I was in Hay-on-Wye at the literary festival, strolling through the streets past all the second-hand bookshops, when I happened to glance in at the window of one of them and caught sight of a book called The White Lions of Timbavati. On the front cover was a striking photograph of a white lion in the African bush. He was looking directly at me, staring at me. I was interested, intrigued. I’d never heard of white lions before. I had thought until then that all lions were tan in colour, or dusty gold. I went in and asked if I could have a closer look. The book turned out to contain a study made over several years of a pride of white lions in South Africa, and there were numerous photographs throughout, of white lions with their cubs, sleeping through the heat of the day, hunting, then sleeping again. It was £4.45. I bought it and took it back to my hotel room.
After that, I took the book with me wherever I went. These rare and beautiful creatures became ever more magical to me as I turned the pages, and I kept dipping into it, kept wondering at them, at their magnificence. So it was that I had the book with me and was reading it again, a couple of weeks later, when I found myself on the train travelling home from London to Exeter. Just before we came into Westbury Station in Wiltshire, the train stopped. I looked up from my book, to see where we were, I suppose, and there, right across the hillside, carved out of the chalk, was this huge white horse. White horse. I looked down at the cover of my book. White lion. I looked up again. White horse, white lion, white horse. From that moment, I knew I was going to tell a story about some great white lion carved out of a chalky hillside. But no story came. My white lion remained simply an image in my head, not a story. Try as I did, I could make nothing more of it.
Then I heard a story, a true story that enabled me to bring that white lion on the hillside to life. I was at a dinner party, and everyone was exchanging stories, I remember, of grandparents. Who knows why! A particularly boring fellow opposite me was sounding off, at length, and in a voice like a trombone, about a grandfather of his who had been in the trenches in the First World War. The tone of his storytelling was so ponderous and pompous that I nearly stopped listening altogether. But I am very glad I didn’t. I know I only went on listening because he said this story was about a lion. It was, it turned out, about a lot more than that.
His grandfather, it seemed, had been sent to the Front in France as a young eighteen-year-old officer. After just a couple of days in the trenches, a shell exploded near by, and he was wounded in the leg. He was stretchered to a field hospital, treated there, and then taken to a large convalescent hospital in a chateau, some thirty miles behind the lines. As part of his treatment, the doctors made him walk into the nearest village every day, with his walking stick, to build up the strength in his leg.
One day, having walked the mile or so from the chateau to the village, he was sitting, having a glass of wine in a café, when he heard the sound of shooting. Wondering what was going on, he got up and limped off round the corner into the square. Drawn up around the village square were a dozen or so wagons and cages from a travelling circus. And then he saw an old Frenchman going from cage to cage shooting the animals one by one, and crying his heart out as he did so.
Enraged, the young soldier wrenched the rifle out of his hand, “Why?” he cried. “Why are you doing this?”
“Listen,” said the old circus keeper, “these are my animals, my family. But I can’t feed them any more. No one comes to the circus. I have no money. And even if I had money, there is no meat to buy, no straw or hay to buy. Everything goes to the soldiers and the horses at the Front. My animals are starving. I have no choice but to shoot them.”
There was just one circus animal still alive, the old circus lion.
“Well, you’re not shooting that lion,” said the young man.
“Then you look after him,” the Frenchman replied. “I cannot.”
Not long afterwards, villagers and soldiers witnessed an extraordinary sight. Coming down the street towards the grand house that served as military headquarters was a young soldier and an old man, the circus owner, who was leading the circus lion. People disappeared into their houses, and shut the doors and windows. Children were hauled off the street. As they approached the headquarters, the commanding officer came running down the steps, demanding to know what was going on.
“Sir,” said the young soldier, saluting. “This is a circus lion. It belongs to me now, because this Frenchman, who is the circus owner, cannot feed him any more. So I arranged that we would look after the lion – he was going to have to shoot him otherwise. And the lion is the emblem of England, isn’t it, sir? So we could not let that happen, could we, sir?”
“I should jolly well think not,” said the commanding officer. So they looked after the old lion, and in time sent him back to England, where he lived out his life in a zoo.
“Well, what do you think of that?” said the teller of the tale when he had finished. All of us had listened to every word. Not surprisingly, after a story like that, no one else seemed to have a grandfather story to tell. I later found out there was truth in his story, that something like that had actually happened.
So now I had a story to tell, but not the confidence to tell it. The truth was, I knew little or nothing about lions, or about Africa. Help came, by great good fortune – I have had a lot of this! – from a chance meeting in a lift in Dublin. I was there to give a talk at a conference. That was now over, and I was making my way up to my room after breakfast, when into the lift stepped someone I knew, a face I instantly recognized. But I hadn’t a clue who this person was. She was maybe about my age, exceedingly beautiful and elegant. All I knew was that this was a face I had loved. As the lift went up, I struggled to recall her name. I did, just in time, but I was so overwhelmed at being so close to someone I had so much admired that I couldn’t think what to say. So I said the first thing that came into my head: “I think your Born Free Foundation is wonderful,” I told her.
“Thanks so much,” said Virginia McKenna, great and beautiful star of the film Born Free, and many other films and plays, and founder of the Born Free Foundation. The lift stopped, the door opened, and off she went. Off I went too, distraught at my clumsiness.
I was packing my suitcase a few minutes later and saw there on my bed a copy of the book I had just published, The Dancing Bear. Leave a copy for Virginia McKenna, I thought. Her whole life has been about caring for wild animals, fighting to ensure they are not locked up in cages or treated cruelly. I knew that was why she and her late husband, Bill Travers, had set up the Born Free Foundation. So I wrote a little dedication to her in my book and left it for her at the reception desk.
A week later I received a wonderful letter from her, saying how much she had liked The Dancing Bear and how heartened she was by my kind words. If ever I needed it, she wrote, if ever I was to think of writing a book about a lion, she would be only too pleased to help, because she knew lions quite well, had lived with them and worked with them, and loved them. I needed no further encouragement. I asked for her help by return of post. And help came. Armed now with all this new inside knowledge about lions from Virginia McKenna, with my story of the white horse carved out on that hillside in Westbury, with that story I’d heard round the dinner table about the young soldier in the First World War, surely I could do it. Surely I could begin. But I couldn’t.
I needed to find the voice for my story. 1914 is a long time ago. I couldn’t start: “Once upon a time…” It wasn’t a fairy story. Someone in the story had to tell it, someone who was there, alive at the time. But who? Someone old now, with a tale to tell, I thought. Memory helped me there, memories of me as a schoolboy, a small frightened boy running away from boarding school – as I had – meeting an old lady a mile or so away from the school who took pity on me and looked after me. She brought me to her home in the village, gave me tea and sticky buns, calmed me down and told me about the photo on her mantelpiece of her husband in uniform and how he had gone off to the First World War and came home deaf from the guns. Then she drove me back to my school, so that no one ever knew I had run away.
The voice of the storyteller in The Butterfly Lion is hers, and the little boy in the story is me. I even call myself Michael. I often do that in my stories. It helps me feel I am inside the story as I am writing, that I am living it. There are more Michaels in my stories than I care to remember. I am not very inventive with names. Often I write in the first person. So then it makes sense to be Michael, even Michael Morpurgo sometimes. I am Michael Morpurgo, for instance, in another story set in my boarding school, the story I call My One and Only Great Escape – also about my running away. I was never very good at running away. But, though I did not realize it at the time, it helped me write my stories, and more than once too. If I had not run away, I think I should never have found a way to write The Butterfly Lion.
I was still deciding which direction to take when I heard a voice from behind me.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
I turned.
“Who are you?” she asked again. The old lady who stood before me was no bigger than I was. She scrutinized me from under the shadow of her dripping straw hat. She had piercing dark eyes that I did not want to look into.
“I didn’t think it would rain,” she said, her voice gentler. “Lost, are you?”
I said nothing. She had a dog on a leash at her side, a big dog. There was an ominous growl in his throat, and his hackles were up all along his back.
She smiled. “The dog says you’re on private property,” she went on, pointing her stick at me accusingly. She edged aside my raincoat with the end of her stick. “Run away from that school, did you? Well, if it’s anything like it used to be, I can’t say I blame you. But we can’t just stand here in the rain, can we? You’d better come inside. We’ll give him some tea, shall we, Jack? Don’t you worry about Jack. He’s all bark and no bite.” Looking at Jack, I found that hard to believe.
I don’t know why, but I never for one moment thought of running off. I often wondered later why I went with her so readily. I think it was because she expected me to, willed me to somehow. I followed the old lady and her dog up to the house, which was huge, as huge as my school. It looked as if it had grown out of the ground. There was hardly a brick or a stone or a tile to be seen. The entire building was smothered in red creeper, and there were a dozen ivy-clad chimneys sprouting skywards from the roof.
We sat down close to the stove in a vast vaulted kitchen. “The kitchen’s always the warmest place,” she said, opening the oven door. “We’ll have you dry in no time. Scones?” she went on, bending down with some difficulty and reaching inside. “I always have scones on a Sunday. And tea to wash it down. All right for you?” She went on chatting away as she busied herself with the kettle and the teapot. The dog eyed me all the while from his basket, unblinking. “I was just thinking,” she said. “You’ll be the first young man I’ve had inside this house since Bertie.” She was silent for a while.
The smell of the scones wafted through the kitchen. I ate three before I even touched my tea. They were sweet and crumbly, and succulent with melting butter. She talked on merrily again, to me, to the dog – I wasn’t sure which. I wasn’t really listening. I was looking out of the window behind her. The sun was bursting through the clouds and lighting the hillside. A perfect rainbow arched through the sky. But miraculous though it was, it wasn’t the rainbow that fascinated me. Somehow, the clouds were casting a strange shadow over the hillside, a shadow the shape of a lion, roaring like the one over the archway.
“Sun’s come out,” said the old lady, offering me another scone. I took it eagerly. “Always does, you know. It may be difficult to remember sometimes, but there’s always sun behind the clouds, and the clouds do go in the end. Honestly.”
She watched me eat, a smile on her face that warmed me to the bone.
“Don’t think I want you to go, because I don’t. Nice to see a boy eat so well, nice to have the company; but all the same, I’d better get you back to school after you’ve had your tea, hadn’t I? You’ll only be in trouble otherwise. Mustn’t run off, you know. You’ve got to stick it out, see things through, do what’s got to be done, no matter what.” She was looking out of the window as she spoke. “My Bertie taught me that, bless him, or maybe I taught him. I can’t remember now.” And she went on talking and talking, but my mind was elsewhere again.
The lion on the hillside was still there, but now he was blue and shimmering in the sunlight. It was as if he were breathing, as if he were alive. It wasn’t a shadow any more. No shadow is blue. “No, you’re not seeing things,” the old lady whispered. “It’s not magic. He’s real enough. He’s our lion, Bertie’s and mine. He’s our butterfly lion.”
“What d’you mean?” I asked.
She looked at me long and hard. “I’ll tell you if you like,” she said. “Would you like to know? Would you really like to know?”
I nodded.
“Have another scone first and another cup of tea. Then I’ll take you to Africa where our lion came from, where my Bertie came from too. Bit of a story, I can tell you. You ever been to Africa?”
“No,” I replied.
“Well, you’re going,” she said. “We’re both going.”
Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more. All I wanted now was to hear her story. She sat back in her chair, gazing out of the window. She told it slowly, thinking before each sentence; and all the while she never took her eyes off the butterfly lion. And neither did I.
Thirty years ago, there were 200,000 lions living in the wild; today there are only 15,000. In thirty-five African countries, where once they roamed free, the lion is now extinct or has virtually disappeared. And although it may be unthinkable that lions ever become completely extinct, they are now listed as “vulnerable” in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.
A wild lion has a “home range” of about 240 kilometres, the area regularly travelled by a single lion in its food gathering, mating and caring for young. This brings lions into conflict with farmers and with the increasing need, driven by population growth, for land building and agriculture. “Anyone who is trying to farm livestock in Africa finds it very difficult to co-exist with lions,” comments Luke Hunter of Panthera, one of the groups trying to save the lion from extinction. He also notes a “very widespread killing of lions, mostly in a conflict situation”. Poachers and big-game hunters also add to the risks for these big cats.
The lion most likely to die out unless we take more positive action is the white lion. White lions are not albinos. Albino animals – and people – have an inherited disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, whereas white lions owe their remarkable colouring to a genetic twist. A pigment gene gives them blue or green-grey eyes instead of brown, and a pelt that remains white all their lives. It is their very prettiness and apparent cuddliness that have been their downfall since their first contact with Europeans in 1938.
White lions probably evolved many millennia ago. Despite this, there was an unsupported belief among some conservationists that white lions could not survive in the wild, on the grounds that their colouring would make it difficult to remain camouflaged when they were hunting. Most white lions were rounded up and sold to zoos – if they were not killed by big-game hunters first.
A few wild white lions can be found on the edge of a South African National Park. To the local tribe, the Shangaan, the area is special. They name it Timbavati, meaning “the place where something sacred came down to earth”.
For centuries, white lions have been part of the African oral tradition. The medicine men traditionally believed the lions to be animal angels. One legend says they were the first creatures to be created by the gods – and when life becomes extinct the roar of the white lions will be the last sound on Earth. Tribal elders believe that the white lions are here to deliver a message for humanity. In spiritual terms their white colouring represents purity and enlightenment. White represents sunlight and contains all the colours of the spectrum in one; white is beyond colour, creed, race, or gender.
Sadly, rich hunters pay huge sums of money to slaughter lions – even though it is illegal to hunt them in the wild almost everywhere in Africa – and white lions are especially prized by hunters. A stuffed lion can sell for £40,000.
Many lions are captured in the wild as cubs, or bred in captivity, brought up as tourist attractions in lion ranches. They are bottle-fed, taught not to fear humans, and spend their days being petted and photographed by unwitting visitors. The animals involved are very vulnerable. No longer fearful of humans, they will approach them expecting to get fed, but instead receive a bullet, or an arrow from a hunting bow. One rancher revealed: “We keep them up until six months for attractions for the people so they can play with them and then we sell them to other lion parks. What they do with the lions is up to them.”
The Global White Lion Protection Trust has spent the last twelve years buying two thousand acres of land in Timbavati and preparing to release white lions, hoping that they might re-establish themselves. Reintroduction into the wild of animals born or reared in captivity is always difficult. Their dependence on human contact can mean the loss of both their hunting instincts and their fear of people – both essential qualities for survival.
Nevertheless, the initial success of the programme was capped in 2014, when the first ever photographs of white lion cubs born in their natural habitat were published. Conservationist Linda Tucker, who founded the Trust, said: “The birth of these second-generation white cubs to a wild white lioness is fantastic news. It brings huge hope for the future of white lions. They recognize me, but I keep my distance and allow them their independence. I look at them like any mother with a brood of growing youngsters. And, in the end, the most loving gift you can give is freedom.”
