It’s the end of August and I’m sitting listening to the rain. I search in vain for the words to describe it. I realise eventually that I cannot possibly find them because rain is highly contextual. What I can hear in my low-lit study, with the window open, is soft end-of-summer night-rain. It’s the kind of rain that lovers mean, when they say they want to lie together listening to the rain fall. Can I call it that, then? A lovers’ rain.
It falls softly, down, not sideways, not wind-blown against the windows. Dripping through the branches of the wisteria, and bay, and rose. Somewhere there’s a downpipe or a leaking gutter, a trickle that sounds like a hidden stream. If I went to the window and looked out into the dark, would the wet slate pebbles look for a while like the stream they imitate, would the crook-laid deck planks begin to evoke the oriental landscape that I should have been heading off to see in a few weeks’ time?
Listening to the rain brings back memories. Childhood memories of being under canvas, curled in a sleeping bag, taking seriously the injunction not to touch the ‘walls’, contact leading to leakage. I remember lying in the dark: it was never dark at home: dark was a camp-site phenomenon. Sound travels further in the dark, we were told. I suspect it doesn’t. I suspect we hear further sounds in the dark because dark is night and night holds less ambient noise.
Even so, rain sounds louder in the dark. Can a sound be both louder and softer at the same time? I guess so. Loud being volume, and soft being tone.
I sit in my study and listen to the rain in the bushes in the garden. It could almost be the sound of waves on pebbles…if a wave went of forever and didn’t retreat.
I remember another night, a hot summer’s night, in a hotel room…opening the window precisely because I wanted to listen to the rain. Lovers’ rain, soft and scented, scattering streetlight into the broken puddles that by morning would be echoes of unshed tears, a hurting, a night that should not have been, a night of pain. An ending. Another kind of lovers’ rain.
Some endings turn out to be nothing more than a pause…some pauses last a very long time, before there is another glance, another touch, another maybe…and you can see way in the distance, if you bother to look that way, storm clouds gathering again. More rain on the way.
Rain memories…somewhere between the childhood and the hotel room…waking to sodden ground and a cold welsh deluge and miles to walk. One thing I learned that trip: never carry a rucksack that puts all the weight on your shoulders. I am not a happy hiker in the wet. Anyone who tells you there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes, doesn’t understand that some kinds of rain beat all kinds of clothes. I maintain that happiness is dry socks, but I confess that if your socks are the only part of you that is dry then sense of humour failure is at code blue. I cannot remember if my socks were dry that morning. I remember very little of the hike apart from the last bit, I remember the water running off my kagoul and the weight of the pack and the fact that the ‘trogging along’ song had stopped being funny-silly and had become annoying, and I remember the road that wound its way down into Beddgelert. I remember stepping into a café and a chap behind the counter telling us immediately “stop, sit…” and asking “bacon butties?” I remember the steam on the windows.
Of course, I have probably embellished that memory over the years of re-telling. But I definitely remember the curving road, and the rain, and the steamed windows, the tea and the bacon sandwiches. I remember we decided to get on a train and go somewhere else.
Back in the here and now, I pause and wander around the house. I open the front door, but briefly, as the gutters overflow, and I’m caught in the blatter of splash-backs. It doesn’t feel like soft summer rain on this side. Torrential would be over-stating it, but it’s heavy, soddening, soaking, persistent.
Back in the study, I realise how this room is in the most sheltered corner of the building.
When the storms arrive, I am reminded of Ted Hughes’s lines This house has been far out at sea all night. My suburban bungalow doesn’t toss and turn and creak the way I imagine Hughes’ house to have done, the way an old sail ship might have done, timbers caulked and holding but moving worryingly, twisting, screaming, groaning. Even so, the ship afloat, being at sea, severed from whatever whoever else is out there is experiencing, that sense descends.
There is something about bad weather that disconnects us. We hunker down. We batten down the hatches. We stow things away. And we wait it out. Like a harboured ship at anchor, or a sail-furled vessel with minimal canvas riding out the worst.
The odd thing is, it isn’t only during the worst of weather that I think about my new home as something afloat. Perhaps it is just that it is still strange, even one year on – is it really almost a year already? – it feels so very much like home and mine and yet, also, at the same time somehow, something, “else”.
The room I did least to when I refurbed, is the one I sleep in. I’d guess the built-in fittings in their dark veneer are very 1970s. Certainly, they’re more masculine than anything I would have chosen to replace them with, if I’d felt it worth ripping them out. I kept them because…because it was his room before me…because it was a room we shared occasionally…because they serve their purpose…because when I decided to make the place my own, I also felt the need for strands of continuity.
Sometimes, when I take breakfast back to bed, or when I shelter from the heat of summer and siesta in the shade of tilted blinds and comfortable pillows, the space makes me think again of being afloat. I can almost imagine it as a state room on a liner…or an over-sized cabin on a Nile cruise. At the height of summer when the insects intrude I think: I need mosquito net drapery. On the very hot nights when I fall asleep to the electric breeze, the fan’s quiet motor sounds like a half-heard engine. And when the rain falls, I hear the gutters overflowing.
Late at night, when the rain has settled into half-hearted drizzle, I go and stand on the yard-deck. I would love to talk about looking out over seas of fields or even over fields to the sea itself…but no. Beyond the deck is my tiny patch of scruffy wild and other people’s havens: gardens, sheds, gravelled parking, the metal-barn-roof of the church hall, street-lights, tyres on wet roads. But I look back at the building, low-slung, soft-lit, and I can still romanticise it, imagine it sailing me into some exciting future or, at the very least, keeping me afloat.
