We peered out of the window. It was supposed to be an August Bank Holiday morning, with promises of sunshine and wave-kissed beaches. Outside it was like a tempestuous nightfall in late November, dark masses of clouds scudding in over the black, white-rimmed seas and colliding low overhead. Waves broke on the shore, flashing like the petticoats of a flamenco dancer's dress. Rain sounded through the house as if angry gravel lorries were dumping their loads onto to the roof.
We've all seen showers and fogs and sunny interludes chasing each other friskily across our holiday horizon. This was none of those things. There was a malign permanence about this. It was not weather. It was a season of the kind once endured by tea-planters in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya, monsoon rains thundering down for weeks and weeks on end while tea-planters sipped punch and drunkenly attempted adultery with whatever natives were not running amok with their kris, and meanwhile keeping a weather eye out for that nasty old bore, Somerset Maugham.
Ring Met Eireann
Peter looked at the waterfall passing inches from the kitchen window and said he'd ring Met Eireann. He had plans for the day. Sailing. Picnicking. Swimming. Striding the lovely long strands of that part of Waterford, leading to glorious cliff walks, vertigo and sudden deaths of unwanted house guests. Idyllic for a writer looking for (a) plot-lines and (b) peace and quiet free of house guests; and Peter is a such a specimen.
Hill walks, sudden death and plot-lines in apparent jeopardy, he rang Met Eireann who reassured him absolutely: what was happening outside his Waterford home was an occasional shower which would pass at noon, to be replaced by sunshine, but with the possibility of the odd outbreak of rain later in the day.
The occasional shower continued to imitate the End of the World. Great grey lakes fell from the skies, turning the countryside into a brown-green marsh, across the surface of which travelled the occasional brace of cows' horns, like a submarine's twin-periscope. It was five to twelve. In five minutes, apparently, this here occasional shower would be magically transformed into sunshine and blue skies, with maybe the odd light light shower later in the day, and ahead lay a toppling house guest and a story-line to beat the band.
Outside it was as bright as a broom cupboard and winds howled, bending trees over as if they were going to be used as siege-machines. Windows tried to wrest themselves from their frames in a vain attempt at fenestral freedom, and the entire house appeared to be contemplating moving to Mayo. Outside, the sole unsubmerged cow was whisked up like a barn in an Ohio twister and vanished, lowing cowly laments as it passed nor'-nor' east of the upstairs bedroom at the far end of the landing.
Peter contemplated the departing cow and, no doubt, the departing prospects of an unwanted house guest toppling to his timely doom, and confessed to doubts about the validity of the Met Eireann forecast. The hour of noon passed. A child was roped and sent out to the garden to see how bad the weather actually was. Ben actually got so far as the front gate before being hit by a Baltic of water and we had to haul him back in, hand over hand, like a full trawl-net.
Shouted conversations
We sat back in the kitchen, watching in silence. There are not many conversations you can have in weather like this, and all of them have to be shouted. The gravel lorries above increased the denier and the frequency of the pebbles, and Peter's eyes swivelled to where any homeowner's eyes must inevitably turn in such circumstances. His slates and joists were intended to repel Irish weather, not the bombardment of the Grand Fleet at Jutland. The roof held, but grudgingly, and only just.
It was time to compel another child-volunteer to sample the weather outside. Will was chosen, was bound with ropes, and sent tottering off into the sodden tornado that was circling the house. It whisked him off his feet and carried him to the end of the tether to which we had attached him, and there he was, a tiny object in the sky. We hauled him back in just as you would a large, wet eagle which had just made off with a hooked and lined bait, his limbs flailing in the hurricane.
We looked for more children to sample the air, as good little children should, but there were none, the girls having climbed the inside of a chimney and pulled the fireplace up behind them. Ha. Girls. The role of weather-sampler could only go to the most feeble-minded adult still standing, the house guest too many.
It was astonishing. Experiencing the undiluted weather - which by this point, Met Eireann had been promising, would be sunny, with the possibility of a shower later in the day - was like standing in a huge blender filled with Ballygowan. Wetness was as instantaneous as the chain reaction in a nuclear bomb. And the landscape all around me was as deserted of human life as if it had been left out overnight, and all residents had fled.
Night follows day
The rain did not pass, nor did it cease, nor did it lighten, and it varied in only one degree, and that degree was that it grew heavier as night followed that eternally long day, and we heard it thundering on the roof and watched it through the window, conversationless, numb, mildewed.
Dawn, and no respite. Noon, the same. We stood at our doorway, sipping punch and wondering if there were any natives with whom to commit adultery. Not a one. Nor any sign of Somerset Maugham either. Nightfall, and still the rain fell, thunderously, through the long dark hours. A winter's morning dawned, wet as an old fleece, dark and windy. It was time to leave, and we left in the rain, ploughing through the vast lake which covered Munster. Behind us Peter grimly watched us through the rain, as a strange figure in a Panama hat limped towards him; ahead of us, three weeks ahead of us, lies the autumn.