Midwich Main

Yeah, okay, I guess you're right. This is from an article by Andy Sawyer, who is the curator of the Sci-Fi archive at Liverpool University, UK. I guess he wouldn't mind, since he was happy enough to send it out to me. It was originally published in the periodical Foundation. I guess if it breaches anyone's copyright it'll just get deleted:

"The title, Midwich Main is unexplained. One possibility might be “Physical strength, force, or power” or “a host of men; a (military) force. Obs.”(Oxford English Dictionary). OED also cite early and obsolete use of the word in the sense of “power, virtue, efficacy”, which could be a nod to the Children’s psychic powers. There might also be a reference to “Main” as “a considerable, uninterrupted stretch of land or water; occas. also of void space”: as in “Spanish Main”: the idea possibly being that we are moving away from Midwich to the wider “range” of Children/hybrids which in the original story were only hinted at. Nowhere in the ms is the title Tomorrow’s Children or Tomorrow’s Child used.

The story begins sixteen years after the events of Midwich. The beginning scene shows us a plane fleeing south over mountains, pursued by fighter which shoot it down. But a parachute slowly drifts down to earth . . .

Richard Gayford, now a widower back in England, is telephoned by a mysterious “Department” and asked to go to Pakistan to investigate reports of a boy who flew out of Russia in a hijacked plane and who may be of similar stock to the Midwich Children. Bernard Westcott, Gayford’s Secret Service friend having been killed in a car crash, Gayford himself is the most obvious person with links to the Children to take on this task. He agrees, identifies the boy as a hybrid with, it is clear from their encounter, at least some telepathic powers . The boy is too injured to survive, but Gayford agrees to help the Department investigate reports of children with strange powers. Most of them, he is told, will be “ordinary” geniuses, mathematical wizards and the like, but some may be of “Midwich-type” stock and he will be able to identify them. Gayford agrees. In Wales, Gayford comes across (in the course of investigating a girl who turns out to be a “normal” genius) Thomas Evans, a thirteen-year old boy adopted by Welsh missionaries in British Guiana, who is known in the community as a genius with radio and who is using the girl’s mathematical abilities to help in his own projects. Young Thomas has apparently picked up from Gayford’s mind images of the Russian boy and the Midwich Children. He shows Gayford a rotating globe which apparently hypnotises him: two hours have passed which Gayford cannot account for. On his return to the Department, Gayford makes a full report, including what happened with the Welsh boy, but it contains notes on two more children than he had been told about -- two more “Midwich” types. Is he investigating on his own account, or is he being, somehow, directed to these children? The final scene shows him in Switzerland, where he discovers yet another hybrid among a school party at a railway station.

This is clearly first draft material. It is clearly heading towards a storyline not dissimilar to that of the film Children of the Damned, in which a multiracial group of genius children are brought together (according to the film, by a psychologist for a UNESCO project), although the use of Gayford as a character and the references to Midwich make it much closer to a conventional sequel than is the film..."

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