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STORMY WINDS

HAS February left you weatherbeaten? In recent weeks, no one could have ventured outdoors without the elements ruffling their composure. First came Storm Ciara, then Dennis menaced, before Jorge blustered in. What imaginatively named blowhard might come next?

We have got off lucky where I live. But my heart goes out to those wind- lashed and rain- strafed communities flooded out of homes and businesses.

There are books where the wind appears almost as a character in its own right. In the children’s classic The Wizard Of Oz, wind is pivotal, a portal to another brighter, though not necessarily safer, world.

In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the lowing, howling wind is integral to the story, shaping not only the geography of its Yorkshire Moors setting, but the roiling emotional landscape of its buffeted characters. The novel is named after the bleakly situated house owned by the Earnshaws, then Heathcliff.

‘Wuthering’, wrote Bronte, ‘being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.’

Spectacularly, on the night when Cathy Earnshaw reveals she will wed Edgar Linton and a devastated Heathcliff runs away, ‘the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building: a huge bough fell across the roof and knocked down a portion of the east chimney-stack.’

Zora Neale Hurston’s startling African-American classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, contains a truly terrifying description of a hurricane, unleashed in all its elemental fury on a poor black community.

‘The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His.’

March has come in a lion, but may yet go out like a lamb.

For now, stay safe.