The booming came nearer and then, suddenly, we could see it over the roofs of the houses to the south: the great hemisphere of gleaming metal rocking through the air above the three articulated legs, several times as high as the church.
“Its shadow came before it, and fell on us when it halted, two of its legs astride the river and the mill. We waited, and I was shivering in earnest now, unable to halt the tremors that ran through my body.”
I cannot now remember quite how old I was when I first read these sentences. But just like young Will Parker, the boy in the book they come from, I shivered in earnest at the arrival of the giant Tripod as I read “Capping Day”, the first chapter of The White Mountains.
Along with John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes and The Day of the Triffids and a few other sci-fi novels mostly written for children and young adults, John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy, The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire, were near sacred texts to me as a kid, books that both nourished my imagination and scared the bejesus out of me all at once.
Frightening suggestible kids with dystopian sci-fi and weird, sometimes tragic fantasy stories seems to have been a flourishing industry in the mid-20th century, and not just by authors like Christopher and Wyndham, but for British children’s television, the output of which dominated New Zealand children’s TV in the 1970s.
If I wasn’t lying on my bed reading The White Mountain or, later, The Lord of the Rings, I was plonked in front of the telly watching Dr Who (Daleks! Cybermen!), Space: 1999 (that alien dragon thing!), The Day of the Triffids (killer plants in your garden!), Survivors (man-made plague kills most of humanity!), Children of the Stones (time-twisting folk horror!) and, most terrifying of all, Escape Into Night (glowing stones with eyes closing in!). Did we sensitive, suggestible 70s kids need all of that on top of living in an already dystopian present, a world locked in a Cold War with the possibility of nuclear war at any moment? Apparently.
It took a long time for Christopher’s Tripod books, written in the late 60s, to be adapted for British television, however. And by the time they were made, and then screened here in the mid-80s, I was no longer a highly suggestible kid. I was a distracted university student who drank beer as often as he could get hold of it and spent most of the rest of his bursary on Flying Nun records.
But even as a semi-demi-adult, The Tripods TV series was terrific fun, and watching it remained, like all those other TV series and books, a magical and exciting memory into my so-called adulthood. So much so that when a DVD collection of The Tripods was finally released in 2009, I ordered it immediately and made Michele watch it, too. Such is the strange power of old TV shows.
I remain a Tripods tragic. And so, too, does Chris Jones, only of a magnitude many times greater. The Wellingtonian has written The Tripods: All For Nothing?, a nearly 300-page, handsome hardback and beautifully conceived tribute to the television show which he, though a bit younger than me then, was also captivated by. It is not just a tribute to a mostly forgotten children’s series, but also to the bumper TV show annuals published in the 60s and 70s and given to kids like me at Christmas.
Seven years in the researching and writing, Chris’s book was first published in Britain last year to mark 40 years since The Tripods first screened. It is now available here, and of course I was honour bound as a Tripods tragic to immediately order a copy.
So now the pruning is all done at Lush Places and the rain is back, I shall happily retreat inside and fall into the book’s glossy nostalgia. After all, when the present is so bleak and the future so daunting, what could be more comforting than the dystopia of the past?
