Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Stanhope Road ·
The Rain Lottery at Stanhope Road
A market gardener on Stanhope Road sells his crop at the village fair on the strength of a weather forecast that no one else can read, and he always wins, but the rain comes down only on the fields of the men who did not buy a ticket.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: Tom Ferrier, market gardener
The village fair at Stanhope Road has an old custom: before the summer show, every stallholder buys a ticket from the rain lottery, a little paper slip with a number on it, sold from a tin box by the church gate. The idea is that the winner gets rain on their fields for the rest of the season, and everyone else gets none. Nobody believes it. It is a bit of a joke. I buy a ticket every year, and so does everyone else, and in thirty years I have never won anything but a packet of mints.
This year I drew number 417 and the old woman in the tin box gave me a funny look, and I thought nothing of it until July.
It was the hottest July anyone can remember. The reservoirs were down to the mud. The council put a hosepipe ban on the whole county and the lawns on Stanhope Road turned yellow. My fields, on the slope behind the chapel, were burning up. I had carrots and beans and potatoes in rows, and the leaves were curling like paper in the afternoon sun. I was out with a watering can every evening, carrying water from the trough, and I was ready to give up on the lot.
Then, on the first of August, it rained.
It came down in a single grey column over the chapel fields, heavy and steady, the kind of rain that soaks through the soil in an hour and runs down the furrows in streams. I stood in my garden next door and watched it, amazed. It did not touch my own plot. The sky over my house was clear blue. The cloud stopped at the edge of my boundary wall, as sharp as a line on a map, and I could see it standing there, a grey curtain, and my own dry fields beyond it.
I walked round to the other side of the wall and stood in the rain. Warm, sweet, soaking. The beans in the chapel fields lifted their heads. The potatoes swelled in the ground. By the next morning the whole slope was green and glossy.
Mine was not. My crops were still burnt and brown. I went back out with the watering can and tried to soak the furrows by hand, but the rain had not touched them, and the water I poured just sat on the top of the soil and dried in the heat.
The old woman in the tin box was at the church gate that Sunday, and I asked her about the ticket. She said nothing for a while. Then she said, quite kindly, that I had won the rain lottery, fair and square, and that the rain had come as it was supposed to, to the fields of the people who did not buy a ticket.
"I did buy one," I said. "Number 417."
"That was the number of the field you didn't buy," she said. "The one behind the chapel, that old Mrs Harper used to rent. She never bought a ticket in her life. She'd say the rain should go where it's wanted."
I went to see Mrs Harper's field. It was a small rough patch of land between the chapel wall and the stream, unfarmed for years, overgrown with nettles and dock. And the rain had fallen on it all summer, every afternoon, while my own land burned. The nettles were tall and green. The docks were heavy with seed. A single old apple tree stood in the middle, bent over with fruit.
On the trunk of the apple tree someone had tied a small paper ticket, very faded, with the number 417 printed on it, and beside it, in pencil, in an old woman's cramped hand, the words: *For whoever it's wanted for.*
I have not bought a ticket since. I still water my own fields by hand in the evenings, and they still burn. But I have started going round to Mrs Harper's old patch on dry afternoons, and sitting under the apple tree with a flask of tea, and every so often, as the clouds come over the chapel roof, a single cold drop falls on my hand, and I look up, and the sky over my head is always blue.