Rain

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; it’s also what swells rivers, floods farms and villages and drives people out of their homes.

Because it’s 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 it’s 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 there’s 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 it’s 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: ‘There’s 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 country’s natural history during precipitation, and nor is it a purely scientific investigation into a meteorological phenomenon; instead, it’s an imaginative account of how England – human, animal and vegetable – weathers, and is weathered by, the storm.

MELISSA HARRISON
, January 2016

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.

It’s 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 we’re 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. That’s strengthened the jet stream and, in turn, the stormy depressions that run east along it towards Britain – and the mild, Atlantic air it’s brought tends to hold more water. The larger truth is, it’s 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.

I decide to visit the place where Britain first learned how to live in partnership with water – because, like many hard-won lessons, it’s 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 Vermuyden’s seventeenth-century drainage work to the Victorians’ system of windmills and today’s 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 country’s 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.

Oddly enough the flat, wet area between Cambridge
and the Wash is one of the driest in Britain in terms of rainfall, partly because it gets little or no orographic precipitation, or rainfall sparked by clouds drifting over high ground – one of the reasons mountainous areas such as Wales, Cumbria and Dartmoor experience such a lot of wet weather. But on a mild, dull day in late January what blankets both my home, in South London, and my destination, the area just north-east of Cambridge, is stratiform precipitation falling from nimbostratus: rain caused by warm air rising gently and slowly over a cold front and condensing into water droplets. It’s that grey, unchanging kind of wet weather that can spread over vast areas and doesn’t go anywhere fast.

Driving towards East Anglia the sky gradually gets bigger; even on a day like today, grey and dim, it becomes enormous, taking up a good three quarters of the view. Eventually we find ourselves in flat, arable land with rich black earth and roads as straight as rulers: fen country. I gaze out through the car’s passenger window on which droplets of water shiver and break backwards; beyond the glass the wet fields unfurl to the unforgiving line of the horizon. In the boot the dog is hunkered down and probably car-sick, enduring the journey for the sake of the dream-rabbits at its end.

Slowly the GPS homes us in on our destination: the little village of Wicken and the National Trust’s oldest
nature reserve, Wicken Fen. Incredibly species-rich, like ancient woodland or true wild-flower meadows, this fragment of wild fen is also an excellent place to see how man and nature together can work with, rather than against, water.

The villages in this part of the country – the cities too, like Ely with its heart-stopping cathedral – are usually built on ‘fen islands’: firmer areas of greensand or boulder clay which support their foundations better than the treacherous peat. In one village a bungalow boasts a front garden full of dripping gnomes and knick-knacks; next door its neighbour’s leafless apple tree has dropped its yellow fruit all over the sodden lawn. Everywhere, collared doves crouch on the telephone wires, puffed up against the damp.

In Wicken village the verges are starred with early primroses, and one we pass is stalked by two green woodpeckers sporting red military caps. Still known in many parts of the country as yaffles, they are looking for ants, using their beaks to disturb underground chambers and extracting them with their long, sticky tongues. In autumn, wood ants retreat to their thermo-regulated anthills, but common ants move to chambers deep below the frost line and enter ‘diapause’, a state of semi-hibernation, until spring; these, fooled by the mild temperatures brought by the Gulf Stream, must have woken early. Ants are well attuned to the weather: many
people believe even now that their movements predict rain, and certainly the little mounds of earth they construct around their burrow entrances do an excellent job of stopping rainwater running into them.

‘You’re keen,’ says the man in the Trust’s information centre, cocking an eye at the weather: apart from a couple of diehard birders with their gaiters and monopods it looks as though we’ll have the place to ourselves. Today, he tells us, the fen is full of water, so much of the reserve is a no-go area. The dog quivers with expectation as we talk, keen to get on with the walk now that we’re here: not for her the information boards or gift shop. As for the rain, she couldn’t care less.

The fact that large parts of Wicken Fen are waterlogged is just as it should be, the peat, sedge and reed beds holding on to today’s rainfall rather then letting it pour away to cause flooding elsewhere. But we can walk along the raised banks of Wicken Lode, which was dug in Roman times to drain this part of the fen and take water from it into the River Cam and thence to the Great Ouse and out to sea, and was used to transport peat and sedge until about 1940. It’s shallow, navigable only by small boats; much of it is now permitted to be used only by the local Fenlanders, in recognition of their ancient right. It passes as slow and silver as mercury between stands of pale golden
Phragmites
reed shot through here and there with blood-red bramble
stolons. The rain falling all around us is almost silent as it dimples the surface of the lode, but the reeds’ feathery pennants whisper and susurrate to themselves as we pass. Deeper and more distant than the reeds’ speech, though, is the rushing-water sound of a breeze we can’t yet feel as it hits the faraway alder and buckthorn carrs. The dog trots ahead of us, alert and keyed up: while heavy rain can wash scent from the ground, moisture makes some airborne smells more volatile, so the world she moves through today may well be denser with information.

The earth of the levee on which we walk is pitch-dark peat marbled with paler Gault clay and silt slubbed out from the lode each year. Twin desire paths, made by pairs of people walking, are worn through the dull winter grass like parallel wheel ruts; here and there they merge in a mire of sticky, ‘loving’ mud that cakes our boots and leaves an ashen cast on the trodden-down grass beyond. Here and there are little black mounds; one has a freshwater mussel shell in it, dug out from somewhere deep on the bank, while others are fibrous with fragments of
Phragmites
root. While severe flooding and intense cold sends moles deep underground, wet weather can result in an increase in molehills. Shallow, damp, less compacted soil is easier for them to work, and this reduction in energy expenditure, along with abundant food sources, leads to better health and lower
mortality – and increased breeding compared to that in prolonged dry spells.

Rain on soil also brings moles’ food source, worms, to the surface, as every bait fisherman, foot-stamping gull and worm-charming child knows. It used to be thought that they were trying to escape drowning, but new studies have suggested this may not be the case; it takes far more than a few showers to render soil uninhabitable for most invertebrates. As with moles, damp surface soil is easier for worms to move through – and it may be that they are taking the opportunity, when it rains, to strike out for new and less crowded ground. Some species, like the floodplain earthworm (
Octolasion tyrtaeum)
, cope particularly well in waterlogged soil, and parts of the country that flood regularly tend to contain greater numbers of these types of invertebrate. Areas unused to regular flooding are usually home to more such creatures per square metre of soil, but are left with far fewer after a serious flood because the species are not adapted to inundation. It can take many years to build invertebrate numbers back up again after a big loss, with knock-on effects on the fertility and drainage of the soil.

To the left of the levee banks of brambles form massy humps, crabbed and tangled as though concealing something troubling within. There are a few bare hawthorns hung with silver drops, while on the other side of the lode young silver birches have been recently cleared and
the trunks piled up to decay naturally; longhorn cattle and rare konik ponies brought in by the National Trust help keep down the rest of the scrub that is threatening to make woodland of the precious grazing marsh. Here and there hazels have produced their yellow catkins; there are hips bright as blood, too, and beside the path a straggle of field mustard, most likely a farmland escapee, blooms yellow and incongruous against the grey January sky: I crush a little between my fingers for its peppery smell and wonder whether spring may not be so far away after all.

Wet days like today seemed interminable when I was a child. Being stuck indoors was the most terrible punishment: outside was where everything exciting happened. Apart from
Blue Peter, Jackanory
and
Noel Edmonds’ Multi-coloured Swap Shop
there was rarely anything good on TV, and although I remember my Dad bringing home a Sinclair ZX81 when I was six, it was only my brother who, following after hours of laborious programming, could cause it to display primitive and largely inexplicable games on our old, wood-panelled TV. The best thing about our house – big enough for six children, full of books, but hopelessly shabby – was the garden with its three ancient cooking-apple trees that were excellent for climbing; a monolithic, impregnable weeping willow, home to woodpeckers, treecreepers and nuthatches; a frog-busy pond made from an old bath;
tangly areas excellent for making camps, and an old air-raid shelter at the far end upon whose sloping roof, in summer, my four elder sisters sometimes sunbathed. It was this little kingdom that wet weather denied us.

And there was more. On fine days we had the run of the local woods (now a paintballing centre and fenced off); we rode our bikes or rollerskated around the village, and the next village a couple of miles away; we explored the fields between the house and our primary school and only went home when we were hungry. A really wet day – Mum, at her typewriter, would shoo us outdoors if it was just a little drizzly – meant the reduction of that vast territory to the smaller, duller enclave of the house itself, and we chafed at it. Yet that circumscribed world is now all that’s available to many modern kids: studies suggest that since the 1970s, when I was born, children’s ‘radius of activity’ – the area around their home in which they are allowed to play unsupervised – has declined by almost 90 per cent. Perhaps every day – not just when it rains – is an indoor day for children now.

A watery sun breaks briefly through the cloud and dazzles off the lode as a kingfisher unzips the air above the water. A blue dart, understood only in the inarticulate half-second after it passes, it almost takes the heart from my chest. Briefly, the day feels illuminated – but just a
few steps on we find a dead shrew on the path, sodden but unmarked; they’re not good swimmers, and with water levels high and large parts of the fen currently underwater it’s likely it was washed out of its burrow and drowned. This can happen with water voles too, who become an easy meal, if forced onto dry land, for mink and birds of prey.