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.
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.