Strong impression

“I wrote the poem, Red Admirals, below based on one of a series of pen portraits my late father wrote about his ministerial colleagues,” says Ruth Walker. “This reverend gentleman was a minister at Inverkeilor and made a strong impression on my father in his earlier years.”

Before the outbreak of the First World War, there was a gentle invasion of butterflies along the east coast of Scotland. Red Admirals were to be seen in every cottage garden, attached to washing hung out to dry, or pinned to clumps of lupins.

They studded swathes of sheaves across the Mearns, floated over sand dunes at Lunan Bay, landing on the white walls of salmon bothies, Some hovered over bandstands in municipal parks. One clung to the doorbell at Inverkeilor Manse. A visitor, about to pull the knob, paused, desisted,

And so, instead, knocked at the door. “How like the Lord,” the minister declaimed, “who intervenes, stops us in our tracks, making us change our plans.” (The Reverend John Adams had a passion for the natural world, was known to leave his Hebrew studies, fly out of the house if he heard the sudden honk of geese.)

The Red Admirals had long disappeared when another war threatened his patchwork fields. The reverend gentleman lived to see

the sky filled with the drone of much noisier machines.”