Sidelight
By COMPTON MACKENZIE GIRLS took no interest in birds or bird's-nesting in the days of my youth: today bird-watching is a fashion- able feminine pastime. Girls took no interest in butterflies and moths either, and I do not think that girls are any more interested in them today. Looking back into the past, I recall many more exciting moments with butter- flies and'moths than with birds, and to this day if I ware given the choice between seeing a Camberwell Beauty or a hoopoe in my garden I would choose to see the butterfly. In fact I have had the fortune to see both, and the Camberwell Beauty remains in my memory as the more thrilling experi- ence. I ,saw the hoopoe in the week of the Diamond Jubilee near ,Alton in Hampshire. I saw the Camberwell Beauty in my own library on the August Bank Holiday of 1904. It was resting on my desk, outspread and motionless save for the occasional twitch which a Vanessa gives to its wings. I know that the Camberwell Beauty is no longer Vanessa Antiopa but I am too old to heed the new classifications.
I was so excited by the vision of that lovely sombre creature that I lost my head and tried to capture it with a panama hat before shutting the window, out of which it flew away. Out of the window I went too, reaching the ground by way of an ancient espalier pear-tree. The Camberwell Beauty flew west- ward and I ran after it until, exhausted by the pursuit through the lush meadows beside the Windrush, I gave up, and turned sadly back to record the event with a diamond pencil upon the window-pane. There in the house at Burford called Ladyham the inscription may still be read unless the pane has been broken in recent years.
Six weeks in Brittany during the summer holidays in 1894 were decisive for my buttcrfly-colleeling because they so widely extended the possibilities of it. There had been a serial by Ascot R. Hope in the Boys' Own Paper called The Butter- ' fly Hunters in the course of which every one of the seventy- two alleged British butterflies at that date were encountered by a party of schoolboys in a series of walks under the guidance of a lepidopterist master. This had made us sceptical about the whole business. We did not believe that one set out for a country walk and sighted a Black-veined White, a Purple Emperor, a Large Blue and all the Hairstreaks within a, couple, of hours. Our experience was, that even a Green- veined White lent distinction to a morning spent entirely among Common or Garden Whites and Meadow Browns. To this day if I turn the pages of Ovid's First Book of Meta- morphoses. I see beyond the large handsome face of Mr. Sankey, then a junior prep-sOool master but one day to be- come Lord Chancellor, the' first Swallowtail I ever beheld. Deucalion and Pyrrha wrought no such miracle as that to repopulate the flood-stricken world. So when I re-read Lucian's Charon I fancy by Styx the swift tumbling flight of Oak Eggar moths down a sunny glade. Those were the two books set for the scholarship examination at St. Paul's School that September.
There used to be an avenue that ran for some three miles from the Golden Pot Inn near the Alton-Odiham to the Alton-Basingstoke Road. We used to visit it for its rasp- berries and dewberries and to watch the hundreds of Silver- washed Fritillaries that frequented a piece of common land dotted with gnarled hawthorns which lay on the other side of the avenue. Then a rumour went round that one might find a White Admiral in the Golden Pot avenue and day after day in that hot summer of 1897 we made the long wa in search of what was then a great rarity outside the Ne' Forest, but like the Comma may now be seen in man localities it never visited in my boyhood. And then one do I sighted a White Admiral in leisurely flight up and do the avenue but never lower than half-way up the tall oa and beeches on either side of the pale flinty road. I woul venture to assert that this was my most poignant lesson the unattainable, about which we have so many lessons childhood; that White Admiral flying slowly up and down that avenue out of reach of any butterfly-net still haunts ni memory as something I have missed in life. I revisited that avenue a year or two ago, but alas, the trees have all beef felled and it is now a dull stretch of macadam for a car t race over in five minutes.
Yet one may still have moments of exultation over butter' flies. All my life I had never succeeded in catching a glimps of a Large Tortoiseshell. I began to think that the Large Tortoiseshell was as much a butterfly of the past as the Black-veined White. Then when I was making a tour o National Trust properties in 1950 I saw half a dozen Large Tortoiseshells lazily floating along an herbaceous border if a garden by Constable's Flatford Mill. I am told that the Large Tortoiseshell is extending its territory, but I have not yet seen another.
The most exciting moth I ever saw was a Clifden Non' pareil. That was in. Hampshire when I was sugaring. It was feeding away among a mob of Crimson Undcrwings, d which it is a cousin. I was so amazed at my .fortune that instead of quickly knocking it off the sugared trunk into the poison-bottle I stood gazing at it in a rapture. And thee suddenly a herd of idiotic bullocks which had seen my lantern came charging in towards it and after I emerged from the trunk behind which I had had to take shelter the Clifdee Nonpareil, was gone. On Barra we used to be visited sometimes by Clouded Yellows, and the sight of Clouded Yellows dancing along by the Atlantic rollers on a white beach competes with Wordsworth's field of daffodils for spiritual exhilaration. The Puss Moth was a resident on Barra, the caterpillars feeding on the leaves of the little wind-vexed willows.. That cater' pillar is a fearsome object. An old lady who saw one crawling round her door thought it was the Devil himself and threw the contents of a holy-water stoup over it.
We had a greater variety of butterflies and moths in the Channel Islands. Jersey Tigers bronzed black, barred and striped with creamy velvet over a flame of orange-scarlet, were everywhere. Great Convolulus Hawk moths in a whirr of rose would fly through the open casements of my library and hover round my books as Humming-bird Hawk moths hover above flowers in a border.
I wonder if any readers of the Spectator have tried their hands—literally their hands—at taming butterflies. Once upon a time I hatched out half a dozen Red Admirals and kept them for a week in the breeding-cage until, they had learnt to sip honey from the tips of my fingers. Then I let them loose in the garden and used to astonish people by attracting them to alight upon my outstretched hands and sip from my finger-tips the honey to which they were accustomed. In spite of their airy fairy existence butterflies can be very greedy.
It is pleasant in the gloom of mid-winter to be writing about butterflies, for when one writes of butterflies the sun is always shining. They, like the gnomon of the sundial, register only the sunny hours.
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