Of course, it tasted all the more nectarous for the wait and the effort, and was a reminder that – except for the rare occasions when they descend on you unbidden – days of halcyon weather often occur because in some way, often unconsciously, we have worked for them. Our journalistic leading-man, Gilbert White, had many small-scale halcyons, for instance on hot July mornings when his beloved swifts, ‘getting together in little parties, dash round the steeples and churches, squeaking as they go in a very clamorous manner.’ But his weather epiphany occurred one autumn, on 12 September, 1758, when he was able to hold a melon feast on the steep beech-clad hill behind his house, the culmination of years of attempting to grow this sub-tropical fruit in the fickle English climate. Eighteenth-century naturalists and gardeners were infatuated by melons. More than any other vegetable growth they seemed to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. They were exotic, picturesque, and repaid investment and scientific ingenuity with enormous productivity.
Throughout the 1750s the ‘melon ground’ as White grandly called it, was the epicentre of activity in his garden. And each year, as he nursed these temperamental fruits to maturity, he became locked into his own version of our common struggle with the rigours and vagaries of British weather. His melons hung, in late winter, in a precarious balance between succumbing to damp-induced mildew or freezing to death; and later, between suffering drought or sunburn or being flooded out. Plus ça change. Their fortunes, and his reactions, are, as always, meticulously recorded in his journal. On 21 March, 1758, there was heavy snow, and a ‘stinking, wet fog … Very trying weather for the Hot beds’. On 16 April: ‘So fierce a frost with a South-wind as to freeze the steam which run out in water between the panes of ye Melon-frames into long icicles’. Two months later it was too hot, and the melon leaves were ‘strangely blistered’ by being in fierce sun while the dew was still on them.
But in mid-August, at last, it all comes good. Gilbert cuts the first ‘Cantaleupe’, and finds it ‘perfectly delicate, dry, & firm [despite] the unfavourable weather ever since the time of setting.’ Then, on 12 September, with all the homage you might show to a classic Bordeaux vintage, he holds a ceremonial melon feast in his little hillside hermitage, and cuts up a brace and a half of fruit among his fourteen guests. ‘The weather’, he adds ‘very fine ever since the ninth.’
But there can be winter halcyons, too, days of clarity and acute perception quite unlike the luxuriance of the warm months. I’m not a winter person myself. I can marvel at the sight of a landscape made anew, reduced to its fundamentals by snow. But I can’t stop thinking about what may be happening underneath its virginal finery. What is starving? What has already died? I once saw thousands of migrating red-wings blown exhausted by a blizzard onto the Norfolk coast, their emaciated bodies already like dark absences against the whiteness. But the Romantics discovered something extra in winter, the possibility of accelerated solitude. Winter offered an unexpected monde renversé for those who cared to look beyond its snuggled interiors: the chance for fierce physical engagement with nature, but on your own, not picnicking with your peers in the Melon Ground.
And ice-skating, brought to Britain by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century was the obvious way in. Gilbert White and Francis Kilvert were mad for skating. So was Goethe, and there is a deliciously wry painting of him from the 1850s, looking a little like Lord Byron and swooping across the ice through crowds of doting female admirers. But it was Wordsworth, legendary as a Lake District skater, who most perfectly captured the Romantic electricity of the solitary ice-glider, the spark and hiss of the frost-fisher. There is a long passage celebrating the jollity of communal night skating in Lakeland in his masterly poem, The Prelude. But halfway through he swerves sideways, ‘leaving the tumultuous throng,/ To cut across the reflex of a star/ That fled, and, flying before me, gleamed/ Upon the glassy plain …’
In the hard winter of December 2011, the ponds on our village green froze solid. I don’t skate, but my partner Polly does. She was brought up in the Norfolk Broads where her father was a country GP, and a renowned skimmer of the lakes and fens. She has inherited his skill and guts – and his skates. So on Boxing Day, we walked down to the biggest of the horse ponds, which, in width and length, is about the size of a cricket pitch. Poll put on her on her own skates, and after a little initial unsteadiness, began to glide demurely about. I felt I should keep a weather eye on her, so I meandered round the edge of the common, casually looking for field-fares and barn owls, and enjoying the way the icy crust over the mud scrunched like a crème brûlée under my feet. Then I spotted a tall dark stranger walking briskly in our direction and felt I should head back to the pond. He proved to be an amiable Dutchman in his mid-sixties, playing truant from his mother-in-law. He looked enviously at Polly’s twirling, and she asked if he’d like a go. Being a Dutchman, his answer was obvious. What was even more eerily coincidental than his serendipitous arrival was that his skate size was the same as Polly’s father’s, whose sleek sixty-year-old leather-shoed blades – so different from the miniature canoes Dutch skaters wear – she had generously brought along for just such an eventuality. Within seconds our new friend had wriggled into them, and was away over the ice. He needed a while to adjust to the skates’ unfamiliar slimness, but was soon arcing round the little pond in true fenland – and true canal-land – style, fast but languorous, one hand behind the back, the other sweeping like an elegant pendulum in front. As he speeded up, the ice began to hiss, and blow in clouds as he took the corners with beautiful, double-pace foot-crossing. As the sun set he became almost a blur against the frosted scrub, and I thought he was one of the most sublime cold-weather creatures I had ever seen. He made a halcyon day for me. But, skimming across the glassy element on which he must surely have been hatched, he brought this tale full circle and became a winter halcyon himself.
5
THE STORM CLOUDS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
‘SUNSHINE IS DELICIOUS, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up.’ So chirped that arbiter of Victorian cultural values, John Ruskin, ending his eulogy to climatic variety with one of the most quoted of all weather sayings: ‘there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather’. That rather neatly sums up the idea I’ve been exploring in this book, that weather, an incontestable feature of the physical world, is also a creature of our imaginations. How we experience and deal with it depends on our moods and memories and powers of myth-making, on how we talk to each other, on our hopes for the future.
For Ruskin the full truth of this became horribly clear years later, when his normally sharp and insightful journal becomes increasingly infused with dark visions. From the spring of 1871 he became convinced he could see an immense storm-cloud louring over the Lake District, often accompanied by ‘plague winds of a diabolic aspect’. On 17 July he records an evening that had become ‘the blackest … the devil has yet brought on us – utterly hellish, and the worse for its dead quiet – no thunder or any natural character of a storm … the black shaking was worst of all.’ When thunderstorms did materialise they were like ‘railway luggage trains … the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog like smoke.’ Soon he was beginning to believe the ferocity in the sky was directed against himself. He was losing his ability to draw natural forms and, in 1880, after recording ‘wild wind and black sky – scudding rain and roar – the climate of Patagonia instead of England,’ he confessed that he was in a state of ‘hopelessness, wonder and disgust… as if it was no use fighting for a world any more in which there could be no sunrise.’ Four years later, in February 1884, he delivered two lectures on his observations at the London Institution, entitled ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. He summed up the new weather in a phrase that has a chilling resonance today: ‘Blanched sun, blighted grass, blinded man.’
Ruskin’s mental health had been deteriorating since the 1860s, and there’s no doubt that these terrible visions were a consequence of clinical depressi
on and maybe episodes of true paranoia. But they may also have been partly real. The blast furnaces at nearby Barrow and Millom were increasingly polluting the air with soot and fumes and the invisible effluvium of carbon dioxide – the storm cloud of our own times.
Yet dismissals of Ruskin’s visions as either psychotic hallucinations or simple melodramatic exaggerations of real industrial-age weather seem inadequate. For all their mania, they chime unsettlingly with our current fears and social anxieties. At their heart was a frightened man ill-at-ease with himself, with the blind and insensitive advance of technology (that railway luggage train!), with nature’s seeming indifference to humankind, and our indifference to nature. A man projecting onto the weather his feelings about the state of the world. Someone rather like ourselves, in fact, as we gaze nervously at the gathering storm clouds of the twenty-first century.
Early this January, 2012 was declared to have been the 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 flood-water generally disperses itself widely but thinly across the whole landscape, we were 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.
It’s hard to believe that only nine months ago we were in the middle of a drought that the water industry informed us would take two winters of heavy rain to cancel out. The spring was so cold that bees bunkered down in their hives in hibernation mode. The apples weren’t fertilised, resulting in the worst crop for fifteen years. The summer lasted about a week. Then, in autumn, the increasingly unstable jet-stream flipped again and the monsoon rains began. Hose-pipe 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, of 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 outpost of the Dordogne, but swings between extremes of weather, with droughts, heavy rain and strong winds likely to be the dominating features. In other words, the traditional British mixture as before, only worse and more muddled.
This book hasn’t been about climate, or its changes. It’s been a personal look at how we live with the weather that is our daily, intimately experienced embodiment of climate. But if the climate itself is on the move, then it becomes part of this story.
Only those with ideological blinkers or vested interests deny global warming is happening, and that human activity has a major role in it. But I wonder if a similar kind of denial, a refusal to accept extremely uncomfortable likelihoods, is blinkering those who believe we may be able to halt it. My own view, if I may be forgiven one last meteorological metaphor, is that we have a snowball’s chance in hell of stopping it, at least in the short term. The last twenty 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 buck-passing public, too irrevocably wedded to our high-consumption lifestyles. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying. It would be good to think we were mature enough as a species to pull this off; yet I wonder if we could tolerate the authoritarian governance and high-risk planetary engineering which would be necessary even if we were to find a solution.
There have been utopian schemes for improving the climate for centuries, and they occupy one of the more bizarre – and worrying – corners of our weather mythology. The eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon believed the earth’s climate was improving, and would continue to do so, because of man’s vigorous taming of nature, especially the clearance of forests, ‘which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun’. He yearned for global warming. Schemes put forward by the engineer Hermann Segel in the imperious mood of Germany in the 1920s and 30s involved draining the Mediterranean and flooding the Sahara desert. That this would wipe the Belgian Congo off the map was regarded as a minor technical difficulty. As late as the 1960s, the Russian engineer P. M. Borisov put forward a plan to dam the Bering Straits and divert the warm water of the Pacific into the Arctic Sea, thus melting the ice-cap completely and making Siberia warm enough to grow cherries.
I find it hard to see much difference between these mad fantasies, with all their arrogance and ecological ignorance, and current schemes to ameliorate global warming with big technological fixes. Sowing the oceans with thousands of tonnes of soluble iron, for instance, to promote the growth of plankton, which would mop up atmospheric carbon dioxide. Or sending giant parasols into space, to shield us from the sun. The unknown and unpredictable ecological effects that could result might be as catastrophic as the warming they are intended to prevent. All these wild dreams reflect our seemingly unshakeable belief that we are clever enough to control nature – the same hubris that got us into the climate crisis in the first place.
Grandiose schemes have no part in the way earth – the intricate, diverse, locally inventive earth – works. So my forlorn guess is that we will have to confront climate change in the way the planet has always done, muddling and adapting our way through as best we can. It’s likely to be a rough ride. More human populations will starve. Many wild species may become extinct. Some landscapes will change in ways we can’t imagine. But what we do not know is exactly where or how all this will happen. We may be able to make statistical generalisations about climate shift, but not about the complex weather it will generate, or about how we and all other living things will react. Succumbing to Ruskin’s doom-laden storm-cloud will get us nowhere.
I’ve experienced two major climatic crises in my life, and seen something of the ways humans and other beings respond. The first was short and dramatic, the great storm of 16 October, 1987. It lasted just five hours and toppled fifteen million trees, less than one per cent of south-east England’s total. But it was a cultural apocalypse, which changed the way we think about the apparent stability of nature, and about the kind of relationship we should have with it. It revealed our touching affection for our arboreal neighbours, and a dismal lack of understanding about how they themselves lived as a community. I roamed about the shattered woodlands for a whole week after the storm and saw and heard stranger images emanating from the human observers than from the tumult of tumbled, creaking, odoriferous-splitting timber itself. Foreboding, guilt, anger at what were thought to be random malign forces, were as clamorous as the ubiquitous whine of chain-saws. At Kew they held an informal service for ‘the fallen’. The Tree Council issued a press statement, an extraordinary solecism that seemed to place the republic of trees solidly inside the kingdom of man: ‘Trees’, it solemnly warned, ‘are at great danger from nature’. Some heritage pundit went on television and declared that ‘the landscapes of southern England had been ruined for ever’.
Next spring things looked rather different. Except where landowners had sent in the bulldozers to clear away the wreckage (and most of the underlying soil) the newly sunlit woods were covered wi
th seedling trees, as thick as grass in places. Ten years on and they had grown into woodlets twenty feet tall. Now, a quarter of a century later, it is hard to tell where the storm hit, and the idea that catastrophes are an entirely natural and often renewing phase in the evolution of woodlands has become part of conventional wisdom.
My second experience of climate change is long term and ongoing. Ten years ago I moved from the storm-tossed woods of the Chilterns to the wetlands of Norfolk, where flooding is the major threat. Not flooding in the manner of the sudden torrents in the steep river valleys of the West, but an insidious rising of the waters under the earth, slow seepages in from the sea. Much of East Anglia lies only metres above the sea-level and the whole geological region is slowly tilting down towards what is locally still called the German Ocean. The warming sea is, for its part, slowly rising, and combined with increasingly frequent storm surges, is causing breaches of the sea-walls on an almost annual basis. The villages on seaward edge of the Broads are slowly tumbling into the sea, and the graves of some of Polly’s ancestors will one day be as deep in the North Sea as Dunwich church. Further north, attempts to keep the sea out with ever-higher shingle banks has simply given the waves bigger targets to ram-raid. After the great storm surge of 9 November, 2007, they looked like chewed fish. The sea had gnawed through in dozens of places and sprayed tongues of shingle hundreds of metres into the freshwater marshes where bittern and marsh harrier breed.
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