How Tove Jansson Taught Me To Live With the Apocalypse
BY WILL BUCKINGHAM
In the early 1980s, the prospect of nuclear annihilation seemed all too real. But at the age of ten, during the summer between elementary and junior high school, one book helped me make peace with the end of the world.
It was 1980, the summer break between elementary school and junior high, and I was in the garden, trying to imagine the Earth cut in half like a grapefruit.
It was my mom who put the image into my mind. Over lunch, my parents talked about nuclear war. “There are enough warheads to blow up half the world,” Mom said, and for the rest of the day, I imagined a hemisphere hanging in space. I thought of all the people on the half that was destroyed, and all the people on the half that remained. If it came to it, I hoped I’d be on the surviving half.
1980 was the year of “Protect and Survive,” the British Government pamphlet about surviving nuclear holocaust. In the playground at school, we talked about air-raid sirens, about radio voices announcing the end of the world, about four-minute warnings. Four minutes: the time it would take from the announcement of an attack to the first raining-down of bombs. We talked about what we’d do with our last, precious 240 seconds.
According to “Protect and Survive,” this is how you prepare for a nuclear war: you hide under the table, or in a cupboard under the stairs. You surround your shelter with heavy furniture filled with sand. If outside, you lie flat in a ditch. If inside and sheltering after the explosion, you improvise a toilet from a dining chair and a bucket. It isn’t just about the blast, the pamphlet says. If you survive the blast, there is the fallout dust. The dust “can be deadly dangerous ... It cannot be seen or felt. It has no smell, and it can be detected only by special instruments.”
As the year went on, I felt fear spread like dust, covering everything. But unlike dust, fear needed no special instruments for its detection. At night, I cried myself to sleep, thinking of fallout, of radiation, of the world cut in two.
In that summer spent in the shadow of the world’s end, it was a book that saved me: Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland. I stumbled across the book in Scurfield’s Books, our local bookstore. The store was run by two retired writers, George and Celia, who had gained modest fame for their cookbooks, Home Baked: Little Book of Bread Recipes, and Home-Made Cakes and Biscuits. Now retired, they kept the bookstore less as a business, and more as a service to the community. The store smelled of damp and old paper. Mom used it as a child-minding facility. When she had errands to run, she dropped my sister and I off and left us there to read. The store was divided into two sections. In the central room, the books were new, and we were not allowed to read them without demonstrating a serious intent to buy. But the rest of the bookstore, where the second-hand books were, was fair game. We could read whatever we liked. So, Mom went off on her errands, and we squeezed ourselves into the gaps between bookshelves, sat cross-legged on the wiry rattan carpet that left impressions on our flesh, and read. I liked encyclopaedias best—books about science and nature. My sister preferred novels.
One day that summer, I gathered the courage to browse the new books, and came across Comet in Moominland. It was the cover that drew me in: a blazing comet in the sky, a small group of terrified creatures running for cover underneath. Protect and survive. When Mom came back from her errands, I asked if I could buy the book. It seemed important.
Jansson wrote Comet in Moominland in the summer of 1945: the year World War II ended; the year America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the year Orwell wrote his essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” warning of a future when states are locked into “a permanent state of ‘cold war’.” Against this background, somewhere in Finland, Jansson sat down to write a children’s book about the end of the world, and about how we may not be able to prevent it. By the time the book was translated into English in 1951, the Cold War was well established, and the world was freezing over.
Comet in Moominland begins in a flurry of strange omens and portents. In a place called Moominvalley, a community of small creatures looks up to see a comet in the sky. It soon becomes clear that the comet is heading for Earth. So, a small, round troll named Moomintroll sets off with his friends on a long and perilous journey to the Lonely Mountains, to glean what knowledge he can from the learned astronomers. When they reach the observatory, the scientists say there’s nothing to be done: the comet, they tell them, will hit the Earth “on the seventh of October at 8.42 p.m. Perhaps four seconds later.” They offer Moomintroll and his friends no comfort and no remedy.
The adventurers return home through a world that is beginning to unravel. They encounter communities of fleeing refugees, driven into exile by the looming disaster. They cross seas dried up by the burning heat of the comet. They attend a sweet, sad party out in a forest glade, and together they dance the samba. They keep their friendships in good repair. They try to make the best of it. At one point, Moomintroll even finds himself feeling sorry for the comet. “How lonely it must be up there,” he says, “with everybody afraid of it.”
When they arrive home, Moomintroll finds his mom in the kitchen, baking home-made bread and cake. I imagine the Scurfields’ books open on the table before her. The family discusses how they should best manage the apocalypse. Then they do what they have always done. They find ways to protect each other, and to survive the terror they are facing: through love, through care, and through the mutual warmth of closeness. They pack up their things and gather together in a cave where they eat cake, snuggle, and wait to see what will happen next. Eventually, they drop off to sleep. As they sleep, the comet sweeps past the Earth, brushing it with its tail, and disappears into the dark.
Throughout that strange, unsettled summer of 1980, I read and reread Jansson’s book. And through reading, I came to see how, even in the face of the very worst disasters, life goes on mattering.
When the summer came to an end, I entered junior high. It turned out not to be so bad. The world went on, whole and complete, and troublesome as ever. Yet the dust of fear that settled over me that summer never fully dissipated. Even now, it sometimes feels as if I’m still waiting for the end. And when the anticipation threatens to overwhelm me, and I need guidance on how to live with the knowledge of life’s fragility, I pick up Comet in Moominland. And as I settle into reading, I am reminded that even if the apocalypse is upon us, and there’s nothing we can do, these things still matter: friendship, care, knowledge, love, and a well-made cake.