Sixty Years On...

The Purple Emperor came into my life sixty years ago, at a beastly prep school in W Sussex where boys were beastly to each other. 

Butterfly and moth collecting was an official school hobby, led by an petrifying Maths master called Jonah. 

Emperors were rumoured to be in the landscape, but we weren't allowed out into it, on pain of death, so the Emperor was but a dream. 

We left the bathroom lights on all night, and propped the windows open, turning it into a walk-in moth trap. At 7am there was a scramble to bag the night's catch. Hawk moths, in particular, could be traded for what we craved for most - sweets. Peach Blossom was the commonest moth.

There I read BB's (Denys Watkins-Pitchford) paean to the Edwardian rural idyll Brendon Chase, in June 1964. 

It tells of the adventures of three boys who can't face going back to boreding skool (syn boarding school) at the end of the Easter hols, and run away to the forest, to live off the land for a summer and autumn. They have the most wonderful Gaian adventures.

Watkins-Pitchford was the original Emperorophile, and the Emperor flits in and out of the tale, as a dream which suddenly becomes real - when this happens to one of the boys - 

'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!'

That paragraph, and its build-up and continuum, was life changing for 9-year old me...

Buy the book and read the rest yourself. It's a story that couldn't be written, let alone published today. Interestingly, Watkins-Pitchford wrote it before he'd seen his first Emperor, when the butterfly was still a dream.

Armed with a pink shrimping net and a copy of The Observers Book of British Butterflies (+ the Larger Moths), I spent late July and August 1964 scouring south-west Somerset for the Purple Emperor, turning up Marbled White, Comma and Clouded Yellow instead. A Hard Days Night was top of the pops, and the sun shone. 

Coming soon, a tribute to Notes & View of the Purple Emperor, published 60 years ago...