A full day of heavy rain on summer‑hard ground falls, runs and accumulates in a familiar, even reassuring, way – up to a point. I know where I need to take its measure. I know the flashpoints and weaknesses in our defences, where the water might seep into the house, my hut, the horses’ barn; they peer out stoically, blinking through long, dripping, witch-knotted forelocks.
My son turns his 22-year-old car round on the field edge, its rump to the weather like the cows next door, so the water is less likely to seep through its perished rubber seals. I know how the water will build, overspill and run down the pavementless lanes – a deepening graphite crosshatching either side of the camber, or opaque as spilt milk off the chalk tracks. I know at what point the leap from the garden steps to the lane becomes unjumpable, and my work shoes are swapped for wellies. I know which benignly brimming potholes have hidden depths. The lanes flood in all the usual places, so I know to slow by Coldharbour Farm corner and, if the water’s reached the oak tree, to turn around.
In the house, I check the chimney breast in the girls’ bedroom (covered in photographs wrinkled by previous storms), and that the lead flashing over the living room window is pressed tight to the wall outside. I roll towels against the prow window of my hut.
Home Field has been seed‑drilled with a fallow crop of legumes to bind and enrich the soil, hold water, provide nectar and feed wild birds. But before it’s had a chance to germinate and work its magic, a stream carves a shallow ditch down its centre, from the bubbling spring by the footpath gate to the storm drain on the lane, washing the seed away. When this crop grows, a river of thistles or groundsel will mark its course, filling in the gap it left behind.
Other “ghost rivers” rise – the little Ingle, and the chalkstream Enborne by the Big House, seem to run backwards, somehow starting whole fields earlier than their spring sources. I note the markers with unease, because at times the rain seems biblical.
The following day, in the wet paste of a white chalk beach across the road, a deer has imprinted delicate hoof prints.
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