WEATHERLAND

WRITERS & ARTISTS UNDER ENGLISH SKIES

ALEXANDRA HARRIS

Weatherland

– It will be rain tonight.

– Let it come down.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

7A MIRROR IN THE SKY

INTRODUCTION A MIRROR IN THE SKY

I hope you are better employed

than in gaping after weather.

John Keats

It’s December, the week before Christmas. I have rented for a few nights

a sixteenth-century tower in the water meadows under the South Downs

in East Sussex. The closest village is Laughton, which is not very near

Lewes, though the lights on the edge of town become visible in the dis-

tance after dark, and every half hour a train goes along beneath the

horizon. Leaning out of a high bedroom window, I have a better view of

the ditches and sluices carrying water quietly away across the fields in

the moonlight.

In the night I wake up damp with cold. Any movement, even to

scratch my nose, creates a breeze. A hot-water bottle lies uselessly beside

me, its heat long gone and the kettle which would rejuvenate it sixty-two

steps down a spiral staircase in the kitchen. For two hours I lie awake

thinking about our sensitivity to temperature, wondering whether

people felt cold in this room four hundred years ago, one hundred years

ago, twenty years ago. The new thermostat at home works doggedly to

keep me at the same temperature all day long; however much I turn

it down it flicks on again and wins eventually, insisting on temperate

regularity. I am losing the capacity to be comfortably cold. I resist the

hot-water bottle, try to enjoy the passing draughts, and fall asleep.

The morning is so triumphantly bright that when I wipe conden-

sation from the window I can see the texture of the grass on Mount

Caburn. It is the kind of sharp low light in which archaeologists can

see field boundaries and lost villages, a light for seeking out long-bur-

ied things. Falling on a notebook by the window, it makes a furrowed

landscape of a previously flat page. I proceed to spend most of the day

rejoicing in the weather. At Alciston white light comes shafting through

the plain church windows as if the pale sun itself had turned protestant;

at Alfriston in the afternoon the reed beds turn a tawny orange-grey,

gently luminous beyond hedges of dark ilex and yew.

8 INTRODUCTION

Weather is so mobile that it brings variance to tarmacked roads

and concrete towers; a bare wall watched over time is interesting enough.

In places where every surface is a different texture, where there are fore-

grounds and distances, shining berries, dense hollies, building stones

which absorb the light in distinctive ways, there is almost too much to

look at. I keep taking photographs, trying to catch each shading differ-

ence in colour as the afternoon goes on. You’d think I had never seen

winter sun before.

Everything changes in the night: as I climb the sixty-two stairs the

wind gets louder, and on each of the four floors, going up, I can hear the

rain being thrown against the windows with more force. By dawn the

meadows are flooded, leaving only small peninsulas of land. The sluice

gate by the drive has been overwhelmed by what is now a fast-flowing

river. There is no way of getting the car out but, since there seems to be

a bit of footpath left, I cannot keep back the impulse to explore on foot.

The aim is to collect a Christmas goose ordered from a farm about a mile

away. Squelching and sinking, I make it across two fields before coming

to a fast river I won’t risk. It is still raining, and the water is going up. If

I reached the goose, I’d never get it back. We’ll have a vegetarian dinner.

I love this deluge. Flooding in towns can wreck homes and liveli-

hoods, but here on the marshes flooding is supposed to happen in

winter. These low fields have for centuries been taking the burden of the

water. The flood laps up to the hawthorn hedges where a few hips show

red against the grey. Clumps of brown rotting thistles keep their heads

above water. While I’ve been gazing, local people have had the fore-

thought to mark the edge of the submerged road with stakes so that it’s

possible to wade through without losing the way. They have also devised

a plan for getting in the shopping. A car from the outside world is parked

on the far side of the water with a boot full of festive food. Two bags at a

time, our neighbour carries his supplies across the flood to his own car,

a dock for the ferry’s cargo.

In the evening, when the rain stops and the air is still, I go out

again. There are small waves breaking gently on the inland sea. The

stakes along the road are only beanpoles, but the wobbly verticals look

dramatic. There is enough moonlight to see the outline of Caburn, which

is now a cliff rising above water. Gulls have come in from the coast, claim-

ing the levels as their own. Indoors, I find a set of postcards in a drawer,

showing Laughton under blue summer skies. There are deckchairs

9

stowed in a cupboard on the stairs. It’s a shock to see them: immersed in

December I find it hard to believe in August. This is one of many strange

characteristics of our relationship with weather: it is difficult to remem-

ber what it feels like to be in any conditions except the ones we’re in. It is

almost impossible to pack the right things for a different climate. I can’t

even imagine these floods going down.

But they do go down, very quickly. I drive away next day at low tide

when the water reveals the land again. The sluice flows along innocently

between its banks. The gulls have gathered on the last lake left to them,

which sparkles in the sun. So that was my holiday. I have done nothing

but watch the light and the water, and feel the cold, the wet, the wind,

and afterwards the warmth. There are places where these things are so

all-consuming that there’s time for little else.

�

Weather is written into our landscape. I grew up near Coldwaltham

in West Sussex, where at some point in the Middle Ages the identity

of coldness was attached to the Old English ‘waltham’ (village in the

wood). In the lee of the downs a few miles away, out of the wind, lies

Coldharbour Farm (a harbour or shelter from the cold). Chalk Farm in

London has its etymological roots in ‘chalde’ from Old English ‘ceald’.

Across England there are winterbournes, streams which rise when the

water-table is high in winter and recede unobtrusively into the drier

landscape of summer.1

Weather leaves its physical trace, but there are many aspects of

weather which are insubstantial. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold

observes, we can feel warmth but we cannot touch it. We can see where a

cloud is and where it is not, but we cannot run a finger around its edges.2

Shakespeare thought of clouds ‘dislimning’. To ‘limn’ is to delineate, but

weather is inimical to lines, dissolving them as soon as they are made.

Meteorological phenomena are serially elusive. Winds and air-fronts

reveal their characters only in the effects they have on other things. We

learn the nature of wind by observing how far smoke drifts from the ver-

tical, or by watching to see whether twigs are moving or just the leaves:

the Beaufort Scale uses these signs from the visible world as a gauge

for the invisible wind. We all have our personal variants on the official

scale, the things we look to for clues, and we come to understand places

through the marks the wind has made on them. Emily Brontë described

A MIRROR IN THE SKY

10

the wind at Wuthering Heights by reading the angle of its trees: ‘one may

guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the exces-

sive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range

of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of

the sun’. These are the expressive signs of wind, though they are not the

wind itself.3

This elusiveness, combined with tremendous power, means that

in almost every culture the weather has at some stage been thought

divine. It has in turn provided the imagery by which deities are known.

The Christian God, everywhere present but nowhere visible except in

His workings, is often represented as a figure emerging from cloud or

air. Speaking out of a whirlwind to put Job in his place, God defines

omnipotence through His command of weather. His speech, as trans-

lated in the King James Bible of 1611, poses some of the most beautiful

and enduring questions in literature:

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the

treasures of the hail, which I have reserved against the time of trouble,

against the day of battle and war? By what way is the light parted, which

scattereth the east wind upon the earth? Who hath divided a watercourse

for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; To

cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein

there is no man; To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause

the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? Hath the rain a father? or who

hath begotten the drops of dew?4

The secret workings of weather are here imagined in ways which

are at once solid and elusive. Snow and hail exist in permanent states,

stored up for the future. A ‘way’ must be made for the lightning because

the Israelites believed the sky to be a solid layer between the earth and

the heavens, through which channels were cut for the weather. The sky

was often described as a sheet of metal, polished to reflect the light.

The King James translators, working in a new age of mirrors, likened

the sky to ‘a molten looking glass’.5 These images of the sky as a solid

architectural structure are combined with lyric appreciation of the del-

icacy and diversity of weather. God’s words to Job, though spoken in

anger, describe the extent of His power in relation to dewdrops as well

as lightning. The questions are presented rhetorically because it should

be obvious to Job that the answer in every case is God. But the point

is also that these are great mysteries of the world, and so they have

INTRODUCTION

1 1

remained. Today, whether or not we find God in snow, we continue to

feel wonder.

The Christian story proposes variable weather as one of the pen-

alties brought down on humankind for its sins. In Eden there was

moisture to nurture the abundant plants, and such warmth that Adam

and Eve needed no extra layers. If there was ‘weather’ at all, it was

steadily benign. The trouble began either immediately after the Fall or

with the Flood. John Milton in Paradise Lost described the creation of

weather as one of the dire ‘alterations in the heavens and elements’ set

in train by God as soon as the apple was eaten.6 Winds were summoned

to do battle in the air. Angels tipped the earth on its axis, subjecting it to

the variability of seasons. Man would now have to cope with the unpre-

dictability of a lopsided globe. The twinned genesis of weather and time

is remembered in the French phrase ‘les temps’, Spanish ‘tiempo’ and

Italian ‘tempo’. Having lost the eternal stability of Eden, man must live

in passing airs and hours.7

The worst of the Old Testament punishments came in the form of

calamitous weather. The Flood demonstrated to Noah and to centuries

of Bible-readers that rainfall is capable of wiping out human life. Later

floods, gales, and freezes have been understood by many who suffered

in them as sequels to those first, awful retributions. During the Middle

Ages and the Renaissance it was commonly believed that the earth

was yearly getting colder as it left temperate Eden further and further

behind. This was easily conflated with the classical scheme in which

Jupiter introduced the seasons after the perpetual spring of the Golden

Age. We still ask ourselves on a daily basis if the weather is a curse or a

blessing. We still see both horror and treasure in hail.

�

The immateriality of weather has made it a potent means of figuring not

only our gods but the most immaterial parts of ourselves – our ‘spirits’

and our thoughts. The association between clouds and minds is so com-

monplace as to go unnoticed; in cartoons, for example, thought bubbles

are cloud-shaped. The thought-cloud has become part of our sign lan-

guage. There was a strand of early Christian mythology that imagined

Adam’s thoughts to have been fashioned directly from the clouds, and

by the mid-tenth century this addition to Genesis was well established

in English and Irish writing. One Old English colloquy asks the question:

A MIRROR IN THE SKY

12

‘Tell me the substance from which Adam was made’, and the answer

comes that he was made from eight pounds of material: a pound of earth

made his flesh, a pound of fire made his hot blood, a pound of wind

made his breath, and so on, including a pound of cloud, ‘from which his

unstable mind was made’.8 The image is splendidly vivid: God takes a

handful of cloud and shapes it into thoughts – except that, being cloud,

the thoughts keep changing shape. In this very early example the cloud-

mind idea implies a mistrust of both cloud and mind, a sense of their

vapourousness. ‘Unstaðelfæstnes’ is the word in the Old English text.

For Shakespeare and the Romantics the comparison between

thoughts and clouds becomes a means of expressing the miraculous

abundance of human imaginations, which are constantly revising and

replenishing themselves. The mind is a theatre, like the sky, in which

whole cities can be built up and then dissolved. Even as he marks the

end of the masque in The Tempest, Prospero unveils another vast pano-

rama that flashes and fades in an instant, made from a single breath,

leaving nothing more or less than a memory:

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.9

�

Our thoughts will be affected by the kind of weather we’re in. Dark clouds

are liable to engender gloomy feelings. The weather can be responsible

not just for our own mood but for the mood of a whole town or country.

Our weather-talk has a special grammar. ‘What’s it like today?’ we ask,

replacing the specific noun ‘weather’ with a cosmically generalizing ‘it’.

What is it like – the weather, the day, the world? Weather is one of the

most powerful threads holding us together: it is what we share with

everyone else who is in it, or under it. Rainy days turn people in upon

themselves – hat pressed down, chin tucked in – but there are common

rhythms in the dodging and splashing and weariness. In the park on the

INTRODUCTION

13

first warm day of the year people of all kinds will be drawn into cheer-

ful fellowship. When a bad day suddenly clears to late sun the thoughts

of individuals all over a city, intent on thousands of different tasks, will

take a momentary united leap.

Still, each among those thousands will feel something different.

The thermometer may be the same whoever reads it, but our experience

of weather is more than statistical. The naturalist Richard Mabey, a life-

long observer of the weather’s effects on us, describes a ‘complex weave

of metaphor, ancient association, and real physical experience’.10 Our

weather is made up of personal memories and moods; an evening sky

is full of other evenings; a mist may be given its identity by a line from

a song or a half-remembered film. The weather is made for us partly by

writers and artists who have set down permanently their response to a

fleeting effect. This is all interwoven with the practicalities of being hot

or cold, wet or dry, while the world around us is blotted out or lit up, a

brass handle or a shopfront suddenly picked out by the sun.

Our common weather, then, is intensely personal and unpredict-

able. There is a moment in Proust’s novel The Guermantes Way when the

weather one morning has a transformative effect on the narrator:

Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay

intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days, there

had been a cold fog which had not cleared until midday: and a change in

the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves anew.11

It is the combination of drama and nonchalance which makes this so

truthful. Of course a foggy morning can make all the difference. This is

just how our moments of revelation tend to come: on an odd Sunday

morning, when the world is a new place because it’s cold. Proust’s narra-

tor is only reborn in the fog, however, because he is ready, this particular

Sunday, for something to change. Inner weather creates outer weather;

we find the external image of the thing we need to express. If this is

true of individuals, changing from moment to moment, it holds true in

a very broad way for societies. It is possible for large groups of people to

find certain conditions more meaningful than others. Cultures have cli-

matic sensitivities, which may be consciously developed or which may

evolve gradually and unnoticed. Weather feelings can be shared by a

circle of friends, or by one artist responding to another, or by thousands

of people linked by a vast web of cultural influences.

A MIRROR IN THE SKY

14

The social scientist Steve Rayner, one of the most influential con-

temporary voices on climate policy, has quoted Proust approvingly: yes,

the weather can recreate the world and ourselves. But for Rayner the cre-

ativity works in both directions. ‘We could add’, he says, ‘that a change

in ourselves is sufficient to recreate the weather’.12 That belief is at the

heart of this book. My subject is not the weather itself, but the weather

as it is daily recreated in the human imagination.

�

My thinking about people and weather has been inspired from the first

by Virginia Woolf. Her 1928 novel Orlando establishes the atmosphere

of English life in different centuries by describing changes in the air. The

turn of the nineteenth century brings with it the most dramatic mete-

orological alteration:

the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then for the first time

noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St Paul’s. As the strokes

sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken and spread with

extraordinary speed […] As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck,

a huge blackness sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth

stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of

cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion.

The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.13

Life changes in accordance with this new weather: beards keep men’s

necks snug, skirts are worn to the ground and tablecloths follow suit.

Damp-loving ivy grows in profusion; in the muffled gloom, evasions and

concealments are bred almost as quickly as children.

Woolf ’s scene-setting is, in a sense, meteorologically accurate.

Springs and autumns in the 1830s and 1840s were wetter than average.

There was also the man-made atmosphere to contend with: industrial

smoke generated its own black clouds. But Victorian England also saw

plenty of fine weather and (in the 1850s) worrying periods of drought.14

Measurable quantities of rainfall and cloud-cover were not really,

I think, Woolf ’s point. Her method in Orlando had much more to do

with a sense that, as cultural preoccupations change, we find affinities

with different kinds of weather. We find conditions to suit us, or from

which we need to defend ourselves. Weather gathers association and, in

a constant exchange of subject and object, our associations shape our

experience of weather.

INTRODUCTION

15

Woolf’s sensitivity to cultural change over time came from aston-

ishingly wide and deep reading, and in that reading she detected shifting

meteorological emphases. In an optimistic moment, I wondered if I

could observe these shifts for myself.15 If I read straight forward through

English literature, or at least if I tried to read in a roughly chronological

way, would it be possible to feel the weather change? I was not serious

about this until I spent a summer reading poetry and chronicles from

the Anglo-Saxon period. There was seemingly no interest in warmth

(except that of the indoor fire), whereas perceptions of winter were

expressed with incomparable subtlety. The sun was nowhere to be seen,

and I wanted to know when spring would come. In March 1913 Edward

Thomas went out ‘in pursuit of spring’, walking west from London in

search of the oncoming season.16 I felt I was doing something like that –

across time rather than space. It proved addictive. My travels were not

across fields, but through books.

It amazed me to realize that there have been times when weather

is all allegory and others when the numbers on a rain gauge count for

more than a pantheon of aerial gods; there have been times for meteoric

marvels and times for gentle breeze. It is hard to find a description of a

rainy night in the early 1700s, but by the end of the eighteenth century

the Romantics will take a storm, or even just a shower, as fit subject for

their most probing meditations. At every stage I was tempted to stop,

bed down, and spend the next ten years studying the Harley lyrics or

William Cowper’s letters. But I kept Orlando in mind: I wanted to experi-

ence a sense of time travel, and to see England (and English skies) as if

filmed with a time-lapse camera.

�

We have arrived, in the twenty-first century, at a critical juncture in the

story of weather. Unless decisive action is taken very soon, the next gen-

eration will see the last of the weather we know. We will have written

our own ending to the history of life in a temperate climate which has

endured for about 11,500 years. Whatever the future holds, we are at a

point of divergence. Either there will be substantial changes in the way

we live, or there will be substantial changes in the climate – which will in

turn necessitate new ways of life. Things will not stay the same; we will

never again stand in the same relation to our weather.

A MIRROR IN THE SKY

16

Now, at what may be an end-point, it seems appropriate to consider

what English weather has meant. We hear a great deal of what may be to

come and much less of what happened in the past. For obvious reasons,

most discussions of weather and climate now operate in the future

tense, illustrated by extrapolations and projections. Even the intricate

work of historical meteorology (and how extraordinary it is that schol-

arship of different kinds converges to tell us what the weather was like

in March 1321) tends often to be valued in terms of the precedents it can

provide for what might happen next. But this is also a time to look back.

I have tried to piece together episodes from the vast history of life in the

English weather. What I offer here is just one very subjective version

of the many histories that might be told of creative responses to a rela-

tively stable set of climatic conditions in England over roughly the last

thousand years. It is a version of the life story of a literary culture, and a

portrait from many angles of the weather in which it flourished.

The rich weather-cultures of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland might fill

many books, as might the shifting relationships between them. I hope

that the imaginative weather-lives of other countries will be written, but

I have confined myself to England, the part of the world I know best. The

dialogue between here and elsewhere is constantly revealing. English

culture is made up from eclectically imported ideas, many of which

have needed adaptation to make them suitable for English weather. The

umbrella (‘little shadow’) arrived from Italy as a sunshade and quickly

turned into a rain-defence. In the eighteenth century, Palladian villas

gleamed on drawing boards, and architects wondered what would

happen to them in damp fields below heavy skies. A steady vein of

satire has laughed at this chronic problem of classicism relocated north-

wards. Alexander Pope in the 1730s mocked the builders of fashionable

mansions who ‘call the winds through long arcades to roar, / Proud to

catch cold at a Venetian door’. Angela Carter in the 1980s made revisions

to A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the basis that 24 June is no time to

be outdoors in an English wood (‘dripping bastard wood … Atischoo!’):

her fairies snuffle irritably through the chilly proceedings. Both these

writers, and many in between, make their art from the change of scene.17

Contrasts in interest and sensibility are never so apparent as

when you catch two people responding to the same thing. So I imagined

Francis Bacon and Robert Burton next to each other, looking at the

sky. Shelley wanted to sublimate himself into a cloud while Ruskin,

INTRODUCTION

17

equally but differently obsessed, wanted to store the clouds in bottles.

Compared with people like this I am the most amateur and faddish of

weather-watchers. I cannot sit looking at the sky for very long without

getting restless. I appreciate the Sky Mirror made by Anish Kapoor for

Nottingham in 2001, installing the great cosmic cinema on the pavement

and allowing us to study the clouds without craning our necks, but I

would not choose to stare into it for months at a time. I need some sort of

human scale and grounding. The effect of rain in a garden makes sense

to me more than the great untethered cloud displays on which Shelley

loved to meditate. So, by reading, I have tried to watch people watching

the sky – and people feeling the cold, and getting wet, and shielding

their eyes from the sun. Woolf talked about biographers hanging up

mirrors in odd corners to reflect their subjects in unexpected ways.18

I have tried to hang a mirror in the sky, and to watch the writers and

artists who appear in it.

A MIRROR IN THE SKY