Rain (2 page)

A heron flaps effortfully over our heads, making for the mere where crowds of wigeon drift and whistle. ‘Nice weather for ducks,’ we say, ruefully – and with some reason: waterbirds’ feathers have an oily coating, renewed by preening, that makes them waterproof and helps them trap air to keep them warm and buoyant. Weather like this really is water off a duck’s back: a recent study found that farm ducks actively enjoyed a light shower, although many waterfowl will take shelter from particularly heavy rain simply to conserve heat and energy.

After twenty minutes or so we strike away from the lode into flat farmland. Some of the fields have recently been ploughed and it’s good to see the rich, dark furrows; some are baized with young crops, but others have been left as stubble over winter, a return to pre-war practices that benefits birds, insects and wild flowers enormously. At the faraway field margins the hedges appear khaki: the long, wet winter has encouraged algae to colonise the bark. Closer at hand I find a single, tiny
speedwell in flower, its blueness cowered in to itself; like the daisy, its petals close in wet weather to prevent its pollen being washed away. The coal-coloured field beyond looks as though it’s been recently drilled, perhaps for winter wheat or barley. Until it comes up there’s no way to know.

Arable country is much less decipherable to outsiders than it once was. Modern cropping has become more varied, more scientific and perhaps more opaque, and we laymen have largely lost interest in where our food comes from beyond what’s written reassuringly on the packet; there’s a disconnect now that my lovely old Ladybird books, with their watercolour illustrations of tractors and gulls and talk of sowing and ploughing and harvest time, didn’t seem to assume. Once they’ve properly broken ground I can recognise wheat, barley, oats and maize, and everyone can do rapeseed these days when it’s in flower, but I can’t identify many of the vegetables or legumes as they grow, or distinguish the cover crops; I’m not sure whether those are scattered swedes or sugar beets in a field we pass, and I don’t know why they haven’t been gathered up. I see the tractors out on the land, and it gives me a warm feeling, something primordial and bucolic to do with things being as they should be – but for the most part I can’t guess what they’re doing. It is a loss.

Here and there the huge, dried umbellifers of hogweed
are silhouetted against a sky smudged white and lemon at the horizon, which seems very far away. The muddy farm track we walk is pitted with the tiny, precise slots of muntjac deer, and where water stands in the tractor ruts it reflects the dull January skies in lozenges of rain-dimpled steel. Deep in the hedge, among the new spears of arum breaking ground, are some fly-tipped engine-oil bottles, newspapers and sodden carpet, while moss is turning the damp edges of the shadier rides emerald-green.

A grid of narrow dykes here collects rain from the fields and feeds it into the watercourses, and because of the rainwater levels are high and are likely to remain so through spring. In a month or two the dykes will be full of frogspawn and, when the warm weather comes, grass snakes, but for now they’re home to fish, from pike to roach to little sticklebacks, fierce-fanged dragonfly larvae that will decimate the tadpoles when they hatch, sluggish frogs hibernating in the mud and leaf litter at the bottom, and – far fewer these days, but there nonetheless – overwintering eels as long as a man’s arm.

As we walk, the muffled thud of guns reaches our ears over the constant patter of rain on our waterproof hoods: someone indifferent to the weather is out shooting pigeons, which feed in flocks at this time of year and make for easy targets. The guns aren’t the only ones
after them, either; a pile of wet feathers, still bloody at the root, betrays a sparrowhawk’s plucking post somewhere in the branches above us. The hawk herself – a female; the males, or ‘muskets’, aren’t large enough to take a pigeon – is hunched in a leafless ash tree two fields away. Well fed, she can wait out the weather, merely shaking the silver beads every so often from her smooth, grey back and barred breast – though if it lasts too long she will be forced to hunt regardless. I tramp on through the mud, compulsively reciting to myself the opening lines of Alison Brackenbury’s lovely poem, ‘Brockhampton’:

As the sun sinks lower, and the temperature falls, the pattering rain slows imperceptibly and stops – and within moments we are rioted around by goldfinches with their end-of-school chatter; there are sudden greenfinches in the hedges, too, and great tits calling, and the silvery notes of a robin trickle like water from somewhere in the carr. They’ve been waiting out the rain and now’s their last chance to feed before darkness falls, so they
must make the most of it: it is as though the landscape has shaken birds from its hedges and thickets as my dog shakes water from her fur.

The air is soft and clear but the day’s rain continues to sink silently into the fields and fens. The land here is so flat it will hold on to the water for a long time before it drains north-east towards the Wash; but drain it will: first into the peat, then by degrees into the field drains and lodes, and to the tributaries, passing through pumping stations and locks and sluices as it goes, then into the River Witham, the Welland, the Nene or the Great Ouse, and eventually into the chill North Sea. As it flows, the dykes and watercourses will be lined with another layer of fine silt; the course of old, lost rivers can still be seen across arable land in the Fens, raised up, counter-intuitively, above the surrounding land by layers of sediment, and known as roddons.

The peat here began forming 4,500 years ago, and as long as it’s kept wet it can lock up thirty times more carbon than if the same area was forested: a precious natural resource. Once it was cut and dried for fuel, and nowadays its rain-retentive properties have led it to be prized by gardeners – though awareness is growing of the devastating effects of peat extraction, in terms of habitat loss, carbon release and flood defence. Over-drainage, to create farmland, also damages peat bogs and fens; unlike a bathroom sponge, when peat has
dried out it shrinks and never swells again, which is why large parts of the Fens now lie well below sea level. At Holme Fen an iron post was sunk right down into the peat in the middle years of the nineteenth century; its top now stands four metres above ground level.

During that time the ability of these areas to absorb water, and defend us against floods, has been greatly reduced, so that when meltwater and heavy rains combine to overwhelm the Fenland rivers – as happened, devastatingly, in 1947 – or the sea walls necessary to protect the drained land are breached – as in 1953, with the loss of 307 lives – there’s precious little left to contain the floods. That’s why these days, low-lying East Anglia needs artificial drainage and vast coastal defences to keep it from being overwhelmed – yet even so, in December 2013 thousands of homes across three counties here had to be evacuated as huge surges demolished sea walls. Seaside towns were flooded, seven cliff-top homes collapsed, farms, wildlife and businesses were destroyed, and two people lost their lives. Afterwards, Norman Lamb, the MP for North Norfolk, described the area as ‘like a war zone’. But here’s the thing about water: the more it is denied the more powerful its incursions become. No wonder many people now believe that with sea levels rising, the Fens, with their protective, buffering function developed over thousands of years, should be restored, and swathes of agricultural
land – some of it reclaimed from the sea as recently as the 1970s – finally relinquished.

We turn back towards the village. Around us crows and jackdaws are beginning to assemble for the night; they wheel and parry over a stubble field near the mere, calling, calling, while a hundred garrulous starlings gather in an ash. Soon they’ll seek more flocks until they join up in a vast murmuration and sweep down on the reed beds to roost. I’m glad of my binoculars then, as we see, across the mere, a tall, stag-headed oak decorated with what I suddenly realise are cormorants: heraldic, prehistoric, facing in every direction as though gathering in the last of the light.

In a sudden, late dazzle of low evening sun our three shadows track us on the reeds across the lode, and a single, heavy bullrush nods to us as though in investiture as we pass it by for the second time. The light is low and clear and turns the reed beds red; it lingers longest on the topmost feathers, gilding them rich copper, but the still, undimpled water they are rooted in is turning deep blue now, not silver, reflecting the darkening sky above.

In the village pub everyone knows each other: teenage girls in short skirts, sixty-something farmers, local tradespeople, village wives and old Fenlanders alike. Warm and convivial, loud with gossip underflowed by the tintinnabulation of the slots, it offers chips, chips, chips with everything. And crocodile steaks.

But around the pub the village sprawls silent and almost pitch-dark, apart from a lit red phone box with no telephone in it. In the darkness, the rain – which this winter seems never to stop for very long – begins to patter invisibly once more on its blistered roof and streak its ancient, cloudy panes.

Shropshire: a rural landscape of woods and fields, market towns, canals and once-busy Victorian industrial sites now sinking back into quiet obscurity. It’s just after lunch on Easter Sunday, and across the nation people, including me, are planning to go for a walk. Of course, the farmers and dog-walkers and hardy hiking types are out all year round; but today they’ll be joined by the twice-a-year strollers, the dutiful family visitors and the buggies-and-toddlers brigade. Everyone hopes for a little sunshine on Easter weekend; it’s a chance to stretch our legs after winter and see a bit of the countryside. The weather, however, doesn’t always agree: over the long Easter weekend in 1998, for instance, a band of heavy rain sat unmoving over the whole of Shropshire, causing floods which resulted in five deaths.

But not this year. The Chelmarsh and Lake Vyrnwy reservoirs may be full, and everywhere groundwater levels are high; we’re not expecting a hosepipe ban this year. But at last the long, wet winter seems to be behind us. The showers that are blowing in and over today are of a very different character to January’s set-in rain.

In Joseph Taylor’s 1812 book,
The Complete Weather Guide,
he says of April:

Sunshine and rain and everything growing: that sounds about right. No wonder Chaucer opened
The Canterbury Tales
with April showers.

I’ve been coming to Shropshire for ten years now to visit my husband’s parents, who live in a little village near the Wrekin, a large, dramatic hill not far from the M54. At first the area was slow to reveal its beauty; having grown up in love with Dartmoor, where my grandparents lived and where we spent two weeks every summer, I immediately loved the upland landscape of
Carding Mill Valley (‘little Switzerland’, the locals call it – not unreasonably, either) and Wenlock Edge’s craggy outcrops, but the unpretentious farmland that makes up the bulk of the county seemed at first to have neither the cosy charm of the West Country nor the wide-open appeal of the Fens. It crept up on me, though: a worked, and working, landscape, full of cows and sheep and largely unbothered by tourists. As for conurbations, there’s Shrewsbury, of course, and Telford, but the county has no cities at all; in fact, Shropshire is a challenge for many people to find on a map. But now I have its measure, like music heard enough times to become intelligible. When I walk its narrow lanes, as I will today, the landscape around me, its hedges and fields and farms, has a particularity – half seen, half sensed – that I can’t help but respond to.

I leave the dog drowsing by the woodburner; she’s been out once already today, and without her it’s easier to tune into the
haeccitas
, the ‘thisness’ of the place, without worrying that she’s about to belt off in pursuit of something furry. Half-terrier, born a farm dog in Ireland, she lived as a stray for her first eighteen months and the hunting instinct dies hard.

Pulling the front door to I pause for a moment, looking out at the wet driveway where a wren shouts a spring trill from the hedge. My parents-in-law are selling their
house and moving to the South-East, and this is the last time I’ll be in the village. It may not be my home, but it’s somewhere I’ve taken shelter, and I know I’m going to miss coming here.

I could walk up the Wrekin, but on Easter Sunday it’s likely to be busy – and having come up from London for the weekend it’s nice to leave the crowds behind. I decide to take a meandering route around the village that will lead me through the lanes, across a couple of fields and back. It rained not half an hour ago and water beads the roofs and bonnets of the cars in the drive, but above me massy cumulus pursue one another across blue April skies, stately and white.

Britain’s prevailing wind comes from the south-west, but today it blows from the north-west and brings a little Polar chill on its breath. While over the cold sea it hardly thawed, but in the spring sunshine the good, rich earth of Wales, along with the rest of the British Isles, has been warming up, heating the air above it and causing it to rise and condense like breath, and the water it bears to form droplets heavy enough to fall as rain. Now, shower clouds are processing inland to the Welsh Marches, the West Midlands and beyond, shedding rain as they go. They will dissipate slowly as darkness falls and the temperature drops again, and the night will be dry – but until then it’s sunshine and showers; barely have the tiles dried on the village roofs than another
blows in. ‘April showers,’ we say to one another, casting a judicious eye at the heavens – although statistically, April is a relatively dry month across most of Britain. But it is changeable; rainclouds tend to build and blow in (and over) quickly, and it’s not always easy to tell, at the start of each day, whether the weather will hold.

April is all about change on the ground, too. Deep in the warm, damp earth seeds are germinating, the hedgerows are coming into leaf, wild flowers are beginning to bloom and insects breed, and everywhere the birds are at their most active, building nests and defending their territories. Life is getting on with the grand business of growing and reproducing; rain may feel like an inconvenience, but at this time of year it’s essential.

Near the church I see that the two horse chestnuts, which came into leaf first out of all the big trees in the village, are now starting to produce their flower-spikes: huge, creamy candles that will blaze into life in a couple of weeks and release pollen, marking the start of the hay-fever season. Showery weather will help wash it from the atmosphere; today, though, the pollen is still locked up safely inside the ripening green buds.

The horse chestnuts’ leaves are already marked with the brown scribbles made by leaf miner larvae, which live between the upper and lower cuticles in a tunnel safe from the elements. Despite this, the clever blue tits here and in several other places across the British Isles have
worked out how to get at them, and their acrobatic abilities and low body weight make it easy for them to hang from the floppy leaves to feed. And now that the blue tits’ eggs have started to hatch, these towering conker trees are seeing a surge in visitors, keen to feed their hungry young.

The leaf miners are just one part of a huge caterpillar explosion that takes place across the country at about this time of year, and around which many birds’ nesting seasons must fit: soft, moist caterpillars are the perfect baby food for fledglings, so mating needs to be carefully timed. But spring is coming earlier to our latitude these days, and while some birds are changing their behaviour to keep up – swallows now arrive about a week earlier than in 1970 – others have been slower to react, and it’s thought that as time goes on those birds that rely on single food sources may prove unable to adapt.

These leaf miners may be protected from the rain in their tunnels, but it’s sluicing some of the bigger caterpillars, like those of the sawfly and purple hair-streak, from the oak trees by the lane; they drop into the churchyard where opportunistic ground-feeding blackbirds and robins will tidy them up once the shower has passed. For now, only the mistle thrush, or stormcock, is out in the wet: he’s earning his country name by perching on the top of the church porch and singing lustily. Even from the lane I can see his throat working and his
speckled breast feathers puffed out against the rain.

It’s felt like spring for a good month now, but only now are some of the other big trees catching up with the horse chestnuts. The old saw goes:

In the little spinney on the edge of the village the ash leaves are still wrapped in sticky black buds, but everywhere the oaks are bursting into leaf: a dry summer ahead, then. Soft and copper-coloured for a little while, maturing quickly to green and then darkening and toughening by August, their topmost leaves are usually the first to unfurl – and will be the first to be lost later in the year.

Those topmost leaves are where the shower hits first: the faintest rain-patter, a few flung drops on the breeze that sparkle here and there on those glossy copper cuticles and speckle my waterproof coat. Then a grey, laden shower cloud obscures the sun, and I put up my hood.

Beyond the last houses the road breaks between pastures in which the rain is helping the grass grow, boosting its ‘D-value’, or digestibility. The early grass, before it starts producing seed-heads, is the most nutritious for sheep and cows, and makes the best fodder for later in
the year, too. The dairy farmers want good growing conditions early on so they can get their herds out from under cover where feed costs them money; the sheep farmers, too, want to get the new lambs out on grass – and good D-values require plenty of sunshine, and just enough rain. In 1957 this entire region remained utterly rainless throughout April; May had a little, but the grass never quite caught up and extra fodder for livestock had to be bought in. The arable farmers did no better: with poor growing conditions in springtime yields were way down come harvest. A dry spring can have consequences that echo through the entire growing season, affecting the prices we pay for our fruit and vegetables – and meat and dairy – in the shops.

One reason we know how much rain has fallen where, and when, is the British Rainfall Organisation: a quintessentially eccentric body and one of the first examples of what we now call ‘citizen science’. George James Symons, who began his working life in the Meteorological Department at the Board of Trade, set up the Association in the middle of the nineteenth century in response to public concern that rainfall was decreasing across the British Isles. He recruited a small network of initial observers, then wrote to
The Times
in 1863 listing the further locations he wanted, calling for observers ‘of both sexes and all ages’ and offering to subsidise the costs of instruments. By 1867 he had 1,300 observers and had
to leave his post at the Board of Trade; by his death in 1900 there were 3,408, drawn from ‘nearly every social grade from peer to peasant’. Symons ran the Organisation on strictly egalitarian principles, emphasising cooperation at all times and ensuring that decisions were made collectively. But ensuring his observers felt valued was more than just tact or idealism on Symons’ part; after all, it was their subscriptions that paid almost the entire running costs of the project.

Symons was eventually made a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Chevalier of the
Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur.
Thirty or so years after his death one young Rotherham recorder, Vernon Radcliffe, visited the London house he once lived in to see his famous rain gauge. When he reported its poor condition to Dr John Glasspoole, President of the Royal Meteorological Society, word of his impertinence got back to Radcliffe’s headmaster – and Radcliffe was told in no uncertain terms to stop meddling. It seems the schoolboy defied his teacher, though, for not only did he go on to become resident observer at the King’s Observatory, Kew, he was awarded an MBE in 1997 for his work as a voluntary rainfall observer, one of thousands whose painstakingly amassed data provided then, and still provides, an invaluable climatological record.

In 1916 the BRO was called upon to determine whether the use of artillery on the Western Front was
somehow responsible for one of the wettest winters on record, something that, in the mud of the trenches, must have seemed horribly possible. But upon consulting their meteorological records the opinion given by its then director, Dr Hugh Robert Mill, was that there was no connection between gunfire and precipitation. The following winter would prove less wet, despite the artillery barrage of the Somme, but bitterly cold.

The BRO was finally transferred to the Met Office after the War, in 1919, but continued to publish its records until 1991; they are still used today.

Joseph Taylor’s
Weather Guide
says:

I’m hoping to spot some swallows while I’m out, but today they are nowhere to be seen. It may be that the local birds have not yet returned from Africa and Asia – or they may have arrived, seen the showery weather and nipped back to the warmer Continent for a few days. Swallows don’t put on weight before their migration, as
some other birds do, so they must feed as they go – and on arrival, they’ll need to find something to eat pretty fast. Studies have shown that aerial plankton, the tiny flies and spiders that float on air currents and which birds like swifts and swallows eat, are pushed along before a weather front, quickly ‘scrubbed’ from the air by precipitation and then begin to ascend again as soon as thermals return after a shower – which might explain the old saw: