Did you watch Cider with Rosie on the television over Christmas? Laurie Lee's delightful account of his childhood in the Cotswolds 80 years ago translates nicely to the screen, but as often happens, the book is even better. An atavistic rural peace descends upon you as you read of "a world of silence, of hard work and necessary patience, of white roads rutted by hooves and cart-wheels, innocent of oil and petrol".
And of course you meet Rosie, the village girl who "baptised" the adolescent author with her cidrous kisses beneath a hay-wain on a summer afternoon. And there is meteorology galore. "In the long hot summer of 1921 a serious drought hit the country. Springs dried up, the wells filled with frogs, and the usually sweet water from our scullery pump turned brown and tasted of nails.
"For weeks the sky hung hot and blue, trees shrivelled, crops burned in the fields, and the old folk said the sun had slipped in its course and that we should all of us very soon die."
There were prayers for rain, of course, but as the author says "the drought continued, prayer was abandoned and more devilish steps adopted".
The villagers had recourse to a persistent myth throughout the ages - and of course it is a myth - that gunfire prompts the clouds to pour forth rain.
The association between rain and guns or battlefields can be traced back to Roman times. Plutarch, for example, writing of Marius and his clash with the Teutons in 102 BC, expressed the view that "extraordinary rains generally fall after great battles, either because some divine power thus washes and cleanses the polluted earth, or because moist and heavy exhalations steaming forth from the blood and corruption thicken the air, which is naturally subject to alterations from the smallest causes".
As technology advanced, this perceived peak in rainfall following hostilities came to be associated with gunfire, explosives, and the noise of artillery in battle. Even Napoleon believed that cannon-fire caused rain, being persuaded that the noise jostled minute cloud particles together, allowing them to coalesce and fall to Earth.
And the notion obviously persisted into the days when Laurie Lee was but a lad: "Finally soldiers with rifles marched to the tops of the hills and began shooting at passing clouds.
"When I heard their dry volleys, breaking like sticks in the stillness, I knew our long armistice was over. And sure enough - whether from prayers or the shooting, or by a simple return of nature - the drought broke soon after and it began to rain as it had never rained before."