She’s the perfect companion when the going gets rough, and would never be a fair-weather friend. She even gets a laugh on stage, and when they part Arthur Smith feels a bit sad

She came to us in the bucketing rain, which is a phrase that makes me imagine giants in the sky scooping up water with buckets the size of Battersea Power Station’s chimneys and tipping it onto Wandsworth Common, where you must shelter under the tent of trees. A line I love, that one, “The river’s tent is broken”; but readers of this column can quote The Waste Land as well as I can, so back to Wendy…

She isn’t quite mine you see, but one of her defining characteristics is capaciousness – that’s the word to capture Wendy, almost entirely. Others would be “green” – a lovely green, the green of herbaceous rosemary – and perhaps “wheelie bin”. Sometimes when I put Wendy’s hood up I wonder if I look like a wheelie bin running away? Reduced to basic nouns, she’s a raincoat – but we’ve named her Wendy because she’s posh, blustery, and tent-like – almost a walking Wendy house. Plus she looks redoubtable but kind, ready to make Neverland a loving home for Peter Pan. On special offer at Country House Originals, she was two sizes too big but my wife went ahead and bought her anyway – and that’s why Wendy also fits me.

I was booked to do an outdoor gig at a festival and woke up to one of those annoying days where it’s hot in between ferocious downpours. It was to be our first adventure together, Wendy and me. I revelled in her deep pockets, so big you can fit a Cornish pasty and pack of fags in one and a pint and phone in the other. I wore my shorts and a t-shirt, but only the lower part of my calves were visible. The rest of me walked, umbrella-less, among drenched plastic ponchos and clinging cagoules, the very opposite of the Emperor with No Clothes – a bone-dry King. Wendy even came on stage with me and was fetchingly comic, playing her part of “bit of a funny coat for a man” very well indeed.

When we got back home – a feat in itself, as I’ve been known to leave new overcoats on trains – she told me I was her favourite and that she’d had a wonderful time. But my wife won’t allow her to live with my coats on the end of the bannister. She hangs with the very many other coats my wife seems to feel the need for – looking over at them now I see she has one for every nuance of weather, style, time and space. Wendy is emphatically devoid of nuance, like the bucketing rain she’s designed for, and she makes me recall that Blossom Dearie song, “I Like London in the Rain”. Taking her off, I felt a bit like Cinderella after the ball.

Probably the most famous overcoat in literature is Gogol’s, in his eponymous short story, a piece Nabokov hailed as “The greatest Russian short story ever written” – and as some Russian writers will tell you, “We all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat.” A humble clerk wears his old coat until it’s falling apart and commissions a new one from his tailor. He cannot afford it, and saves assiduously. But as the tailor outlines plans, the clerk enters an ecstasy almost holy in its trembling gravity. On taking possession of his wonderful new garment, he is emboldened to go to a party. Shimmering joy and life is finally his inside those seams. I won’t spoil the ending; if ever there’s a short story worth reading it’s Gogol’s masterpiece. But that poor clerk goes from comic to tragic, as indeed I did myself with my aforementioned lost overcoat – and, given Barclaycard rang up the day after my wife bought Wendy, I feel the financial aspects also resonate.

Coats, from Gogol to Wendy, are a thing we can measure life by; often the truth of poverty is told by someone having no coat. But if we are lucky, coats are memorable indicators of identity, often fondly recalled. “One little girl in a pale pink coat heard”; the coat of one’s lover on a date; the fur-coat-and-no-knickers years of one’s prime; the distinguished cloaks of generals as they march out to the Cenotaph; and the coat inhaled and loved and kept when one’s beloved is gone.

This article appears in the current edition of the Idler.

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