Rain (3 page)

The village is far behind me now, its squat church tower lost in trees. The lane I walk is flanked by hawthorn hedges, and on the verges glossy hart’s tongue ferns funnel the rain so it puddles in their centres where the new fronds unfurl. There are bluebells, too; not the pushy, varicoloured hybrids that colonise my London garden, but English bluebells hung with silver drops, delicately drooped like a shepherd’s crook, and with a curious luminosity to their cobalt flowers. A woodland plant, their flowering period is timed to take advantage of the gap between the soil warming up and the canopy closing as trees come into leaf; in a dry spell their bulbs have the ability to pull themselves, by means of special
contracting roots, further down into the ground, where rainfall like today’s keeps the soil moister.

There’s stitchwort, too, and occasional dandelions like big brass buttons in the hedge-bank, and here and there the cow parsley is just starting to come out. I remember Edward Thomas’s poem ‘It Rains’, with its lovely sense of the lushness of spring rain on new green growth, and its clear sense of rain’s oblique relationship to memory and the past:

I’ve only seen one other person on my walk so far, a man walking two miniature dachshunds in little waterproof coats, and I wonder how busy it is up on the Wrekin; whether, if I was a crow flying over it with crankshaft wingbeats I’d look down to see a line of bright anoraks and raincoats straggling across its long back, and hear the children calling and laughing and racing ahead.

When I was at school one of the most heady of announcements was that of ‘wet break’. A large, unprepossessing comprehensive composed in no small part of damp, prefab outbuildings, it had hardly any proper outside space aside from a bleak tarmac playground and one small, muddy games pitch, so, unlike at home, staying indoors didn’t seem much of a loss; instead, brief anarchy would reign in the drab classrooms and corridors as, intoxicated by the temporary licence, we ran, raised our voices, sat on the desks and generally behaved indoors as we would out. It’s strange how clearly I can still recall the way the drenched, deserted playground looked through shower-streaked classroom windows, squalls blowing across it to create shifting curtains of rain.

In the woods on the slopes of the Wrekin groups of shy fallow deer will be lying up and ruminating under the cover of dense yews, waiting for dusk when they’ll emerge from cover to graze. At this time of year they live
in separate herds of bucks and does: the bucks will soon start to cast their antlers ready for a new set, while many of the does are now pregnant, and will break from the herd to give birth alone in May or June. When occasional raindrops plop down on them through the yews’ dark branches they flick their big ears and every so often shiver their coats. Thirty miles away, in Mortimer Forest, there’s a unique herd of fallows with long coats and strange ear-tufts; but the herd here is of the ordinary kind.

Deer aren’t the only creatures sheltering in the woods and waiting for dusk. The tawny owls I’d hear calling if I walked this way after dark are tucked away out of the rain; they have to stay dry as their plumage doesn’t hold up at all well in damp conditions. Owls’ powdery feathers are designed to be totally silent in flight; they have a downy upper surface, and ‘fimbriate’ or serrated margins that muffle the rushing sound of air over their wings as they fly. These adaptations mean that they become waterlogged far more easily than other birds, so in all but the direst of need owls will wait out wet weather, rather than hunt. It’s why they usually choose covered places to nest, like holes in trees, squirrel dreys and owl boxes: not just to protect the young chicks from rainfall, but the parents when they’re incubating the eggs.

The shower cloud blows over, taking its shadow with it across the fields; the sun dazzles briefly off the wet road
with its seam of compressed dung, and everything sparkles. April is a good month for leverets, and I know that hares have been seen just outside the village in recent weeks; as I walk I try to tune my eyes to spot their small, brown shapes in the fields on either side. Unlike rabbits, hares don’t sleep or breed underground; instead, they create shallow scrapes or depressions called forms in which they lie up and rest with their black-tipped ears flat back. They tend to choose fairly exposed sites so they can see all around them; hares’ eyes are positioned to give them nearly 360-degree vision, so they’ll have plenty of warning of predators. But not taking cover does mean that when it rains they get wet. Fortunately – and unlike rabbits – they have a special layer of fur that helps to keep off the worst of the weather; they’re also excellent swimmers and have been seen to cross rivers; and with no warren to tie them down and excellent topographical awareness they can simply move to drier ground if the land becomes too waterlogged.

If there are any hares around I can’t see them; I just hope they’re not getting too wet. I decide to take a footpath that runs along the top of a paddock and back to the village. Two comma butterflies dance low over the lush spring grass of the paddock; they spiral, rising and falling, as though describing in air the structure of their own urgent DNA. Really heavy precipitation can knock butterflies from the air, damaging their wings or
leaving them at risk from opportunistic predators, so at the first sign of approaching bad weather they’ll tuck themselves away, clinging to the undersides of leaves or creeping into tall grass. But when the shower passes and the sun comes out they’re quick to take wing again.

On the distant slopes of the Wrekin the rain has washed the walls of the old quarries, carrying away infinitesimal amounts of minerals from the bare rock faces and minutely weakening the seams in the exposed stone. It’s filled the old quarry pits by an amount too small to measure, and in the wooded areas is already being sucked up by the oaks’ and ashes’ thirsty roots. And across the county and beyond it’s fallen on the backs of nesting birds, sitting tight and determined on clutches of blue, or white, or brown, or speckled eggs, or flying back and forth to feed importunate upturned gapes.

A week from now, a dust storm in the Sahara will combine with air pollution to hang over the south-east of the country, eventually to be washed out of the sky by rain and deposited on our car where it’s parked in our South London street. But for now it looks as though it’s going to be a fine evening in Shropshire, warm and clear, and hopefully a dry Bank Holiday Monday tomorrow. It’s good to walk without my hood up so I can hear the blackbirds begin their evening performances; good, too, to note the fresh-washed clarity of the air and the way it
carries sounds. If I stop walking for a moment I can hear the occasional plinks of the last raindrops falling from the trees by the road.

Coleridge may have lamented its ‘dull, two-fold sound’ (‘An Ode to the Rain’), but in an audio diary made a few months after going blind the writer and theologian John Hull described how the sound of falling rain actually brings the invisible world around him to life:

I’m just outside the village, the sun low and lambent, when I see it flickering over the cows’ backs: a swallow – unmistakeable in its
thisness
, utterly heart-lifting – then another. Five paces on and I can hear their twittering calls. They have returned from Africa to the village where they were born, where they’ll scope out last year’s
nests in the church tower or the rectory, and raise another generation of long-distance travellers. Perhaps this year they’ll build in the eaves of my parents-in-law’s house, too; the house which today I will leave for the last time. The thought of their rootedness is both comforting and bitter-sweet; the sight of them tells me, as swifts told Ted Hughes, that against all odds, the globe’s still working.

It’s a muggy Friday morning in August and instead of going down the steps into the Underground at Brixton, to go to work, I have climbed up to the railway platform and taken a train heading east, towards Kent. It’s hardly rained for the last three weeks and I want to have a look at the River Darent (or Darenth), a tributary of the Thames that is, like all our precious chalk streams, particularly affected by drought.

I love London, but it feels stale and heavy. The leaves on the plane trees, so fresh back in May, are now dark and leathery; the parched grass in the city parks, having set seed over a month ago, has become thin and yellow-thatched. But as I sit on the grimy train, passing through Penge and Beckenham and all points east, change is coming. Low pressure has been sitting to the west of the British Isles, high pressure to the east. Warm, moist air has been stable over much of the south of the country. But in the last twenty-four hours or so, hotter, drier air from Spain’s plateaux has moved up and over everything like a lid.

At about the time I get off the train, the temperature hits eighteen degrees and a cumulus cloud begins
forming above a valley just south of where I am, a little, sheltered suntrap lined with trees. The atmosphere above England is already warm and carrying moisture, but this pocket of air is even warmer, and as I set out on my walk a cloud begins to grow: first becoming a cumulus congestus, then eventually spreading upwards into the dry air of the upper troposphere until ice crystals begin to form at its rapidly spreading, anvil-shaped top. It begins to process slowly north towards the Darent Valley, another cloud birthing in its wake.

Thunderclouds have long been a source of consternation and myth-making – which is hardly surprising given their dramatic and occasionally violent effects. One Leonard Digges, in his
Prognostication Everlastinge of Ryghte Good Effecte
(1571) set out some of the popular lore relating to thunder, while prudently distancing himself from it just in case it proved to be nonsense:

Digges was not alone in foretelling the future through thunder. ‘Winter thunder and summer’s flood, never boded England any good,’ went the old saw, while the popular compendium
The New Book of Knowledge
, attributed to one ‘Godfridus’ and frequently republished, laid out the significance of storms in every month of the year: in January, great winds and ‘plentiful corn and cattle’; in February ‘many rich men shall die in great sickness’; March ‘debate amongst people’. August thunder, worryingly for me today, signifies ‘the same year sorrow, wailing of many, for many shall be sick’.

For now, though, the air may be close, the sky white rather than its recent untroubled blue, but the thunderhead is still some way off. I find the Darent in the pretty village of Shoreham where it flows in a culvert past a couple of cosy pubs and some Kentish brick-and-tile houses; one of them, a plaque informs me, once lived in by the visionary landscape painter Samuel Palmer, another with a UKIP poster at an upstairs window. I lean on the wall and look down to where water crowfoot sways and the mysterious silhouettes of fish drift and hold in the shallows. Typically for a
chalk stream the water is astonishingly clear.

It is in part the purity of rivers like the Darent that has been their undoing. Fed from beneath the ground by a chalk aquifer, their naturally filtered waters are exceptionally clean and require less expensive purification than other rivers – making them attractive to water companies, who like to abstract their flow. Occurring mostly in the southern UK and a couple of places in France, many pass through important agricultural areas – like here in Kent – where farmers need their water to protect thirsty crops like fruit and vegetables from failure during the growing season. But chalk streams make wonderful habitats, their alkaline water supporting vast numbers of invertebrates, brown trout and other fish, and wild flowers and birds – all of which are easily threatened by low water levels, pollution and agricultural run-off. And back in the late 1980s a series of long, rainless periods, coupled with over-abstraction, meant that this chalk stream suffered the lowest recorded flow of any river in the UK. Fortunately, much work has since been done to restore the Darent and its wildlife, and while its upper reaches sometimes run low in summer as groundwater levels fall within the chalk, this section is looking healthy.

My route takes me up to Meenfield Wood on its high ridge, the M25 invisible, but not inaudible, to the east. On the hill’s flank a stark chalk cross can be seen for
miles around, its hard angles inimical to the soft, rolling farmland that Samuel Palmer invested with such luminosity in his enigmatic paintings; it may be a sign of faith, but for me the cross lacks all profundity. Nevertheless it’s worth the climb: from the top of the ridge I can look out over a vast sweep of prosperous Kent countryside: oast houses, golf courses, stables and copses in full leaf. The day is becoming humid and still, with a slightly claustrophobic feel.

Descending the ridge along a narrow path thick with cow parsley just starting to go over, I find the Darent again where houses hundreds of years old boast beautiful gardens running down to the river. Here and there thistledown swirls on the water’s surface, destined to set seed further downstream, and a southern hawker dragonfly patrols the air above. There are little rain flies about, too;
Anthomyia pluvialis
are said to dance before the onset of showers, but these are simply congregating on the white flowers of Queen Anne’s lace, or wild carrot, blooming near the bank.

Near Castle Farm the footpath skirts some widely ridged fields of lavender bushes, recently harvested. They must have looked spectacular in July, richly purple and abuzz with bees from the hives at nearby Lullingstone Castle. Something’s missing, though, and it takes me a moment to work out that it’s the songbirds. There may be swallows hunting the water meadows, and the odd crow
or wood pigeon overhead, but it’s August and everything from blackbirds to blue tits is now silent and in moult.

There are young, russet-coloured Devon cows grazing the fields a little further on, and in keeping with the uncertain weather some are standing while others lie down and chew the cud. A recent American study showed that while there was no direct link between livestock lying down and the approach of rain, cattle did spend more time in repose in chilly temperatures. Yet the bovine behaviour question is really just the last survivor from a vast and once-necessary hoard of folk wisdom about the weather. Barometers could warn of impending changes in pressure, for those who had them, and before their invention observations of cloud formations and migrating birds had their uses, but in the main, people were very much in the dark – though the survival of entire communities could ride on bringing in a good harvest. As a result, folk methods of weather prognostication used to run riot, much as today a multitude of rumoured causes of (and questionable treatments for) cancer fill a gap caused by fear and lack of information. Once, dozens of days in the calendar, not just St Swithun’s, could be used to foretell the weather for the coming months; or a farmer might look at which day of the week New Year’s Day fell on, study the moon and the zodiac, observe the precise colour of lightning, note where each year fell in certain patterns (for instance, every seventeenth year being bad for crops),
test the weight of salt and use a thousand other methods to predict how much rain would come, and when.

The Shepherd of Banbury’s Rules
(1670) was just one among many meteorological guides which claimed to help accurately foretell the weather, and yearly ‘almanacks’ (some still being published today) both collected together, and added to, the store of folk wisdom. Joseph Taylor’s
Weather Guide
gives us this helpful advice:

Not all the old folklore was off the mark, though. Not for nothing were weather almanacks usually ascribed to shepherds or other rustics: there was a core of sound wisdom shared by such people that had been earned by years of minute and necessary observation. Who but a farmer
would see at a glance that his grass appeared ‘rough’, and know that rain would follow? For clover, common in grass pasture, does contract its trefoliate leaves upwards when the air is damp, subtly changing the texture of a field. Likewise, many wild flowers (for instance pimpernel, also known as ‘countryman’s weather-glass’) will close their petals at the approach of rain, and dandelion clocks fold up to protect the fluffy seeds from becoming waterlogged. By reading signs like these, country people could (and still can) foretell rain better than city folk – something the old shepherd’s almanacks capitalised on.

When the Kent sky – already overcast – darkens, it does so suddenly. A restless wind gets up, bullying the muggy August air so that the ripe wheat shifts uneasily, gusts pushing its golden surface this way and that like a nap. As the first fat drops of rain hit the dry earth of the footpath I make for the shelter of the river bank, hastily zipping my camera back into its case. There’s a plaque there, mounted on a tree stump carved into the shape of a big brown trout: ‘Officially unveiled on 12th October 2004’, it says, ‘to celebrate the restoration of the River Darent’. Here and there, pond skaters at its slow, shady margins are racing for the edges as raindrops begin to disrupt the meniscus on which they depend.

The downpour that follows seems to fall with more force than mere gravity could provide, and as lightning
flickers – first distantly, then much closer – and thunder rends the sky, I weigh the risks of standing beneath the bankside trees against the discomfort of getting drenched. Of course, I had known ahead of time that the weather was due to break, and have brought a fold-up anorak, but without our sophisticated forecasting systems storms like this one often took our forefathers by surprise – a particular problem for farmers and sailors.

The aptly named George Merryweather displayed his storm forecaster, the ‘Tempest Prognosticator’, at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Looking not unlike a miniature merry-go-round, it consisted of a circle of twelve pint bottles, each containing a little rainwater and a single leech. His idea was that, on sensing electrical activity in the atmosphere, the leeches would crawl to the top of the bottles, triggering whalebone levers connected to a bell on the topmost dome; the more times the bell rang, the greater the likelihood of an approaching storm. Merryweather had big plans for his Prognosticator, believing that it could easily be connected to the telegraph network in such a way that the bell in St Paul’s, London, could be rung to signal an approaching storm. But then, he also believed that arranging the bottles in a circle would allow the leeches to see one another and not become lonely. Sadly – though perhaps not surprisingly – his plans for a leech-powered storm warning system did not come to fruition.

Behind the cumulonimbus currently discharging itself over the Darent Valley, more are forming; the afternoon will see thunder and lightning over much of the south-east of England, including London, less than twenty miles away. There, the sudden cloudbursts will clean pollen and pollution from the air; traffic will slow all over the city, and cyclists and bikers will take shelter under bridges. Storm sewers will fill up and overflow into the Thames, and polluted run-off will affect the Lea, too, lowering the water purity and affecting ecosystems right the way downstream. Beneath the teeming air the wide, brown Thames will become pockmarked and dull, and up and down Oxford Street shoppers and tourists will shriek and crowd into doorways as hard rain bounces up off the pavements in a grimy spray. It’s August, and few will have brought umbrellas with them; many, in sandals or flip-flops, will squelch home later, filthy-footed.

Plus ça change.
Jonathan Swift described a not dissimilar scene in his long poem ‘A City Shower’, set over three hundred years ago:

There may be fewer dead dogs and turnips these days, but today’s rain will still leave the capital city fresher than it was before. It will wash the particulates from the broad leaves of the London planes where they have been collecting for weeks; it will dissolve the dog shit on the pavements and inch it towards the gutters, along with dust and dry leaves, cigarette ends and fried chicken bones and dead worker wasps.