One for Sorrow (14 page)

When clouds appear like rocks

and towers,

The earth will be washed

by frequent showers.

One of the most reliable methods farmers and sailors had for making accurate weather forecasts before the arrival of modern technology was cloud watching. It wouldn't have allowed them to make long-term predictions, but it could often give a clear idea of what the weather would be like later that day and into the next.
    The clouds in this old rhyme match the description of what we now refer to as cumulonimbus clouds – dense, rock-like clouds that can measure several miles across. Strong updraughts cause these clouds to form vertically, building up like towers into middle altitudes where their tops are sheared off by fast horizontal winds. These flat tops have led them to be given the nickname ‘anvil clouds'. Their name is a blend of two Latin words,
Cumulus
, meaning accumulated and
nimbus
, meaning rain.
    Unlike many pieces of weather lore, which were used by farmers, fishermen or sailors, this one makes specific mention of the earth, rather than the sea. This is because cumulonimbus usually form over land as a result of the change in pressure caused by the heat escaping from the earth in the afternoon after it has absorbed the sun's heat during the day.
    These clouds are responsible for sudden downpours and they often produce wind and lightning, but because they form where the air pressure is unstable and changeable, they are not associated with steady rain and their impact is short-lived.

This sixteenth-century proverb stresses that wishing for something you want is useless, for so many wishes are made that if each was a horse, there would be enough horses for even the lowliest of beggars to ride. It is also interpreted as a lesson that wishes don't come true because if they did, each man would already have had his wishes granted and beggars would be elevated to a status that would allow them the luxury of a horse.
    The sentiment was recorded with a different metaphorical image in 1605 in William Camden's collection of facts and adages,
Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine
. His version went
:
‘If wishes were thrushes beggers would eat birds'. Horses had entered the equation by 1670, when John Ray's
Collection of English Proverbs
included a pleasingly rhyming version: ‘If wishes would bide, beggers would ride', and at some point in the sixteenth century a longer verse was devised and set to music to form a nursery rhyme that went:

If wishes were horses

Beggars would ride;
If turnips were watches
I would wear one by my side.
And if ‘ifs' and ‘ands'
Were pots and pans,
The tinker would never work!

The phrase is still regularly used today to admonish people for wasting time longing for things rather than taking whatever action they can to make them happen. It's generally abbreviated to ‘If wishes were horses . . .' and delivered with a wagging finger or an arched brow.

   

This piece of ancient weather lore dates back to the mid-sixteenth century and refers in a literal sense to the benefits of the repeated rain showers characteristic of April for successful plant growth the following month.
    It featured in a long poem by the musician, poet and farmer Thomas Tusser in
A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie
(published in 1557, to be expanded to
Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie
in 1573) in the form of the couplet:

Sweet April showers
Do spring May flowers.

Showers of the sort we expect in April are the result of the start of the warmer season. The sun heats the earth all morning and as the heat rises from the ground into the air during the afternoon, the air becomes less dense and begins to rise. As it rises it cools and the water vapour in the air condenses and forms clouds. As temperatures rise towards mid-afternoon, these clouds reach their maximum height and the water falls as rain. But the showers only last as long as the rising temperatures and as the air cools with the approach of evening, the skies usually clear, creating a pattern of showers that delivers the optimum dose of water to flowers preparing to come into bloom.
    In later years the phrase has come to be used to encourage optimism; as a metaphor for the notion that the experience of something unpleasant, represented here by rain, is often followed by something good.

   

Just as the first robin or thrush to rise will beat his feathered friends to the juiciest worm, so those who rise (or arrive at their place of work) early will triumph over their competitors (see also
‘Early to bed and early to rise'
). This reliable old adage, which takes its lesson from the natural world, was recorded in William Camden's
Remaines concerning Britaine
(fifth edition 1736) and in John Ray's 
Collection of English Proverbs
in 1670 as

The early bird catcheth the worm.

It has remained in such regular use that from it we have taken the term ‘early bird' to mean someone who habitually gets up early in the morning. We also use ‘early bird' in a commercial setting to describe holidaymakers who make early bookings to secure the cheapest deals, and to diners who eat early in the evening and can therefore order from a cheaper, ‘early bird' menu.
    In very recent use calling someone an ‘early bird' in a work setting has come to have negative connotations, suggesting that they're overly keen to get an advantage over their colleagues or eager to please the boss at the expense of their fellow employees.
    At some point in the twentieth century a humorous rejoinder came into use: ‘The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.'

This ancient saying is used to suggest that someone has done something the wrong way round and makes its point by example. Putting the cart in front of the horse rather than behind would make it impossible for the horse to pull the cart along as is intended. It's a nonsensical reversal of a correct sequence with the purpose of demonstrating the importance of maintaining the proper order of things.
    The Roman philosopher and orator Cicero used the phrase (along with another well-known one) in his work
On Friendship
, written in around 44
bc
, by which time the phrase was already well established:

We suffer from carelessness in many of our undertakings: in none more than in selecting and cultivating our friends. We put the cart before the horse, and shut the stable door when the steed is stolen, in defiance of the old proverb.

It was first recorded in English in 1589 in George Puttenham's
The arte of English poesie
, an authoritative treatise on the art and history of poetry which included a section on figures of speech. Puttenham wrote:

We call it in English prouerbe, the cart before the horse, the Greeks call it Histeron proteron.

Histeron proteron
translates as ‘latter before' and was a Greek figure of speech used to describe the literary device of switching the order of words to emphasize the most important ones. Outside the realm of literature, the phrase was usually employed as a warning not to do things the wrong way round and this is how the phrase is most commonly used today. By extension it has also come to be used as a caution against trying to do something before you have properly prepared (see also
‘Don't go near the water until you've learnt to swim'
)

This old nugget of fisherman's lore is a prime example of cause and effect in the natural world. The country folk who first used the sight of leaping fish as a way of foretelling showers can have had no idea of the atmospheric changes that caused the phenomenon, but it didn't matter why they did it, what mattered was that when they did it, it really did signal rain.
    Alterations in atmospheric pressure are one of the best predictors of changes in the weather because weather arrives in bands of high and low pressure. The first mercury barometer, an instrument we still use today to monitor changes in pressure, was invented by Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli in 1643, but the device wasn't found in people's homes until the following century, so people looked for other signs that air pressure was changing.
    A drop in atmospheric pressure means the air is rising away from the earth at a faster rate than air from the surrounding areas can flow in to replace it. In these conditions, even gases trapped under water, say those produced by rotting plant life on the bottom of a lake or pond, begin to rise, bubbling up to the surface and taking with them a feast of microscopic organisms from the nutrient rich depths. Small fish that feed on these organisms race to the surface in pursuit of these bubbles and the bigger fish are hot on their trail, often leaping into the air in a feeding frenzy.

   

This medieval version of our modern saying ‘what goes around comes around' has its origins in fourteenth-century notions of morality. Chaucer gave expression to the idea at the end of the fourteenth century in ‘The Parson's Tale', with the line:

And ofte tyme swiche cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.

Cursing in this context meant wishing ill on others, so Chaucer's suggestion was that whatever ill fortune a man might wish on someone else would eventually befall the man himself.
    Chickens seem to have replaced the more generic ‘bryd' of the original some time in the eighteenth century, when hens were kept by most households and their habit of roaming freely during the day but returning to their own coop for the night would have been familiar to most early users of the phrase. It finally appeared in print in the modern form on the title page of the Romantic poet Robert Southey's epic poem
The Curse of Kehama
, in which an evil priest puts a curse on a man for killing his son but is ultimately defeated by the man, who has grown in strength as a result of the curse.
    The proverb has been so well used over the years that the part about curses has worn away. We now say simply ‘the chickens have come home to roost,' when we find ourselves facing the consequences of any kind of past bad behaviour.