when-the-wind-blows

When The Wind Blows, a My Life in Horror

When The Wind Blows, a My Life in Horror by George Daniel Lea

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When The Wind Blows

I’m unsure of what factors inform our politics. Like all matters of the mind and identity, it seems so complex and in flux as to be indiscernible. I fundamentally mistrust the assertion that one “knows one’s own mind.” Of all the things we can presume and assert to know, our own minds are the least likely subjects. 

We live in our own minds, we are our own minds: We can’t even pretend objectivity of analysis, as they are both the subject and instrument thereof. The best we can hope to do is conjecture, and develop the means that allow us a little insight. 

So, when I say: I have no idea where the formulation of my politics began, I mean it sincerely. 

One thing I can point to as an artefact that exercised considerable influence in that regard is Raymond Briggs’s When The Wind Blows. Like most of my generation, I was familiar with Briggs’s work from a very young age, largely owing to animated adaptations such as The Snow Man and Grandpa. By the time I was old enough to begin formulating some sense of identity, I’d already tasted the characteristic bitter-sweetness of his work, the contrast of joy and loss that most of his stories emphasise. 

For many of us, The Snow Man was the beginning: A sweet, celebratory, magical adventure that ends on a note of aching loss when the eponymous Snow Man is found melted in the morning after their great adventure by the lonely little boy who wished him alive. A sweet and sentimental piece of work, it nevertheless treats its audience with incredible respect and sophistication, providing for many  our first taste of loss and grief in fiction. Briggs, unlike many of his contemporaries, wasn’t interested in pretending that children don’t experience emotions as broadly and profoundly as adults do. Nor was he interested in diverting or distracting from the ostensibly more negative end of the spectrum: 

Grief and loss are part and parcel of existence, and Briggs understands his audience well enough to appreciate there’s no purpose in shielding us from them. Instead, he provides a means by which we might experience them in fiction, where no actual loss has occurred, but which feels intensely real for children who’ve yet to determine the distinction between the actual and imaginary. 

As a child of the 1980s, I was rocked and traumatised by The Snow Man in the best possible way; in a manner that shaped the development of my emotional and imaginary life. I still attribute experiences such as that to the development of my particular sensitivities; the visceral streak of humanitarianism that informs everything I say and do. Whilst most would not classify The Snow Man as a political text per se, it retains subtle positions regarding the treatment and status of children in our society, the experience of loss and loneliness and imagination. Like all created things, it cannot help but have its own politics (a factor that’s compounded beyond measure by the understanding of Briggs’s own political leanings and activism). 

The Snow Man actively cultivates sensitivity, emotional maturity and openness in its readers. Briggs’s project here may be unconscious, as any agenda within the text is so naturally bound up within the story itself. But the ripples and implications of that project make themselves felt even now (were it not successful to some degree, I would not be here writing this exploration). 

When The Wind Blows
When The Wind Blows

Such sensitivities and positions can’t help but inform our politics as we grow (in my instance, a species of left-wing humanitarianism not a million miles away from Briggs’s own). In many respects, work like The Snow Man provides us the contexts for enduring and understanding more complex, adult work like When The Wind Blows. 

I first experienced When The Wind Blows at my cousin’s house as a very young child. I don’t think our parents quite understood what it was (back then, the notion of animation for adults was still fairly taboo, despite the work of Bakshi et al in the 60s and 70s). Had they understood, they likely wouldn’t have allowed us near it as young as we were. 

As it was, we found our developing little minds blasted by a work of overt political activism, an animated expression of lingering, Cold War horror that pervaded so much of our media and discourses at the time. Though far too young to understand its political connotations, I think we grasped it in a less conscious way, as something that existed in all of our minds: The pervasive fear of sudden nuclear destruction. 

The film begins much as any other Raymond Briggs adaptation: The style, animation and characters are familiar (deliberately so; Jim and Hilda Bloggs are, as their names suggest, designed to be everyone’s Grandparents. There’s a particular generation of children and Grandchildren here in the UK who will instantly recognise the archetypes they represent). Whilst maybe a little more sedate than most of its contemporaries, there’s little to suggest it’s anything more than another in the catalogue of Briggs’s bitter-sweet fables. 

Nothing, that is, save for the incongruously sinister cutaways to the silhouettes of nuclear submarines prowling the ocean depths, military bases where preparations are being made for a self-destructive Armageddon. 

As a child, these cutaways disturbed in ways that are difficult to express to those who didn’t grow up in the looming shadows of mushroom clouds, the narrative of imminent apocalypse that was part and parcel of our childhoods. Even without that context, there’s something uniquely disturbing about the tonal dissonance of those moments: 

Whereas Jim and Hilda’s life in the English countryside is post-card idyllic, they are bleak, industrial and ominous, even the style of animation different from the “children’s drawing” aesthetic Briggs typically exhibits.

That sense of incongruity is chilling, and serves as an omen of something terrible approaching. 

As a child, I didn’t grasp the banal horror of Jim’s endless parroting of governmental propaganda concerning the imminent apocalypse; the blithe and unassuming trust he places in “the powers that be” to ensure everything goes according to plan. To Jim and Hilda, despite having lived through the atrocity of World War 2, the notion that the systems of history might break down entirely, that control and design has always been a delusion, is anathema. They insist and believe with a quiet certainty to shame any fundamentalist, such that they follow governmental advice to the letter (even when it’s contradictory or evident, palliative piffle). 

At the time of my original viewing, I appreciated none of this: All I saw were two very familiar Grandparent archetypes, in whom I saw so much of my own Grandparents (whom I loved dearly). It didn’t consciously occur to me that something monumentally terrible was going to happen to them. 

Until it did. 

When The Wind Blows
When The Wind Blows

It may be a false memory, but I recall the sequence of the atomic blast -rendered in horrific detail in the cartoon adaptation- being one in which the usual games, jokes and laughter stopped. I recall silence, and a breathless unquiet inside unlike anything I’d ever felt before. 

The shift in tone and colour that follows struck me like a physical blow: The familiar, pastel shades of bucolic English countryside obliterated in favour of a black and dreary wasteland, a Mordor-like condition of black clouds, grey mist, charred grass and soil. A hazy effect overlays every moment in this new desolation, a greasy, shifting film designed to simulate fallout, but which also washes the entire work in the veneer of a sick and dying dream.

And that is exactly what it is: The dream of civilisation, the dream of humanity, the dream of life itself, over in a flash. Whilst in the book, the apocalypse is momentary and disturbingly quiet, in the cartoon, the style of animation shifts to distressingly realistic portrayals of villages being torn up and ripped apart, church towers collapsing, trains being swept off their rails, entire tracts of countryside eaten away by a seemingly-living wall of desolation.

It certainly struck something in my exceedingly young imagination; something inarticulate, nascent, barely an ember, but one that would swell from that moment, becoming an all-consuming inferno by my teenage years: 

Already inclined to darker modes of thought, this imagery merely expressed concerns I’d already begun to develop. As a child of the 1980s/1990s, it was impossible not to experience to some degree the numerous doom-saying narratives prophesying our extinction: From malingering Cold War concerns of nuclear Armageddon to projections of Climate Change, we were bombarded with such messages from the earliest instance, and often -bafflingly- urged to take responsibility for their defeat.

Even then, the sense of impotence before those forces shuddered me to my soul. Like many of my generation, it began to become apparent to me -almost inarguable, in fact- that we would not live to see our parent’s ages (the 40-year-old sat writing this now is still somewhat astounded at his own existence). So, so much of the world seemed blithely intent on its own murder, on our casual genocide (a factor emphasised, of course, by my developing homosexuality, which I hadn’t yet determined in any clear or conscious way, but which had certainly already kindled). 

The aftermath of the apocalypse leaves Joe and Hilda in the most wretched, impotent state: Still blithely believing in the rectitude of existing systems, of “the powers that be,” still following every contradictory instruction to the letter, even now the world has been reduced to ruin. They assume and believe so utterly that they will be saved, that life will return to normality in a matter of weeks, it’s heart-breaking to watch: 

They are the living dead, in a world too arid at this point to even be called a cemetery. I recall being shuddered to the point of nausea by the visual representation of their decline; the characters growing thinner, more sallow and sickly, greys and greens shading their features. They grow weaker, more sickly with every passing day, losing their teeth and hair, bleeding from their mouths, becoming bilious and unable to eat what little they have left. 

It’s a slow, sad surrender; a realisation that never voices itself, but is expressed by their actions. 

We don’t linger to see them die. We don’t have to; the end of the piece is so stark and resonant in its emptiness, it leaves us under no delusion. 

And it hurts. It’s intended to hurt, to traumatise: Joe and Hilda are everyone’s Grandparents. If you were a child of the 1980s/1990s, you know them almost instantly. The way they look, the way they talk, the way they act. Their almost child-like ignorance of history, politics and world-affairs, their infantile trust in systems of authority…we all know them, and see our own Grandparents in them. 

That’s the horrific brilliance of the work: It forces us to see what would happen to our most beloved in that most awful of circumstances, how they would fail to cope, how they would suffer. It hurts almost physically, in the manner of a blow to the gut, a stutter of the heart. It is profoundly, resonantly horrific. 

For my part, I recall coming away from it shuddered almost to the point of tears, but also obsessed, as I was and still am by material that makes me sincerely feel something (even if that reaction is ostensibly negative). 

This is where so much of what I now consider my politics was kindled (no doubt as writer Raymond Briggs intended), but also somewhat deeper, more inalienable positions: 

For the longest time as a child, I was consumed by a species of existential nihilism that manifests internally not unlike the scenes of desolation in When The Wind Blows. As I grew older, I became enraged by my own powerlessness in the face of those forces I was endlessly enjoined by media to combat and defeat (the tag-line of conservationist super-hero cartoon Captain Planet was “The power is yours!” which it would impose like a mantra or catechism on the single-digit aged audience. What “power,” exactly, do 6 and 8 year-olds have in the swirling, auto-corrosive systems of history and politics? What influence or power could we exert to redirect our species’ seemingly incontrovertible desire for self-extinction?). 

Whilst When The Wind Blows is a uniquely powerful parable for activism (most notably with regards to nuclear disarmament), it is also so tonally powerful as to have another effect: The inculcation of existential despair and sense of inevitability so overwhelming as to be inescapable. 

Joe and Hilda are largely blameless for the circumstances in which they find themselves, certainly powerless to influence or alter them. By the time the animation begins, everything is already over. History has turned to the point it always would, and we merely await the inevitable. 

This sense of being grit ground up and spat out by the forces of our own history is exceedingly common amongst my generation (late Generation X/Early Millennial), as is the nihilism that comes part and parcel: 

Battered by images and promises of apocalypse from the youngest age, we have internalised those narratives and have since sat back, watching their slow fulfilment from within. 

Now, in 2024, When The Wind Blows has a more expansive resonance from its original 1980s context: 

The threat(s) we face aren’t as immediate or obviously devastating as nuclear Armageddon (though that spectre is certainly raising its Thanatic head once again). Rather, we are in the midst of history’s utter failure: The collapse and auto-cannibalisation of systems whose decline nuclear obliteration was merely one potential expression of: 

Now, Joe and Hilda’s plight is more abstract in import, referring more widely to a number of imminent -and currently occurring- apocalypses, as well as metaphorically to the systemic collapse we all readily perceive in every aspect of our lives. 

The generation to which they belong is now largely gone from us, their absence a perpetual wound. Now, the threat is largely to us: Not those wholly ignorant of its horror, but equally powerless to prevent it.

As a child, When The Wind Blows played on my mind horribly, becoming a source of morbid obsession (as material that evoked ostensibly negative reaction so often did). I’ve little doubt that a goodly chunk of my abiding mistrust regarding systems of authority. The prescriptions of culture and history, derive from my exposure to it and other, similarly transgressive pieces of work. 

Whilst that condition comes with its own raft of difficulties, it’s one I wouldn’t be without, and which I’m eternally grateful to Briggs for stoking. 

George Daniel Lea, 31st March 2024

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  • George Daniel Lea

    George Lea is an unfixed oddity that can occasionally be sighted wandering around the UK Midlands. Queer as a very queer thing. Following the publication of his first short story collection, Strange Playgrounds and Essential Atrocities, he found a home amongst Perpetual Motion Machine Publications/Ghoulish Books stable of queer writers with his two-volume short-story collection, Born in Blood.

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