Listening to the tales that the clouds tell the trees
PAUL JOHNSON
One of my greatest pleasures is to sit outside my house in the Quantocks, 500 feet above sea level, and watch the clouds arriving from the west. In they conic, cumulus and stratus, cirrus and nimbus, as they have been doing for millions of years, each formation unique, bearing moisture in tiny or gigantic quantities, bringing us our weather from the still-vexed Bermoothes or Labrador's countless lakes, and making Britain what it is, not so much a European as an Atlantic country. Here in the heart of Wessex, Alfred, too, watched the clouds and wondered if they carried Danish war-sails with them. Drake studied them as harbingers of the Armada, and Raleigh as messengers from the lands he longed to settle. Dr Johnson watched them, when Reynolds took him to his birthplace to see the images which made him an artist — and Constable sketched similar formations when they reached Wiltshire and Salisbury Plain. Watching clouds from the west, mesmerised by their rhythms, allows you to be carried aloft in one of the great continuities of our history.
From records and diaries I have learnt a lot about the weather hereabouts. The journal kept by Parson Holland two centuries ago complains about incessant rain and fears a sinister and permanent change in the climate. He is echoing, in reverse, John Aubrey's words about the desiccation of Wiltshire 150 years before. I daresay Alfred, too, adumbrated the parson's head-shaking: 'There's something wrong with the weather.' Our climate changes all the time in long and short cycles, and yet in the context of a millennium it remains the same: awful but interesting. Two decades ago, when we came here, and I studied the notes that Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge made about the Quantock watershed in 1797-8, I found that streams they had described as torrents had sunk to mere trickles, and that waterfalls they gloried in had disappeared entirely. This comparative desiccation continued for a number of years, and I began to shake my head like Parson Holland. Now all has changed again: Dorothy's torrents are chattering noisily, as they once did to her ears, and Coleridge's waterfalls have sprung out of the sodden ground, to delight a new generation of children.
It is observing what actually happens in a particular place that makes me laugh at the theory of global warming. Karl Popper pointed out that a true scientist makes his theory specific and susceptible to disproof. That is what Einstein did with his General Theory of Relativity (1916), and if the proofs he demanded had not been confirmed by the observations of 1919, he would have scrapped it. By contrast, Popper argued, pseudo-scientists like Marx and Freud made their theories vague, and if evidence emerged which contradicted them, they simply enlarged the theory to accommodate it. When we had dry years, the global warmers said, `Ah-ha! Proof! Heat and desiccation.' When it got horribly windy, they said, 'Global warming means violent weather.' Now it has rained a lot they say, 'Yes, extremes of weather are part of the global-warming pattern.' I see: so what they are really saying is that the weather varies. Even the three-yearold girl with her new bonnet on, gazing sadly through the rain-spattered windows in Sophie Anderson's beautiful painting 'No Walk Today', could have told us that.
I like a lot of rain. The downpours we have had this winter have not only made the streams dashing and the waterfalls frantic, they have also livened up the landscape's colours in two notable ways. This is red-earth country, and the softness of the fields means that red splashes have appeared in the intense, rain-sodden greens of the meadows, where the cattle have congregated and created quagmires. Copious moisture, raining down and surging out of the earth like a miasma, has enabled tiny organisms to cover the lower trunks of trees and many branches with brilliant emerald greens of different intensities and hues, adding a new dimension to the colour scheme of woodland. In response, I notice that the brittle growths which seek out the lower limbs and exposed roots of beech trees are looking pinker than usual. Soothing, multiple shades of pink are important components of the Quantock winter colour spectrum, so much more subtle than the summer one. The tracks, battered by the weather, are pock-marked by tiny cavities which fill with milk-chocolate-coloured water, and when this dries on nearby rocks and stones they blush pink, like the bosom of a shy debutante. There are shades of pink amid the gingerbread browns and coconut sepias of the dead bracken. On the horizon, the tips of the trees turn pinkish when the clouds trundle on into the Midlands, and the sky briefly clears, an eggshell blue as in Bellotto's canvases of Dresden. Two doves have made a nest in my garden, and I have suddenly realised that the term dove-grey, which implies a pinkish
underhue, springs from the minute glimpses of pink skin through their soft grey feathers.
There are pink-tinged sheep, too, which have got themselves filthy, and on Saturday I even saw a pink deer. The red deer (so called) are great rollers in the mud, and in the Highlands this gives the stags a black boggy hue which they assume will frighten off other stags in the competition for does. I prefer them pink. Winter is the best time for watching the deer. They are hungrier and so less shy. In the bare ruined choirs of the woods, stripped of leaves, they are more visible, I am particularly keen to study and draw them while I can, for I do not believe they will survive the criminalisation of stag-hunting. The deer sense this. They are proud creatures, roaming free. They do not want to end up starving to death in 'sanctuaries' created by the emotional spasms of billionaire pop-singers or, more likely, in the cooking pots of ethnic restaurants in Bristol and Birmingham, supplied by ruthless midnight gangs with their repeater shotguns and spotlights. Such stags as I have been able to contact are unanimous against the law, nodding their handsome cervidacious heads when I put the case for resistance, Now I know that in the lower recesses of Aisholt Common, under Durborough Hill, there lives an extended family of left-wing deer. I am one of the few people who ever see them, for walkers do not penetrate these fastnesses. Their stags have not a horn between them, let alone a ten-pointer. Their patriarch has the lost-theplot look of Jack Straw, down to spectacle markings round the eyes, and he is often accompanied by two dishevelled old does, who answer to the names of Shirley and Polly. This pecoral family are of great antiquity, and in the time of King Alfred were notorious for sympathising with the Danes, whom they regarded as asylum-seekers. Or so the tale goes. Other deer take no notice of them.
Meanwhile I watch the clouds, classifying them according to the system of 26 categories worked out by Clement Ley in his marvellous book Cloud/and (1894). When I can take my eyes off these nebulous shapes, especially the altocumulus-castellatus, I draw and paint trees. I am becoming obsessed by trees, rather like Thomas Pakenham. Indeed, Thomas and I are thinking of holding a joint exhibition devoted to trees — his photographs and my watercolours — if we can find a suitable gallery. What better objects to devote declining days to — trees and clouds, listening to the tales they tell as they move to the rhythms of the season?
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