1957 It was Brian Aldiss who coined the term ‘cosy catastrophe’, specifically for the novels of his fellow science-fiction practitioner, John Wyndham (one of the pen names of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris). No catastrophe is cosier than that depicted in Wyndham’s novel, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).
The action is set in Miss Marples-land. The fictional Midwich is located in fictional Winshire – ‘an ordinary little village where nothing ever happened’. It has a Norman church, some 60 houses, a pub called the Scythe and Stone, and an aura of time-in, time-out unchangeability.
Something, however, does happen. On 26 September (in an unspecified 1950s year) two Midwich residents, Richard Gayford and his wife, spend the night in London, celebrating his birthday. On their return on the 27th, they discover that for 24 hours, the village has been sealed off under an invisible and wholly impenetrable bubble. The authorities are impotent and have no explanation. The bubble mysteriously lifts and life returns to normal – as the village fondly but mistakenly thinks.
Some months after the ‘Dayout’, as it is called, every one of the 65 or so fertile women in Midwich – including young maids and middle-aged spinsters – find themselves with child. It emerges that they have been impregnated by aliens – xenogenesis.
Nine months to the day, a crop of clone-like, golden-eyed Wunderkinder are born. The children have extra-human powers, telepathic communication among themselves, and mature at a terrifyingly precocious rate. It becomes clear that they have no great love for their hosts – any more than does the nestling cuckoo for any young birds alongside it. Anyone who crosses the Midwich children dies.
Other nests of these ominous children have implanted themselves in various parts of the world. The Russians ruthlessly nuke theirs. Midwich requires a more humanely English genocide. Gordon Zellaby, a man of great learning and a terminal cardiac condition, has befriended (insofar as it is possible) the Midwich cuckoos. He straps explosive to himself and, while discussing classical history, blows them, and himself, to smithereens. The world (more specifically rural England) is saved. For now.
Zellaby leaves a bleak farewell note for his wife:
[W]e have lived so long in a garden that we have all but forgotten the commonplaces of survival. It was said: Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more [‘If you are in Rome, live in the Roman way’], and quite sensibly, too. But it is a more fundamental expression of the same sentiment to say: If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.
Uncosiness (Zellaby’s bomb) is the only key to survival.
It is tempting to tie Wyndham’s novel, and his other catastrophic scenarios (The Kraken Wakes, The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids), with the 1950s ‘Age of Anxiety’ when nuclear destruction was expected, with only four minutes’ warning, from the skies at any moment. The nervousness of the decade is similarly caught in Nigel Kneale’s 1953 TV series, The Quatermass Experiment – which may well have influenced Wyndham.
The Midwich Cuckoos has itself been adapted for TV and has been twice filmed (in 1960 and 1995) under the fatuously gothic title, Village of the Damned.