Melissa Harrison is having a prolific year. Rain: Four Walks in English Weather is the third book bearing her name to have surfaced already in 2016. February saw the paperback publication of her much-lauded second novel, At Hawthorn Time, shortlisted for the Costa novel award 2015 and now longlisted for the Bailey’s prize announced on International Women’s Day. Also in February came Spring, the first of four books edited by Harrison, subtitled “an anthology of the changing seasons” with the other three to follow – in their season.
The idea for Rain, Harrison tells us, “came to me in the Lake District …we walked from Keswick to Threlkeld along an old railway track … and it absolutely hossed it down, as the locals say”. It is a short book, 128 pages including the now almost compulsory glossary (since the glorious glossaries of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks and Dominick Tyler’s Uncommon Ground last year), and is exactly what the subtitle says it is: four walks in English weather. Why four? It’s a number that seems to be significant for Harrison, and for a naturalist it is a good one – the four points of the compass, the seasons, the winds, the humours, the elements and more. Both her novels follow the lives of four apparently disconnected individuals united by a common landscape, and now there are the four seasonal anthologies. Finding connections – between characters, in the case of the novels, or landscapes and weathers, in the case of Rain – is a thread that runs throughout Harrison’s work. By looking closely, almost forensically, at the near-at-hand she teases out the wider picture, and despite her openly secular stance – she dismisses a chalk cross carved on a hillside – there is something mindful, almost Buddhist in her method.
The walks are either taken alone or in company and if I was frustrated by anything, it was in not knowing the identity of Harrison’s companion or the name of her dog, which slightly interfered with my total submersion as imaginary co-walker. I found myself scanning backwards and forwards, eventually locating them in the acknowledgments. The walks themselves take place in January, April, August and October 2014 around Wicken Fen in East Anglia, the Wrekin in Shropshire, the Darent valley in Kent and Dartmoor in Devon.
Wicken Fen is the National Trust’s oldest nature reserve: “Species-rich, like ancient woodland or true wildflower meadows, this fragment of wild fen is an excellent place to see how man and nature together can work with, rather than against, nature.” Harrison is an intensely informative guide, and steers us effortlessly through 1,500 years of ingenious attempts to manage the watery flatlands, from the Roman dykes to the present-day hydroelectric pumps.
On the day that she visits, “stratiform precipitation” is falling from “nimbostratus: rain caused by warm air rising gently and slowly over a cold front and condensing into water droplets”. In other words, and Harrison provides the translation: “that grey, unchanging kind of weather that can spread over vast areas and doesn’t go anywhere fast”. In addition to being a guide, Harrison is a patient teacher, using the proper names for meteorological phenomena, but then unpacking them into digestible layman’s terms. She directs our gaze towards a multiplicity of wildlife. Two woodpeckers on a grass verge are looking, she tells us, for ants; moles, attracted by the shallow, less compacted ground produced by wet weather, leave evidence of their passing; and worms, which any enthusiastic “worm-charming child” knows, break surface as a result of the tapping rain (though you can replicate the effect with a watering can). A kingfisher “unzips the air”, widgeon drift and a shrew lies dead on the path, probably drowned. A sparrowhawk is hunched in a leafless ash tree, goldfinches riot.
However, it’s not all pastoral idyll. Engine-oil bottles and bits of old carpet are stuffed or blown into hedgerows along with rotting newspapers. Harrison finds herself unable to “read” the farmed arable land, and in this simple statement the tension between farmer and naturalist briefly surfaces: “We laymen have largely lost interest in where our food comes from beyond what’s written … on the packet.” Harrison’s candour is a delicate acknowledgment of the imperative to heal the schism between farmers, often struggling to make ends meet, and the rest of us, including naturalists critical of their conservation methods.
April brings Harrison to an Easter walk through Shropshire lanes on a day of “sunshine and showers”. She shares her close knowledge of the changing season, the “huge, creamy candles” of horse chestnuts not yet open, “the pollen … still locked up safely inside the ripening green buds”. As well as speculating about what she knows to be there but cannot see, Harrison furnishes us with folklore, weather rhymes and a history of the attempts to measure rain, including the work of 3,408 volunteer observers who, in 1900, were “drawn from nearly every social grade from peer to peasant” by the British Rainfall Organisation. In August she weathers a thunderstorm by the river Darent before ending her sojourns on an October day of fine misty rain – mizzle – retracing paths she learned as a child and ending, poignantly, at the place where her mother’s ashes remain. I was reminded, on more than one occasion, of James Joyce’s The Dead, but with rain instead of snow “falling … upon all the living and the dead.”
Rain was completed in November 2014. Since December 2015 we have witnessed the destructive power of English floodwater, especially for Cumbria, in a way that was only beginning to assert itself at the time of writing. Harrison refers to the Somerset floods of 2014 and the “long hangover from the excesses of our industrial revolution … only now beginning to bite”, and she acknowledges but does not dwell on this legacy. For Rain is a fascinating exploration, a celebration and a meditation on that curiously English obsession. This is an unashamedly English book, yet one far away from the problematic associations of nationalism and closer to a more deeply felt and older connection with the landscape, and that is an achievement to be celebrated in itself. Harrison is a welcome and modest companion, one who shares her extraordinary knowledge and acknowledges “my year of getting wet… has broadened and deepened my feeling for the outside world. I’m no longer just a fair-weather walker”.
Katharine Norbury’s The Fish Ladder is out now in paperback (Bloomsbury). Rain: Four Walks in English Weather is published by Faber (£12.99). Click here to order a copy of the latter for £10.39
