In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty-year Affair

1 Starting out

There was no beginning, no single moment that set in motion a journey of at least fifty years, a journey through Nature. This is because Nature was central to my existence from birth. The only thing that may be remarkable here is that I did not stray away from it, as many of us do, perhaps because it had bitten too deep or because I lacked the ambition or bravery to venture elsewhere. So I journeyed with it, and it with me, and in the process I became distanced from some of the thinking and values that are prevalent in Western civilisation, together with the associated material benefits.

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 1943. 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.

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.

Worse, my family had moved from a peripatetic existence in the wilds of Somerset to the developing suburbia of the mid-Chilterns, where Mother had obtained a job running a conference centre. Unused to omnipresent traffic noise and houses of wealthy folk scattered intrusively everywhere, I struggled to feel even remotely at home there. Everything was Private. The countryside had been vanquished there, offering no freedom to roam. The orange glow of distant street lights obliterated the familiar stars, and the Milky Way abruptly vanished from my life. The freedom of the Somerset countryside was no more, which rendered that offered by the West Sussex countryside during term time even more important.

Mother had had enough. She sent me on a weekend butterfly course at Pendley Manor, Tring, run by Robert Goodden of Worldwide Butterflies. He introduced me to chalk grassland as a habitat, and tipped me off about various good butterfly localities in the Chilterns that could be reached by bus or bicycle. The Chalkhill Blue came into my life that weekend, as the first males were on the wing at Totternhoe Quarries close by to Tring. We also found Small Blue larvae there, an impressive lesson and eye-opener for a fourteen-year-old.

Inspired and informed by Goodden, I took the Aldershot & District omnibus service to Watlington, a small sleepy town at the foot of the Chilterns escarpment which, traffic apart, has not changed substantially since the summer of 1968. Watlington Hill (NT), on the scarp slope, turned out to hold a modest population of Silver-spotted Skipper and several colonies of Brown Argus in pockets of tall grass. The former was a devil to catch, darting at high speed low over the short fescue turf. But caught it was, by employing a turf-level version of cricket's sweep shot or by quickly dropping the net down on settled specimens. The National Trust may wish to contact me regarding the collecting of butterflies on its land, contrary to its bylaws.

On the other side of the road leading up the escarpment to the delightfully named Christmas Common was an even better butterfly site, consisting of old quarry pits and a long sunken chalk-land gully. Chalkhill Blue was abundant there, and Dark Green Fritillary numerous in a nearby abandoned field. Sadly, this whole area became enveloped by scrub within 25 years. Places change.

4 Rebellion

The late 1960s was above all else a time of radical social change, even within boarding schools where little had altered since Edwardian times. Lindsay Anderson's film If (1968) was supposed to be a parody of contemporary public school life, but to those of us who sneaked out of such places to watch that proscribed film in local cinemas it was remarkably verbatim, and unfunny. Frustration was simmering. The system was being challenged.

Change even penetrated the pursuit of butterflies. At Christ's Hospital, Jonah's retirement had brought to an end the supply of young enthusiasts entering the senior school, for no fresh-faced young master arrived down from Oxbridge to continue the hobby within the junior school. Furthermore, a generation of older practitioners, such as Cesar, Longhurst and McClure in my house, and Robbins in Lamb A, left for the real world, whatever that was. All of a sudden one was in a rapidly dwindling minority, within a social environment in which compliance to peer pressure increasingly meant Everything. Interest in natural history quickly became socially unacceptable in the extreme, and butterflying was deemed a gross eccentricity. Only Oates and Johnson in Coleridge A remained, and a rather fun-loving trio led by Francis Ratnieks in Lamb A (named after Charles Lamb, a contemporary and friend of Coleridge). Similar changes were doubtless taking place at that time in other public schools. Lepidoptera collecting started to become an endangered practice.

Behavioural modifications had to be made. In consequence, I gave up collecting butterflies, though not simply because of peer pressure and rising levels of testosterone. Above all, I had become too fond of butterflies. In effect, the butterflies had collected me, having infiltrated my soul. As concessions to peer pressure, bird nesting, fishing and moths were abandoned, but the power of the relationship with Nature offered through butterflying meant too much and had to remain, and intensify. The Rubicon had already been crossed (probably on May 19th 1968). The way forward necessitated bearing the cross of eccentricity. Acceptable interests in the disparate likes of Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and the Incredible String Band afforded a social lifeline.

The problem is very much alive today. Young children are fired up about Nature, wondrously, only to feel obliged to ditch that enthusiasm the moment they enter secondary school, in obedience to what they believe is expected of them by their peers. They may end up sacrificing themselves in order to be like others, or more precisely, to be as they feel others are and expect them to be. It happened, visibly, to my own children when they moved up to secondary school. Preventing this breakdown is one of the major challenges facing our relationship with Nature.

In the woods, 1969 was a year of consolidation and pushing limits back further. Okehurst Woods, way to the west near Five Oaks, were discovered, and found to be alive with both species of pearl-bordered fritillary, especially selene. St Leonard's Forest, to the east, was finally conquered, many of its young plantations also alive with the two fritillaries, and its buckthorn bushes stuccoed with Brimstone larvae.

At the end of a June dominated by cricket and exams the woods were alive only with myriad Meadow Browns, which were bib-bobbing everywhere along the rides. The White Admirals appeared on July 2nd in Marlpost Wood and, as in 1968, an expedition on the first Sunday of the month to far-flung terra nova, this time the woods around Loxwood in pursuit of reputed High Brown Fritillaries, ended with retreat in heavy rain as an unwelcome wet spell commenced. Life was repeating itself.

Yet again, iterum atque iterum, everything hinged on the final weekend of term. The Saturday was lost to cricket, but the Sunday was hot and clear. Marlpost Wood beckoned and received, but yielded only a goodly number of rather worn White Admiral and a Silver-washed Fritillary, then an extremely scarce butterfly in the district. Once again, term ended just as the Purple Emperor season was beginning.

Shortly afterwards, on July 21st 1969, having stayed awake all night