The Boy Who Was Afraid of Butterflies

Chapter 1 The Orchard

I am four years old. I am sitting in a nursery school howling my head off. In front of me on the plastic table I have made a barricade of toy bricks and in it placed my book, opened at my favourite page, a picture of the big green steam engine called ‘Lord Nelson’. The teachers sent my mother away saying, 'leave him, he will soon get over it once you have gone away'. They are wrong. I have howled all morning, through lunch and now it is early afternoon. The other children are doing their best to ignore me, the teachers are getting frustrated because of the din. They cannot phone home. We have no phone. They persuade me in the early afternoon to look at another book. For a few minutes I stare at a photo of the royal princesses - I remember a long hard look at the seven year old Princess Margaret Rose, ignoring her older sister - and then I return to my train book. They wait until my mother comes and then they say “It’s no good. Do not bring him tomorrow. Bring him only when he’s old enough to start Primary School.” I am still sobbing although I’ve run out of tears. The bricks are cleared away. My books are closed and put safely in my mother’s cycle saddlebag.

A year later I go to school. It is the same place, but different. I am a year older. There is something active to do. I want to learn to read and write. My father is still away in the army. I do not know what he does or where he is, but sometimes he comes home on leave and we see him off again at the station. He always takes me to see the engine. I remember ‘Queen Guinevere’ once. We get into the train before departure time to say farewell and I panic because I think the train will take us with him, and we have to get out lest my mother is embarrassed by my piercing screams. I don’t understand train timetables yet. I receive small letters from my father. He always draws the picture of an engine in the top right hand corner of the notepaper - stylised like my toy train I pull around on the carpet.

It is wartime. I have never known anything else. Our cat came from an army camp, brought home in a haversack. We let it out in the train compartment and I screamed until my father put it back because I thought it would escape. We called it ‘Dumpy’ because it kept arching its back and its front legs were shorter than the back. During the black-out my younger sister and I sleep on shelves in the built-in cupboard in the downstairs living room. When the sirens go, we all pick up blankets and candles and step down into the corrugated Anderson shelter under our Morello cherry tree. The cat always gets there first. Our next door neighbour who is a very ancient lady joins us because she has no shelter and teaches me to play ‘Snap’ and ‘Old Maid’.

In the last year of the war, I used to alert my family when I heard a ‘doodlebug’. I could always tell the difference between a plane and a ‘doodlebug’ though no-one else in my family could (except the cat). I would hear the drone and shout ‘doodlebug’ and we would all rush for the shelter. They could come at any time, it was not like the regular night time bombing raids. One night as I am being carried to the shelter - I think I have been asleep - and see the ack-ack exploding like fireworks in the sky, my mother tells me that peace is coming soon. I am scared. “What is peace?” I ask. “Will we be safe?” I think it is some new terror.

Anyway, I’m now in school. My teacher is Mrs Roots, she is a grandmotherly lady, she lives next door to my grandma and grandpa. She sees I am eager to please her, to learn and she gives me special stars on my work. The school corridors are painted lime green and smell of cabbage. We all have a tiny square of garden beside the school entrance drive. We grow vegetables as the government exhorts us to, but I grow tall hollyhocks as well. Perhaps we eat our vegetables for lunch. I cannot remember. But I do remember puddings. Three times a week we have semolina (we call it ‘frog spawn’) or rice pudding. I hate milk in any shape or form, and refuse to eat it. You are not allowed to leave your dinner. Eating is compulsory. They put a spoonful of jam in the middle of the rice pudding and make me take a mouthful. I gag immediately and spew it out. I become an exception to the rule. They never force me to eat my food again.

We don’t have an air raid shelter at our school. When the siren goes we all troop out of the classroom into the orchard. Do the teachers think we will be protected by the leaves overhead? The orchard is quite big, it has a number of mature fruit trees - plum, pear and big ‘Granny Smith’ apple trees. In the autumn when the fruit is ripe, we must have some in our lunches, but all I can remember is the vast array of half-eaten rotting windfalls left in heaps around the unmown grass which we crush beneath our feet when the sirens go. And the insects. Huge wasps guzzling on the sickeningly sweet putrid flesh. And gaudy butterflies basking on the sunlit fruit, opening and shutting their flashy wings at me, some with flesh-crawling eyes. It is horrible. I am more scared of that orchard than of the German bombs or ‘doodlebugs’.