Rain, rain, go away…

With more than enough rain to go round in ever-rainy Britain, when the sky darkens and the heavens open, children chant         

Rain, rain, go away,

Come again another day

Rain, rain, go to Spain,

Never show your face again

According to some sources the rhyme originated in Elizabethan times when a stroke of meteorological luck in the shape of a storm – tormenta scattered the Spanish Armada and dashed Philip II’s hopes of invasion.

 Since Spain is blessed - or cursed – with rainfall – precipitaciones that range from drizzle – llovizna to a downpour – un aguacero, not forgetting the frequent likelihood of a monsoon-calibre cloudburst – tromba de agua, children here make a very different request:

                        Que llueva, que llueva,

                        La Virgen de la Cueva

                        Los pajarillos cantan

                        Las nubes se levantan

                        ¡Que sí! ¡Que no!

                        ¡Que caiga un chaparrón

                        Con azúcar y turrón!

Not only is this rhyme longer and more engaging but religion, in the shape of Our Lady of the Cave (patron of potholers, incidentally) enters the picture too. 

Furthermore, there are little birds that sing and clouds that clear and despite the indecision of the Yes! and the No! the purpose of the rhyme is to ask for un chaparrón, another version of a downpour, and ends on a literally sweet note with sugar and turrón. 

Dictionaries insist on translating turrón - made from almonds, honey, sugar and egg-whites - as nougat, although the Spanish varieties thankfully bear little resemblance to the chewy plastic nougat that post-war English speakers grew up with.

A Spanish proverb maintains that nunca llueve a gusto de todos – it never rains to everyone’s liking or, in other words, you can’t please all the people all the time.  This is irrefutably true of rain – lluvia in Spain which, despite Professor Higgins, does not fall mainly in the plain.  On the contrary it falls wherever it pleases, usually in the Spring and Autumn when it can be depended on to devastate crops and cause maximum annoyance to off-season tourists. 



The Algar river in Altea after too much rain

Nevertheless, except in the north of Spain where Galicia, Asturias and the Basque Region often have more rain than they want, the southern sectors of Spain would prefer to have rain and be unhappy than to have no rain at all and be unhappier still.  And what could be more descriptive of the unpredictability and fleeting incidence of rain in Spain than the use of temporal to mean a storm?