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WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS

Times, over the last thirty years I’ve stood in the shelter of the haybarn and watched the rain coming across from Lambert’s Castle. It seems to take an age and one hoped that it would miss us, stay the other side of Beaminster Tunnel and go on to Yeovil. Unless of course we wanted rain for the crops.

It moves slowly towards us, an opaque curtain gently hissing as it gets nearer. Sometimes a very heavy storm hits the trees in the Common with a loud roar which gradually dies away as it passes on to Toller and Maiden Newton.

The water cascades off the corrugations of the barn root in little waterfalls, each one wearing its own bubbling hole in the soil before joining with the others to run in a stream along the cart track and into the field. The dog comes along and laps at the water in one of the holes but it is not to her taste and she leaves, shaking the rain from her coat as she goes.

The storm moves on and leaves a quiet peace. It is lighter and the sky is blue again. The downrush from the roof slowly peters out and large drops of water make plopping noises as they fall into the little ponds. Eventually even this ceases and as I look down the valley, especially in the summer, a haze rises from the ground and as far as one can see the cattle have no legs for a while. The atmosphere gets noticeably warmer and I think that this is growing weather and tomorrow we shall see a change in the garden. The cobwebs will be covered in watery diamonds just like they are after a heavy dew.

I look across the mist, the fields and the hedges to the Common in the distance and there, right in the middle of the trees, as if it had taken root, is the end of the Rainbow. A path of multicoloured ribands six feet wide, no, ten feet, no, it must be more and it goes up into the sky and comes down again somewhere near Melplash or Netherbury and I think perhaps there is sombody at the other end wondering where this end is. I could tell them if I knew that they wanted to know.

The longer I Iook at it the stronger the colours become until they are quite dazzling as they stand out vividly against a background of blue sky and straggly cloud. Is it true, I think, that there is a crock of gold at the end of it? I consider the possibilities. Is it worth while walking down to the Common to have a look? While I’m pondering on the chances, of what I could do with the wealth, with the fame it would thrust upon me, the Rainbow begins to fade and it is too late, the same as it was last time and the time before, to do anything about it.

A moment later it’s gone, the sky is clear to the west and I can see, in the far distance, the tail-end of the storm as it moves on eastwards and I think maybe, somewhere over there, is the end of another Rainbow.