The earth shook violently as the enormous metal monster closed in. It was 100m away, 50, 20 … then it was on me. As I watched its giant steel tentacle, with its whirling, screaming blade, stretch down towards me, I was conscious less of the fear of a bizarre death by bisection than of a futile need to escape. I ran for my life …
Or rather, I didn’t. Such are the perils of an overactive imagination: a giant tree-trimming machine comes to Lush Places for a couple of days, and I am suddenly a kid deep inside the pages of The Tripods, an exciting series of sci-fi books for young adults first published back when stories of dystopian realities and unknowable monsters were the stuff of fiction rather than our daily news.
The giant machines of author John Christopher’s Tripods novellas – written in the late 60s and later adapted into a pleasingly naff TV series – owed a large, three-legged debt to the mechanical monsters in HG Wells’ older and much more famous The War of the Worlds, of course. But just like Wells’ huge Martian “Fighting Machines” – they were 30m tall with two heat-ray guns – the unarmed tripods were utterly terrifying.
Let me tell you, the huge trimmers needed to cut tall shelter belts are as big as Tripods, and no less scary. Before this one turned up, such machines – the trimmers, not the Tripods – weren’t a complete unknown; I had heard and seen them working at a distance on neighbours’ properties. However, nothing quite prepares you for witnessing the noise and brutality of their work up close. Or the mess they make: debris everywhere, giant ruts in our paddocks.
It certainly didn’t help that we’d been lallygagging on tidying our many shelter belts; most are at least twice as high as they should be. But we finally found we had enough dosh to trim the two closest to the house.
By the time the Tripod was done, after hours of racket and scores of falling branches, the trees’ tops were certainly down. But so, unfortunately, was a fence. At least my overactive imagination and I got out alive.
Inside Christopher’s Tripods were the mysterious “Masters”, frightening blob-shaped aliens with no necks, three eyes, stumpy legs and three tentacles for arms.
The Master inside the Tripod cutting our trees was no creature from outer space, but an old bloke with a droll sense of humour and a knowing smile. He hardly seemed scary at all.
The first thing the Master and I established about each other was that we both liked to swear. The air went blue. The second thing was that we both like a chinwag, which, on first meeting, we did for what seemed an hour until he suddenly announced he was off “to put my nosebag on”. Later, and much to Michele’s amusement, the Master and I compared the length of our chainsaw bars. His was longer.
It wasn’t just his two huge machines – the trimmer and another for moving the massive amount of debris into big piles – the Master turned up with. There was his swag full of yarns as well.
There was the one about him and some mates going down south years ago and visiting a pub in Te Anau. “We drank the place dry,” he reckoned. This might be why, when I asked what he thought of Te Anau, he said, “I have no idea.”
Then there was the one about a hot market day in Martinborough a thousand years ago. He’d walk into a pub to find a “blonde bombshell” working behind the bar. He knew what he had to say, and so he said it. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he announced. “What’s a flash bird like you doing in a place like this?”
You’d have thought the blonde bombshell would have fled the place like she was being chased by a Tripod. Instead, she married him – the Master not just of metal monsters, but also of dodgy one-liners.
