Turned Out Nice Again

by Richard Mabey

  We love to tell tales about strange weather occurrences. And we’re oddly proud of them. They didn’t just happen, they happened to us. There are plaques on seaside buildings to commemorate the high watermarks of historic floods. National forecasters give proper attention to record-breaking weather, like the fact that 2012 was the wettest year in England since, as they say ‘records began’. But they also announce, as if they are giving away end-of-term prizes, the highest temperatures, the deepest snowfalls, the earliest frosts, at a scale that would be more appropriate for a local history project. ‘Foggiest Day on Tyne for ten years’ is hardly of record-breaking interest for the rest of us, but it is for the people who live there. It’s their weather. There is, from our ringside seats at the oddball-weather circus, an intriguing interplay between freak-show and something more distinctively local and neighbourly. On 8 April, 1979, eleven amateur footballers in Gwent were each struck by lightning as they ran off the field during a thunderstorm. None were badly hurt. During Britain’s fiercest tornado, on 21 May, 1950, a cat was seen in full flight through the air in Leighton Buzzard, all four legs akimbo in an automatic balancing act. In Hemel Hempstead, at the height of the July 1983 heatwave, the municipal dahlia beds caught fire when someone dropped a cigarette onto earth that had turned into a baking cake of inflammable fertiliser. And on 13 February, 1879, the Reverend Francis Kilvert baptised an infant in his little church in Clyro, Radnorshire, ‘in ice which was broken and swimming about in the font’.

  You could list such oddities endlessly – ice-meteors, hayfield twisters, rains of herrings. I’ve seen a few myself. I’ve been in one of the ‘red-rains’ that happen when southerly winds blow immense clouds of Saharan dust north, so that they stain cars and washing and even, on one occasion, the open pages of a prayer-book during a burial. I remember being thrilled at finding this exotic exhalation of Africa – a kind of climatic spice – in our Home Counties backyard; that was until I learned of another Saharan dust-blow of barely credible proportions. Every winter forty million tonnes of desert sand is sucked up from Chad by the wind and whisked 5,000 kilometres across the Atlantic to gently descend on the Amazon basin. It is the main source of new minerals in Amazonia, a fertilisation on a global, Gaian scale without which the rainforest couldn’t survive.

  I’ve also, just once, witnessed a glazed frost, a phenomenon of scary beauty which occurs when rain falls onto a landscape locked under air at sub-zero temperatures and freezes on impact, so that all solid objects rapidly appear to have become crystallised in glass. I noted in my diary for that day in January 1979, that ‘as raindrops hit the window panes they made distinctive harmonic rings, and soon built up a quarter of an inch of glaze.’

  But again home-team pride is trumped by awesome encounters in the weather’s Premier League. In Britain’s greatest twentieth-century ice-storm on 27 January, 1940, cats were iced to branches and birds killed in flight as their wings froze solid. Telegraph wires rotated under their pay-load of ice (one stretch in Gloucestershire carried eleven and a quarter tons between just two posts) so that they were adorned by upward-pointing icicles. Gilbert White – and what an extraordinary record of natural wonders he kept – described a miniature and picturesque ice-storm that might have been specially designed as a divertissement for his gentleman’s landscape garden. It happened on 10 December, 1784, and he had never seen anything like it before.

  Being bright sunshine, the air was full of icy spiculae, floating in all directions, like atoms in a sun-beam let into a dark room. We thought them at first particles of the rime falling from my tall hedges; but were soon convinced to the contrary, by making our observations in open places where no rime could reach us. Were they watery particles of the air which froze as they floated; or were they evaporations from the snow frozen as they mounted?

  I love this image of White, enchanted by the glittering tinsel in his outlet, but not so dazzled that the amateur scientist in him didn’t bustle out for an alfresco experiment in the adjoining field.

  Bizarre weather, from teasing crackles in the air to falling ice-bombs can, in principle, happen anywhere. But reading about it in these vivid diary records, stretching over the centuries, it doesn’t seem at all random. It isn’t just that each event is, so to speak, date-lined, occurring at a particular moment in a specific place, but that they seem to fit those niches almost ecologically. A soccer team struck by lightning, all together on the exposed pitch. The thin plates of mist that rise over sandy heaths on August evenings – still for me the most atmospheric evocation of the change from summer to autumn – which come up no higher than your chest, so that you can gaze down on them as if you are in an airliner, or playing at being Gulliver. And Coleridge again, and his breathtaking, intensely-located vision of what he called a smoke-flame in August 1800, a pillar of fire-coloured clouds soaring up through the crevasses round Derwentwater. They all feel so right, as properly placed as a hatching chrysalis on a grass-stalk, or a swallow arriving back in its barn. (And other organisms can be more than metaphors in these small dramas. One cold and windblown day in June I found a troop of house-martins strafing for insects deep inside the shelter of a canal lock, a local refuge inside the local weather.) These fine-tunings between weather and habitat – you might call them weather accents or dialects – seem to me the meteorological equivalents of biodiversity, a tribute to the variety and eccentricity of Britain’s landforms.

  And this is surely the reason we find the shipping forecast so evocative, even though most of us are hazy about where the great stretches of ocean it describes are situated. Yet their names – brooding, wind-tossed, pewter-grey names – seem to be emanations of the sea-parishes themselves: Lundy, Fastnet, South Utsire, North Utsire. They’re the music of weather’s local distinctiveness. Sean Street’s poem ‘Shipping Forecast, Donegal’, catches their sense of being incantations – not just respectful tributes to sea and weather, but call-signs from the home-patch:

  Fisher, German Bight, Tyne, Dogger

  This pattern of names on the sea –

  Weather’s unlistening geography…

  this minimal chanting,

  this ritual pared to the bone

  becomes the cold poetry of

  information.

  The exceptionality of local weather can produce moments and places that transcend the physical bluster of freak tornados and glazed frosts. They can be dramas of pure sound or light, so that to be present is like walking into an art installation. Coleridge – who always seemed to be in the right place – once witnessed a moonbow, the spectral arc of colour formed when moonlight passes through fine rain or water spray. He was in Cumbria on 22 October, 1801. ‘Thursday evening, half past 6. All the mountains black and tremendously obscure … At this time I saw one after the other, nearly in the same place, two perfect Moon Rainbows … It was a grey, moonlight mist-colour.’

  I’ve never seen a moon rainbow, but I have seen a cave rainbow, which is the next best thing, and even more topographically specific. It was 1986, and I was sixty miles east of Coleridge’s Lakeland retreats, making a film about the limestone country of the Yorkshire Dales. We had decided to film a sequence down in the aptly named Weathercote Cave, partly because it’s one of the most extraordinary chambers carved out by the watercourses that catacomb the Dales, and partly because Turner had painted weatherscapes inside the cave. Weathercote has a waterfall tumbling into it, lit up by the sun where part of the cave roof has collapsed, so that it shimmers with iridescence. It’s no wonder Turner was entranced by it during his painting tours of the Dales. He first visited it in 1808, and made the perilous seventy foot descent just to see the marvel of a cascade of water falling out of the sun. But on his second trip eight years later, he couldn’t even get inside. The rain had been so heavy for weeks that the underground rivers were in spate and bursting like fountains through the hillsides. Weathercote itself was half-full of water, and Turner had to make do with a rapid drawing made from the top, noting in his sketch-book ‘
Entrance Impossible’. He marked the time of day as mid-afternoon, with the sun shining from the left, and low enough to throw a beam through the boiling spray of the waterfall. The result, an ectoplasmic ‘curve of prismatic colour’, hovering over the sunless depths below, is clearly visible in his finished watercolour of 1818.

  The tumbling waterfall still fills the cavern with an eerie and almost luminous mist and I saw rainbows in the spray, too, when I climbed down. It was cold and slippery inside and I edged onto a fallen block of limestone known as Mahomet’s Coffin, which hangs suspended between cave roof and floor. Momentarily, to keep my balance, I leaned forward slightly, and abruptly one of the rainbows flipped over on its side and formed a circle, completely surrounding me at chest level, like a fallen halo. High above me, joining sky and earth in another way, flycatchers were swooping down into the cave and hawking for midges in the sunbeams.

  Four years earlier I’d made a trip to the western reaches of England, after another weather phantom. I’d read about a wood on the River Fal in Cornwall that was tidal at the spring equinox, a unique mix of tree and wave; and that if the wind was a stiff sou’wester that day, the water would rise high enough into the wood for you to have the surreal vision of primroses flowering under the sea. There was one other thing. The Fal flows through the china-clay beds below Bodmin. Much of the clay has been mined out lately, but when it reaches the estuary the river can still be as milky as whey.

  So, on the afternoon of 21 March, first day of spring, I perch under the oaks in Lamorran Wood and wait for the equinoctial high tide. There are piping curlews overhead, and a thin rime of salt on the lowest branches, maybe a relic of earlier inundations. When the high water seeps up to where I’m sitting, it’s not quite the dramatic mix of wood and water I’d hoped for. It laps milkily and rather sedately around the primroses and golden saxifrage, but doesn’t flood the wood as I’d dreamed it might.

  But in the night, out of my sight, it did. A south-westerly gale had blown up and the spray was lashing the second-storey windows in my hotel. Next morning Lamorran Wood and the whole Fal estuary was a scene of devastation, littered with flotsam, and with a thin veil of white clay covering the whole of the low-lying land.

  The theatre of the weather includes music, too, beyond the bounds of Jefferies’ ‘noises in the air’. Flora Thompson, working as a post office telegraph operator years before she wrote Lark Rise to Candleford, loved to listen to the wind singing in the telegraph wires, her wires; and in their busy metallic hum she liked to imagine their role as a ‘golden highway for … messages to traverse from friend to absent friend’. I have the same kind of feeling for the rattle a sea-wind makes in the rigging of moored dinghies. Extraordinarily, this vox loci has, as yet, no popular name, yet for me hearing it at night on the Norfolk coast sets my skin tingling; its siren’s song about the lure of the water’s edge as powerful as the urgent calls of wading birds going to roost.

  This is accidental wind music, as are the deep bassoons a few hollow trees become in gales. But there is deliberate weather music, and literal wind instruments, too. The Aeolian harp is the best known, named after Aeolus, the mythological keeper of the winds, and popular from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. It consisted of a wooden box about three feet long, fitted with gut strings of different thicknesses, which was placed on a window-sill or any outside ledge. The strings were tuned in unison, and the vibrations the wind produced in them varied according to the strings’ thickness and generated ethereal harmonics and chord-like effects.

  Much larger versions are now made as garden ornaments or outdoor installations. But the biggest Aeolian instrument never got beyond the drawing board. In 1980, the architect H. T. Cadbury Brown put forward a proposal for a memorial to the composer Benjamin Britten, who had lived at Aldeburgh, and whose music was so expressive of the temperamental weather of the Suffolk coast. Brown’s musical obelisk would be like a giant oboe, a wooden column erected on Aldeburgh beach, and drilled with holes which would whistle in the wind. When a gale off the sea built up enough ferocity the column would produce the two notes used by the crowd in Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, when they call out obsessively for the mad, disaffected fisherman.

  The idea was never taken up, but the artist Maggi Hambling has created her own haunting memorial to Britten on the Aldeburgh shingle. Scallop is a giant steel shell, facing out over the North Sea. It’s mesmerising seen from a distance, shape-shifting from mollusc to fairy-tale sailing-ship to seaweed forest; but close-to it makes you turn your head, to listen to the reflected roar of the sea – which on this coast, has drowned not just fictional characters like Peter Grimes but whole settlements. Half of the medieval town of Dunwich, six miles up the Suffolk coast, lies under the sea, and has its own legendary weather music, the submarine bell-peals of drowned churches.

  There is often a dark shadow behind the most seductively dramatic and beautiful weather. On the top rim of the scallop, Hambling has drilled out a calligraph which spells out a line from Peter Grimes: ‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned.’

  3

  BLACK DOG

  IN EAST ANGLIA where I live, everyone knows one particular skin-crawling weather legend. On Sunday 4 August, 1577, the market town of Bungay in Suffolk was visited by what witnesses called a ‘straunge and terrible Wunder’. The church was struck by a violent electric storm, with such thunder and lightning ‘as was never seen the lyke’; and in the same instant, ‘a horrible shaped thing’ passed down the aisle, causing nightmarish casualties. Two men, kneeling at prayer, had their necks jerked backwards and broken. Another, according to a local chronicler Abraham Fleming, received ‘such a gripe on the back that ther-withall he was presently drawen up togither and shrunk up, as it were a peece of leather scorched in a hot fire: or as the mouth of a purse or bag drawen together with a string.’

  The phenomenon was almost certainly an instance of the rarest and most eerie of weather events, ball lightning. No convincing explanation has been found for this apparition, which is usually associated with storms, and appears as a bright, vaguely spherical ball of electromagnetic energy, capable of moving through the air, breaking windows and entering buildings, crawling up walls and along floors, and occasionally killing people stone dead.

  But the parishioners of Bungay saw something extra that fateful Sunday. Not just bright ‘flashes of fire’, but a ‘dark companion’, a great black dog, which tore marks out of the church door with its talons. They’re still visible if you’re impressionable enough, as they are on the north door of Blythburgh church, visited by the diabolical beast on the same day.

  The Great Black Dog, often known as Black Shuck, has since become the most famous creature of East Anglian folklore. He’s been spotted across the region for the last four centuries, and a sighting is usually supposed to presage death or serious trouble, though this isn’t borne out by the subsequent experiences of the witnesses.

  Black creatures are widespread symbols and portents of devilish states of affairs, and it’s not surprising that two centuries later the phrase ‘black dog’ became a metaphor for another kind of affliction – melancholy or depression. Scientifically curious observers noticed that this dark invader of the spirit often appeared alongside severe weather, just as, allegorically, Shuck had manifested himself during the Bungay tempest. Samuel Johnson was the first writer to use the term in print. Writing to his friend Mrs Thrale in 1783 he says ‘When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the back dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking …’ Johnson’s biographer Boswell also suffered, his dour temper always markedly worse in foul winter weather. By the time Winston Churchill had popularised the phrase for his own bleak moods during World War Two, medical science was becoming aware that there were clear links between weather and human psychology, though no precise conditions, like SAD, had yet been defined.

  I suppose I am what is usually described as ‘weather sensitive’. I’m slow to adapt to cold, get freaked by in
cessant wind, become morose and torpid in the dark winter months. What’s mystifying to me is that everybody isn’t a registered member of this club. Perhaps, in an offhand way, we are, since ‘feeling under the weather’ is the most commonly-used metaphor for being off-colour. If you do no more than track across the exterior of our bodies you’ll realize we are a landscape of tissue at the total mercy of the elements. Sunshine can give us burns, sunstroke, melanomas, prickly heat, photosensitive rashes, even blindness. Persistent wind can bring on dehydration, wrinkles, maddening tics. Cold can conjure up frostbite, chilblains, hypothermia, a dangerous lowering of the pain threshold.

  When you go below the body’s surface, an even more bewildering array of other sensitivities emerges, chiefly due to the body’s response to air-pressure. Our insides, from individual cells to whole digestive systems, are labyrinths of gaseous cavities and bags of fluid, so it’s no wonder that the genetically susceptible react dramatically to the rapid changes in outside pressure that accompany the passage of a weather front, especially a low. The volume of the fluids in joints expands, aggravating rheumatic complaints. The width of blood vessels and the capacity of the lungs change. Retinas can detach and the business of giving birth speeds up. During the passage of an extreme low front, hospital admissions for problems as diverse as schizophrenia and phantom limb pain more than double. The increase in strokes is so marked that in Germany there is a ‘Metalert’ to warn doctors of approaching pressure troughs.

  It’s these low fronts, and the dinge that so often accompanies them, that always seem to give me trouble, bringing on symptoms that are certainly doggish and black – anxiety attacks, irritability, a heaviness of mind and body that teeters on the edge of outright depression. They’re worse in the winter, when the decline of daylight, acting through the pineal gland, reduces the levels of hormones like melatonin and serotonin to levels close to those that occur in sleep – or hibernation. In susceptible individuals – maybe five to ten per cent of the population – this manifests itself as full blown Seasonal Affective Disorder, whose serendipitous acronym, SAD, says it all.