While relationships may be centre stage for many during the years of physical and
emotional changes, vital world issues are also deeply important. The incredible response
among teenagers to issues concerning the environment and the needs of those in
developing countries, as was revealed in the success of first Live Aid and then Band Aid,
also needed to be reflected in fiction. Different issues dominate at different times and
books which deal with them can be important stories of the moment rather than
becoming classics. Robert Swindells’s Brother in the Land (1984) was just one of a
number of books published within a five-year span which dealt with what, at the time,
seemed a perfectly likely event—the dropping of a nuclear bomb. The prospect of the
destruction of the world and speculation as to what might survive and how led to some
undisciplined and morbid writing. Many seemed to assume that the sheer gravity of the
subject matter was enough to make a book on the subject good. Brother in the Land is
an exception and the fact that it is as readable and poignant today proves the point. In
the aftermath of the nuclear destruction moral order breaks down, survival depends on
selfishness. Or so Danny thinks, until he finds a crumb of reassurance in the behaviour
of a handful of the other survivors. Robert Swindells wrote a book reflecting the mood of
the moment but his understanding of how people behave in extremis has made it a book
to last.
The picture book format of Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows (1982) might not
make it immediately look like a book for teenagers but the comic strip layout of text and
pictures does little to soften the intensity of the tragedy that unfolds through the story.
Jim and Hilda, a retired couple, try hard to follow the government’s instructions about
what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Briggs’s point was that such guidance was
fatuous and would do nothing to help people if a bomb really was dropped. Jim and
Hilda are not directly hit by a bomb but they are affected by radiation sickness. Watching
them slavishly trying to do as they have been told while all the time turning greener,
weaker and with less hair is almost too painful to bear but it is a frighteningly powerful
way of conveying the impact of the atomic bomb while also serving as a hard-hitting
attack on government policy in supporting a nuclear programme.
Other books of the same period such as Louise Lawrence’s Children of the Dust (1985)
reflected just how pessimistic current thinking then was. Set after the dropping of the
bomb Children of the Dust describes a horribly mutated race as the sole survivors in a
bleak new world.
When Joan Lingard wrote the first of what was to become a quintet of books about
Protestant Sadie and Catholic Kevin, the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland had only just
begun. In The Twelfth Day of July (1970) the two teenagers meet against the background
of the annual Orange Day celebration in Belfast. They rapidly become a modern version
of ‘star crossed lovers’ in Across the Barricades (1972) facing increasing hostility from
friends and family—with the exception of Kevin’s sister. Realistically, Joan Lingard
moves the couple from Belfast in Into Exile (1973) and from then on the political
situation in Northern Ireland recedes into the background as the story of the young
couple’s early married life unfolds. Sectarian hostilities happen the world over and even
if the Northern Ireland situation is resolved the Kevin and Sadie books offer shrewd
insight into a long episode in the history of the country as well as describing what it
might feel like growing up anywhere where there is civil war.
390 TYPES AND GENRES