Draft 11 no cover

Thunderhead Photographs, transcription, design & layout by

Lisa Richards

Text based on audio commentary by

Teresa Adams

Colour Transparencies by

Glenmark Thomas Adams & Kathleen Mary Bullas Adams

Contents Chapter 1: Direction 7-24 Chapter 2: Sea 25-46 Chaper 3: Superstition 47-78 Afterword 81-87

The whole world, and the whole of nature is dependent on weather, everything, everybody’s life cycle is dependent on weather. The official met office use the clouds very heavily. They will watch cloud formations coming in from another country over to ours, see what direction it’s coming in, is it growing thicker? is it getting thinner? That will tell them roughly what’s floating over us for the next 24 hours, 48 hours, whichever way they wish to go. Which means, that they are using the clouds to try and pre warn us what is likely to happen. Sometimes they get caught out because the wind will suddenly change direction and that cloud mass doesn’t come to us at all, it carries on floating out in a different direction, but usually they will follow paths.

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Some people think that the clouds are a separate entity to weather, they’re not, they are part of the weather, but they are our visual representation of what the weather is doing.

You can stand outside and have a wind swirling round you and you do not know what direction the wind is actually in, because perhaps you’re in your back garden and you’re in a bit of a tunnel and it may be coming at you from every direction.

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Clouds will only be going in one direction.

When you suddenly see a blanket sky that looks like completely unbroken cloud, we are going to have rain at some point, the darkness of the clouds will dictate whether the rain is going to be heavy, the darker the cloud the more water it has and the chances are it will come out, and we will get wet.

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if you’re looking over a land mass, if you can get yourself high enough that you can see a large land mass you can watch a storm come right through, you can see where it’s starting, you can see where it ultimately ends up going,

and you can see what destruction it can do in between.

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Similarly with good weather,

You can see the good weather following things, the weather it will have a path, but the only way to see the path is to watch the clouds.

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The winters, that was where real weather came from.

Slap bang in the middle of the seafront, you would through the day watch the sky darkening, the cloud building and getting heavier and heavier, and by the time the evening came, the power of nature, you were left with no illusions of it. I would be in a position with my grandad of running around the hotel to the upstairs bedrooms, boarding up all the front windows.

The weather would start, the winds would build, the clouds would build, then the thunder would start and the lightening would start, after a few seconds the sea would start breaching the seawall.

That wasn’t too much of a worry until it would reach the sea wall at probably eight to ten feet above the sea wall, and this water is coming directly at you, like our own version of a small tidal wave coming. The top of the water would break off into very very thick spray and it would hit all your front windows with such a force, if they didn’t have the wood behind and in front the glass would be gone, 29

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And indeed a few times the glass still broke, even with the wood up.

Where the main bulk of the water would gush straight across the road, we lived in, basically in a square, with the seawall at the front, 2 rows of hotels to the left and right of us, and us at the back.

Running all the way around the back of the hotels was a large lane, it was all filled with the great big rubbish bins and everything else round the back, it was also used for an awful lot of your deliveries, the butcher would come round that way, and obviously during storm times, so did the sea.

It would come gushing down each end of the lane, run all the way round the back, and when it met at the middle it only had one place to go and that was forwards. The front part of every hotel where every single public area was 2 feet higher than the rest, and that was due to the flooding, they were all built that way on purpose. I’ve got wonderful memories of my grandmother in the kitchen, with a great big wooden broom, desperately trying to hold the sea back, brushing it out of the kitchen for all she’s worth.

Stood in the top bedroom windows, you had a wonderful sight straight across the bay, and the main thing you can remember seeing is the massive, big transporter ships going through, and they’d be just like little specs and the occasional light that you’d be able to see, until a huge bolt of lightning would come down, it would light everything up,and you could see the ships clearly,

you could see everything.

The lightening would strike followed very shortly after by the lifeboats going out. The big boom would go out and it was basically the big canon being fired off on Birnbeck pier, and it would fire three times, and at that time the lifeboat crews were all people that worked in the town, and they would just have to run from wherever they were working, they would run, up to the boat house which was quite pegging it from town, quite a way, they’d run up to the boathouse, quickly get into their gear and by which time the boat was being launched, and off they would go. I’m pretty certain it’s not done that way anymore.

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I have an absolute love affair with the sea, I love everything to do with it.

Sea creatures I adore, my favorite creatures on the whole planet are sharks, I have no fear of them whatsoever. I would have been a marine biologist, but, I am terrified of open water.

I cannot go near open water. I can’t even put my hand in a fish pond. If someone wanted me to actually put my hand a bucket of seawater, I cannot do it, it’s just something I can’t do.

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The damage that nature can do to land is absolutely amazing.

When we have heavy heavy winds going on, the tidal waves that are going on beneath the sea are enormous.

Most of what we see on the above is also happening under the seas. You get the opposite on things like mountains, on the top of massive mountain ranges, you will get heavy clouding but that’s not what the weather is bringing, that is a product of what’s already happened, the top of these mountains are completely frozen, they’re probably covered in snow, so this cloud is not bringing rain, it’s probably not bringing any more snow, it will occasionally, but it’s probably not bringing anymore snow, it just has nowhere to go.

It has to linger there, because there is nowhere for it to go, It’s just lingering because it’s stuck.

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The absolute base point on any of this in my mind is nature is unstoppable.

The important thing to remember with clouds is from the beginning of time people have used clouds to help us interpret what the weather is doing. The clouds are not there simply to make the sky look pretty, they are there as a complete indication to the water levels that are in the air. People have used clouds to con other people, by trying to pretend that they are magic, that they hold magic or they hold powers.

They don’t,

it’s just that they were clever at interpreting what the clouds were going to do. You would have someone who had set themselves up to be very high up in these civilizations, someone that everyone admired, and believed everything they had to say. Very often they linked themselves to something within the healing world, but your normal joe blogs in the street would see them as some kind of a witch or a wizard or a medicine man type thing,

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They would use things like eclipses to say, ‘you have been a very bad person’, or ‘the whole of our nation has been bad and we are going to lose all of our light’, And they will know roughly when this is coming.

Certain skies would tell you that the seas had dried up, there are no fish in the sea anymore. It’s because of the kind of cloud formations that have happened, all our weather is produced from deep in the seas, whatever the seas are doing underneath will help to produce what we can see in the sky. When the sea is too turbulent the fish that are normally in that area will move slightly away, which means yes, there aren’t many fish in that particular part of the sea, but because they, these people only know that particular part of the sea as far as they’re concerned all the fish are gone.

The world goes black, the fish have gone, and they are paying the price for what they’ve done.

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They understand all of these things, they will con them into believing that they have made it rain, they have made it thunder, only because they’ve read the weather conditions. Our visibility is there with clouds, we cannot see any other kind of weather, but we can see clouds.

I think everybody knows that the weather is very much affected by massive things in the world, and the results that the weather can produce, you’ve got your big tsunami waves, you’ve got your earth quakes, tornados, hurricanes, all that kind of thing.

We all know they’re to do with weather, we all know they’re to do with geology, but the effects on the weather from a geological point of view from an earthquake, the earthquake will affect the weather, but unfortunately for most of us, we don’t know it’s coming until you can see it and then, it’s a little bit late. Your proper geologists will probably know a bit more in advance, but we are still not in a position that we can do anything about them, just because we know a volcano is going to erupt it doesn’t mean we can stop it.

If we know an earthquake is due because the tremors have started to get a bit more violent,

we still can’t stop it happening.

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Wicca people were around a lot believing in all kinds of magic, they were very heavily into nature, whereas weather is a huge part of nature.

An awful lot of myths and legends and fables were made in the Pagan times. The biggest ones were to do with the moons, and the cloud formations around the moons. The wolf moon is an easy one to recognize, it’s in and around the full moon, usually three or four days before the full moon including the full moon, but only up to a day or so after the full moon. You can see the moon very large, very, very bright, on the top right hand corner there is a vague outline that looks similar to a wolf ’s head pointing downwards with its mouth open.

It’s the epitome of what looks like a scary sky.

That is the wolf moon, but you cannot use it as a wolf moon unless it has heavy thick black clouds around it, and the moon shines directly in the middle of the black clouds. That was a really important moon to the Pagans. A couple of days after you get the wolf moon, if the conditions are right, the picture in the moon slightly changes from the wolf and you can make out on the opposite end, where the wolfs ears would be, there becomes something that looks rather like a stick, and that’s called the witch moon. anything from the undead will be out on that night, so full moons have always very much been linked with the bad side of supernatural stuff going on, but during the Pagan times, and a lot of other civilizations as well, they paid big attention to bad things, so as soon as there was, say there had been a very, very heavy cloud form all day which is actually telling everybody it’s going to rain, but it absolutely ends up in a complete and utter flood, that’s because the wolf moon was out, that’s what they will blame it on. It isn’t, it’s weather conditions and it’s what’s coming but they would blame it back to the wolf moon, ‘I looked up and saw the wolf moon and this is why this has happened to me’.

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Those kinds of people very much lived in superstitions, and it isn’t really until you get to more modern times where you’ve got proper scientific people looking at things that are saying ‘no, this is nothing to do with superstition, this is just weather conditions that you could expect to find at that time of year because of the weather temperature, because of the amount of water in the atmosphere..,’ but back in those times they didn’t care about any of that.

Things were used in those times to trick people.

Older civilizations would reserve there to be one particular person that would be able to interpret these things which gave them a really big seat of power because other people didn’t understand how they knew these things; they just studied clouds.

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You can see the clouds rolling in,

they’re heavy, they’re black, they’re thick,

they are going to down load hundreds of tons of water in a very short amount of time.

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Afterword

by Teresa Adams

My life has not followed normal paths, when I was 6 months old my mother abandoned me and left me in garden for a whole day and the only person there to look after me was my 18-month old sister at the time, who she looked after me, we were there from 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon when a lovely neighbor got hold of my grandad to come and collect us. After that point I was handed around lots of different aunts and uncles in the family, until eventually my grandparents got fed up with this whole situation, they collected me and I lived with them for the rest of my childhood, right through until I first got married and left home. At that time, we lived in a hotel, that was my nan and granddads business, right slap bang in the middle of the seafront 81

at Weston. We were in an absolute fantastic place to watch everything to do with weather. When I was at school I studied geography, I did three years of geography and the whole three years were clouds, because we kept having different teachers changing all the time and every single new one that came in was clouds again, so we all got to the point that we were all sick to death of clouds, but the problem you then have is in later life you suddenly look up and you see a different cloud formation and it takes your interest because you actually do know something about that subject. I am in no way an authority on it, and a lot of the terms I use are things that my mind have linked to what I feel it does or it feels like, sometimes certain cloud formations I can’t remember the technical name for because I’ve made my own name up for it, so please excuse me if I’m not too technical. I’ve suffered two strokes which has left me visually impaired. I also suffer from very bad migraines, and I’ve learned over the last couple of years that, that is I’m very susceptible to what the weather is doing, I think everybody probably is but because they’ve never had anything really bad they haven’t linked it to anything, they haven’t realized that quite a lot of thing that you are going through are actually linked to the weather, are linked to the clouds formations, but I’m aware with mine.

Outside my window right at the minute is what I call a blanket sky, it’s just one solid lump of cloud, you can see no sky through it, it’s very white, that is what

I call a blanket sky because there are no gaps in it whatsoever. As I stand today it’s reasonably warm, it’s not terribly windy, my head is absolutely is fine. What it looks like out there at the minute is what everybody else would recognize as looking like a snowy kind of sky where the whole sky is just white. I can guarantee you there is no snow in the atmosphere whatsoever right at the minute because my head’s not tingling; my head is not telling me snow is out there. If you get a snowy blanket sky my head will be killing me until the snow has come down, fallen, and the sky is a lot lighter. Once that’s happened and the snow is already down my headache will go, if it is a thundery sky as that’s building up and you’re getting the big thick black clouds rolling across and then they become solid, again my head will be killing me but on the opposite side of my head to where the snow is. I would imagine that this is the same for everybody, perhaps to a lesser degree, but you just don’t think about it; you have a headache today, and people will perhaps not realize that the weather has had any influence on that whatsoever. I can usually tell if we’re going to be into a heavy day of rain, and the sudden downpours they can make my head hurt. So, this is all not based in science whatsoever, it’s based in what my head feels like in certain conditions, which is not a reliable source or anything else but it’s very reliable to me. I am superstitious in as far as I do believe that things go on in this world that we are not capable of understanding at this point. I am not 83

willing to outwardly say that if I walk under a ladder something terrible is going to happen to me, if I open an umbrella indoors something terrible is going to happen to me, but because I don’t know I actually still won’t do those things.

I can give you one horrible example, a couple of years before my grandmother died she did ask me, she was in a nursing home and very ill, she did ask me if I ever knew she was going to die would I go to the cemetery and ask my grandfather to wait for her.

A couple of years later she had a massive stroke, she was put on pathway in the hospital which basically meant we were waiting for her to die, so I did go to the cemetery, and I did sit at the grave, and I did ask my grandfather to wait for her. My auntie asked me why I did it because I don’t believe in the afterlife, I don’t believe that, once somebody is buried as far as I’m concerned that’s it they’re gone. And I said I did it for two reasons, the first reason I did it was because my nan asked me to, and there was no way I would not do what a dying woman has asked me to do. Secondly, because I don’t categorically know that there is no afterlife, my nan believes that when I die I will go up to heaven and when I walk through the gates she will be waiting for me. On the off chance that she’s right, not me, I am not walking through those gates to find my nan going ‘and you didn’t tell him!’ so, there’s my reasoning on it. If I can categorically see something and it has been proven in science, yes I will believe it, but just because it can’t be proved doesn’t mean I will not believe it.

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Copyright Lisa Richards 2017. All rights reserved. All content unless otherwise specified created by Lisa Richards, no part of this may be reproduced or otherwise copied withour the express permission of the copyright holder.

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