Mark Mattock takes a break from the cabin to embark on an annual, violet-winged pilgrimage.

“And the highest enjoyment of timelessness ― in a landscape selected at random ― is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain.” – Vladimir Nabokov

There’s not enough room on the limestone bridge’s narrow pavement, so I step off the kerb for the jaunty morris man in his effete Alex-in-Clockwork-Orange outfit loping down from town towards me; with his circlets of shin-bells jingling, fluttering waist hankies, braces and aviator sunglasses; crowned with what looks like some ‘poor ole dear’s’ faded flower bonnet borrowed from a cottage sash windowsill. Not because I let him vibe me off — no way — but so I can check him all round as I step back on it. Banker. He’s heading over to the cricket field, across from the station, from where ‘trad jazz’ —  trumpet and clarinet — is drifting over the ripening barley, totally unsynchronous with the screams of swifts slicing up the midday blue above. Now I know why the crowded platform. It’s the annual beer festival. Before taking the footpath into the ripening land I stop briefly to gaze downstream into the glinting riffle, to wallow just a little longer in the lucid flashback that had just burst in my brain, run the clip to conclusion, of Ernie Simm’s delusional drunken attempt to jump the river on the deluxe racing bike he’d just ‘borrowed’ quickly from the well-spoken boy that didn’t go to our secondary modern. To the wails, jeers, screams and expletives of his sun-stained, bare-torsoed and bra-topped audience gathered on the bridge and bank: choking and spluttering, caught mid drag and swig, as he crushes his seed on the cross bar on landing in the shallow water. There were no huge crack willows back then, and the bank was high and undercut. I’m prodigal son on sacred ground. Holy land. A pilgrim paying an annual homage. Six years to the day since…

Earlier, back in May —

I’m fixating on my squat mucilaginous shadow clinging to my boots as I stride up hill in time with a pumping chaff chaff. House martins bickering above, ruffian sparrows chirping on the roofs, more dusting in the verges. It’s actually hot, bright. The air buzzing, whining. Glare from the road and heavy hawthorn blossom, heady with its sickly fragrance. In the corner of my sweat-stung eye someone and dogs emerging from the front door of one of the small houses atop the steep little bank. From the last one where the rising road draws level, in the painfully quaint village.

“Aye, aye, ain’t sin you in a while”

I look back, don’t recognise him, then, of course I do. “Hey, how is it going?” It’s Pete the farmer. I’m at first a little surprised to see him here, but then not at all. We declare our appreciation of the glorious day and then he asks, clearly in light of the conducive weather, if I’ve come to see them. I tell him it’s too early, another six to eight weeks — end of June, first week July. Standing in the brilliant spring sun, absorbing the regenerative rays, we catch up, agree on how unbelievably wet it’s been, the ground still so sodden. I mention the excited ladies I met in the ‘big horse field’ earlier, keen to tell someone that it appeared to be an ancient field. We know it is, an island of something older and healthier in a high-yielding arable ocean. I tell him that the large amount of giant puffballs that pop up some years in it are an indicator, and they make good burgers. He’s not sure about that but with glee recalls how you used to boot the shit out of the dried up ones. We did, kicking them feverishly around the fields like punctured footballs, exploding clouds of spores like the pyrotechnics on Captain Scarlett and Joe 90. It was his dad that had decided to leave it untilled.

We get back to butterflies. I tell him it’s already looking dire. Despite the obvious, exceptional, spring flowering there’s an unprecedented lack of them. The most serious indication of which is the fact that I’ve really struggled to find half a dozen orange tip eggs in the ample garlic mustard (the easiest butterfly eggs to find; I still rear a dozen or so each year). The only ones I found so far today were along ‘his lane.’ I told him how much l loved that lane when we first met, six years ago, when I risked sharing a secret with him, something almost transcendent — after all it was on his land — and what it meant. It genuinely thrilled him. He loves seeing the butterflies, not needing to know their names, knows there are less every year. Our mutual guardedness and his proper farmer suspicion and disdain evaporated when I had told him my story, why he’d seen me regularly over the last few years. My credibility instantly unquestionable when we realise we had previously shared time and space. We went to that same secondary modern, his sister in my year, he one below, and we couldn’t understand why we didn’t remember each other. All verified by names and anecdotes: teachers, characters and rivalries; village halls, pubs, family clans. But he was also clearly perturbed, the possibility it now becoming wider knowledge. He told me the story of how ‘experts’ from the University ‘came to interfere,’ some years ago. To rescue some rare newts, collecting hundreds from an old junk-filled and bramble-screened pond lost in his incredible shambolic barn complex, a cornucopian bazaar, time tunnel, of agricultural tech, rusting ancient to shining current. To relocate them to a new one they’d dug over the other side of the track. They only found six the year after. I got it. Knew other stories like it. Shared his mistrust.

The dogs slink off to crash in some shade. He says he mentioned me to a lady the other day, ‘from some wildlife organisation.’ And that she knows. She told him it was because of all the hawthorns. I question if she actually said sallows: it’s their larval food plant. If it is the hawthorns then she knows something I don’t. Unlikely. But possible. I’m surprised someone else knows. I never found anything online.
We carry on, reminisce, lament; about when there was more. And less. Before the social cleansing, social media and obscene house prices. Cuss the tidying, fencing off, felling, chopping, clearing…the exclusion. He says how he’s been ‘grassed up’ to the ‘farm bodies’ by recent neighbours, about his corners of untidiness and neglect. (I wouldn’t cross him!). Bitching about those responsible, guilty, that lord over it all, inevitably leads to —

Me: “But look who’s…” I mention the name of a very powerful person

Pete the farmer, nodding to the house behind me: “that’s his owse”

Me: “No fucking way, this one right here?”

Pete: “yeah”

I know he’s not joking, cogs are falling into place.

Me: “this one here right next to the burnt out cottage with the charred beams.”

Pete: “yeah, someone came to petrol bomb his but got the wrong one, burned down that one instead”

Me: “Holy fuck!”

Pete: “My mum’s house, I grew up in that house with my brothers and sisters. They say if my mum was in it at the time she’d have been killed, the fire was so fierce.”

I’m momentarily rendered speechless. Just as I was about to make what suddenly would have been a dangerous comment.

Pete: “After it all he offered to buy the ‘owse’ at the end for her. I ain’t taking his money.”
(I really don’t think he needs to take anyone’s money).

We chat a bit longer then ‘need to get on,’ enjoy the beautiful day.

27th June 2018. The first time.

Dry heat, high UV levels. I’m looking back, down the long straight powdered shit, mud, and husk-dusted farm track. Hedged high with mature hawthorn, blackthorn and sallow. Air sour with manure. Above, what earlier looked like the sky in the intro of The Simpsons, is now a vast washed out cerulean blue. Cumuli of weary umbellifer flower heads — hogweed and hemlock — billow from the verges. Giant glowing white bells of bindweed, like paper cup litter. Insect buzz and distant jacks, caws and ‘kaahs’ from local corvids; black flecks oscillating in the hot haze of the far off parched fields. A butterfly, like an erratic flake of the blackest shadow fluttering in the blinding bright of the baked, bleached earth, at the entrance to a massive field, half way down, is holding my gaze. Powerful flyer, a vanessid, a peacock, so why am I still hesitating to continue? It’s too big. Broken white wing bands now visible as it continues towards me; a red admiral. No red. No way! It can only be a white admiral then, but here? I freeze. As the large butterfly glides past inches from my knees, the electrical flash of iridescent, tropical, intense, shimmering royal purple is instantly imprinted on my retinas for the rest of time. The moment is the ‘adult only’ version of a child’s gasp at the sight of opening butterfly wings. It’s HIM! Time stutters and in a slow motion stupor I watch him accelerate in powerful flits away from me. Incredulously the regal insect alights on an oak sapling yards in front. I release my held breath. Suddenly gifted with an unimaginable opportunity, I continue in the slowed down time, lower my rucksack, remove and assemble my butterfly net (have always carried one). I have one chance and one only. Net held to my right side for the back hand, the bag end pinched taught in my left hand, I refill my lungs and hold, inch towards him, my crouching ninja shadow undulating over the hard chevroned ruts in parody. I enter strike range, jerk the net, he lifts off, strike, at the end of the stroke flick the end of the net over the frame, whether he’s in it or not. Stiff angry rustling emanates from the collapsed and folded net bag. A radiant liquid thrill seeps from the base of my skull, floods every capillary, I drop to my knees, tingling, put the net down on the soft grass central reservation of the track. The sudden, shocking, sheer magnitude of the moment. I had to phone someone.

In my net, HIM, His Imperial Majesty. The most craved for, lusted after, obsessed over, prize of the fanatical Victorian butterfly collectors, who first elevated apatura iris, the Purple Emperor, to its mythical, deistic status in British natural history. Iris, ancient Greek goddess of rainbows, messenger of the Olympian Gods.

In my net, HIM: rare, elusive, distant, impossible.

In my net, HIM. A radiating purple shard of rainbow held gently, wings spread, but firm, in folds of soft black nylon, less than a crow flying mile from my old school. From the art room of which, at the top of the asbestos contaminated pre-fab, forty five years ago, a Bowie and butterfly obsessed adolescent stared out across to this very spot, whilst sharing a sneaky Embassy with the teacher. The idea, manifest in this moment, that Purple Emperors were right under my nose the whole time, or even real, an utter fantasy. Thirty more years before I saw my first Purple Emperor.

In my net, HIM, who back then would have been preciously manoeuvred into a pill box and taken back to my bedroom to face regicide in a killing jar of carbon tetrachloride fumes. To be set, and when dried, pinned in prime position in a naphthalene-reeking specimen box, eventually to become a fading memento of long hot sweaty summers past.

In my net, with coercion, with nothing to lose, the now hitherto inconceivable possibility of an incredible portrait. His. But I desperately need shit, fox or dog ideally, it’s critical, or some rancid corpse. Because Purple Emperors are almost never seen on flowers. Sipping nectar with the proletariat too low for them, literally, as they rarely come down from the tree tops, where they pose and preen, sunbathe; wind each other up, chase, duel; lick aphid excreta. Fearless and pent with aggression, assaulting passers by, up to the size of wood pigeons. But in a common cliché of their ruling class the royal dandies, decadent and debauched, unable to resist the occasional pleasures of the gutter. To flaunt their depravity, mantled in deep purple finery atop a cone or coil of dark shit, or just sipping quietly in disguise, wings closed, camouflaged, as they syphon the crucial salts that they crave dissolved in the putrid wet.

I slide my hand into the nylon folds, carefully take hold of him at the thorax, making sure wings are closed and his delicate hinged legs are collapsed tight to his body. As I withdraw him feel the pumping of his powerful wing muscles. I swap him to my left hand, pinching his closed wings firmly with thumb and fore finger. Shuffle over to where the half a sausage of completely desiccated dog turd that I miraculously remembered I passed earlier, which I rehydrated with the last of swig of water in the plastic little Evian bottle, (a considerable sacrifice, and gamble) which, again, miraculously I still had, sits waiting with the camera. Laying prostrate before the turd and with all the upmost delicacy that I can muster, lower HIM onto the shit until his feet touch and take a rested position. Butterflies taste with their feet. I wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. It happens. His lime green watch-spring proboscis uncoils and starts probing the cracks in the shit then rests still, he’s feeding. Head rush, pumping, moment of truth, make or break. I let go and withdraw my hand, take up the camera, position and look into the viewfinder, all with the pace of a rising tide and without breathing, click, click, click…

He gave me ten minutes, but refused to spread his wings. It ended with him vanishing in a five hundredth of a second.

I’ve been given more time — the site seems viable, but it’s a small population — on many occasions in the seasons since, including once watching Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress, fastidiously egg laying in the sallows. She’s impressively larger than him, (second largest British butterfly) more ‘mature,’ and considerably more elusive, She doesn’t have the refractive wing scales. No purple: it’s called sexual dichromatism.

Working my way back across country to the station feeling dejected, a no-show after four hours searching, with a neck ache from constantly looking up, I unbelievably come across a present day adaptation of my earlier flashback, A hot dusty late afternoon, hay mown field and riverbank scene of barely clad vaped up ‘jazz’ intolerant youth; soggy boys with the forehead coiffures of prized show poultry, speaking in homogenised tongue and tones, all hyper enthused. Spaced out girls, cross-legged on the grass, who look at me as if… As I pass through them like some phantom time traveller from a bleak future, craving a rejuvenating hit of nostalgia, but that had miscalculated the date and time by a smidgen. If just they knew. Too early.

I return, once again sanguine, ten days later. Past notes show early to mid July is a safer bet here. But still fretfully no joy. Return the day after, and the next, each time traversing this unforeseen and understated little imperial fragment of the planet over and over, scouring tree tops, and track; noting turds, pats, piles and wet patches. Occasionally throwing clods of earth into the air in suspect spots to try get a reaction of any unseen males. Feeling increasingly ill at ease, agitated, soul sick. Warm bright sunny days, perfect; cotton wool skies, more perfect; more activity, each burst of sun from behind a cloud impels flight. But no. Then finally on the fourth desperate visit…there, movement, the right kind, gliding against the disruptive dazzle of thousands of sallow leaves and shade, out into the open, high up against the blue, the unmistakable. HIM. Gliding away from me, disappearing over tree tops. Phew! But it wasn’t a relief, more momentary respite, because I’m pessimistically overwhelmed by the thought that I just made it in time to catch the last emperor.

Footnote:

Purple Emperors might be beneficiaries of global warming, though prolonged warm very wet winters may prove otherwise. I believe this last record-breaking mild wet winter a major factor behind this year’s alarming lack of butterflies, and many other less visible fauna. Apatura iris seems fine though, in general, even spreading. Each year more new sites reported by their loyal fandom, expanding north and west. They appear to colonise, re-colonise, easily, presented with their prime habitat — woodland scrub — whether restored or created. The incredible Knepp ‘re-wilding’ project proof beyond doubt. Now heart of the Empire with phenomenal numbers in good years. They probably were never really that rare. Just,elusive. It’s crucial to the whole mystique.

For sure this humble pilgrim will go check in next year.

Oh, and that day in May and the arsonist? Every time I’ve thought of it since…did he get the wrong house?