Who remembers Val Guest?

We have been here before. In literature or in film at least. Who remembers Guest’s ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’? or Shute’s ‘On the Beach’? 

These stories do not consider the impact on earth of a pandemic or the plague, in old money, but the devastation of unwise political decisions on our planet ie the bomb.

It’s not just nuclear destruction that causes ruin for the earth. My current  read is ‘Wilding’ by Isabella Tree. I have reached the chapter where she relates that the stag in Scotland, known for its grandeur, is clearly much less heavy than its Norwegian counterpart. Why? Simply that the cause of the Monarch of the Glen’s low weight is the destruction of shrubs and diverse plants which has led to thin feed for wild animals in Scotland. Norway doesn’t have it quite right, according to Tree, however, as the most diverse landscapes are less forested than Norway but also less empty than Scotland.

In the film ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’ the planet is warming dangerously quickly. Universal weather patterns shift and there are floods in some areas of the globe, terrific gales in others and heavy snow falls where snow is rare. In the film water is scarce in the UK and, here’s the contemporary link, after chaos and panic, young people go mad in the street. They are tired of fear and being told what to do. However they don’t rush to the beach. Following doom-laden newspaper headlines youths spill out on to the streets, creating water fights, turning over parked cars and terrorising people trying to take a bath. Water in some areas has become bad, carrying disease like cholera or typhoid.

The film, in which Val Guest was the screenwriter, is not a disaster movie with a pandemic-lockdown theme but the behaviour of people in the streets is similar to those rushing to Bournemouth on the hottest day of the year. The message in the film and in reality is that lockdown and behaving cautiously will be tolerated for only so long. 

In ‘On the Beach’ the threat of nuclear annihilation drives Australians to spend their last few healthy weeks playing and relaxing on stretches of sand and swimming in the sea. Nuclear sickness has spread across the world and Australia is the last major country to be affected.

In February and March this year we knew coronavirus was heading our way. I recall knocking elbows, instead of kissing, with friends in town in the week before lockdown. We smiled. We still thought it funny. My optician was less humoured. He said he was dreading the pandemic reaching our shores.  

‘On the Beach’ is set in that pre-crisis time. The population knew death and sickness were coming. The film is a study of how the well folk cope, and prepare for almost certain death, in the weeks before doom. 

We may not have visited a pandemic in the above narratives but the dread and ‘last trips to the beach’ before it reached us in March are experiences familiar to us. I was in Devon, at a beach, in the week before lockdown. 

Letting off steam ie the lemming-like rushing to Bournemouth last week is a human response to feeling trapped. 

There are many novels written about the plague, as an historical record. And there are, of course, dystopian novels set five minutes into our future. We don’t, in the 2020 pandemic, have to suffer the scavenging and cannibalism of ‘The Road’  in the search for food, thank goodness. But in the novel we see the after-effects of a cataclysm and how mere humans react to a catastrophic present and a very uncertain future. This much we share. In our quest for an escape from lockdown reading about disaster may not be the answer. But death, disease, destruction are part of the human experience.

In literature and film we have been here before.