My latest book, 100 Words for Rain, was published this week by Collins and the National Trust, and so I thought I’d share some bookish highlights from the Rain chapter with you fine bookish folk. I’m quite mean though, so you’ll have to actually buy the book to get the eponymous wordlist.
Blood rain
One of the earliest weather reports comes from a record in the Anglo Saxon Chronicles:
A.D.685. In this year in Britain there was a bloody rain, and milk and butter were turned to blood.
Although naturally distressing, blood rain is rather an unusual phenomenon, the result of red dust from deserts being distributed far afield by storms and mingling with rain droplets. Recent examples in Britain occurred in 2015 and 2022, but it has a long history, often regarded as a bad omen. It is mentioned by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his 12th century work Historia Regum Brittaniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, which established the King Arthur legends) and in July 1679 when a milkmaid in Hereford noted it falling onto her cows and into her milk.
Raining cats and dogs
It’s not clear when people started describing heavy precipitation as descending felines and canines, but the first time the idea was recorded was by Welsh poet Henry Vaughan in his 1651 poetry collection Olor Iscanas. He wrote:
The pedlars of our age have business yet,
And gladly would against the Fair-day fit
Themselves with such a roof, that can secure
Their wares from dogs and cats rained in shower.
Nor is it clear why we should say this. It may come from the Greek ‘cata doxa’ which means ‘against accepted knowledge’ i.e. nobody expects it be raining so hard. Or it could come from ‘catadupe’ an obsolete English and French word for ‘waterfall’. But we’re not alone, it pours down strange things in many other languages too, so in Welsh, it rains ‘elderly ladies and sticks”, and in Danish ‘shoemakers’ apprentices’.
Floods as punishment from God
The Bristol Channel Floods of 1607 – so severe that there is even a theory they were caused by a tsunami (pictured above in a contemporary woodcut) - inundated South Wales, Gloucestershire, Devon, and Somerset. To the pamphleteers of the period they indicated divine wrath. William Jones’s tract ‘Gods warning to his people of England By the great over-flowing of the waters’ was among these, as was a pamphlet published by Edmund White called ‘A True report of certaine wonderfull overflowings of Waters’ in which he described the floods as “destroying many thousands of men, women, and children, overthrowing and bearing downe whole townes and villages, and drowning infinte numbers of sheepe and other Cattle… our punishment greater because our treaton againt God is more horrible.” Around 2,000 people are believed to have died in the flooding.
Orford’s Fludde
In 1953, the Suffolk coast suffered major flooding (the east coast in general was very badly hit by the storms, leaving more than 300 people dead, and 30,000 evacuated from their homes). The village of Orford was among the many suffering damage, but it was here five years later in 1958 that composer Benjamin Britten premiered his opera for children and amateurs, Noye’s Fludd, in St Bartholomew's Church.
Britten’s libretto used the words of the Chester’s Corpus Christi medieval mystery play focusing on Noah and traditionally acted by the Drawers of Dee guild who brought water to the town from the local river. Among the watery elements introduced by Britten was the singing of the maritime hymn ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’ by cast and audience, and the sound of raindrops produced by local schoolchildren tapping suspended ‘slung mugs’ like a xylophone.
Readin’ in the rain
1) The Romantic poets gloried in the twists and turns of our climate and were certainly not averse to a spot of rain. Here is Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing in his notebook about a pleasant Friday morning drizzle on October 21, 1803.
A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light…Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms.
2) It rains throughout Summerwater (2020) by Sarah Moss, from beginning to end in the slightly past its best cabin park in Scotland where the novel is set: “Although there’s no distance between cloud and land, nowhere for the rain to fall, it is raining…”
3) Ted Hughes’ poem Rain throbs with description of a heavy deluge, and not in a good way:
Wraith-rain pulsing across purple-bare woods
Like light across heaved water. Sleet in it.
4) It rains incessantly in James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners, an accompaniment to beautifully written but generally melancholic times. Here’s an example from one of the pieces, Araby: “It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds.”
5) Gabriel Oak is convinced it’s going to rain on Bathsheba’s wedding night in Thomas Harday’s Far From the Madding Crowd, but his warnings are in vain and so he has to protect her crops all by himself while the rain comes down “obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.”