The heatwave is over for now, so let’s keep cool and carry on
Sleep and sanity return to the capital as the hottest June weather in 40 years comes to an end
THE relief is palpable. The heat has released its grip and we can move again. Sensible thoughts, in abeyance all week, are starting to form again. In streets and offices, people are looking refreshed, as if they might have slept. The neighbourhood toddlers are not crying.
We’ve been “basking” in the sun, so the headlines tell us; we’ve been at the beach and in the park; the thermometer peaked with the solstice in a magical conjunction. Was it glorious or appalling, our week in the sun? In Britain we are not on stable terms with summer heat. Our feelings about it are prone to change by the hour as we explore this unfamiliar territory. Our rules and regulations are put to the test. The dress code at Ascot was relaxed, and the TUC urged businesses to allow shirt-sleeves where suit jackets would usually be required. But in Oxford the dons dripped under their gowns at the end-of-term Encaenia ceremony, and at Westminster the peers packed into the House in their furs.
Such displays of carrying on were both stoical and ridiculous in the usual British measures but measurements in heat can go awry. High-pressure systems exert all kinds of force on our minds. Internal barographs veer wildly down and up: down into lethargy and up into tense expectation that seems to build like static. The weather says “stop”, and at the same time the weather says “here, now, this is the moment”. Even the creaking sounds of a baking patio are freighted like the music to a thriller.
It’s notable how often British novels reach crisis point in the heat. Ian McEwan is a master of high-temperature social comedy and psychological investigation: Mrs Tallis in Atonement lies prone upstairs with a migraine, and a roast dinner turns stomachs on the stifling day in 1934 when young Briony tells a disastrous lie. The novel is about what happens in the heat of the moment — and in the aftermath that lasts a lifetime.
Things that go unsaid through overclouded months burst out in eruptions of hot-headedness. The plot of Penelope Lively’s 1996 novel Heat Wave concerns quiet English lives which, like the weather, can build to frightening intensity. “If I could kill you I probably would,” says Pauline to her son-in-law. When the combine harvesters have “pulverised” the landscape, and the air pressure feels as though “everything were being compacted”, Pauline lifts her hand to strike Maurice; “She has never felt such rage”. Does she strike or fantasise it? Maurice — whether through violence, fear or drunkenness — falls down the stairs.
Sociologists have noted strong correlations between rising temperatures and violent behaviour; some studies propose causal links between warmth and crime. Though the physiological processes that trigger agitation in the heat are still contested, it’s long been recognised that sudden heat can disturb emotions we normally keep under wraps. Medieval and Renaissance doctors, who understood the balance of the body’s four humours to change in tandem with the temperature, associated summer with excesses of choler.
Advice books warned of the urge to anger in June and July; your pocket almanac might carry a cautionary picture of people hitting each other. The challenge was to recognise the danger and control it, to “temper” one’s humours while recognising that some degree of anger can be put to good use.
July in the Renaissance? It’s hard to imagine history in the sun. Heat causes a claustrophobia that makes it hard to look far forward or back. We tend to compare our heatwaves with those in living memory. Recollections abound from 1976 especially: the dust on the cars that couldn’t be washed, the vistas of green valleys turned brown. But can we change our perspective on the present by going back to when hot Londoners closed shutters against the sun in 1417 and 1517? There was little sign of basking and a good deal of anxious “sweltering”. That word is derived from the Old English “swelte”, to die.
On a hot Sunday afternoon in 1666, Samuel Pepys walked through St James’s Park and did what any of us might do today: “It being mighty hot and I weary, [I] lay down by the canal, upon the grass, and slept awhile”. He would have kept his wig in place but he may have loosened his shoes for a few minutes’ relief. We’ve all known the misery of chafing leather on swollen, sweaty feet. Pepys had new shoes on that day, and they were causing “great pain”. No surprise that he traipsed as far as Fleet Street, gave up, found a coach to take him home and drank “a great deal of small beer”.
Jonathan Swift, the future author of Gulliver’s Travels, was driven to distraction by the heatwave of June 1711. “The weather is mad,” he wrote to his lover Stella, and he felt he was going mad with it. He stripped his bed to a single sheet but it was still too much. He fantasised about ways of cooling down, and crept out in his slippers to bathe in the Thames. He was too desperate to mind the stones on the foreshore, the dirty water and the risk of a ferryman rowing into him. As we crowded around water coolers on Wednesday, little had changed.
Then again, our expectations of hot days have shifted markedly. We’ve invented a whole industry of sunny pleasures. The aim in the 16th and 17th centuries was to survive a broiling summer rather than to enjoy it. This was the season of disease. As Pepys lay on the grass he knew the plague was spreading. In a largely agricultural society this was also the season of hard work, from hay mowing to the harvest. The idea of summer as a time of festive relaxation came with the control of disease, the move away from farming — and perhaps the wonders of refrigeration too.
Now we expect our summer lives to be blissful. Our grey-day dreams are poured into balmy fantasies long deferred, so that the pressure that mounts in a heatwave is partly of our own making. Like Christmas it must be perfect and rarely is. I’m glad to have muddled through and committed few irreversible acts. We’re right to be obsessed with the weather: we are dealing with a mindaltering phenomenon. It’s worth asking how our summer expectations have changed, and how the same old hotheadedness keeps catching us out.
Alexandra Harris is Professor of English at the University of Liverpool and author of Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies, Thames & Hudson, £9.99.
It’s long been recognised that sudden heat can disturb emotions we normally keep under wraps