of

GM-modified foods and resistant strains of disease culture. If such a scenario unfolded in present-day

Western society, then all I can say is… God help the lot of us.

THE DEATH OF GRASS

JOHN CHRISTOPHER

First published by Michael Joseph 1956

Published in Penguin Books 1958

Reprinted 1963, 1970

PRODROME

As sometimes happens, death healed a family breach.

When Hilda Custance was widowed in the early summer of 1933, she wrote, for the first time since her

marriage thirteen years before, to her father. Their moods touched — hers of longing for the hills of

Westmorland after the grim seasons of London, and his of loneliness and the desire to see his only

daughter again, and his unknown grandsons, before he died. The boys, who were away at school, had

not been brought back for the funeral, and at the end of the summer term they returned to the small house

at Richmond only for a night, before, with their mother, they travelled north.

In the train, John, the younger boy, said:

'But why did we never have anything to do with Grandfather Beverley?'

His mother looked out of the window at the tarnished grimy environs of London, wavering, as though

with fatigue, in the heat of the day.

She said vaguely: 'It's hard to know how these things happen. Quarrels begin, and neither person stops

them, and they become silences, and nobody breaks them.'

She thought calmly of the storm of emotions into which she had plunged, out of the untroubled quiet life

of her girlhood in the valley. She had been sure that, whatever unhappiness came after, she would never

regret the passion itself. Time had proved her doubly wrong; first in the contentment of her married life

and her children, and later in the amazement that such contentment could have come out of what she saw,

in retrospect, as squalid and ill-directed. She had not seen the squalidness of it then, but her father could

hardly fail to be aware of it, and had not been able to conceal his awareness. That had been the key: his

disgust and her resentment.

John asked her: 'But who started the quarrel?'

She was only sorry that it had meant that the two men never knew each other. They were not unlike in

many ways, and she thought they would have liked each other if her pride had not prevented it.

'It doesn't matter,' she said, 'now.'

David put down his copy of the Boy's Own Paper. Although a year older than his brother, he was only

fractionally taller; they had a strong physical resemblance and were often taken for twins. But David was

slower moving and slower in thought than John, and fonder of things than of ideas.

He said: 'The valley — what's it like, Mummy?'

'The valley? Wonderful. It's… No, I think it will be better if it comes as a surprise to you. I couldn't

describe it anyway.'

John said: 'Oh, do, Mummy!'

David asked thoughtfully: 'Shall we see it from the train?'

Their mother laughed. 'From the train? Not even the beginnings of it. It's nearly an hour's run from

Stavely.'

'How big is it?' John asked. 'Are there hills all round?'

She smiled at them. 'You'll see.'

Jess Hillen, their grandfather's tenant farmer, met them with a car at Stavely, and they drove up into the

hills. The day was nearly spent, and they saw Blind Gill at last with the sun setting behind them.

Cyclops Valley would have been a better name for it for it looked out of one eye only — towards the

west. But for this break, it was like a saucer, or a deep dish, the sides sloping up — bare rock or rough

heather — to the overlooking sky. Against that enclosing barrenness, the valley's richness was the more

marked; green wheat swayed inwards with the summer breeze, and beyond the wheat, as the ground

rose, they saw the lusher green of pasture.

The entrance to the valley could scarcely have been narrower. To the left of the road, ten yards away, a

rock face rose sharply and overhung. To the right, the River Lepe foamed against the road's very edge.

Its further bank, fifteen yards beyond, hugged the other jaw of the valley.

Hilda Custance turned round to look at her sons.

'Well?'

'Gosh!' John said, 'this river… I mean — how does it get into the valley in the first place?'

'It's the Lepe. Thirty-five miles long, and twenty-five of those miles underground, if the stories are to be

believed. Anyway, it comes from underground in the valley. There are a lot of rivers like that in these

parts.'

'It looks deep.'

'It is. And very fast. No bathing, I'm afraid. It's wired farther up to keep cattle out. They don't stand a

chance if they fall in.'

John remarked sagely: 'I should think it might flood in winter.'

His mother nodded. 'It always used to. Does it still, Jess?'

'Cut off a month last winter,' Jess said. 'It's not so bad now we have the wireless.'

'I think it's terrific,' John said. 'But are you really cut off? You could climb the hills.'

Jess grinned. 'There are some who have. But it's a rocky road up, and rockier still down the other side.

Best to sit tight when the Lepe runs full.'

Hilda Custance looked at her elder son. He was staring ahead at the valley, thickly shadowed by sunset;

the buildings of the Hillen farm were in view now, but not the Beverley farm high up.

'Well,' she said, 'what do you think of it, David?'

Reluctantly he turned his gaze inwards to meet her own.

He said: 'I think I'd like to live here, always.'

That summer, the boys ran wild in the valley.

It was some three miles long, and perhaps half a mile wide at its greatest extent. It held only the two

farms, and the river, which issued from the southern face about two miles in. The ground was rich and

well cropped, but there was plenty of room for boys of twelve and eleven to play, and there were the

surrounding hills to climb.

They made the ascent at two or three points, and stood, panting, looking out over rough hills and

moorlands. The valley was tiny behind them. John delighted in the feeling of height, of isolation, and, to

some extent, of power; for the farm-houses looked, from this vantage, like toy buildings that they might

reach down and pluck from the ground. And in its greenness the valley seemed an oasis among desert

mountains.

David took less pleasure in this, and after their third climb he refused to go again. It was enough for him

to be in the valley; the surrounding slopes were like cupped and guarding hands, which it was both

fruitless and ungrateful to scale.

This divergence of their interests caused them to spend much of their time apart. While John roamed the

valley's sides, David kept to the farmland, to his grandfather's increasing satisfaction. At the end of the

second week, boy and old man, they went together to the River field on a warm and cloudy afternoon.

The boy watched intently while his grandfather plucked ears of wheat here and there, and examined

them. His near vision was poor, and he was forced to hold the wheat at arm's length.

'It's going to be a fair crop,' he said, 'as well as my eyes can tell me.'

To their right there was the continuous dull roar as the Lepe forced its way out of the containing rock into

the valley.

David said: 'Shall we still be here for the harvest?'

'Depends. It may be. Would you like to be?'

David said enthusiastically: 'Oh, yes, Grandfather!'

There was a silence in which the only intrusion was the noise of the Lepe. His grandfather looked over

the valley which the Beverley's had farmed for a century and a half; and then turned from the land to the

boy at his side.

'I don't see as we shall have long to get to know one another, David boy,' he said. 'Do you think you

would like to farm this valley when you're grown?'

'More than anything.'

'It'll be yours, then. A farm needs one owner, and I don't think as your brother would be fond of the life,

any road.'

'John wants to be an engineer,' David said.

'And he'll be likely enough to make a good one. What had you thought of being, then?'

'I hadn't thought of anything.'

'I shouldn't say it, maybe,' said his grandfather, 'since I've never seen ought of any other kind of life but

what I glimpse at Lepeton Market; but I don't know of another life that can give as much satisfaction.

And this is good land, and a good lie for a man that's content with his own company and few neighbours.

There's stone slabs under the ground in the Top Meadow, and they say the valley was held as a

stronghold once, in bygone times. I don't reckon you could hold it now, against guns and aeroplanes, but

whenever I've been outside I've always had a feeling that I could shut the door behind me when I come

back through the pass.'

'I felt that,' David said, 'when we came in.'

'My grandfather,' said David's grandfather, 'had himself buried here. They didn't like it even then, but in

those days they had to put up with some things they didn't like. They've got more weight behind them

today, damn them! A man should have the rights to be buried in his own ground.'

He looked across the green spears of wheat.

'But I shan't fret so greatly over leaving it, if I'm leaving it to my own blood.'

On another afternoon, John stood on the southern rim and, after staring his fill, began to descend again

into the valley.

The Lepe, from its emergence to the point where it left the valley altogether, hugged these southern

slopes, and for that reason they could only be scaled from the eastern end of the valley. But the boy

realized now that, once above the river, it could not bar him from the slopes beneath which it raced and

boiled. From the ground, he had seen a cleft in the hill face which might be a cave. He climbed down

towards it, breaking new ground.

He worked his way down with agility but with care, for although quick in thought and movement he was

not foolhardy. He came at last to the cleft, perhaps fifteen feet above the dark swirling waters, and found

it to be no more than that. In his disappointment, he looked for some new target of ambition. Directly

over the river's edge, rock swelled into something like a ledge. From there, perhaps, one could dangle

one's legs in the rushing water. It was less than a cave would have been, but better than a return, baulked

of any satisfaction, to the farmland.

He lowered himself still more cautiously. The slope was steep, and the sound of the Lepe had a

threatening growl to it. The ledge, when he finally reached it, gave little purchase.

By now, however, the idea had come to obsess him — just one foot in the water; that would be enough

to meet the objective he had set himself. Pressed awkwardly against the side of the hill, he reached down

with his hand to unfasten the sandal on his right foot. As he did so, his left foot slipped on the smooth

rock. He clutched frantically, aware of himself falling, but there was no hold for his hands. He fell and the

waters of the Lepe — chill even in midsummer, and savagely buffeting — took him.

He could swim fairly well for a boy of his age, but he had no chance against the violence of the Lepe. The

current pulled him down into the deeps of the channel that the river had worn for itself through centuries

before the Beverleys, or any others, had come to farm its banks. It rolled him like a pebble along its bed,

as though to squeeze breath and life from him together. He was aware of nothing but its all-embracing

violence and his own choking pulse.

Then, suddenly, he saw that the darkness about him was diminishing, yielding to sunlight filtered through

water still violent but of no great depth. With his last strength, he struggled into an upright position, and

his head broke through to the air. He took shuddering breath, and saw that he was near the middle of the

river. He could not stand, for the river's strength was too great, but he half-ran, half-swam with the

current as the Lepe dragged him towards the pass that marked the valley's end.

Once out of the valley, the river took a quieter course. A hundred yards down, he was able to swim

awkwardly, through relatively calm water, to the farther bank, and pull himself up on to it. Drenched and

exhausted, he contemplated the length of the tumbling flood down which, in so short a time, he had been

carried. He was still staring when he heard the sound of a pony-trap coming up the road and, a few

moments later, his grandfather's voice.

'Hey, there, John! Been swimming?'

He got to his feet unsteadily, and stumbled towards the trap. His grandfather's arms took him and lifted

him.

'You've had a bit of a shaking, lad. Did you fall in then?'

His mind remained shocked; he told as much as he could, flat-voiced, in broken sentences. The old man

listened.

'It looks like you were born for a hanging. A grown man wouldn't give overmuch for his chances if he'd

gone in like that. And you broke surface with your feet still on the bottom, you say? My father used to tell

of a bar in the middle of the Lepe, but nobody was like to try it. It's deep enough by either bank.'

He looked at the boy, who had begun to shiver, more from the aftermath of his experience than from

anything else.

'No sense in me going on talking all afternoon, though. We must get you back, and into dry clothes.

Come on there, Flossie!'

As his grandfather cracked the small whip, John said quickly: 'Grandfather — you won't say anything to

Mummy, will you? Please!'

The old man said: 'How shall we not, then? She can't but see you're soaked to the bone.'

'I thought I might dry myself… in the sun.'

'Ay, but not this week! Still… you don't want her to know you've had a ducking? Are you feared she'll

scold you?'

'No.'

Their eyes met 'Ah, well,' said his grandfather, 'I reckon I owe you a secret, lad. Will it do if I take you to

the Hillens and get you dried there? You shall have to be dried somewhere.'

'Yes,' John said, 'I don't mind that. Thank you, Grandfather.'

The wheels of the trap crunched over the rough stone road as they passed through the gap and the Hillen

farm came into view ahead of them. The old man broke the silence between them.

'You want to be an engineer, then?'

John looked away from his fascinated watching of the rushing Lepe. 'Yes, Grandfather.'

'You wouldn't take to farming?'

John said cautiously: 'Not particularly.'

His grandfather said, with relief: 'No, I thought not.'

He began to say more, but broke off. It was not until they were within hail of the Hillen farm buildings that

he said:

'I'm glad of it. I love the land more than most, I reckon, but there are some terms on which it isn't worth

having. The best land in the world might as well be barren if it brings bad blood between brothers.'

Then he reined up the pony, and called out to Jess Hillen.

ONE

A quarter of a century later, the two brothers stood together by the banks of the Lepe. David lifted his

stick and pointed far up the slope of the hill.

'There they go!'

John followed his brother's gaze to where the two specks toiled their way upwards. He laughed.

'Davey setting the pace as usual, but I would put my money on Mary's stamina for first-over-the-top.'

'She's a couple of years older, remember.'

'You're a bad uncle. You favour the nephew too blatantly.'

They both grinned. 'She's a good girl,' David said, 'but Davey — well, he's Davey.'

'You should have married and got a few of your own.'

'I never had the time to go courting.'

John said: 'I thought you countrymen took that in your stride, along with the cabbage planting.'

'I don't plant cabbages, though. There's no sense in doing anything but wheat and potatoes these days.

That's what the Government wants, so that's what I give 'em.'

John looked at him with amusement. 'I like you in your part of the honest, awkward farmer. What about

your beef cattle, though? And the dairy herd?'

'I was talking about crops. I think the dairy cattle will have to go, anyway. They take up more land, than

they're worth.'

John shook his head. 'I can't imagine the valley without cows.'

'The townie's old illusion,' David said, 'of the unchanging countryside. The country changes more than the

city does. With the city it's only a matter of different buildings — bigger maybe, and uglier, but no more

than that. When the country changes, it changes in a more fundamental way altogether.'

'We could argue about that,' John said. 'After all…'

David looked over his shoulder. 'Here's Ann coming.' When she was in earshot, he added: 'And you ask

me why I never got married!'

Ann put an arm on each of their shoulders. 'What I like about the valley,' she said, 'is the high standard of

courtly compliments. Do you really want to know why you never married, David?'

'He tells me he's never had the time,' John said.

'You're a hybrid,' Ann told him. 'You're enough of a farmer to know that a wife should be a chattel, but

being one of the new-fangled university-trained kind, you have the grace to feel guilty about it.'

'And how do you reckon I would treat my wife,' David asked, 'assuming I brought myself to the point of

getting one? Yoke her up to the plough when the tractor broke down?'

'It would depend on the wife, I should think — on whether she was able to master you or not.'

'She might yoke you to the plough!' John commented.

'You will have to find me a nice masterful one, Ann. Surely you've got some women friends who could

cope with a Westmorland clod?'

'I've been discouraged,' Ann said. 'Look how hard I used to try, and it never got anywhere.'

'Now, then! They were all either flat-chested and bespectacled, with dirty fingers and a New Statesman

tucked behind their left ear; or else dressed in funny-coloured tweeds, nylons, and high-heeled shoes.'

'What about Norma?'

'Norma,' David said, 'wanted to see the stallion servicing one of the mares. She thought it would be a

highly interesting experience.'

'Well, what's wrong with that in a farmer's wife?'

David said drily: 'I've no idea. But it shocked old Jess when he heard her. We have our rough-and-ready

notions of decorum, funny though they may be.'

'It's just as I said,' Ann told him. 'You're still partly civilized. You'll be a bachelor all your days.'

David grinned. 'What I want to know is — am I going to get Davey to reduce to my own condition of

barbarism?'

John said: 'Davey is going to be an architect. I want to have some sensible plans to work to in my old

age. You should see the monstrosity I'm helping to put up now.'

'Davey will do as he wishes,' Ann said. 'I think his present notion is that he's going to be a mountaineer.

What about Mary? Aren't you going to fight over her?'

'I don't see Mary as an architect,' her father said.

'Mary will marry,' her uncle added, 'like any woman who's worth anything.'

Ann contemplated them. 'You're both savages really,' she observed. 'I suppose all men are. It's just that

David's had more of his veneer of civilization chipped off.'

'Now,' David said, 'what's wrong with taking it for granted that a good woman will marry?'

'I wouldn't be surprised if Davey marries, too,' Ann said.

There was a girl in my year at the university,' David said. 'She had every one of us beat for theory, and

from what I heard she'd been more or less running her father's farm in Lancashire since she was about

fourteen. She didn't even take her degree. She married an American airman and went back with him to

live in Detroit.'

'And therefore,' Ann observed, 'take no thought for your daughters, who will inevitably marry American

airmen and go and live in Detroit.'

David smiled slowly. 'Well, something like that!'

Ann threw him a look half-tolerant, half-exasperated, but made no further comment. They walked

together in silence by the river bank. The air had the lift of May; the sky was blue and white, with clouds

browsing slowly across their azure pasture. In the valley, one was always more conscious of the sky,

framed as it was by the encircling hills. A shadow sailed across the ground towards them, enveloped

them, and yielded again to sunshine.

'This peaceful land,' Ann said. 'You are lucky, David.'

'Don't go back on Sunday,' he suggested. 'Stay here. We could do with some extra hands for the

potatoes with Luke away sick.'

'My monstrosity calls me,' John said. 'And the kids will never do their holiday tasks while they stay here.

I'm afraid it's back to London on schedule.'

'There's such a richness everywhere. Look at all this, and then think of the poor wretched Chinese.'

'What's the latest? Did you hear the news before you came out?'

'The Americans are sending more grain ships.'

'Anything from Peking?'

'Nothing official. It's supposed to be in flames. And at Hong Kong they've had to repel attacks across the

frontier.'

'A genteel way of putting it,' John said grimly. 'Did you ever see those old pictures of the rabbit plagues in

Australia? Wire-netting fences ten feet high, and rabbits — hundreds, thousands of rabbits — piled up

against them, leap-frogging over each other until in the end either they scaled the fences or the fences

went down under their weight. That's Hong Kong right now, except that it's not rabbits piled against the

fence but human beings.'

'Do you think it's as bad as that?' David asked.

'Worse, if anything. The rabbits only advanced under the blind instinct of hunger. Men are intelligent, and

because they're intelligent you have to take sterner measures to stop them. I suppose they've got plenty

of ammunition for their guns, but it's certain they won't have enough.'

'You think Hong Kong will fall?'

'I'm sure it will. The pressure will build up until it has to. They may machine-gun them from the air first,

and dive-bomb them and drop napalm on them, but for every one they kill there will be a hundred

trekking in from the interior to replace him.'

'Napalm!' Ann said. 'Oh, no.'

'What else? It's that or evacuate, and there aren't the ships to evacuate the whole of Hong Kong in time.'

David said: 'But if they took Hong Kong — there can't be enough food there to give them three square

meals, and then they're back where they started.'

'Three square meals? Not even one, I shouldn't think. But what difference does that make? Those people

are starving. When you're in that condition, it's the next mouthful that you're willing to commit murder for.'

'And India?' David asked. 'And Burma, and all the rest of Asia?'

'God knows. At least, they've got some warning. It was the Chinese government's unwillingness to admit

they were faced with a problem they couldn't master that's got them in the worst of this mess.'

Ann said: 'How did they possibly imagine they could keep it a secret?'

John shrugged. 'They had abolished famine by statute — remember? And then, things looked easy at the

beginning. They isolated the virus within a month of it hitting the rice-fields. They had it neatly labelled —

the Chung-Li virus. All they had to do was to find a way of killing it which didn't kill the plant.

Alternatively, they could breed a virus-resistant strain. And finally, they had no reason to expect the virus

would spread so fast.'

'But when the crop had failed so badly?'

'They'd built up stocks against famine — give them credit for that. They thought they could last out until

the spring crops were cut. And they couldn't believe they wouldn't have beaten the virus by then.'

'The American's think they've got an angle on it.'

'They may save the rest of the Far East. They're too late to save China — and that means Hong Kong.'

Ann's eyes were on the hillside, and the two figures clambering up to the summit.

'Little children starving,' she said. 'Surely there's something we can do about it?'

'What?' John asked. 'We're sending food, but it's a drop in the ocean.'

'And we can talk and laugh and joke,' she said, 'in a land as peaceful and rich as this, while that goes on.'

David said: 'Not much else we can do, is there, my dear? There were enough people dying in agony

every minute before; all this does is multiply it. Death's the same, whether it's happening to one or a

hundred thousand.'

She said; 'I suppose it is.'

'We've been lucky,' David said. 'A virus could have hit wheat in just the same way.'

'It wouldn't have had the same effect, though, would it?' John asked. 'We don't depend on wheat in quite

the way the Chinese, and Asiatics generally, depend on rice.'

'Bad enough, though. Rationed bread, for a certainty.'

'Rationed bread!' Ann exclaimed. 'And in China there are millions fighting for a mouthful of grain.'

They were silent. Above them, the sun stood in a sector of cloudless sky. The song of a mistle-thrush

lifted above the steady comforting undertone of the Lepe.

'Poor devils,' David said.

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Synopsis:Thisnovelisperhapsoneofthebesttreatmentsoftheecologicaldisastertheme,writtenwithbothintelligenceandaclearunderstandingofthehumanconditionwhenfacedwithlife-threateningcircumstances.Thestorylinestartsoutwiththenewsthatadeadly,resilientplantvirusknownastheChung-Livirushasvirtuallywipedallcere...

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John Christopher - The Death Of Grass

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