In Pursuit of Butterflies Read online

  Someone whose first memory is of being eaten alive by red ants in a playpen might be expected to develop a pathological loathing of entomology, if not of natural history altogether. Strangely, I suffered no such reaction from that beastly experience, though it may explain why it took me nine years to get to love insects but only four to develop a passion for birds. I am not alone, however – my friend David Bullock has an early memory of being pinned to a gate by a frisky nanny goat, and he went on to become a leading mammal biologist, specialising in goats.

  Yet, significantly, another personal early childhood memory is of catching, in the tender hands of infancy, a small and delicate white butterfly resting on a red rose upon that self-same wisteria-fringed veranda where the ant-biting episode had occurred, before releasing it into a brightening sky. The image – no, the very experience – remains wondrously clear. If only we could readily understand the meaning of such events, which in modern nature writing are often termed epiphany moments. Meaning, of course, often kicks in long after the event, and our understanding of metaphor is inherently poor.

  These early dramas took place in Crewkerne, a bumbling small town in south-west Somerset. In those days Crewkerne specialised, if at all, in the manufacture of pyjamas. Incidents were rare, apart from a lengthy campaign of terror by a fire-raiser, who turned out to be a fireman with a penchant for torching barns and haystacks, and a serious incident when an Aberdeen Angus bull broke out and ran amok in a skittle alley, only calming down when a group of bulling heifers was cannily introduced. The town had an excellent toy shop, an autumn fair with dodgems, and seriously scary teddy boys who hung out outside a café called the Minto. The town was pronounced Crew-kurn by its few posh denizens, and variously as Cruc-kurn, Cruck-urrn or Croo-kurrn by its true natives, probably depending on for how long their families had dwelt there. Whatever, the name means the Place of the Crooked Cross, for the town had developed around a staggered cross roads on what was to become the A30, then the main highway to the far West Country. To the south lay the western fringes of Dorset, to the west the vast rural domain of Devon. All around were ridges of Lower Greensand separated by clay vales dotted with small dairy farms with thick meandering hedges, Primrose banks and dazzling streams.

  My father was headmaster of the grammar school. On his staff was a young biology teacher, John Keylock, who became a leading member of the Somerset Wildlife Trust and an authority on fungi. John ran a bird nest recording programme at the school. When I was not yet five, in the spring of 1958, he showed me a Willow Warbler's nest, on a rough scrubby bank by the school fives court. The domed nest, hidden in a tussock of coarse grass, consisted of intricately woven stems of fine blades of grass – Red Fescue probably – and contained a number of tiny speckled eggs. Every now and then one discovers something for which one was unwittingly searching. Never mind epiphany moments, this was almost the blinding light on the Road to Damascus itself. The mental imprint is so great that I could show you the very spot. A Goldcrest's nest followed shortly afterwards, in a fir tree in the nearby Victorian cemetery, necessitating a heart-pulsating journey up a gigantean stepladder held firm by the mighty Keylock.

  Brilliant as he was, Keylock was soon outgunned. On the wilder side of town lived a loose group of boys, led by a ten-year-old called Ronald who always wore a maroon jumper. These were serial nest hunters. Perceptions of social class, so prevalent at the time, meant that it was not appropriate for me to mix with them, or them with me, and their accents were so strong that I found them hard to understand. Nonetheless, tagging along was tolerated on a few precious occasions. Inspired, I ascended rookeries, peered into mud-lined Magpie nests in entanglements of thorn, was sworn at by irate Mistle Thrushes and stung to near-death searching for Common Whitethroat nests amongst brambly nettles. The gang's main targets, though, were nests of the Robin and what was then called the Hedge Sparrow (Dunnock), as these could hold Cuckoo eggs. Incredibly, at least a couple of these elusive trophies were found per year. Sooner rather than later, I will go a year without hearing a Cuckoo, and have, of course, long given up even dreaming of seeing one of their eggs again. But what happened to Ronald, who was seriously skilled at finding bird nests? Surely he now works for the RSPB or BTO? All I know is that he failed the eleven-plus exam and was consequently banished to the secondary modern school. Had he been examined in rural boyhood skills he would have won a scholarship to somewhere prestigious.

  The boys did not avidly collect birds’ eggs. The thrill was not in possession but in discovery, and they undoubtedly lacked the ability to curate eggs anyway. I never collected more than the odd addled egg, or eggs from deserted nests, being far too fond of the birds themselves. The problem, of course, is that over-enthusiastic children accidentally encourage nest abandonment by visiting too frequently. My heart still bleeds for an abandoned young Swallow I unsuccessfully tried to feed on bread and milk. That may have to be answered for on the Day of Judgement.

  This might seem an idyllic childhood, but it was in many ways typical of what rural children experienced into the 1960s. The freedom they had was immense, unrestrained by the all-pervading modern fears of stranger danger and traffic. It was quite normal for children to roam around the countryside, singly or in twos and threes, with no sense of fear other than of some farmers who had gone Barking mad, become alcoholics or were simply shotgun-happy (Barking mad requires a capital B, as the term is derived from a mental asylum in Barking). There were some unwritten rules, such as never run between cow and calf and, most crucially, ‘Don't tread on my (effing) mowing grass!’ (uncut hay). Crucially, odd characters were well known and closely watched by the rural communities in which they lived. Children were well governed by their stomachs, and would always return for tea, and parents were concerned with recovering from a world war and rebuilding the country.

  Do not for one moment think, though, that all was harmonious between Man and Nature in the countryside back then. Barbed wire fences, hedges and field trees were commonly dressed with the crucified corpses of Rooks and Carrion Crows, which were as much the victims of ignorance and prejudice as of cheap homemade cartridges. On more than one occasion I was petrified by the Otter hunt, whilst out fishing for Perch on the River Parrett. The Devon & Somerset Staghounds, up on Exmoor, were even nastier. We spent much time there, staying with Great Uncle Percy, the Reverend J P Martin, who published a series of best-selling children's books in his eighties.

  It is hard to remember what I did outside the four-month heaven that was the bird-nesting season. Birds were ever-present, moving, flying, calling, but such encounters lacked the fascination and wonder provided by the hunt for nests and eggs. Wild duck and skeins of geese flew over from the nearby Somerset Levels in autumn and winter, and the Fieldfare hordes arrived to feast in untamed Hawthorn hedges. Probably, I simply roamed, picking Primroses, damming streams, exploring farms run by amenable farmers, climbing trees and haystacks, and feasting off abundant apples, blackberries and plums in season. And then, in winter, snow was a transport of delight.

  There were also instances of sheer boyhood exuberance, too many of them in all probability. Notable here was the springtime practice of fishing in field ponds, with rod, line, float, leaded weights, hook and worm – for Great Crested Newts. The newts would simply ingest the loose end of the worm, and not impale themselves, and one would end up releasing a bucket full of writhing newts, hopefully none the worse for their brief captivity. The fine for such an activity nowadays could be anything up to £2000 per newt.

  Farms were regarded as adventure playgrounds. Bored youth of all ages would gravitate towards these wonderlands. Farmers had to find boys something useful to do, such as feed the calves, gather eggs or help dag sheep, or boys would simply run amok, usually by creating sophisticated tunnel systems through bales stacked high in barns. In the modern utilitarian interests of health and safety, it is now almost impossible even for a farmer's own children to sample such Utopian delights.

  There were also
books, for it rained all too frequently; books in front of flickering firelight, and Children's Hour on the BBC Home Service. We had no television, and computers were less dreamt about than spaceships. For an undiagnosed dyslexic like me, reading was not particularly easy, but one could dream for hours at C F Tunnicliffe's illustrations in the Ladybird What To Look For books, which were published around 1960, price: 2/6 net. The countryside he depicted, idealised and already almost bygone, was where I wanted to be, and indeed largely was. These books taught me my first butterflies: Orange-tip, Red Admiral, Painted Lady and ubiquitous cabbage whites. Likewise, Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairy books taught the basic rudiments of botany, though the poetry often irritated. These books fired up a love of flowers, but only in their seasons, and fed an already-incipient belief that all living things have souls, alongside the feeling that places and the seasons themselves have spirits. The concept of spirit of place was obvious, and was taken for granted. Bird books abounded, but were admired more for their illustrations than for their text – apart from descriptions of nests and eggs. All these early childhood favourites survive in a bookcase today, alongside the likes of The Chronicles of Narnia. They are brought out whenever flu strikes. Books persist, and can set directions in life. In good books, new meanings are discovered at each perusal.

  However, the idyll of childhood was shattered into irretrievable fragments by the sudden death of my father, aged 52, in March 1962. We did not merely lose a father and a husband, but the Victorian school house we regarded as home. Worse, at the age of eight I was of necessity packed off to board at the local preparatory school, which I already attended as a day boy. Never again would I visit the yew tree in the grammar school grounds in which Spotted Flycatchers nested annually. This had been the first decent nest I found unassisted. But personal tragedies can, if anything, strengthen one's relationship with Nature, and not simply by making one more dependent upon it. The problem was that boarding school equalled incarceration, albeit amongst pre-existing friends – and I could not have been amongst kinder, friendlier children. My heartland, though, was no more.

  Some tentative conclusions can perhaps be reached from this opening tale. First is a suggestion that naturalists are not so much made as born – not because they are in any way special but because all people are born to Nature: we are all born as naturalists, it is just that some or many of us choose, or feel obliged, to forsake that calling, perhaps as the poison of modern materialism strengthens within our minds. Secondly, natural history was considered a normal childhood pastime, a first-nature, which raises the question of why this is no longer the case. Thirdly, but equally, the freedom to roam has been eroded from childhood. Indeed, in 2012 a study conducted for the National Trust found that the home ranges of children in the UK had shrunk by 90% since the 1970s – make that 95% in comparison with my own childhood. This is disturbing, for children fall deeply in love with their homeland, and need to explore it and live it to the full, not in the company of well-intentioned but nevertheless domineering adults but by themselves. Perhaps people establish not so much territories as heartlands, to reuse a curious word introduced at the end of the previous paragraph. It is a concept that will be developed throughout the coming pages.

  2 Laudator temporis acti

  In the early 1960s one of the junior houses of Christ's Hospital school in the West Sussex Weald was run by an ancient housemaster nicknamed Jonah. A cadaverous man, Jonah was normally quiet but like the proverbial simmering volcano was prone to sporadic eruptions of Plinian magnitude, when deliberately wound up by boys – and wound up he surely was, regularly. He taught maths, or, more precisely, dry-maths. Something exciting actually happened in one of his lessons, just once: he had the habit of storing half-smoked cigarettes in his trouser turn-ups, and caught fire, rather spectacularly, to the hysterical delight of fifteen eleven-year-olds. He also played the piano at junior chapel services, ingloriously so on one memorable occasion after someone had wickedly mistuned the skool piano. (This was of course the era of Nigel Molesworth. School was spelt ‘skool’ and masters were there to be pranked.)

  On Tuesday afternoons in the summer Jonah did something arguably less futile than teach maths-without-humour and punish boys for having dirty shoes. It was Hobbies Afternoon, and he ran a butterfly and moth collecting group. B&M, as it was known, was nothing new to the school, having been introduced by an entomological chaplain, the Reverend L H White, in 1902, when the school migrated from London to a new location south of Horsham. Jonah continued the tradition, handing out wobbly Edwardian cane-framed nets, the bags of which were riddled with holes, along with pill boxes, breeding cages and other paraphernalia associated with the collecting and breeding of Lepidoptera. Apparently he had been inspired as a boy by no less a mortal than S G Castle Russell (1866–1955), a gloriously eccentric but deeply respected butterfly collector who had the habit of appearing randomly at public schools to instruct boys in the subtle arts of collecting. Castle Russell struggled to tell left from right, and in consequence was forever getting lost in forests, but he could tell at fifteen yards whether a male Orange-tip, in flight, possessed the small black spot in the forewing orange splash or not. He was also colour blind, which is remarkable as he was a pioneer electrician who wired up Buckingham Palace and the Admiralty. A modern equivalent of this well-intentioned and utterly innocent evangelist is much needed, but would doubtless require Criminal Records Bureau clearance.

  Butterfly collecting was difficult, as junior boys were restricted to a stark expanse of playing field, on pain of extreme pain, and expeditions afield could not be arranged within a sport-orientated regime. However, Orange-tips, Green-veined Whites, Common Blues, Meadow Browns and the standard aristocrats (Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell, Red Admiral and Comma) occasionally strayed within bounds, and were vigorously pursued, netted and pinned (badly). The pride of the school's official collection was a Queen of Spain Fritillary that had been taken on the edge of the junior school cricket pitch during the great immigration summer of 1945. Boys quickly learnt how to find Red Admiral caterpillars, hiding in curled nettle leaves, and bred a profusion of Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells, plus a few Commas and Orange-tips.

  And bounds were there to be pushed, of course. Jonah once caught two of us marginally out of bounds, in a hay meadow full of Meadow Browns, and duly erupted. In blind panic I dropped the Marmite jar containing a pristine Meadow Brown. The unnecessary death of one Meadow Brown still haunts my conscience.

  Moth collecting was much easier. Boys slept in long dormitories, the ends of which held ablution blocks that were brightly lit all night. The windows were jammed firmly open, turning these toilet and washing units into walk-in moth traps. There would be a stampede each morning to box the night's catch. Lime, Eyed and Poplar hawkmoths were frequent and highly treasured, the first of these breeding freely on the nearby avenue of mature lime trees. Buff Arches, Lappet, Large Emerald, Oak Beauty and Peach Blossom occurred commonly in summer, and during the early autumn the Feathered Gothic and Figure of Eight – all as intriguing as their names suggest.

  The alternative wildlife hobby group, Birds, in which I dabbled, had boys tracking down nests for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) Nest Record Scheme. Regular highlights included Goldfinch and Treecreeper, the latter nesting behind loose bark on tree trunks, and roosting each winter in excavated hollows in bark along an avenue of Wellingtonia trees. But I was used to better fare, and missed water birds and warblers in particular, along with the right to roam. The junior school, or Leigh Hunt house as it was known, was a veritable prison (and alumnus Leigh Hunt had indeed spent a while in prison himself, whilst fighting for the freedom of the press). That pupils were dressed up as penguins, in a stiff Elizabethan uniform, was but a minor inconvenience. Boys were cooped up for hours on end in a small day room, where they teased and bullied each other mercilessly, largely out of boredom and the frustration of being enclosed. Boys were constantly forced to perform utterly pointless tasks, such
as compulsory nose blowing each morning (‘Handkerchiefs out! Nose blowing by numbers, One, Two, Three!’ – I jest not) and changing shoes a dozen times a day. Alumnus Samuel Taylor Coleridge summarised the condition through the term ‘Christ's Hospitalised’. We were highly stressed anyway, for the school is a charitable institution specialising in taking into its stewardship boys (and now girls) from families which had fallen on difficult times. Most of us were from single-parent families. None of us ever talked about our backgrounds or home lives.

  Sometime in the mid-1960s Jonah retired into a rhomboid or parallelogram, or wherever ancient maths masters go to lie down. Nonetheless, I owe him Everything, though he scarcely knew of my interest, and never openly encouraged it. One of the many curious facets of the human condition is the frequency with which people unknowingly act as catalysts for others’ callings.

  The school prided itself on its Spartan values. These manifested themselves in myriad ways, not all of which were based on common sense or seemed to serve any purpose. One manifestation was the absence of curtains in dormitories. The wisdom of expecting thirty small boys to get to sleep in such conditions on bright summer evenings can be called into question. In the summer of 1964 the house master of Leigh Hunt B, Mr Eagles (known, predictably, as Beaky) temporarily solved the problem by reading out Brendon Chase, Denys Watkins-Pitchford's captivating tale of three boys who (understandably) choose to run away and go feral in a forest at the end of the Easter holidays, rather than return to – you've guessed it – boarding school. Watkins-Pitchford, who taught art at Rugby, wrote under the nom de plume of ‘BB’, after a grade of shotgun pellets used for shooting geese and also as fishing-line weights. He was an old fashioned gun-and-rod naturalist.