Richard Mabey: the unpredictable power of nature
It governs our moods, the clothes we wear, the things we do, what we talk about. But, for Richard Mabey, the weather holds the delightful promise of a new day as he finds himself mesmerised by the unpredictable power of nature
Sutton Bank, near Thirsk, northern England. Photograph: Nigel Roddis/Reuters
When Hurricane Sandy's siege of New York last autumn was quickly followed by waves of marauding floods in Britain, the closing acts in a year of numbing gloom and damp, the idea of "global warming" began to sound like a rather black joke. 2013 has set itself up in a similarly pugnacious mood: a comparatively traditional two weeks of snow, followed by yet more rain and unprecedented floods. Ten years ago, some optimists were relishing the prospects of olive groves on the South Downs. Now it looks as if we may be heading full steam for the state of Newfoundland.
But scientists, if we'd listened properly, have always insisted that climate change can't be neatly translated into weather pattern. It's likely to generate incoherence, extreme events. Climate may be the big slow-moving backdrop, but weather is what happens here and now, to our settlements and landscapes, to us. In that sense, it's part of our popular culture. One autumn afternoon back in the 1980s, I was meandering through a favourite wood in the Chilterns. Frithsden Beeches has always been an epic weather theatre, a place where freak frosts can scorch the bracken as early as September, and southwesterly gales routinely strew the ground with 300-year-old pollards. It was becoming a kind of woodwreck by then, but also gave off the aura of a woodhenge; and whatever melancholy I felt walking among the fallen was balanced by a frisson of excitement that something wonderfully Promethean was happening inside the green chaos.
On that particular afternoon the weather upped the stakes. Out of a clear blue sky (how we love our weather metaphors) it began to pour, in sheets. The rain was ferocious, spattering off the golden leaves in silver jets. The whole wood began to change colour, the trunks slicking to slate grey, next year's beech-buds glistening like glazed fruit. I huddled under the nearest holly, and realised that I'd gone to ground right next to the remains of a dear departed, the tree I called the Praying Beech, on account of two branch stubs that had fused across it just like a pair of clasped hands. Four years earlier it had been split open by a lightning strike. Bees had nested in the hollow gash. Then it was toppled in a storm. Now this gargantuan supplicant, half as tall as our parish church, was prostrate on the ground. And it was liquefying in front of my eyes. The rain was hammering drills of water at the already rotting trunk, and flakes of bark, fungal ooze, barbecued dregs from the lighting-charred heartwood, began to drip on to the woodland floor like thick arboreal soup.
Peering out from my bush, I was mesmerised. I was witnessing the dissolution of a tree, but also what felt like the beginning of something new, the elements of forest life returning to the crucible. The alchemy wrought by that storm changed my whole view of weather and the resilience of nature.
By any standards it was a spectacular weather event. If I hadn't been the only witness, it could have become a star piece of local mythology, part of that ceaseless, nagging, narrative we British have about the weather. The poet Samuel Coleridge, one of the greatest writers on what in his day were called "Meteors", would have relished the bizarre vision of a dissolving tree. On 26 July 1802, when a day of topsy-turvy Cumbrian weather had left the sky dotted with flotillas of motionless clouds, looking, he thought, "like the surface of the moon seen thro' a telescope", he'd had a brainwave. Why didn't he write a set of posters – "Playbills" he called them – "announcing each day the performance by his supreme Majesty's Servants, the Clouds, Waters, Sun, Moon, Stars"?
He never got round to it, but I reckon his scheme might go down well today. The playbills would be rather eye-catching, stuck on parish noticeboards alongside the programmes of the local dramatic society. "Melting tree on the common!" "Lightning scar on church door!" "Five-foot icicles hanging round the council offices – keep a safe distance". We're often mocked for our national obsession with weather, and the fact that some blindingly obvious remark about it is often the first greeting we make to a fellow human. "Turned out nice again" we say, or "The wind's got up". Our comments are usually banal catchphrases, hardly conversation at all, signs perhaps of our stiff – maybe frozen-stiff – upper-lips. But I find it heartening that we use these coded phrases as a kind of acknowledgment that we're all in the weather together. Of course we should be preoccupied. It's the one circumstance of life which we share in common. It affects our bodies, our moods, our behaviour, the structure of our environments. It can change the cost of living and the likelihood of death. It is a kind of common language.
And though much of the time we complain about our climatic lot, about our seemingly inexorable legacy of insidious rain and grey skies, there's a little bit of us that relishes rough weather, just so long as it doesn't move into truly malevolent mode. So, we swing between sulky resentment and playful derring-do. The municipal gritters never arrive on time, our plumbing is a disaster, but come the first decent snowfall and we are out playing truant on our toboggans. On the first day of December, our local pub in Norfolk throws down the gauntlet by announcing – in its own version of the Coleridgean playbill – a "Guess the Date of the First Snowfall" competition, pinned on a board next to the biggest wood-burner in the district. We can make any pastime into a winter sport. I once watched the annual Oxford and Cambridge rugby match played with mad gallantry in four inches of snow and a temperature of -6C. Glastonbury is now every bit as much a mud festival as a music festival, and has turned the Wellington boot into a fashion item.
Our creative sparring with the climate flourishes when it comes to clothing. The "Country Life" style has always been ridiculed for its pomposity and obvious discomfort, but vernacular weather togs are another matter. I love seeing folded newspaper sunhats and knotted handkerchiefs on the beach, and fieldworkers donning fertiliser bags in summer storms. Once, by the river Dove in Derbyshire, I watched a gang of five-year-olds picking the rhubarb-sized leaves of butterbur to make themselves umbrellas during a downpour. I've no idea whether they were just aping modern brollies, or had the same instinctive sympathy with plants that led the ancient Greeks to name butterbur petasos, meaning a broad-brimmed hat. On another cold and showery day in 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth and her beloved brother William buttoned themselves up together in a "Guard's coat", and Dorothy coyly confessed that she "liked the hills and the rain the better for bringing us so close to one another ..."
These ambivalent, not so say contrary, responses to the weather – fury at the "wrong sort of snow on the line" coexisting with a breakfast-table thrill at hoar-frost turning the trees to lacework – are special to Britain. They happen because we haven't really the foggiest idea about what, day on day, to expect, so that any slightly untoward disturbance of the atmosphere is regarded as an unnatural affront, or, then again, an unexpected benediction. Sudden snowfalls and un-forecast heatwaves throw us equally. Because of where we live, on an island in the middle of the Atlantic storm belt, just offshore from a huge, breathing, landmass, our meteorological lot is messy and erratic, whether we like it or not. We can't acclimatise, reconcile ourselves to these repeated bolts from the blue, even though our climate is, in reality, quite mellow. We don't have to live with active volcanoes or sudden tsunamis. The temperature has only exceeded 100F (38C) three times in the last hundred years. The heaviest rainfall in a single day was 11 inches in Martinstown, Dorset, on 18 July 1955. When you compare that with the several feet that can fall in a couple of hours in a tropical monsoon, you can get our weather in some kind of perspective. What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you're going to be under three feet of snow every February.
And hanging over all of us now is that more sinister, unpredictable, climate change. It's already happening, and there are few encouraging signs that we're willing, or able, to do anything about it. But how it might translate into local weather is impossible to predict. Even harder is imagining how we and the rest of creation will react. Living organisms aren't passive victims, and there will be surprises there, too.
But if we are bequeathed a new climate, of whatever sort, its bouts of maverick weather won't necessarily be unfamiliar. The best antidote to an attack of "we've never had it so bad" is simply to look back clearly at the past. Every extreme and nuance of weather has been experienced in Britain before. And for at least 400 years, writers, painters, scientist and folk in the street have left records of our legacy of outrageous, beautiful, violent, glorious, mysterious and simply ordinary weather, and how they – and we – reacted to it. We have more weather proverbs than the Inuit, proverbially, have descriptions for snow. Constable and Turner's paintings brim over with weather, as do the works of modern artists such as Kurt Jackson. We have weather symphonies and weather nursery rhymes. And it would be hard to find an English writer whose diaries don't carry, under the dominant melody of their daily lives, the choral hum of sun-dried grass and windblown leaves and subterranean water. Dorothy Wordsworth was Coleridge's gentler, domestic soulmate, and in March 1802 watched "Little Peggy Simpson standing at her door catching the hailstones in her hand". Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great synaesthetist, perceived sheets of bluebells as floods, and clouds as solid rocks. On 19 June 1848 he saw "two beautiful anvil clouds so low on the earthlines in opposite quarters, so that I stood between them." For about 30 years I kept a kind of nature diary myself but it was constantly interrupted by sulky notes about my internal weather – a reminder that the climate is also an influence on and a metaphor for our wellbeing. Thomas Hardy, most Martian-eyed of diarists, wrote one freezing January that "Cold weather brings out upon the faces of people the written marks of their habits, vices, passions, and memories, as warmth brings out on paper a writing in sympathetic ink."
But, for me, the master is the 18th-century curate Gilbert White, of Selborne, in Hampshire. White was the first truly literary naturalist, and the journal he kept for the best part of 40 years raises weather writing to a new level. If most diarists are essentially weather-scapists, White was a weather storyteller. His journals are full of spare, glittering miniatures that often have the depth and rhythm of haiku. 31 March 1768: "Black weather, Cucumber fruit swells, Rooks sit" – the ambivalent progress of March caught in a three-act drama of seven words. Or this entry from 1 February 1785 that could be a scene from a symbolist film: "On this cold day about noon a bat was flying round Gracious street-pond, & dipping down & sipping the water, like swallows, as it flew: all the while the wind was very sharp, & the boys were standing on the ice!"
The skill of all these diarists is that they catch the feel of weather through ordinary domestic detail. White knew it was really cold when the pisspot froze under his bed, just as I did – before we had central heating – when there was frostwork on the inside of the windows. His heatwave threshold was when the meat went off in the safe; mine when there were tar bubbles on the roads. Samuel Pepys caught the extraordinariness of a scorching July day in 1667 by describing how he slept, daringly, for the first time since he was a boy, with only a rug and sheet upon him.
This intimacy of detail has now been adopted by the weather forecasters. Their invention of "spicks and spots of rain" has entered the vernacular. In 2012, the term "grass frost" became fashionable, a friendly phrase that describes exactly what you could see out of the window first thing without having to leave the house and thrust a fork in the ground. Weather forecasters have become our new shamans, and the forecast has, in a sense, become part of the weather, an affecting, emotional experience as well as a detached prediction.
The forecast reminds us, crucially, that the weather, in our culture and our psychology, is intricately linked with time, and especially with time's familiars: memory and expectation. Sometimes weather leaves physical remnants of its fulminations. White wrote an electrifying account of the tangled banks of Hampshire's deep hollow lanes, and how they had been formed by centuries of floods and frosts. Weather had been preserved in the aspic of geology. I experienced a more ephemeral weather relic when I moved to East Anglia a decade ago, and found its gales, ranting uninterrupted from the Urals, were a sight more brazen than the treetop wind-gossip in the Chilterns. The October I moved into a 16th-century timber-framed farmhouse, a mighty wind got up, and was palpable even inside the house. A strange miasma began to drift into the rooms through the beam-joints and knot-holes, an airborne flotsam of rotten wood crumbs, lime-plaster dust, wisps of horsehair and centuries'-old swift droppings, sucked up in the loft and whirled down through the cracks in the ceilings. It was an aerial fossil, evidence that weather, seemingly so much a phenomenon of the now, has currents reaching back into the past and forward into the future – and that it can blow our minds. We forget real good days and invent golden ages, blame the messengers for the bad and then expect to be punished ourselves should we ever be blessed with an inordinately perfect summer. "We'll pay for it," we gloomily predict. When it comes to weather, we're still primitive animists.
Last year was declared to have been the second-wettest year in England for at least a century. The flooding, especially in the Midlands and West Country, was devastating. During November and December, 8,000 homes were submerged and the Environment Agency issued 1,000 flood warnings. The whole of Devon and Cornwall were cut off from the rest of England for days, first by rail and then by road. Up here in the flatlands of East Anglia, where floodwater generally disperses itself widely but thinly across the whole landscape, we're living in a rural time-machine, the ancient dips and subtle gradations of the land pricked out by water just as they must have been at the melting of the glaciers 15,000 years ago. Even after a month of comparatively little rain, walking across our sodden lawn, riddled with wormcasts, feels like treading grapes.
It's hard to believe that only nine months ago we were in the middle of adrought that the water industry informed us would take two winters of heavy rain to cancel out. The spring was so cold that bees stayed in hibernation in their hives, and the apples weren't fertilised, resulting in the worst crop for 15 years. The summer lasted about a week. Then, in autumn, the increasingly unstable jet-stream flipped again, and the monsoon rains began. The hosepipe bans were rapidly converted into flood alerts. Potato crops were simply washed out of the ground. Ash die-back, a new tree disease in Britain, was rumoured to have migrated here from the near east on warming air contours. In November, the popular press, gleefully tapping into the growing sense of climatic apocalypse, predicted December would begin with the worst winter freeze-up for 400 years, which was followed, it hardly needs saying, by one of the warmest, if wettest, winter months. It seems as if the whole pattern of seasonal weather, as well as our capacity to talk sensibly about it, has gone completely out of kilter.
These oscillations, taking Britain's always unstable weather to a new state of reductio ad absurdum, have been going on long enough to qualify as a trend. Are they also the consequence of global warming? Quite probably. Scientists have long suggested that in our corner of the Atlantic the results of climate change won't be a pleasantly gentle rise in temperature, making England into a kind of northern extension of the Dordogne, but swings between extremes of weather, with droughts, heavy rain and strong winds likely to be the dominating features. The traditional British mixture as before, in other words, only worse and more muddled.
Only the wilfully blinkered or economically compromised deny global warming is happening, and that human activity has a major role in it. But maybe a similar kind of denial, a refusal to accept extremely uncomfortable likelihoods, is blinkering those who believe we may be able to halt it. The last 20 years have seen nothing but missed targets and repeatedly postponed agreements. Politicians are too self-interested, corporate business too greedy, scientists barely able to grasp the complexity of what is happening, and the rest of us, the buckpassing public, too irrevocably wedded to our high-consumption lifestyles. And though it would be good to think we were mature enough as a species to do better than this, I wonder if we could tolerate the authoritarian governance and high-risk planetary engineering that would be necessary even if we were to find a solution.
Meanwhile, we will doubtless continue with our tragicomic street theatre of daily coping. Parishioners will rope themselves to favourite trees to try to keep them upright in gales. Policeman will improvise giant snowballs to block off sliproads on iced-up motorways. Crowds at sporting events will sing uproariously to frighten away the rain. And all the while we will say to each other, while both waving and drowning, "It's turned out nice again."
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