The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough

IN the breakfast room of my grandfather’s house where I spent the war years was a cabinet of many drawers.

The first four, very shallow and glass covered, contained butterflies. They were pinned by the thorax in columns and all named with a small label.

The next four, deeper, had compartments like a compositor’s typeface drawer, each space with baize. They contained birds’ eggs, all named and labelled.

There were then three more drawers of fossils and seashells. The whole cupboard was out of bounds to me, though I’d seen what it contained.

Above all this treasure was an African grey parrot called Polly whose forte was a passable version of the Lambeth Walk and an ability to recognise the telephone. It had a habit of pecking the curtains. I kept my distance from Polly who had made it plain that it didn’t like me.

The cabinet and its contents and the parrot all belonged to two uncles away at the war.

The other day the brimstone butterfly forfeited its right to be the first on our post-winter scene, upstaged by four small tortoiseshells and a solitary peacock. I had admired them. Last week I urged you to go steady on hedge-trimming because of the nesting season. And I thought of that cabinet.

Time was, before the war when pinning butterflies to a board and snaffling birds’ eggs from their nests was of no consequence and a common pursuit for small boys. Not now. I doubt if there are many among us who know how to prick a bird’s egg and “blow” it free of its contents.

I have no interest whatsoever of long-gone uncles who innocently increased their knowledge of all these things in a way that was normal at that time. But that was how things were.

That they have ended is good. But as with so many things, blame does not attach.