Mark Mattock on a year of enacting empathy in the midst of an anti-life rampage.
Hairstreaks and Palestine
I went down to the lane, dazed by the brilliance of the day, my mind still webbed with the night’s fading blackness, with the darkness that even in the brightest sunlight never completely dies. We have our darkness within us, our beating hearts are black, our limbs move in black nets of muscle; light enters our bodies only through the sudden wound. — J. A. Baker, ‘The Hill of Summer’, June: Midsummer, 1969.
Tamper had scratched his name in crude runes on the scuffed palimpsestic penal-grey floor of this severe brutalist form-follows-functional space, exposing a past layer of victorian raw brick red. With what? With the ball-tipped bendy pith of a biro like the one I’d been given, with paper, to begin writing this with? I can’t see it. Was it Tamper’s fist imprints, like some digital clematis’s battered blooms of sickly florescent shine, around the small hatch of the steel panelled door, through which I received another paper cup of dispenser coffee and biscuits? Could it, by some impossible alignment of infinite possibilities in the incomprehensible vastness of time, even be Tamper now venting violently against one of the other steel doors along the custody suite, and who would, admirably, keep up his resistance all night long? I don’t think we were here for the same reasons though. Was the young woman, also snatched from among the kettled earlier this evening, ok? Why did I assume Tamper was he?
I’m getting my head around being possibly twenty four hours in this sterile claustrophobic ‘cell.’ With its impermeable membrane of tiling, concrete and steel; enclosing warm bleach-tainted cytoplasm, too thin for me, now its nucleus, to float in. I thought of the burglar wood mice I used to trap in the cabin and intern overnight in a bucket outside with the heavy frying pan as lid. ‘Cell,’ from the Latin cellula meaning ‘small room,’ the basic structural unit of all forms of life. Tamper and the panel beater are the only other signs of it, until I rediscover the tiny bramble thorns still embedded in my stained fingers and thumbs from this morning’s garden fruit-picking. Half a blackberry clafoutis waits for me in the fridge. I’m determined to remove every micro thorn, something to focus on, to kill time with. The cell induces calm and peace. I’m safe. I accept it.
I drift, deep dive, back several weeks, to what I now know was a significant day at the of the beginning of a significant week, at the end of the first half of a significant year.
I emerge from the warm green vapour of deep beech shade. The mature trees run along the ridge of an old stone slate mine with Roman origin, on whose elephantine boles two, three, generations of a village’s allegiances, betrothals, lusts, desires and frustrations are written in blade by scribes skilled and unskilled. A now illegible seventies poem in a typeface extended by time and growth; hearts, phalluses, ‘fuck;’ multiple stab wounds, what look like bullet holes, a couple of life drawings and a chronology of names that become more affluent class the fresher the wounds are. Glistening tracks of crisped roman snail slime laminate some of the characters. I cross the valley and walk up through the thorn scrub which is heavily cloaked in verdant old man’s beard, up to the common that runs along the south of the village and above the river. Halfway up sits Briar Island, its impenetrable tangle-domes and barbed coils interlocking over a large area of rabbit-cropped ground. It’s humming like a dangerously exposed confusion of live wires. And it’s overwhelming, thrilling. I press into it, feel it in my chest, the gentle vibrating snow storm of white petals and bees. So many bees. Unprecedented. Several species. The longer-bodied cuckoo bees now easier to differentiate among the white and buff-tailed bumbles. But it’s disconcerting, I want to smile, but I’m frowning. Did I step into a time tunnel somewhere back down the slope, in one of the gaps in the hedges? Only days ago more soul-suffocating doom with the latest data on the global insect holocaust. The dominant driver of catastrophic crash in numbers being heat, destroying narrow thermal ranges. But look at this! It’s how it is supposed to be… how it was. Last year’s butterfly numbers were near apocalyptic. Here jostling with the bees multiple browns and whites. It’s not a mirage. But is it a blip?
I don’t see them straight away. Just catch their low voices, then I’m aware of them in my peripheral vision. I turn to the three strangers, in deep discussion, phones in hands, looking a bit Last of the Summer Wine; it looks like about something at their feet. I raise my hand in greeting as I continue towards the unmissable violet blue spikes of meadow clary to grab a quick pic with my phone.
“Are you interested in all this?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Come and have a look at this.”
Obviously it’s not the uber rare meadow clary. We all seem know about it. A phone is turned towards me as I approach. On the screen what looks like an accidental close-up photo of a small bit of strobe-lit hedge at an all-night outdoor party. I reach for my glasses. They seem confident that I’ll know what the small torch-lit fluorescent alien blob glowing gunge-green in the middle of it will be. A scrolling thumb reveals more. I’m pretty sure I do know, just not the species…
“Wow, no way, are they…?”
“Brown hairstreaks.” At that I ‘wow’ again, longer, louder, constraining the ‘fucking hell.’ Then again, because I’m dumbfounded by what I know will be the answer to the next question before I even ask it. I hold my breath…
Only very recently discovered, hairstreak caterpillars photo-luminesce under ultra violet light. I knew purple emperor pupae did but didn’t know this. So camouflaged are they that it is almost impossible to find them otherwise. There are five species of hairstreak butterflies in the UK, all are small and extremely elusive, magical, including the commonest, four are treetop dwellers, two are rare, one very.
My village lies visible on the horizon to the west of us. I grew up around here, fledged here, it’s imprinted on me. My time here mythologised in the decades since. I know it now even more intimately than I did then, I’ve been returning, weekly, for the last twelve years, wandering, roaming, observing, discovering, dreaming, remembering; pilgrimage. It is my holy land.
It’s what I explain to the three citizen scientist magi — lepidopterist, post-grad botanist, devoted local conservationist — after we finally introduce ourselves to each other amidst the gifting of priceless intel and anecdotes. Some of which I can’t believe I’m hearing. I mumble “brown hairstreaks” at each pause. I reciprocate with the offering of info like bee hawk moth sightings, the location of the purple emperor site I discovered seven years ago. They didn’t know. “Purple emperors are not quite brown hairstreaks though.” True. My priceless contribution ultimately is the knowledge of what was. We chat in nature geek speak, in detail down to individual trees, strips of hedgerow, square meter patches of land. And particularly of butterflies as if they were pages of old diaries, describing summers past.
Finally we “have to get on”. J the botanist — who I didn’t realise had only met the others minutes before me — headed down towards the river. Was it all supposed to be? J the conservationist back to the village. M the butterfly man announces he’s off over to the blackthorn thickets in the hidden valley just beyond, where they’d discovered the caterpillars. He wants to check it, just in case, for black hairstreaks! He mentioned them earlier. So incredulous is it I laugh. But, but, actually, it is infinitesimally possible. I join him. For an hour. No joy, but a very late green hairstreak and the implausible idea of seeing all five hairstreaks… here on my home turf, this summer.
Late afternoon, speeches over, Sameera approaches me and asks if she can sit. She is a complete stranger. Of course she can. We sit silent at first, on the worn lawn of Parliament Square soaking up the therapeutic sun and sanity. In the thermal rising from the crowds a butterfly crossing. I stay with it as it skirts flags, slips over the line of men and boys of Neturei Karta, the orthodox Jewish sect fiercely opposed to Zionism, loved by everyone. I mention it to her, how it looks like a butterfly that just couldn’t be here; it’s common. But here?
And it’s very early if it is. It’s a good omen. I try to describe it, realise its chequered pattern is a little bit like a piece of a keffiyeh. A marbled white, a familiar insect of grassland, meadows, brown sites, not metropolitan lawns. Our chat inevitably slips slowly into the dark. The dark so so it is without dimension, beyond vocabulary; that needs new terrible words yet unthought of even though we see it everyday on glowing screens, in our millions, despite the mainstream media, and why we thousands are here, again.
The bus turns sharp right off the Edgware Road towards Paddington, continues parallel with the Marylebone flyover, under which a toxic pollutant-dusted encampment of cheap and flimsy pop-up nylon tents, rag and card shelters. From two of the transitory throw-away tepees, on willowy poles, Palestinian flags flap defiantly. The elephant in the cramped room steps on my head again, the tents are burning, flash back, we carry what we see in the morning. The tiny spoil heaps of the burrowing digger wasps on the cracked sun-fired path, stampeded through the ripening wheat, used to look like miniature volcanoes on the surface of some parched red planet. Today it’s aerial footage of blanket-bombed desolation, the banded insects like killer drones. There’s even some white tissue with spots of old blood on it rested in the cereal stems. I’m making my way to hopefully see the first purple emperor of the year, it’s early, but everything is early this year. I’m three miles west from days ago. On the hazed horizon an RAF Voyager air-to-air refuelling tanker is gliding into RAF Brize Norton at the risk of being re-sprayed blood red in a few days’ time. There has always been a war plane on this horizon. Two circuits of the empire, no emperors. Meadow browns, early ringlets, the first marbled whites, large skippers. A small dark butterfly crosses my path, suddenly warrants serious attention, my gaze struggles to track it into the long grass verge. Is that it sat on the rust-pocked dock leaf deep in the vegetation? I freeze. I can’t let it disappear because I know I really need to know. The auto focus struggles to lock on. Click, click. It vanishes at the third. I can’t see it on the screen at all. I know it’s dead centre, in the eighty megabytes of detail. My finger slides between the magnifying glass emojis. There it is, I’m speechless.
The magnitude of the sudden revelation engulfs me, despite the surrounding abundance, the peace, the warmth, the calm, the light, the hum, the blue, the green, of life, it jolts like the click of a lock on a door in a false room that you didn’t know was there. An even brighter light leaking from the sudden thin right angled rim.
It’s a black hairstreak…
They must have always been here. A die hard resistance. You always hoped, that one day… You knew.
I saw five.
The morning of the day after. Palestinian Flags inscribed ‘saoirse don phalaistín’ sharing the same extension poles with Irish tricolours, dance provocatively above the dense crowd in front of the Court House. Kneecap have just departed Westminster Magistrates. The magistrate had had to ask for a translator. Mo Chara, charged under anti-terrorism legislation for showing support for a proscribed organisation, is bailed unconditionally. Little do we know yet what’s coming in the weeks ahead for many of us. As the people disperse a triple amputee protestor joggles mischievously, with his only hand, the joystick of his motorised chair that suddenly failed, very inconveniently, in the middle of the westbound lane of the busy Marylebone road, traffic stacks rapidly, some honking is supportive, police desperate to move him. The temperature of another hot day rises.
Midday, next day. 32C. Perfect. The shuffling coming from the crumbly rutted farm track behind the hedge turn out to be M. We had arranged to meet, after I’d sent him a mail and evidence of what I’d discovered two days ago. Again, butterflies everywhere, but two hours, two pairs of highly experienced eyes, we agree we probably only saw one, crossing the shimmering blue between two blackthorns. He needs to get back home, suggests stopping off on the way, something he mentioned when we first met last week. I could be dropped anywhere so fine.
How dodgy it must have looked to the couple in the car parked in the can-littered lay-by on the main road, as we emerged from the one rolled up behind them, interrupting whatever it was they may have been doing as we passed, oblivious to their existence, staring up in some kind of reverence of the huge brilliant green Wych elm that you can see from points miles away. At first there are none. Is it too late? Then there are, as if everything popped into sharp focus. Along the hedge top; fluttering out in erratic hairstreak spirals briefly into the sun-green glow enveloping the magnificent tree’s canopy; sipping nectar on the chest-high umbellifer plates of hogweed. A thriving colony of white-letter hairstreaks. One drops onto the crocheted bloom right next to me. The delicate hair-thin ‘W’ penned on its buff underwings like a mini upside down of Tampers ‘M,’ A curved conjoined row of orange red chevrons borders the outer edge with a drop shadow of black and a tiny drupelet of metal blue. Only the white streak continues on the forewing. The tiny white tipped false antenna at the bottom of each hind wing almost indiscernibly quivering in the delicate breeze. This infinitesimally tiny detail induces a disproportionately huge flush of nostalgia. I recall my kite net snagged on the flowering brambles, below the elm stand. On the labels under the two specimens in my old collection, ‘Oxfordshire June 75’ handwritten in blue ink, in impossible miniature. They were also always here, hanging on.
Satyrium w-album numbers were decimated in the seventies as its main food plant was savaged by Dutch Elm disease.
“It’s not about us” it’s what they said outside the court, they’re reiterating it right now, on TV, did maybe an hour ago on the West Holts stage, the BBC refused to live stream it. The whole show, the space, the people, one giant soul defibrillator. I spot briefly an ember from that fire in the sea of flags at some other point in the weekend’s footage; a Palestinian flag sharing a flag pole with “save the bees.”
My bail conditions prohibited me from entering the borough of Westminster for three months. I disobeyed, to witness ever more dystopian scenes of past and a terrifying future.
A couple of weeks ago I get a mail from M. “If you fancy coming up to do a Hairstreak egg count once the leaves are off the Sloe and Elms let me know”.
It entails looking for tiny pin heads in whole hedgerows. A version of a needle in a haystack.
So why? Because you have to. Because roaming the land, filling the streets “are where kind hearts find each other”. Because it’s EMPATHY.
Because anti-life is on the rampage.
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. – Carl Sagan
