Those Vaguely Sinister Skies

Jonquils bloomed across Britain last February, and there was snow in Edinburgh in June. Thus it should have come as no surprise that this summer London (at 90DEG) was hotter than Casablanca. So, for that matter, was the rest of Europe, as the Continent suffered through the ninth straight week of a subtropical heat wave that was widely regarded as the worst in a century.

Though the scorcher showed some signs of abating last week, at its height it sent temperatures from the tip of Lapland to the boot of Italy soaring into the 90s day after day. Palermo recorded 105DEG, Cannes 98DEG, Helsinki 90DEG. In Stockholm's outskirts, where the mercury rose to 95DEG for the first time since 1811, a heat-crazed elk burst out of the woods, plunged into a suburban swimming pool and splashed madly back and forth before finally being rescued by amused firemen. While Moscow shivered under cold blasts from the north that plunged temperatures into the mid-30s and brought topcoats out of summer storage, the Siberian city of Verkhoyansk--the coldest spot on earth, with temperatures in winter dipping to -140DEG--sweltered in 86DEG heat.

Motorcycles parked on Paris streets keeled over under their own weight as kickstands simply sank into asphalt that had turned to mush. In Joenkoeping, Sweden, city fathers warned parents not to let children play on park slides. Reason: too many badly burned bottoms. Ice cream sales climbed, and Britons lapped up Dalek Death Rays Ice Lollies (ices on a stick) at the rate of 2 million a week. They also forsook their tepid brews by the million, sending the sale of chilled Continental-style beer up by 60%. Hot pants were everywhere to be seen on Rome streets, as were nude bathers on Copenhagen beaches, and topless nymphs in Stockholm parks. Though the Coldstream Guards at Buckingham Palace sweltered stoically in their bearskins, London bobbies resorted to what some considered to be the British equivalent of toplessness --they went tieless. "It's the first time in our history we've allowed them to do this," explained an apologetic London inspector. "As soon as the weather turns back to normal, the ties will be back."

Dog Days. French and German winegrowers said that the long, hot summer was swelling grapes on the vine and would produce a vintage crop. Elsewhere, the sizzling sun brought punishing drought. The French government declared parts of Brittany and Normandy agricultural disaster areas. The grain crop was expected to be off by 10%, and there were fears as well for corn and potato harvests. Because of a lack of hay for cattle, milk production plunged.

The dry weather was also blamed for a rash of forest fires, particularly in Germany and Italy. In Lower Saxony, 7,400 West German soldiers were called out to assist 6,000 civilian firefighters battling two fires that destroyed 20,000 acres of forest land and threatened ten villages. Zookeepers also had their hands full. Penguins in the Cologne zoo had to be put in air-conditioned boxes. A lion in a safari park near Frankfurt lumbered out of his lair and took a dip in the park's fountain, and a frazzled baby leopard at the West Berlin zoo sprang out of its crate and bit West German President Walter Scheel, tearing his jacket.

One of the areas most affected by the great canicola, as the Italians called the dog days, was southern Italy. With rainfall off by 50% this year, Rome and Naples and hundreds of smaller communities are rationing water. The southern town of Cutro reported 70 cases of typhoid, and health officials have declared a "pre-alert." In Palermo, where strike-neglected garbage aggravated the situation, water is limited to one hour a day--and nobody is ever sure which hour it will be. One Palermo man has taken to sleeping in the bathtub with his feet under the open tap. As soon as a trickle of water awakens him, he sounds an alarm, rousing relatives and neighbors to fill every available pot.

Not So Liberated. Even so, there is not enough for bathing. As one Palermitan admitted with a wince, a shower or bath has become rare, generally reserved for those too young or too infirm to jump into the sea. Well-off vacationers in scenic Positano are resorting to expensive showers of bottled mineral water. Britain's daily Sun proposed another solution. It printed a Dutch poster that showed a nude couple embracing under the shower and was captioned: "Shower with a friend." Mrs. Sybil Clayton, spokeswoman for the Family Planning Association, predicted that the heat might help to beat the population problem. Said she: "I feel absolutely sure from talking to friends that there is less interest in sex in this weather." Not in Norway, apparently, where a young couple attracted a crowd of spectators by making love in midafternoon in front of Oslo's parliament building. The city's not-so-liberated police fined the woman $30 (she explained that she had not realized where she was). The man decided to contest the charge in court.

What caused the heat wave and did one summer presage a trend? Hubert Lamb, a head of the climatic research unit of Britain's University of East Anglia, contended that the heat wave was a symptom of the gradual cooling of the earth. "That general trend means more volatile weather," he said. "It will be more hot, more cold, more wet and more dry, just as it was in the, 17th century."

Most meteorologists, however, declined to find a pattern and simply explained that this year, for reasons unknown, a high pressure area that normally moves east from the Azores was carried farther north than usual. As a result, Europe caught the weather that should have gone to Africa.

Whatever the cause, the seemingly endless sunshine perversely caused a vague foreboding. Leave it to British Essayist Malcolm Muggeridge to put that feeling into words. Recalling the beautiful summers of 1914 and 1939, Muggeridge wrote in the New Statesman: "There seems to be something vaguely sinister in the continuing blue skies and warm, still evenings, as though they portended the coming of the positively last crisis ... when our present way of life, so stained, so distorted, so fraudulent, finally disintegrates."

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