For these reasons I shall not be able to bring myself to approve of what ought to be done. I am, as you know, a humane man…As a further disadvantage I am a civilised man. So determined that there is really only one thing to be done with them once one’s nest is infested. Already he suspects what is really going on, but blanches at the course of action that he feels is neccessary :Ĭuckoos are very determined survivors. Zellaby carries out some tests and realises that the Children of Midwich are a single entity, one girl and one boy, who share intelligence, thoughts and learning.
Soon, however, they display mental powers, forcing those mothers who have left the village to bring them back so that they can all be together. When the sixty-one children are born they appear to be normal human children, except they all have a sheen to the skin, golden hair and golden eyes. His daughter Ferrelyn, planning to be married, is one of the pregnant women. The novel also has that familar Wyndham character, the older man who sees what is really going on, which in The Midwich Cuckoos is Gordon Zellaby, who lives in a large house in the village, and writes learned books. He is the typical Wyndham protagonist, intelligent enough, but his wife is cleverer.
Gayford is recruited by an old friend and government intelligence officer, Bernard Westcott, to observe what takes place in the village after the Dayout and report back.
The story is told, partly at least, through the eyes of village resident and writer Richard Gayford and his wife, Janet, who fortunately were not in the village at the time of the Dayout. Some months later, however, every woman of childbearing age, married or single, discovers that she is pregnant. The authorities outside cannot get in: an aerial photograph reveals an object in the village with “a pale oval outline, with a shape, judging by the shadows, not unlike the inverted bowl of a spoon.” When the village come back to life the object has gone, while the villagers appear not to have been harmed by what they quickly come to call the “Dayout”.
It begins with a small ordinary English village being subject to a mysterious force rendering everyone within a circle unconscious for a whole day on Tuesday 27th September (which would have fallen in 1960). After the post-nuclear war landscape of The Chrysalids John Wyndham’s fourth novel, The Midwich Cuckoos, was a return to familiar (though, as we shall see, unsettling) territory, a possible alien invasion of the world.
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