Weatherland: Writers and artists under English skies by Alexandra Harris
(Thames & Hudson, paperback, 432 pages. Out now and available here in the Caught by the River shop, priced £9.99)
Review by Tim Dee
1st January 1768
It freezes under people’s beds – Gilbert White
*
Alexandra Harris’ Weatherland is a book I have been waiting for all my life. I’ve wanted words about the weather as well as the stuff itself for as long as I’ve known the difference between mist and drizzle, rain and sleet, depressions and highs. Weatherland superbly provides. Its arrival makes me realise how odd it is that no one had tried such a thing before. Thanks be that we have it now: a compendious, informed, and enthusiastic account of how the weather has got beneath the skin of English culture from its beginnings until now (I say English not British because that is what the book declares itself to offer).
I got a page-a-day diary for Christmas in 1968. The first words I wrote in it in at the beginning of the new year were ‘Snow. Fox prints in the garden.’ I began keeping a bird notebook around the same time. After the date, I wrote a weather summary, and then a bald list of species and numbers. From early on wind was my obsession. I knew it blew the birds from one zone to another, to places where they had to go, with the in- and out-breaths of seasonal change; I also knew that it drove some birds far from where they ought to be and those birds, accidentals or vagrants, were the ones you really wanted to see. The misfits born of bad weather, the wrecks, the blow-ins.
*
12th February 1870
The slate slabs of the urinals even are frosted in graceful sprays – Gerard Manley Hopkins
*
Everybody talked about the weather because everybody lived under it, but to be interested in it, looking up at the sky, keeping a weather eye, was thought old fashioned, almost quaint. Remember the Emergency Minister for Rain and his dance? The Ealing comedy of Michael Fish? A rustic scrutinising frogspawn at the end of a news bulletin; a salty sea-dog and his auguring seaweed? We all got excited and exercised when the weather asserted itself one way or another (my father’s principal memory of his National Service is of filling sandbags against the great North Sea storm surge of 1953); but believing that it operated as more than a backdrop or atmosphere, with just occasional outlandish moments, suggested a depressed appreciation of the march of human progress. An unnecessary negativity. We lived after all in a temperate place in a temperate time. We would fill enough sandbags and raise our sea-walls, for we were on the brink of bossing the weather into submission, seeding clouds, centrally heating our lives, double glazing ourselves, unfurling umbrellas, catching the wind, and marshalling the sun. Then, just now, we discovered that we had mastered it beyond our intentions; worse, we were trapped in a terrifying snarl of feedback, a howl around, and were now, without ever wanting to be so godlike, determining how it would determine our fate. In the last ten years winter has pretty much disappeared in the south of England except for strange spasms now known as weather events. Generally, we are cooking ourselves.
*
12th March 1802
The sun shone while it rained, and the stones of the walls and the pebbles of the road glittered like silver – Dorothy Wordsworth
*
Climate change is what Weatherland is all about. Most of its talk though concerns the past and not the present. Instead, it takes on the term at its widest and most suggestive meaning. Climate has and continues to change how we are and therefore how we record ourselves through our arts. You can’t learn about the Beaufort Scale here, nor the taxonomy of clouds, nor reach for an occluded front or ungraspable haar. Other books or apps perhaps can help with this. But what is here is more than enough: a beautifully told account of the weather as muse to a thousand writers and painters and other artists through the English centuries, since the Roman soldiers posted to the Wall, holding back the shaggy northerners, sent shivering messages home to the warm south asking their mummies for some woolly socks.
*
2nd April 1855
Lovely sleet showers with melting sunshine – John Ruskin
*
The scope and range is extraordinary in this book: no one time is singled out, no writer or painter preferred. The weather, as it will, pushes the story. This, for two thousand years has been mostly the same, a year-round dance, with cyclical fluctuations, some spikes and troughs, little ice ages and droughts, some summers without sun and some winters without frost, but mostly as English as the weather will be, or at least was. But our island species has moved at a different speed to the weather, emotionally evolving over these two thousand years, and also benefiting along the way from gabardines and Gore-Tex, so that we have not always felt or read our weather in the same way.
We have grown up with a local and specific climate and know how to pull forty different faces against our various rains. Our expressions now are not quite what they were when our grandparents made them. Likewise the same rain falls on Belgium but they have different faces for it there. Just because. And in places there the rain speaks French and in others Dutch.
The weathered nature of our history means that the Anglo-Saxon world is a winter world (‘English literature began in the cold’, Harris writes); that the discovery or invention of the sublime in nature privileged storms in the late Eighteenth Century romantic era (see the account of Coleridge rushing out into a North Devon howl around, without a hat, to feel its slap and to lap it all up); and that Victorian England shows ‘Varieties of Gloom’ above all other weathers in its novels and paintings (Harris is brilliant on the Nineteenth Century enthusiasm for fog and anxiety about smoke and its genius at painting dusk and street lamps).
*
16th May 1918
The country in the bright morning light was simply bowed down with beauty – heavy, weighed down with treasure – Katharine Mansfield
*
The sun does shine in Weatherland. Lidos get a look in.
There is a day every spring when I feel, although it’s a factual nonsense, that the temperature outside my body must be the same as that within, so joined and continuous is the sensation of well-being and happiness; it’s like floating in an amniotic bath and I might swim through the air; a naked ape comes to mind, though only rarely have I been known to set off alarms by realising the image.
*
13th June 1783
Dead ducks cannot travel this weather; they say it is too hot for them, and they shall stink – William Cowper
*
I got to know Alex and we devised a radio version of her book. We met last June in Oxford and drove to Wayland’s Smithy on the Oxfordshire Downs to talk about how we might conjure the weather for the radio. The smithy is a Neolithic long barrow and chambered tomb. We sat on its grassy roof as the surrounding grove of tall beech trees – babies to its placed stones – greenly thrashed and greenly moaned in the high summer wind. Everything we wanted to say seemed to be being said.
We decided to call the series ‘During Wind and Rain’, quoting Thomas Hardy’s poem, but the meta-data people at the BBC told us we needed ‘weather’ in our title otherwise people wouldn’t find the programmes. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows but you do need the right word. The ten-part series was broadcast earlier this year and is now available on the BBC Radio 4 website.
*
6th July 1848
Went to Land’s End. Mist. Great yellow flare just before sunset. Funeral. Land’s End and Life’s End – Alfred Tennyson
*
The butterflies are good in July – spring weather panel-beaten into wings – but little else is at its best. For a birder it is dire: nothing is moving and everything has stopped singing; ugly babies are crashing about in hedges, wheezing like punctured tyres; ducks begin their moult and loaf around in their underwear. Here come the dog days, when the year’s energy, its swing towards the light, falters, all traction spent. Go south and burn; or north and get eaten by mosquitoes.
During a broiling week in London in 1771 Jonathan Swift went night swimming in his nightgown in the Thames: ‘his description in the letters is so vivid that we can visualize him there, bare feet on stone, a pale middle-aged figure in the dark, clammy with heat on a sultry city night. Longing for a “cold bath”, he plunged in, dived right under, and lost his cap…’
*
4th August 1802
Before me, the huge enormous mountains of Wasdale all bare and iron-red – and on them a forest of cloud-shadows, all motionless – S. T. Coleridge
*
Happiness writes white it is said, and good weather writing likewise yields a much slimmer folder of cuttings than bad or even ordinary weather (British culture probably does rain and grey better than anyone else – it is marketable, the painter Whistler came for the greys and found what he wanted). Constable looked at clouds from as many sides as he could – and I’ve often wondered what he or Turner or Ruskin would have made of air travel and cloudscapes seen from above, and have wondered also why artists of our time have made so little of the view from five miles up.
Put alongside these hypothetical flights the aureate visions of harvest fields at night-time by Samuel Palmer; and the memorably blazing accounts of cutting a crop under hot sun by D.H. Lawrence in stories and his own letters (in 1908 he described himself as a long mushroom in a felt hat on the top of a haystack); and the extraordinary opening chapter of John Fowles’ Daniel Martin, where a wartime Devon harvesting bleeds into adolescent awakenings with cornered rabbits in the last uncut rows of wheat and a stricken enemy plane ploughing into the earth.
*
3rd September 1797
A leaden-coloured vapour rising upon the horizon, the ocean whiter; until the last deep twilight, when all is one gradual, inseparable, undistinguishable, grey – Ann Radcliffe
*
These brief intersecting weather-inflected reports are culled mostly from, what I grew up thinking of as, the olden days. But it – the weather thing – does all still continue and still continue to operate. Matthew Hollis and I recently put together a poetry anthology for Faber called The Seasons. We were pleased to include these two poems (one from the eighteenth century, one from the twentieth) at curtain-up:
The Twelve Months Snowy, Flowy, Blowy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy, Breezy, Sneezy, Freezy. George Ellis A Song for England An’ a so de rain a-fall An’ a so de snow a-rain An’ a so de fog a-fall An’ a so de sun a-fail An’ a so de seasons mix An’ a so de bag-o-tricks But a so me understan’ De misery o’ de Englishman. Andrew Salkey
*
7th October 1874
For some time I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering glancing twinkling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. This afternoon I saw the word written on the poplar leaves. It was ‘dazzle’ – Francis Kilvert
*
The general synopsis, at the moment at least, is wet not warm. I have twice been on a boat and listened to the shipping forecast on the radio with a view to sailing the next day. Twice the even tones and measured readings stalled a plan to get to Saint Kilda. Mostly I listen landlocked, in hock only to my pillows and duvet, and let the poem of it all wash or blow over me in my nest of home. Nothing else on radio has drawn poets to it as much as the shipping forecast – the incanted journey around the sea lanes and wild waters of our islands; havens and harbours evoked and desired; the mysterious numbers listed like a translation of betting odds or the football results into the language of air; the sense you catch, from your fastness, of others listening out at sea and all that that suggests.
*
17th November 1798
What fine weather this is! Very pleasant out of doors at noon, and very wholesome – at least everybody fancies so and imagination is everything – Jane Austen
*
One of Alexandra Harris’s finest chapters is about Frost Fairs on the Thames. Adversity then was turned to celebration: bad weather made good. Nowadays it is hard to imagine the river frozen. I felt one recent winter arrive and depart in a single day. It lasted about four hours. One morning in the capital it dipped towards freezing with a china-clay sky but it warmed in the afternoon and I took my gloves off and never needed them again.
I grew up thinking that Ice Ages were things of the past. I know now about inter-glacial periods and the North Atlantic oscillation and desertification and acid rain and water wars and ozone and El Niño and sunken atolls and drowning cities. The new arts on these new known and newly lived experiences are coming and will need collecting and documenting.
Imagine the records of how it was to live under the weather, on a world gone wrong at our hands, and these thrown hastily on board whatever ark we might manage to fashion. For how it has felt up to now we have Weatherland.
*
25th December 1824
Gather’d a handful of daisies in full bloom – saw a woodbine and dogrose in the woods out in full leaf and a primrose root full of ripe flowers – John Clare
*
Tim Dee is a writer and BBC radio producer. He’s at work on a book about gulls to be called Landfill and another about the spring in Europe. He’ll be talking to Alexandra Harris on our Port Eliot stage on Sunday 31 July.