In All Weathers

RAIN

At times rain is a devastating disruption that explodes into our lives, transforming rivers to destructive torrents and sending floods into our homes and businesses. But mostly it is simply seen as an annoyance; an inconvenience that stops play, ruins weddings, picnics, camping trips, sports days and hairdos. Dull, dreary, miserable days filled with grey cloud, drizzle and mizzle. When was the last time you deliberately went outside to feel the rain on your skin?

By avoiding rain, we've forgotten how to appreciate it - how it falls, how it feels, how it affects the land. Our knowledge has been relegated to the wet and wild nomenclature of old: the dabbly rain that sticks to the skin in Suffolk or the moor-gallop of Cumbria and Cornwall where the rain moves in quick-moving sheets across high ground.1

Perhaps it is easy to want to rethink rain now that its absence has stretched on for week after dusty week, but I find myself longing to experience and enjoy it, rather than view it grimly through a window. I want to relearn and relive rain in all its forms: frontal rain that falls when cold and warm air meet; orographic rain caused by air passing over high ground; rain that comes down so hard it takes the breath away. I want to run outside when it explodes out of the blue, to walk through the showers, deluges, downpours and drizzles that leave the world glistening and renewed.

BREAKING. PETRICHOR.
STORM. Suffolk, August 2022

In our house we always sleep with the soothing sound of the rain. Google, play the sound of a storm. We ask for it without fail. First, a distant peal of thunder and then a wet tapping that builds quickly to a torrential white noise. My daughter does it too. Every night you'll find two localised rainstorms rattling around upstairs. Damping down the day, making the house, the bed, feel that much more cosy. We drift off in a safe, rain-ringed harbour. But tonight there is to be a third storm.

We hear it coming in the early hours. The deep, belly-rumble of thunder growing to a vicious crack that sounds like something terrible is being broken. We talk quietly, slipping in and out of sleep, plotting the distance of the storm by counting the seconds between the sheet lightning that flashes white around the edges of the blind, and the corresponding hollow boom of thunder. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Divide by five. Two miles. We wait, staring up into the darkness. Flash. I drum the seconds out on my stomach. One, two, three, four, five. Boom. One mile. The air is changing. Becoming charged. Closer, we whisper. It's definitely getting closer.

We have been waiting for this for weeks. For something, somewhere to shift and for the pressure to be relieved. The storm will be, we hope, the reset switch. A turning off and on again that will make the weather behave in a way that is more, well, normal. That will bring an end to what feels like two months of ceaseless, almost violent heat.

A couple of days ago, on a breathless evening when outside was marginally cooler than in, rain had begun to fall from a lumpy bank of cumulonimbus. Jen and I stood in the garden and looked up until our necks hurt, expecting a downpour, for the rain to turn thick and heavy. The patio slowly darkened, but you could still walk between the drops without getting wet. There was almost enough time for the stone to dry before the next drop fell. This wasn't yet to be the relief we'd been waiting for.

The smell was there though. You know it. You'd know it anywhere: petrichor.

The word was first used in 1964 by researchers at the Australian CSIRO science agency to describe the yellow-coloured oil, which is responsible for the scent, that was released from rocks after they had been steam distilled. In Greek, petra means 'stone', and ichor refers to the golden fluid that flows through the veins of the immortals of Greek mythology. The oil is a combination of plant secretions (signals to halt root growth and seed germination during dry weather) and chemicals released by soil-dwelling bacteria. Some people are said to have a nose for petrichor. So much so they can actually smell when it is going to rain, as the higher humidity causes the pores of rock and soil to fill with moisture and push oils into the air. But the smell is strongest when the rain finally arrives. As raindrops, falling at 9 metres per second (about 20 mph), explode on dusty or clay soil, they trap air bubbles, which are then thrown upwards and out, taking aerosols of scent with them.

For me the odour is sharp, almost animal. It is a smell that bubbles with memories: dust and straw from the rabbit hatch; a single ice-cold drop on the back of my neck; the zing of the rain on the black lid of the barbecue; running down the side of the house to shelter in the garage. It is standing on a concrete floor that is cool to the point of dampness and ringed with oil from someone else's car while listening to the clatter of heavy rainfall on the half-closed metal door.

There is an excitement with petrichor that I'm sure is linked to anticipation, to relief. We have our personal memories, like mine of the freedom of childhood. But maybe there's a deeper, older, shared memory too. A memory of a time when our needs were tied more tightly to rain, when it was wished for.

On this evening, the dog seemed to smell it too. Whether it was the rain she was excited by or the change in pressure, she had barked and chased up and down the garden - a skipping, see-sawing sprint, topped and tailed with dramatic pounces and turns that send dead grass and dust flying. She rolled on her back, wriggling her shoulders down into the earth the way she does to collect any scent she deems delicious. Her legs kicked as she rolled before she flipped back over and did another lap of the garden, her ears pressed back against the roundness of her skull. She stopped and stuck out a lolling tongue. A paw raised. Unsure again. I held out a hand. Nothing. The rain had stopped. The drops on the patio dried. The humidity ratcheted slowly back up. Inside the heat hadn't shifted at all. It stood silent and dark in every room, like a guest who had outstayed their welcome.

The next day I spoke to my parents, who live about a forty-five-minute drive away. Their phone line was crackling the way it does when it gets damp. For years engineers have tested and probed. Dug up the path outside, replaced cables, sucked their teeth and made test calls, but still, when it rains, the phone line crackles and spits. Gobbles up whole words. They had rain, they say, my dad on the phone and my mum shouting from the back. The high street flooded. I know exactly where it will have been. I can see the water pooling at the bottom of the valley down by the line of houses by the Mill, the parade that now houses more betting shops than grocers and bakers, the black timber-framed pub where Lovejoy filmed in one exciting week in the late 1980s.

It used to be the river itself, the Colne, that crept into homes and businesses, but the floodgates stopped that. Now it is the dryness of the land that causes flashes of brown water to rise up to people's knees. The soil, starved of moisture, has become hydrophobic - it repels rather than absorbs. The water stays on the surface and gathers speed and force as it courses over concrete, brick, paving slab, road and gardens that have been hammered flat by the sun. My dad says he had to turn around by the fire station as he drove into town; the water was too deep for cars. I told him that they stole our rain. The line crackled and fizzed in response. The voices are swallowed.

This night though, the rain will finally arrive in full force. We slept again. We must have done, because when I open my eyes my son is here and so is the storm. Standing in the darkness, he is talking quietly but urgently. His room is at the top of our narrow house. He says it is too noisy, too bright in there. The hair on his legs is standing up on end from the static. The lightning flashes, once, twice, three times and the thunder rolls almost at the same time. Hammer on tin. The anvils of our ears shake. The storm is right above us.

I lift the sheet and Seth gets in, shimmying on over to Jen. The realisation that he's scared, that he still needs us, still wants us, is as welcome as the rain. He is a teenager now. On the cusp of becoming. He has increasing independence, views, tastes and desires of his own. His life, as it should, is beginning to unfurl from our own. The hand holdings are becoming rarer, the kisses on the cheek are more quickly taken. But tonight he is a child again, his slim back cuddled into my wife's stomach. His head, with its loose curls, fitting under her chin like it did on that very first night when every part of him felt like something impossible: a wonder, a miracle. I listen to them breathing together. The rhythm of them. The shallow gasp as the lightning flash comes just a heartbeat before the roll of thunder. There is no time for counting now. The storm is right above us, the speed of light cannot outrun the thunder. The rain is so loud it sounds as though water is coming into the house. The gutters have given up. Rain sluices down windows and walls. The building feels like an old wet dog that is done with shaking. I get up and Jen asks what I'm doing. Her voice is soft. Sleep heavy. Cloud thick. 'Are you going out?'

I am. I hadn't really thought about it, but I am. I have a strange yearning for the freshness of the rain, the end of this bloody heat. I get...