Harrison - Rain: four walks in English weather

What does rain mean to you? Do you see it as a dreaded inconvenience, a strange national obsession, or an agricultural necessity? We love to grumble about it, yet we invent dozens of terms to describe it and swap them gleefully; it trickles through our literature from Geoffrey Chaucer to Alice Oswald, and there are websites and apps that mimic its sound, soothing us while we work or sleep. Rain is what makes the English countryside so green and pleasant; its also what swells rivers, floods farms and villages and drives people out of their homes.

Because its something that sends most of us scurrying indoors, few people witness what actually happens out in the landscape on a wet afternoon. And yet our topography creates such unstable conditions that almost every day, as natural and inevitable as breathing, weather fronts form, clouds gather and rain falls, changing how the English countryside looks, smells and sounds, and the way the living things in it behave. And the falling rain alters the landscape itself, dissolving ancient rocks, deepening river channels and moving soil from place to place. Rain is co-author of our living countryside; it is also a part of our deep internal landscape, which is why we become fretful and uneasy when its too long withheld. Fear it as we might, complain about it as we may, rain is as essential to our sense of identity as it is to our soil.

And theres something else that rain gives us; something deeper and more mysterious, to do with memory, and nostalgia, and a pleasurable kind of melancholy. Perhaps there have simply been too many novels with storm-drenched emotional climaxes, and too many films in which sad protagonists look out through rain-streaked windows, but it seems to me that rain is a mirror of one of our key emotional states: not a negative one at all, but deeply necessary just as necessary as joy. Water, after all, both reflects us, and brings life; it was also, for Jung, an archetype of the unconscious, and of change. Into each life some rain must fall, wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (or was it Dennis Potter?) and its quite true: after all, nothing new can grow without it.

The idea for this book came to me in the Lake District, where I was spending a week with my husband and his parents. Cumbria has some of the highest levels of rainfall in the entire UK, and when we go there we go prepared: Theres no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing, as the redoubtable Alfred Wainwright said. That day, we walked from Keswick to Threlkeld along an old railway track in full waterproof gear (even the dog had her coat on) and it absolutely hossed it down, as the locals say. But unlike in December 2015, when much heavier rain and flooding devastated the area it was wonderful: we were dry and warm inside our clothes, the River Greta rushed and roared white, a dipper dinked smartly from the gleaming rocks and the leaves dripped green and glossy on the trees. We saw a couple of other walkers out with their dogs, but really there was hardly anyone about. It seemed such a waste.

To write a book about rain I had to get used to going outside and getting wet, as we did that day. I visited four parts of the countryside in showery weather and, when others looked apprehensively at the sky and went indoors, I put on waterproofs and headed out in some cases, several times. I have blended these expeditions with reading, research, memory and a little conjecture in order to describe, I hope without undue distortion, the course of four rain-showers as they pass over English soil.

This book does not pretend to be an exhaustive survey of the countrys natural history during precipitation, and nor is it a purely scientific investigation into a meteorological phenomenon; instead, its an imaginative account of how England human, animal and vegetable weathers, and is weathered by, the storm.

MELISSA HARRISON , January 2016

Kelching: raining hard

It is the end of January 2014, and I feel as though it has been raining for weeks. Large parts of the South London park where we walk our dog are under water, and it barely seems worth towelling the mud from her fur between one walk and the next. With a blocked gutter and an extremely dilatory landlady we lie awake and listen to water spilling down our bedroom window night after night; eventually, part of the exterior wall becomes saturated and I have to move all my clothes out of the cupboard as mildew begins to take hold.

Its far worse elsewhere. The Somerset Levels have flooded, drained, and flooded again, the Eastern fen country is full of water, and right across the country rivers roil high and brown, burst their banks or are in spate. Farmers lose crops and see their grassland die; friends are washed out of their homes; tragically, people drown. The rain continues regardless, with the stubborn, set-in quality of a child who cries without expectation of help.

In December 2013 parts of the country had double their usual amount of precipitation, and the TV tells us were having the wettest January for 250 years. Blame America, say the weathermen; their severe winter weather (or polar vortex, as the media has dubbed it) created too much of a contrast between its bitter, freezing air and the warmer climate to the south. Thats strengthened the jet stream and, in turn, the stormy depressions that run east along it towards Britain and the mild, Atlantic air its brought tends to hold more water. The larger truth is, its unlikely to be a one-off; we may all need to get used to more extreme weather conditions, more often, as the long hangover from the excesses of our industrial revolution begins to bite.

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I decide to visit the place where Britain first learned how to live in partnership with water because, like many hard-won lessons, its something we may be in danger of forgetting. The Fens were in large part drained, but have never quite been conquered; today, in fact, we are restoring some areas converted to agriculture to their original role, and returning other parts to the sea.

The Fens are a low-lying area consisting mainly of peat (vegetable matter laid down by decaying plants) and silt (fine mineral matter deposited by water) around the Wash, on the border of Norfolk and Lincolnshire. Once a vast, waterlogged marsh, now only 0.1 per cent of the original Great Fen Basin remains as true wild fen, in four tiny fragments: Wicken Fen, Holme Fen, Wood-walton and Chippenham. The rest, for the most part, is farmed.

Into the fen country four major rivers and a number of tributaries drain rainfall collected from four million acres of higher ground in several counties. The rain that collects there has been managed for centuries in different ways, from Roman dykes to modern pumping stations, and from Dutchman Cornelius Vermuydens seventeenth-century drainage work to the Victorians system of windmills and todays hydroelectric pumps. Yet 1,500 years of such ingenuity is more than matched by the tough Fenlanders themselves, who once used everything from boats to stilts and jumping poles to traverse the waterlogged landscape, and made their living, before the fen country was drained and farmed, from wildfowling, fishing, and turf- and sedge-cutting. Now one of the countrys most fertile and productive agricultural areas, containing about half of the top-quality growing soil in the whole of England, the spirit of the original fen tigers lives on in the fierce independence and no-nonsense practicality of the Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk natives who still populate this watery place. Here, the fens power, and their value, has long been clearly understood not only in modern terms of biodiversity conservation or regional hydromorphology, but with a deeper respect: a sense, now proving true, that this marshy landscape exists here for a reason.