Samuel Youd (aka John Christopher) (1922-2012)

For some reason I missed this from a month or so back. I’m subscribed to David Langford’s Ansible newsletter on science fiction topics, but for some reason I missed reading March’s issue where he noted the death of John Christopher.

I dare say the majority of my readers who have heard of John Christopher know him as the author of The Tripods trilogy, which was filmed by the BBC in the 80s. I have neither read the books (which essentially were a Young Adult fantasy series) nor seen the TV series. The reason I celebrate him is from his apocalyptic book The Death of Grass from 1956:

(In the US it was named No Blade of Grass, and filmed as such.) I read this book when I first started reading science fiction, introduced to the whole genre by my Uncle Roger when I was in hospital recovering from an appendectomy (he sent me a care package of five or six novels; I forget which at this stage although one was almost certainly The Incredible Shrinking Man).

I must have been about 13 or 14 when I bought this book in 1970 or ’71. As you can see from the back cover, it was printed during the time the UK was transitioning from pounds-shillings-pence to the decimal currency and so the price is printed as both 30p and 6/-.

I’d already read and enjoyed some John Wyndham and so this book fit right in. The world is suffering from an unknown virus that affects all grasses, killing them. Since wheat and rice (and barley, rye, oats and so on) are grasses, suddenly crops start failing and a worldwide famine descends. The protagonist, John Custance, who lives in London,  gets a warning from his friend who works for the government that the virus is spreading uncontrollably across the West and that he should get out of London as soon as possible. It seems the Government, in trying to control the rioting population – and reduce it – may resort to dropping an atomic bomb on the capital city. John has a brother who owns a potato farm in some remote part of Westmoreland and so he sets off up the Great North Road (aka, the A1) with wife and friends to try and reach it before the country descends into anarchy.

Unlike John Wyndham, who might be accused of writing “cosy”, very British stiff-upper-lip apocalypses (think The Midwich Cuckoos), The Death of Grass soon descends into savagery. John’s wife is raped by a couple of strangers on the journey, with her rapists shot after being caught. Later on the travellers invade a farmhouse and kill the farmer’s family for the bread (“They had food, and we didn’t,” was the excuse given to the farmer’s daughter). They make it to the brother’s farm, which, even to a 13-year-old’s eyes was rather too cleverly protected, but at what cost to their humanity.

The book, even at this remove (some 56 years) is pretty terrifying. Yes, there are parts that are stuck in their time (Great North Road, really?), and there are some downright unbelievable bits (would the Government really drop a bomb on London to control the population? perhaps it was more feasible in the mid-fifties at the height of the Cold War) but the whole account of the descent of British civilization into anarchy and barbarism is all too credible and well described.

I reread the book three or four years ago and was completely surprised to find out that the fugitives travelled west across the Pennines from Masham to Sedbergh, close to where my parents lived for so long. I’d completely forgotten that part of the book – or perhaps it might be more correct to say the names of towns and villages meant nothing to me at the time (we lived in Surrey; Yorkshire was on a different planet). It brought a sudden poignancy to that part of the novel.

I don’t know why but I never read any other John Christopher. I’d guess his adult oeuvre was out of print even then.

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