D J Taylor: Happy when it rains. Why we'd be lost without our gathering clouds

As it turned out, this weekend's weather forecast was unusually promising, but I think I can safely predict that a fair number of the holidaymakers among you reading this will be doing so under a lowering sky, beneath dripping trees or while waiting for the ominous drumming noise that denotes water sharply descending on a car bonnet or a caravan roof. Rain, after all, is as characteristic of a British summer holiday as traffic jams, cream teas or pier-end entertainment. Gordon Brown will feel its moist descent as he makes his way around Southwold; David Cameron will doubtless be inconvenienced by it as he traverses the bosky back lanes of Lostwithiel; Nick Clegg will watch it melancholically from the window of wherever it is that he stays with his in-laws. You can be sure that from now until the beginning of September, from Jura to Cromer, and from Robin Hood's Bay to the clogged Carmarthenshire beaches, rain will fall.

One of the first songs I remember from infancy was Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday". But of what did the summer holidays of the mid-1960s actually consist? By and large, the childhood memories of anyone over the age of 40 who grew up in the era of home-grown holidays, before the age of cheap flights and leisurely saunters around the Dordogne, will be dominated by rain. My own are full of it. Rain cascading over the Suffolk wheatfields, and, in particular, the quiet corners of them earmarked for family picnics; rain falling in soft, pointilliste swirls over the dung-coloured Bognor sand; rain converting the innocuous Lakeland rills where one wandered with one's parents into a mutinous torrent. The summers of adolescence when, for once, the sun miraculously shone seem freakish by comparison, a few haphazard stokes directed against a stern, unappeasable current, after which the swimmer turns tail and drifts on with the tide. With hindsight, the long, drought-ridden summer of 1976 seems an oddly sinister time. At some point, everyone knew, it would rain. But when? And for how long? Gradually, as pavements cracked in the heat and back gardens turned into dust-bowls, the suspense became unendurable.

The feeling of deep, climatic unease that envelopes nearly every British holiday in a fog of anticipatory gloom is a feature of our wider national life. In fact, rain's role as one of the UK's great cultural signifiers is insufficiently appreciated. Omnipresent, ever-regrouping, its sudden advent rarely to be discounted, instantly on hand to despoil long-planned social events and sporting extravaganzas, it can, mysteriously, never quite be neutralised or turned matter of fact. Working in the City of London a decade ago, I was struck me a certain proportion of the workforce was actively scared by rain. As the skies turned black over Chancery Lane or Farringdon Street and the first gusts blew in against the shivering plate glass windows, one would start to hear secretaries making nervous phone calls, assuring their nearest and dearest that they were coming home early, asking to be met at stations or picked up on nearby street corners "because of the rain". Weather forecasters still have this habit, I notice: a wet weekend might be a plague of frogs for all the downcast prophesying that precedes it. There is something – literally – elemental about this, an echo of Lear on the blasted heath, or some stranded medieval traveller, halfway between the point of embarkation and the last homely house, the thought that none of the appurtenances of modern civilisation – mobile phones, central heating, motorised transport – can, in the last resort, save you from the primal indignity of getting wet.

Language and literature abet this deep uneasiness in the presence of rain. Whole metaphorical systems have been predicated on it, entire proverbial word-hoards dug out from the mud beneath its sluice gates. The figurative language of rain is, as you might expect, profoundly unsettling. It rains "cats and dogs". It rains in "torrents", in "cataracts", it "teems", takes on the biblical proportions of "deluges". Lashed to the creative imagination, it produces some of the most striking imagery in poetry: Tennyson and his tears falling "like summer tempests", say. In the hands of novelists, rain becomes not just an occupational scenic hazard but a fail-safe way of lowering the emotional thermostat, an integral part of aesthetic cause and effect. Dickens's Bleak House has two abiding presences in addition to its human traffic: the fog that hangs over London to provide a metaphor for the interminable Chancery case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, and the rainwater that seems permanently to inundate Sir Leicester Dedlock's Lincolnshire pile, and in whose clammy aftermath Lady Dedlock can be seen out a-wandering.

One of the most salient features of the inter-war novels by J B Priestley, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh is that it nearly always seems to be raining. Waugh once said that if he wanted to herald the arrival of something unpleasant in his works he merely inserted the sentence "Outside it was raining". Priestley's Angel Pavement (1930) offers the spectacle of a whole group of characters, the employees of a down-at-heel concern in London's EC2, laid low and subtly diminished both in self-esteem and in their relationships with each other by a change in the weather. On the day that Mr Smeeth, the ground-down clerk, struggles out of sleep in Stoke Newington to find himself "faced with one of those dull spouting mornings which burst over unhappy London like gigantic bombs filled with dirty water", the firm of Twigg & Dersingham, for which he labours, might just as well declare itself bankrupt on the spot.

In children's literature this tendency is even more marked. Here rain is an explicitly moral force, ripe to trample on infant happiness. In the children's books of my youth, it always rained – infallibly – on the morning of the church garden fete, and the reader spent a tense couple of hours wondering if wee Tim and pert Elspeth would be able to run the hoopla stall whose proceeds were primed to save old Mrs Furbelow from the workhouse. As every Beatrix Potter fan knows, Mr Jeremy Fisher's problems begin at the moment when the first raindrops fall, and a monstrous trout comes looming up through the shallows. Only once in any of these books did rain seem to figure in a remotely agreeable light, and that was in a boy's school story where the establishment was threatened by drought.

As for the popular song, rain lurks eternally, nearly always with sinister intent, forever figuratively launched against the settled relationship and the pious hope. When the rain comes, as the Beatles keened in "Rain", "they might as well be dead". "It's raining again/Too bad I'm losing a friend," Supertramp pronounced. There were those rainy day women, those cakes left out in the rain, that singer who didn't think that he could take it for he'd "never have that recipe again". Very occasionally, one could walk in the rain with the one you loved, or decide, as Status Quo once put it, that you couldn't "live without the rain", but the Jesus and Mary Chain's declaration that they were "only happy when it rains" was sheer ironic contrarianism. Normally, the downpour was either bleakly unstoppable ("Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling down" – Simple Minds) or capriciously random, as in Magazine's "I can't do a thing about the weather".

And to concentrate on the abstract responses of art, literature and song is to ignore a much wider rain culture founded on straightforward utilitarian necessity. Historically, large parts of the UK's clothing and footwear industries have been bound up in a search for garments resistant to water. Mackintoshes, Inverness capes, galoshes, sou'westers, Barbour jackets! The symbolism of the umbrella is a PhD subject in itself, and there have been countless characters in our national life – Harold Wilson in his Gannex mac – and fiction whose public profile has been almost entirely governed by the rain-resistant clothes they wear. Significantly, in Anthony Powell's 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, the garment that defines the oddity of Kenneth Widmerpool for all time, and may even be the foundation stone of his terminally warped personality, is a raincoat.

All this is much too big to be ignored, something wired into the national DNA, offering an instant hotline to the heart of the national psyche. Never mind the "soft, refreshing rain" of "All Things Bright and Beautiful". No, rain is the destroyer, the lingering menace, the romantic's scourge.

Meanwhile, as climate change continues to bite and the meteorologists talk of a future filled with damp, rain-strewn summers, it can only get worse. However much we look on the bright side, wait still the storm is over or look for the silver lining that lurks in every cloud, it will be still be raining in our hearts.

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