Caterpillar

On a warm but overcast day, we went up Lodge Hill. With my box of pastels and a sketch pad, I felt like Vincent van Gogh going out to do a day’s work. Before I knew its real name, we (kids and I) used to call it Butterfly Hill, because in August particularly it was full of lepidoptera. The Chilterns are a range of chalk hills, but Lodge Hill is different, a carbuncle on the general flow of the undulations. Don’t think of a tall windswept place, but a miniature nature reserve. Its trees and shrubs give it shelter without destroying the views which stretch off to the Vale of Aylesbury in the misty distance. Such vistas you never see in Wye Vale: here, when you stand on a hillside, you see across to the rest of the town on all the other hillsides. It’s a community poured into a series of valleys. Are we therefore “inward-looking”?

We found a spot in a little meadow spongy with mosses, bumpy with tussocks of ancient rabbit-warrens, enclosed with thorn-bushes. The butterflies were pursuing one another romantically, sometimes at risk of inter-species relations. Do they dare, or is it taboo? The wildflowers were exquisite and often tiny. They put me in mind of some alpine meadow, which I’ve never seen in real life. There was wild thyme in flower, some mint that smells like lavender when crushed, yellow loose-strife, viper’s bugloss, stonecrop, ragwort and many I’ve never seen before. Elders and brambles were in flower, promising rich black fruit with purple juice later; and sloes swelling green like olives. Later they’ll turn glossy black under an indigo bloom.

It must take a lifetime of study to know the flora and fauna by name and family, and all the details of how they propagate and why they are the way they are. Most of what I know is from Mr Warriner, a master at prep school who took us on country walks and taught us  names of plants which have pretty much stayed with me since.

We sprawled on a rug, K with her crossword, till she lay down and snoozed, whilst I wondered what if anything I could capture with my box of cheap colours. I stuck to the first thing I had noticed: a striped caterpillar which appeared to be reclining lazily on ragwort. Closer examination showed that it was munching furiously on bud after bud. I was able to draw the caterpillar easily enough but ragwort is not easy with chunky crayons. The cinnabar caterpillar is striped like this, it seems, to warn predators that it is full of the ragwort poison, which is so strong that they have to make sure there is no ragwort in a field where animals graze.

The colourful wall records some initiative years ago to express a no-drugs message with professional graffiti—text and panorama—sponsored by local companies. Other messages have long been superimposed.

But then, “official” graffiti are on the increase in Wye Vale (my code name for this town). The University puts out cool messages in this form. And even at the Hospital, near where K works, they have screwed some large graffiti-like paintings (prepared elsewhere) to certain drab outside walls. Why, we cannot imagine,

Are we culturally advanced or retarded? I can’t decide.