In Pursuit of Butterflies Read online

  Beaky read this book brilliantly, not least because it is a brilliant book. The heroes were seriously good naturalists, and were skilled as fishermen and hunters (having ‘borrowed’ the gardener's Rook rifle and ammo). They proved more than capable of looking after themselves in the forest, and, more importantly, the forest looked after them. They experienced precisely the range of adventures in Nature that I had sampled and for which I craved, but was being denied by a system hell bent on containment, rugby, simultaneous equations and making boys change their shoes. The book is essentially about freedom, freedom in Nature.

  Beaky taught Geography, very well in fact. One term he taught the geography of the local area, the Horsham district, with a passion almost unknown within the teaching profession at that time. He described a treed landscape of forests, woods, shaws, copses and lags, of veteran oaks amongst buttercup fields on small higgledy-piggledy farms, of meadows and orchards bordered by outgrown hedges of Blackthorn, and of an undulating landscape on heavy Wealden Clay, dissected by the valleys of the major Sussex rivers – the Arun, Adur, Rother and Ouse. He recalled the industrial history of iron making, timber production and hammer ponds. In fact, he described a paradise, accidentally in all probability, but a paradise that any budding naturalist would readily recognise. The difficulty was that we were not allowed to venture into it – yet it was all around, calling to us.

  Books can change people's lives. Brendon Chase changed mine, for in it I discovered the Purple Emperor butterfly. This is the passage that Beaky read out one warm evening in early June 1964, to a dormitory of restless ten-year-olds:

  And then … he saw it, quite suddenly he saw it, the glorious regal insect of his dreams! It was flying towards him down the ride and it settled for a moment on a leaf. Then, as he advanced, trembling with excitement, it soared heavenwards to the top of an oak. There he watched it, flitting round one of the topmost sprays far out of reach, mocking him, the Unattainable, the Jewel, the King of butterflies! It was well named the Purple Emperor, it was truly regal in form, colour and habits. The old entomologists called it His Imperial Majesty! They were right, those old boys, it was an imperial insect, and no mistake.

  Years later I had the honour of meeting the author, when he visited Selborne. I took afternoon tea with him and our mutual friend Valezina Viscountess Bolingbroke, known throughout butterflying circles by her maiden name Valezina Frohawk, for she was the youngest daughter of the wildlife artist and great lepidopterist F W Frohawk. ‘BB’ could talk Purple Emperors till the cows came home, but he rather resented anyone probing his imagination or adulating his work. I never met a more distant, dreamy man. Perhaps he recognised that I coveted his dreaming, his imagination and his fantasy world?

  Thus The Emperor was firmly established as a dream. Bed making, cricket, something ghastly called French, and constant shoe changing and nose blowing, remained the reality.

  At last the summer holidays began. Back in Somerset, a young butterfly enthusiast was unleashed on the unsuspecting countryside around the small village of Seavington St Mary, near Ilminster, armed with The Observer's Book of Butterflies and the equivalent volume on Moths. It was a hot August. The Beatles were Number One with ‘A Hard Day's Night’ and the Clouded Yellows were in: I caught one of these golden speedsters in a pink shrimping net outside Seavington, in a wildflower combe that has long since been converted into a cereal field. The same net also plucked a hovering Hummingbird Hawkmoth out of an azure sky at Woolacombe on the north Devon coast, during a week's holiday at the end of July. We must assume that the ‘Large Blue’ caught at the back of nearby Morte Point was a misidentification, but of what? Fantasy and reality are not easy disentangled, especially in childhood.

  Encounters with new species are often memorable, not least because of the identification challenges they raise. Many a beginner's heart has leapt with joy before crashing with despondency on first encountering the humble Wall Brown, mistaking it for a mighty fritillary. In the summer of 1964, Comma, Marbled White, Ringlet and Painted Lady were all encountered in and around Seavington St Mary, the last of these occurring freely in old apple orchards; the Dark Green Fritillary was seen hurtling up and down Charmouth Cliffs, elusively so; a colony of Grayling was discovered along the paths leading up to Dunkery Beacon on Exmoor; and the quarried hill fort of Ham Hill, by Stoke sub Hampden, revealed Brown Argus, identified by the bright females, and a huge population of Common Blue. Twenty-five butterfly species were identified that first summer, and the giant Old Lady moth proved to be a regular visitor to our cottage at night. None, it must be added, was killed, for I lacked collecting equipment – and the heart. If nothing else, some standards had been set, a path had been chosen or ordained. Above everything else, it was all regarded as being both normal and perfectly natural. It was part of rural life.

  3 Escape to the woods

  Hilaire Belloc spent much of his life at Shipley, three miles down the road from Christ's Hospital school. In the preface to The Four Men he writes: ‘a man love(s) with all his heart, that part of earth which nourished his boyhood. For it does not change, or if it changes, it changes very little, and he finds in it the character of enduring things.’ He is wrong, of course, for the landscape that we are about to explore has changed quite fundamentally. But at the same time he is absolutely right, as its spirit of place is still there – only you have to look more closely, more locally, to find it, and concentrate hard to shut out intrusions such as traffic noise.

  In a dusky corridor of the junior school at Christ's Hospital hung an old 2½-inch Ordnance Survey map of the landscape between Horsham and Belloc's heartland at Shipley. By the time I was moved up to the senior school I had learnt that map off by heart – no easy task, as boys were not allowed to loiter in corridors. As a junior in the senior school one was – at last – allowed out, at least for the odd couple of hours, rugby and cricket permitting. So, at the start of the autumn term of 1967 I finally broke out, ran two miles down to the nearest block of what is known as Southwater Forest – the gloriously named Dogbarking Wood – and revelled in it, utterly. A tawny Comma butterfly ascended from a log pile, and a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker was watched probing a birch trunk. I had come Home.

  Winter intervened, as it always does. Non-entomologists have no idea of the agonies suffered during the darker months, especially in boyhood. Those of us who spent part of our youth fishing will know of the angst that coarse fishermen experience waiting for the three-month close season to end. Football enthusiasts are out of season for all of six weeks, but to those afflicted with a love of butterflies autumn and winter inflict six whole months of acute mental suffering. Never mind Seasonal Affective Disorder, in itself a reality for many lovers of Nature in these islands, this is Spiritual Deprivation. We have to learn, first, how to survive winter, and then how to conquer it – the latter takes about forty years.

  Fortunately, there are books. Books for escaping into, when the warmth of the summer sun is far, too far away. At Christ's Hospital, two butterfly books were favoured once we had progressed beyond the Observer's books. We fell into two camps, disciples of Richard South's The Butterflies of the British Isles and of Edmund Sandars's A Butterfly Book for the Pocket. The former contained photographs of set specimens, though these were rather dark and dingy. Sandars's book had poorly reproduced paintings, again of set specimens, but also contained illustrations of larvae and pupae, and distribution maps and life-cycle calendar charts. It lacked the rather verbose descriptions of the adults so prominent in South. I was a follower of Sandars. However, one page of South fascinated me beyond what was probably good for me: Plate 31, opposite page 63, featured the ‘Black Admiral’, the rare all-black colour variety of the White Admiral, and the ultimate prize, aberration iole of the Purple Emperor – the all-purple Purple Emperor.

  The spring of 1968 started slowly, but its magic steadily grew. Any day now, something mighty was going to erupt within the world of Nature, and on Sunday May 19th it did. This was no mere
epiphany moment but a life-altering day, the first day in a life's calendar of sempeternal happenings. After chapel (compulsory) I ran, in heavy nailed school shoes and dressed as a penguin, the two and a half miles to Marlpost Wood, entered the wood at the zenith of spring, and crossed rapturously into a new dimension. There, to illimitable delight that must now be shared, I found colonies of the exquisite Pearl-bordered Fritillary and what was then known as the Duke of Burgundy Fritillary. The former was undoubtedly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, being the most graceful of our butterflies in flight, alongside the White Admiral.

  The first of these colonies was found in a plantation where rows of young oaks had been inter-planted with lines of Norway Spruce, as a nurse crop. The second, across the stream gully in the wood's eastern half, was in a young Corsican Pine plantation. In both, the Pearl-bordereds searched frenetically amongst old and new bracken fronds and over patches of Bluebell and Lesser Stitchwort, pausing only to visit ride-side patches of Bugle. Speckled Yellow moths were hatching, fair-weather cumulus clouds drifted lazily above, atmospheric pressure was rising, and a Nightingale sang snatches of some Elysian song. Will people who do not recognise that Paradise exists upon this earth please revise their beliefs: it does, as this book will repeatedly attempt to demonstrate, only it tends to be transitory and episodic, and you have to be in the right place at the right time, and in the right frame of mind – you must allow Nature in.

  A horribly soppy and naive song by a group called The Honeybus, who perhaps mercifully had only the one hit, was riding high in the charts that May, and was in my mind throughout and beyond that visit. There was only one thing to do: rewrite it, to give it some personal meaning, slow it down and remove the annoying castrato and counter-tenor parts. This heavily revised, sanitised and almost paganised version of ‘I Can't Let Maggie Go’ is my song of the Pearl-bordered Fritillary, but like so much of what one holds dearest is inappropriate for general communication. One dare not come out at that level, at least not quite yet.

  Songs play a curious role within our lives. They are integral to the collection of the memories with which we fill our minds. Either we ignore the words altogether, and allow ourselves to be merely haunted by the tune, or we spin personalised meanings into the cadence of the words. Either way, they become associated with specific periods of our lives, and the original meaning is ignored. I went further, and completely rewrote the lines of many a song, to give them idiosyncratic personal meaning and relevance.

  Two older boys in my house, Cesar and Longhurst (first names did not exist in boarding schools during that era), who were allowed bicycles, had discovered an even better spot, which they teasingly called Grimblings Meadow. There, they found Duke of Burgundy and Pearl-bordered Fritillary in even greater numbers. In vain I sought that place, knowing full well that it would not be a meadow. Eventually I found it, a young conifer plantation on an ancient woodland site called Northlands Wood, to the south, down the sunken Oldhouse Lane towards Brooks Green. No wonder they tried to keep the place secret, for euphrosyne the Pearl-bordered Fritillary abounded there.

  May merged into June, the tree canopy closed over, and Bluebell scent drifted into memory. Euphrosyne was replaced by its congener selene, the Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary. In those days the Latin and Greek specific names of butterflies were still predominantly in use, and some schoolboys even knew how to pronounce euphrosyne. The Small Pearl-bordered Fritillary proved to be all but ubiquitous in young plantations in that woodland system, spreading along some rides, though it lacked the psychic dimension of its cousin. The Nightingales stopped singing, though the Turtle Doves continued to purr content into the world. The woods became the domain of myriad Meadow Browns and a scatter of Large Skippers, only. The equivalent of what beekeepers know as the June Gap was upon us.

  Yet the Purple Emperor season was approaching, slowly, though none of us knew when, where or how to look. An older boy, Cottingham A (as opposed to his younger brother, Cottingham B), had netted a male flying low down in a ride in Marlpost Wood the previous July, only the fortunate insect had escaped whilst in the process of being boxed. The drama was witnessed by Cesar, Longhurst and McClure, and so was genuine. Had no witness been present even a wholly honest fellow like Cottingham A would never have been believed.

  Also approaching, rapidly and without welcome, was the exam season. Rather inevitably, then, July ushered in a short-lived heatwave, with temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. Two superb days were consequently spent revising on the vast expanse of playing fields known as Big Side, probably for lost-cause subjects like physics. Let it be known, then, that almost fifty years on the enforced wasting of those two days is deeply resented, increasingly so in fact. Worse, this wastage was repeated exactly a year later, in identical weather. Which malicious demon determined that the exam season should coincide with the peak of the butterflying, cricket and hay-fever seasons? Pupils who experience all three stand little chance in exams, and consequently under-perform. It is obvious that the academic year should start in January, and that exams should be staged during November, so that their victims can then recover over Christmas. But we deviate.

  Then, on July 3rd, the White Admiral entered into my life, and spontaneously became central to it – as if it had always been so. It is an integral part of every butterfly lover's existence, and one of the nation's best-loved insects. I have seen this gem of a butterfly annually since, searching for the first of each year in a state of pilgrimage. White Admirals were rumoured to occur in many of the local woods, so the sighting of an early male in Marlpost Wood came as no real surprise. What was surprising, or rather amazing, was the supreme grace with which the insect skimmed the ride-edge foliage, weaving secret ways in and out of sprays of horizontal leaves. A return visit in hot sunny conditions three days later resulted in the taking of a small series, and an encounter with the White-letter Hairstreak – a butterfly deemed so obtuse and elusive that none of us ever dreamt of finding it. Naturalists who have never collected butterflies will have no idea how difficult White Admirals are to catch, both in flight and when feeding from their beloved bramble flowers. Saturday July 6th 1968 remains a life red letter day – one of the top ten days I would most like to relive given the opportunity. A song, even more dreadful than ‘I Can't Let Maggie Go’, was in my head – a merciless melodrama sung by Richard Harris called ‘MacArthur Park’, in which love is likened to a cake left out in the rain. It was hastily rewritten, and became, unrecognisable, the song of the White Admiral.

  The following day I headed out towards St Leonard's Forest, east of Horsham, which I believed might be the paradise ‘BB’ had chosen for the setting of Brendon Chase, ostensibly set in the Weald. After running most of the way there, several miles, heavy rain set in. I ran back, soaked. The trouble was that we had no access to anything remotely approximating to a weather forecast at boarding school. The problem was eventually solved under the tutelage of the senior geography master, who had a profound understanding of British weather. Years later I found out that Brendon Chase was actually based on Salcey Forest in Northamptonshire, and that ‘BB’ had moved it to a fictional Weald because that name had a certain resonance.

  The weekend that straddled July 13th and 14th was critical. It held that summer's only chance of encountering the Purple Emperor, as shortly afterwards something preposterously inappropriate was destined to occur – term would end, just when some of us actually needed to be at boarding school. Moreover, the best part of the preceding week had been lost to heavy rain. Saturday the 13th started fine. The woods to the south were calling.

  Meanwhile, in another part of the Purple Emperor's empire, a Classics master from a small boarding school boarded the 6 am train from Salisbury to London, before travelling on to Huntingdon. This was I R P Heslop, lead author of Notes & Views of the Purple Emperor. His target was the Large Copper, which occurred only at Wood Walton Fen National Nature Reserve (NNR), where its population was artificially maintained through
captive breeding and releasing. Heslop arrived at the fen at about 11.30, only to find it severely flooded. Undeterred, for he had spent 25 years in West Africa, he swam through the flood to the main flight area, collected a fine series of dispar, swam back, dried himself off, and caught his return train to London and Salisbury. He was 64 at the time. Such people make perfect boyhood heroes.

  Longhurst and the much younger Oates were not supposed to associate, because of the age difference between them (in all-male schools such disparate associations could mean but one thing – though, needless to say, these two boys went on to father nine children between them). Undeterred, they made a strategic decision, and headed for Dogbarking Wood. One of the housemasters, Norman Fryer, had tipped me off that he had seen iris flying around a clump of tall oaks on the crest of the hill there a couple of years back. Norman was a reliable all-round naturalist. His revelation had been prompted by my showing him Hawfinch nests I had located in the school's neglected orchards that May. Dogbarking it was. White Admirals were skimming the ride-edge shrubs, but the crown of oaks revealed only a scatter of irritatingly high-flying Purple Hairstreaks. Then it clouded over and the day was lost.

  Everything hinged on the Sunday, which turned out to be cloudy but warm with bright periods. Dogbarking Wood merited another go, but Marlpost and indeed the adjacent Madgeland Wood also cried out for visits. Chapel inflicted a delayed start, dragging on for even longer than usual, complete with Psalm 119, which is at best interminable. Again, the oaks were tenanted only by Purple Hairstreaks. In hindsight, it is likely that recent felling work had deterred Purple Emperor males from gathering over the now exposed hilltop oaks. On returning to school the worst possible news broke: a boy called Robbins, from another house, had netted a male iris in Marlpost Wood that morning, after committing the cardinal sin of skipping chapel. But it was too late, term finished. A year was lost in the pursuit of iris.