WORMWOOD by Catherine Czerkawska (Part One)

Catherine Czerkawska

When the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in April 1986, I was three months pregnant, with my son, Charles. The feeling of helplessness as the radioactive cloud drifted towards Scotland has remained with me over the years, as it has with friends who were in a similar situation. I’m not sure whether this was compounded or relieved by the fact that my much loved father, a distinguished research scientist, was working at (but just about to retire from) a facility where the radiological protection officer was running environmental tests in this part of Scotland. He reported that, even here, so far away from the accident, there were minor hotspots. That – for instance – places where rainwater collected, dried a little, collected again, would contain concentrations of radioactivity. Friends with sheep farms also reported that contamination seemed to be patchy and not terribly predictable. I, meanwhile, was confined to the house with flu. It was no picnic being pregnant and having flu, but – as it turned out – it was a blessing of sorts. 

As a playwright, I knew that I wanted to write about Chernobyl, but it was many years before reliable accounts would come out of the Ukraine. The rise of the internet helped. My father helped. And I always knew that, whatever it was going to be, it wouldn’t be a simple anti-nuclear polemic. My father had worked for the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna, and was by no means anti-nuclear himself. But he was still sceptical about, for example, costs of decommissioning and was fond of going to promotions held by the nuclear industry and asking awkward questions from a position of knowledge. 

The play was called Wormwood, and not just after the now notorious biblical quotation – ‘And the third angel sounded, And there fell a great star from heaven, Burning as it were a lamp, And it fell upon a third part of the rivers, And upon the fountains of water. And the name of the star is called Wormwood. And the third part of the waters became Wormwood And many men died of the waters, Because they were made bitter.’ But it’s still chilling, even now, to think that Chernobyl means wormwood, so named because the bitter plant grows in profusion in that area. 

It was inevitably going to be an ‘issue based’ play, but that didn’t mean that it was only going to be a play about issues. Drama of this sort can be deadly dull, tub thumping of the worst sort. For a long time I wasn’t sure what form the writing would take. But I began to read extensively about the subject and the more I read, the more troubled I became.

A scene from WORMWOOD

The play – or my writing of it – began in the mid 1990s, with a hesitant  voice trying to describe the events of that warm April night in the Ukraine – a nice spring night when people would have had their windows open. The voice was speaking in terms that would not only be comprehensible to the lay person, myself included, but which would convey some of the horror, and the sense of inevitability which seemed to lie at the heart of it. With that voice came a clear vision of an abandoned place, a place where time and normality had stood still, a place where human lives had been destroyed and many potential futures ruined. (Later, when I saw the pictures, I was amazed by how accurate my visions had been.) As I found out more about those real human lives, the idea of the play began to take shape. I didn’t want it to be a play about some remote disaster that ‘couldn’t happen here.’ Because the more I explored and read, the more convinced I became that, given a particular set of demands upon human fallibility and complacency, anything can happen anywhere. 

Somewhere along the way, I discovered a quote from Albert Einstein, who wrote ‘The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.’ Wormwood, the play, is about the effects of one such catastrophe on a small group of people most closely involved: two scientists working at the reactor, a fireman, his schoolteacher wife and their young son. There is also a mysterious character who interrogates the others, who interrogates the situation itself, in an effort to make some sense of it. 

The play explores all kinds of things, but especially the fact that a safety experiment triggered the disaster. Chernobyl has always, I think, been played down in the West with the belief that because we have better technology it ‘could never happen here.’ And there’s a good deal of truth in that supposition – but all the same, when human beings are dealing with dangerous technologies ‘you decide that some things are so very unlikely to happen, that they can safely be ignored. First you persuade yourself of this unlikeliness. Then you set about persuading other people. You have covered all eventualities, the unthinkable can’t possibly happen and so you realise that it would be a waste of time and resources to plan for it happening. But if it should happen, not only will you not know what to do. You will not even know what to think. And if it should even begin to happen, neither you nor your colleagues will notice until it is much too late to do anything about it.’

Earlier this year, as I watched, transfixed by those successively exploding reactor buildings in Japan, accompanied by the voice of a scientist reassuring us that this was actually meant to happen, that all would be well, that no, there was no possibility of any kind of melt down, I remembered those lines from my own play, with a certain wry amusement. But it wasn’t amusing at all. And neither is our media’s reluctance to engage with Fukushima and what happened there, beyond those first alarming weeks. Reuters reports today (25^th August) that ‘nearly six months after the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years at the Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan faces the task of cleaning up a sprawling area of radioactivity that could cost tens of billions of dollars, and thousands may not be able to return home for years, if ever.’ But you have to hunt online to find the report. The BBC doesn’t seem to consider it worth a mention. 

[Part Two of this guest blog will be posted tomorrow.] 

Biographical Note: Catherine Czerkawska is an award winning author of historical novels, short stories, many plays for the stage and more than 100 hours of drama for BBC Radio 4. When not writing, she also finds time to collect and deal in antique and vintage textiles, especially those with a Scottish or Irish provenance and often finds herself writing about them. She blogs about her work at WordArts

Her latest literary venture is to publish her out-of-print novel The Curiosity Cabinet as an eBook, on Amazon’s Kindle, along with a trio of short stories called A Quiet Afternoon in the Museum of Torture). There are a couple of new novels waiting in the wings, The Amber Heart and The Summer Visitor, with a new book called The Physic Garden almost completed.