On the wings of love

WHEN did I become obsessed with butterflies? The answer is simple—I don’t know.

As a child, I quickly became aware of them. There were white ones, ‘cabbage whites’, that father blamed for eating our cabbages as caterpillars; brightly coloured ones in the spring that fluttered against the window panes, trying to get out of the house; and others in the autumn that tried to get in. However, at that stage, that is as far as me and butterflies went.

Then, years later, I met an amazing countryman—well, a Londoner who had moved into the countryside as a child during the Second World War as an evacuee—called Gordon Beningfield. By the time our paths crossed, he had metamorphosed from an urban child at risk from war into a quite extraordinary watercolour artist and conservationist; what a transformation. He was also a man who suffered with dyslexia, yet could hold