The Night of the Triffids Read Online Free PDF

from a watering can. He'd stroke the leaves, as you or I would stroke a cat, and sometimes he would murmur to the plants as if they were his closest friends.
        For a long time I believed that he loved the plants - as if they were some cherished branch of our family - so it was something of a shock when, at the age of eight, I learned that he was trying to find a way to kill them. Bewildering stuff indeed. Even more so when he told me he wasn't content just to kill those triffids that were in our glasshouses but that he wanted to destroy every triffid in the world. Running his fingers through a handsome head of greying hair, he'd speak to me of defoliants, growth hormones, cellular degenerators, pollination inhibitors, mutant triffid species with guaranteed nil reproduction capability.
        More bewildering stuff. Double Dutch, as the old saying goes.
        Then I'd tug the sleeve of his white lab coat, demanding that he come and help me fly my kite. More often than not he'd flash his big good-natured grin and say, 'Give me ten minutes, then meet me up on the hill.'
        All this should really have given my father at least a good hint of where my future lay. Viz.: no comprehension of botany (evidenced by my lack of interest therein) plus no head for academic subjects meant that my following in his footsteps was extremely doubtful.
        No doubt my father cherished dreams of my pursuing a career in applied botanical science - one specifically devoted to the eradication of the triffid menace. But love him as I did, and try as I might to master the baffling language of botany and the Byzantine complexity of test tube, retort and Bunsen burner, I must have been something of a puzzle to him. But to say I was a disappointment to him would have been putting it too strongly.
        Because, quite simply, Bill Masen loved his children. He allowed us to cultivate our own interests; not for a moment did he wish for us to be mere facsimiles of himself or our mother. (Although my sister Lisabeth did inherit my mother's literary abilities - and a mischievous appetite to shock - with her steamy stories of affaires d'amour that appeared in the Freshwater Review when she should, according to her disapproving headmistress, have still been a blushing seventeen-year-old.)
        My total ineptitude at laboratory research came to a head one Tuesday evening after school when I was 'helping' my father. I was twelve years old. I managed, quite inadvertently, to concoct an explosive blend of the familiar pink triffid oil in its raw state with an equal amount of wood alcohol. Father told me to leave the glass beaker somewhere warm for the alcohol to evaporate. I had a brainwave. I'd speed up the process by boiling off the alcohol with the flame of the Bunsen burner.
        Then I sat back to watch, beaming proudly at my own brilliance.
        The explosion that followed was as impressive as it was loud. It was even heard by the Mothers up at Arreton manor. I lost most of my hair in the fireball. And lost - permanently - my part-time job as my father's lab assistant.
        My hair did grow back, although it acquired a pure white fleck in its otherwise jet-black fringe, which earned me the nickname 'Snowdrop' at school. (And, oh, how I'd cringe whenever friends teased me with that one.)
        Later, that same day of the explosion, after my father (and his more competent assistants) had remedied much of the damage I'd wrought, he visited me in my bedroom. He stood there, a candle in his hand, the light shining on his greying hair. For a while he gazed down at my bandaged head, thinking I was asleep; I heard him exhale audibly through the white bristles of his moustache.
        I had expected an extremely colourful, not to say high-volume description of my inabilities.
        Instead, I realized that as he looked down at me he was thanking heaven I hadn't taken my head clean off in the explosion. (After all, Dr