Robert Swindells Quotes

“It’s called making yourself homeless. And so here I am sitting in this doorway which is now my bedroom, hoping some kind of punter will give me a bit of small change so I can eat.”

“The word negotiable was spelt ‘Negoshable,’ and the whole thing looked like a six-year-old had written it, but I didn’t care. There was an address.”

“It didn’t feel like peace on earth, I can tell you that. There wasn’t a lot of goodwill towards men floating about.”

“I’m invisible, see? One of the invisible people. Right now I’m sitting in a doorway watching the passers-by. They avoid looking at me. They’re afraid I want something they’ve got, and they’re right.”

“Also, they don’t want to think about me. They don’t like reminding I exist. Me, and those like me. We’re living proof that everything’s not all right and we make the place untidy.”

“Shelter, as in shelter from the stormy blast. It’s what they’re all seeking. The street people. What they crave. If they can only find shelter everything will be fine.”

“He’s about fifty for a start, and he’s one of these old dudes that wear cool gear and try to act young and it doesn’t work because they’ve got grey hair and fat bellies and they just make themselves pathetic.”

“You’re leaving a place you know and heading into the unknown with nothing to protect you. No money. No prospect of work. No address where folks will make you welcome.”

“They abolished National Service, and they’ve put me where I can’t turn garbage into men any more, but I can clean up the garbage, can’t I?”

“And there’s nowhere you can run to, because nobody cares.”

It’s also horribly, heartbreakingly sad. After a nuclear cataclysm transforms the world as they know it, the survivors are thrown into a cruel new reality.

Danny survives the bombing and rejoins what is left of his family to face the struggles of life after the bombing. The book is full of awful scenes---the dead who died from the bombing, the dead who slowly die after the bombing, shooting those who have food, and much more.

They’ve still got food stocks in the cellar, enough to last them for a very long time. But the problem is they need to be careful about sharing or appearing to not need food, which only advertises that they have it.

The dark world of a nuclear fallout — a world blighted by dead crops, a poisoned atmosphere, the devastating, long-lasting horrors inflicted by post-mushroom-cloud radiation

“Anyway, I played with him a bit in he back where Dad stacked the crates. It was all right at first but then he started wittering; so when Dad went off in the van, i gave him ten pence for a lolly. He ran inside and I got on the bike and left. ”

Before the nuclear bomb that destroyed their northern England town (and many others), Danny Lodge, his little brother Ben and his father kept a little convenience shop.

“It was dark when I heard it. I’d been asleep: God knows how. I guess it was my mind’s way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker. I lay rigid, biting my lip, something was moving about out there, something big.”

Denny, a teenager, is one of the unlucky ones, a survivor, one of those who have come through a nuclear war alive.

“It was that which first made me understand the enormity of what had happened. Nuclear missiles had fallen on England, and if they’d fallen on England they must have fallen on a lot of other countries too. This rain, black rain, was falling now on each of them.”

“It was dark when I heard it. I’d been asleep. God knows how. I guess it was my mind’s way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker.”