By Diane Shipley
The weather app on my phone flashes CAUTION: DANGER TO LIFE!
Schools across England are closed this morning in case extratropical cyclone Storm Eunice whips herself into a frenzy—smashes trees into windows, rips roofs off buildings, and crushes children where they sit.
Hundreds of Brits have commemorated the occasion by uploading a notorious 1987 weather forecast to TikTok, where it plays on a loop. The mustachioed meteorologist smirks as he announces, “Apparently a lady rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, don’t worry if you’re watching, there isn’t…”
That was the day my teacher battled breath-stealing gusts to greet our class at the top of the school’s crooked steps, her skirt billowing and eyes watering. When the wind snatched my Care Bears satchel and danced it along the surrounding bushes, she grabbed for it again and again, handing it back daubed with mud before she rushed me into the building, past bowed trees shaking their branches like fists.
As I waited to cross the road to my mum’s car a few hours later, a squall picked me up like a tissue and tossed me into traffic. Panicked, the crossing guard bellowed, “You could’ve died, you stupid girl!”
He wasn’t wrong: that night, hurricane-force gales felled 15 million trees, knocked out the power to hundreds of thousands of homes, and killed twenty-two people.
In the decades since, the mustachioed meteorologist has repeatedly protested that his comments were taken out of context, that he was referring to conditions in Florida, not Britain. Still, he underestimated the country’s worst storm in centuries, allowing only that it would be “very windy.” As for the stereotypically neurotic woman who called the BBC, at first, he said she was a stranger, then a colleague’s mother, and then he admitted he’d made her up.
Back then, my friend and I used to play ‘weatherman’ for hours, mimicking his magnetic suns and clouds with crumpled Scotch tape that we stuck to the wall, sweeping our hands to show areas of low or high pressure. Her older brother ignored us until one afternoon in the school playground, when he waved me over. Proud to have finally won his attention, I skipped up to him and in a flash, he pinned me to the asphalt so another boy could lift my skirt and examine my underwear. Hot breath grazed my cheek as my friend’s brother whispered, “He likes you.”
The news claims today’s cyclone is especially dangerous because the public underestimates storms with female names, assuming a woman will be less likely to wreak havoc than a man. And no wonder: According to the next bulletin, men and boys sexually assault eleven thousand women and girls a week in the UK. That’s 1571 attacks a day. Every day. A natural phenomenon.
As the sky darkens, I check my windows and doors are locked. Outside, the trees are motionless yet alert, tensed to discover whether Eunice chokes down her fury or lets it fly.
Diane Shipley is a journalist and writer based in the UK, where she is a PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Lancaster University. Her previous work has been published by The Guardian, The Rumpus, and Longreads, among others. You can also find her on Instagram (@dianeshipley) and Substack: https://loweryourexpectations.substack.com.
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