Raining Cats and Dogs

On her first morning at Cwtch Books, a small charity in Cardiff that ran reading clubs for children, Paula Herrero was told that the name was the Welsh word for a hug and that the job would be a piece of cake. She nodded politely. She had a degree in translation from a university in Madrid, she had translated two novels and a great many washing-machine manuals, and she knew perfectly well what a piece of cake was. What she did not yet know was that her new manager, Gareth, would say something like it roughly every four minutes for the rest of the week.

Gareth was a large, kind, endlessly enthusiastic man from the Valleys who seemed to have no access to literal language whatsoever. Money was never short; it was "a bit tight, like". Problems were never difficult; they were "not rocket science". When the photocopier jammed he told her to keep her hair on, although she had not said a word, and when a volunteer called in sick he announced, with genuine sympathy, that poor Bethan was "under the weather". Paula glanced out of the window, where the weather was, in fact, rather pleasant, and wrote everything down in a small notebook to look up at lunchtime.

By Wednesday the notebook had four pages. Some of the idioms had relatives in Spanish, and those she enjoyed: something that cost an arm and a leg cost only an eye in Madrid, and being on cloud nine was simply the Spanish seventh heaven, two floors lower. Others had no relatives at all. She could find no logical reason why "Bob's your uncle" should mean that a job was done, and when she asked Gareth who Bob was, he looked genuinely puzzled, as if she had asked him who owned the moon.

The open day was on Saturday. It was meant to be the high point of the charity's year: a bouncy castle, a book swap, face painting, a visit from the local radio station and, above all, an appearance by the charity's patron, Mrs. Eleri Price, a retired headteacher who had paid for a magnificent new banner, three meters long, with the charity's name in letters you could read from the far side of the park. On Friday afternoon Gareth checked the forecast and said it was going to rain cats and dogs. Paula, who by now knew better than to look for animals in the sky, simply asked whether they should move everything indoors. "Nah," said Gareth. "It'll blow over."

It did not blow over. It poured from the moment they unlocked the gates, sideways, in the way that only Welsh rain seems to manage, and by eleven o'clock the bouncy castle had become a paddling pool. The children came anyway, in wellies and waterproofs, because Welsh children are not easily put off. Then, at around noon, a gust of wind lifted the magnificent banner clean off its poles and carried it over the hedge, across the car park and out of sight. Gareth stood and watched it go with an expression Paula would remember for a long time.

"Right," he said at last. "Mrs. Price is coming at three. She is not to know about this. Nobody says a word. Don't let the cat out of the bag, all right?" Paula wrote it down. She was fairly sure, from the context, that no actual cat was involved. Then she and two teenage volunteers spent the afternoon searching the park in the rain, under benches, behind the bins and, at one desperate point, in the duck pond, while Gareth told everyone who asked that the banner was "being cleaned".

Mrs. Price arrived at three o'clock exactly, under an enormous umbrella, accompanied by a presenter from the radio station holding a microphone wrapped in a plastic bag. Everyone had taken refuge in the church hall, and there she made a short, gracious speech, thanking the volunteers, the parents and the children. Then she looked around the room. "And where," she asked warmly, "is my lovely banner?"

Gareth opened his mouth. Before he could say anything, the door banged open and a large, muddy, extremely happy spaniel bounded in out of the rain, dragging behind it three meters of soaking fabric with the word Cwtch just about visible on it. The dog shook itself vigorously over the front row. Several children shrieked with delight. And Paula, who had spent the whole week studying, saw her chance at last and took it. "Well," she said brightly, straight into the radio microphone, "I'm afraid the cat is out of the bag."

There was a terrible silence. Then Mrs. Price began to laugh, a proper laugh that shook her umbrella, and the whole hall laughed with her, and the presenter said it was the best thing he had heard all year. The clip was played on the breakfast show on Monday. Gareth, who had turned the color of a beetroot, eventually forgave her. "Spot on, that was," he admitted a week later. "Perfect idiom. Shocking timing." Paula wrote that down too.