Love Among the Butterflies

One of my daughters took this photograph in the museum at
Plymouth. The butterflies on display are not from Margaret
Fountaine's collection, but I like the picture!

Margaret Fountaine was a feisty Victorian Englishwoman of independent means who travelled the world for 50 years collecting butterflies, and was totally unfazed by the unaccustomed situations and conditions she encountered, seeing off drunken men, robbers, fleas, snakes, mosquitoes, riots, wars, troublesome natives and the odd stray lion.

She visited 60 countries on six continents, journeying through mountains, marshes, tropical forests and deserts, and enduring excruciating heat, searing cold, drenching monsoon rains, bitter winds, mist and snow. Her accommodation ranged from palatial hotels and the homes of friends and fellow collectors to run-down boarding houses, remote monasteries, mud huts, and a beehive-like shepherds’ shelter, constructed from large, loose stones.

Victorian traveller and butterfly collector
Margaret Fountaine - I think she looks
very determined.

Sanitation and washing facilities were often 'unmentionable'; clean, comfortable bedding was rare and she slept – not always happily - on coconut matting, bamboo poles, and brushwood piled on bare earth and covered with rugs.

She began her travels after being abandoned by the man she hoped to marry, but seems to have attracted many other men throughout her long life (including a Sicilian bandit and a Hungarian nobleman). However, she found happiness with a handsome Syrian guide and translator who was 15 years her junior. and they lived,worked and travelled together, unmarried, for some 27 years.

Margaret recorded her experiences in a series of diaries, published by Collins in two parts, and then by Virago in one volume, Love Among the Butterflies, The Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady, and this is the edition I found. Sadly, it now seems to be unavailable, but the story of how it came to be printed is the stuff of fairy-tales.

When she died in 1940, aged 78, Margaret left her vast collection of butterflies to Norwich Museum, together with a mysterious black japanned box, which was sealed and padlocked, and came with instructions that it was not to be opened until April 15th, 1978. On that date 12 ledgers were discovered, containing her diaries, dated from 1878 to 1939. They are annual reports (written up from her earlier notes) and rarely mention a month, let alone a precise day, but they are surprisingly intimate in places, and reveal a woman who was obsessive, independent, and fearless, with a tremendous joy and enthusiasm for life.

As you read, it soon becomes apparent that Margaret, the daughter of a Norfolk vicar, had a penchant for unsuitable men. At 21 she developed an all-consuming passion for Septimus Hewson, a paid chorister at Norwich Cathedral. For seven years she pursued him with the relentless determination she later used to hunt butterflies. When he was sacked for drinking she followed him to Ireland, and considered herself engaged – but he thought otherwise.

She sought solace through travel, and while in Switzerland she tells us:

My 1997 edition of  'Love Among the
Butterflies'. If you see a copy, snap it
up, because it is a fascinating read.

I would often spend my afternoons at at St Jean and go out with an an English girl after butterflies, a pursuit which once once started became all-absorbing. I filled my pocket box with butterflies,s ome I had only seen in pictures as a child and yet recognised the moment I caught sight of them on the wing.

From that moment she was captivated, and spent the rest of her life hunting butterflies, often in the most inhospitable and inaccessible places. When her money ran out she accepted commissions from other collectors, and she bred many of the butterflies in her collection from from eggs or caterpillars, keeping notes and painting specimens (her sketch-books are in the Natural History Museum).

Despite her passion she was always aware that she caused the death of the creatures she loved, and in 1892 she wrote:

I caught a splendid specimen of male Brimstone, thinking that though it was common enough in England I should always love to think that it was caught in Italy. It gave me a pang of remorse to take this beautiful creature from her flowers and her sunshine, which I knew so well how to enjoy; the death of the butterfly is the one drawback to an entomological career.

But it's the human side of the diaries which is so fascinating: Margaret wrote about her feelings and relationships, and gave wonderful descriptions of the people she met and the places she visited, offering glimpses into worlds that have changed beyond all recognition.

Near Mesolonghi she gets caught in a shower of rain and gets wet through, so she seeks shelter at a mountain monastery:

The kindly monks had a sort of open stove filled with smouldering cinders placed at my disposal, and also provided me with a cassock, with many apologies that they were not in a position to offer me a more strictly feminine garment while my own dress was being dried. Then later on they placed before us a simple luncheon of poached egg and a kind of sweet confiture made from rose leaves mixed with sugar.

Margaret at Palm Springs, America.

In 1923, unable to continue with her travels in China, she gives us a sense of how chaotic things were:

China was in a turmoil from end to end; trains had been attacked by bandits on the main line between Shanghai and Pekin, and many foreigners robbed, and taken away by the bandits to be held for ransom. Even on the sea and up the rivers pirates were busy attacking boats, while in the interior civil war was raging.

Central to the diary – apart from her obsession with butterflies – is her relationship with Khalil Neimy, the dragoman (guide and translator) she met in Damascus on a late May afternoon in 1900 or 1901:

… he had a crushed almost cowed look; though his hair was quite fair his eyebrows and eyelashes and mustache were dark, and it was almost a boyish face beneath the tarboosh which he wore thrown far back... All I thought as I looked at this man for the first time was that he was very fair for a Syrian, and I liked to see a really fair man for a change. I noticed that his grey eyes were always looking towards me.

Since European women cannot walk around on their own, she employs him, but his attentions annoy and entrance her in equal measure:

... I did not choose to have my hand kissed first thing in the morning – later in the day I would perhaps graciously submit to this humble act of adoration, though I could not help thinking sometimes that the kisses were a trifle more fervent than the occasion seemed to demand, and once I pulled my hand away, but he looked so awfully hurt that I never had the heart to do that again...

She finds his ‘untiring devotion and constant adoration' is 'decidedly pleasant’ and agrees to marry him, despite the differences in their culture, class and age - she is 39, he is 24. I thought her account of their engagement was very touching:

A page from Margaret's diary, with Khalil's photograph
pasted in.

And then – out there beneath the shadows of those great rocks neat Baalbeck, on that glorious summer morning I solemnly vowed to Khalil Neimy that I would be his wife, and the I said, ‘I have never kissed you once, but now I will give you one for the first time’, and I kissed him on the cheek, which was smooth and pink like a boy’s, and we held each other's hand and swore to be true. And all the time the big, brown butterflies flitted unmolested to and fro among the hot rocks.

Margaret makes it clear that they lived as man and wife, but the relationship was not always easy - it turned out that Khalil already had a wife and children, and he made frequent trips home to care for his mother. He died on a visit to his Damascus home in 1929, still proclaiming his love for Margaret and insisting that his divorce had finally been granted. “How can I bear to tell it?” Margaret writes in her diary, adding: “Nothing could help or comfort me now.”

 She continued her work, on her own, and was collecting butterflies in Trinidad when she died in 1940. A monk discovered her collapsed on the roadside, her butterfly net nearby. She was carried to the guesthouse of the monastery, where she died, and was buried on the island.

I loved this book and thought it was a real 'find'. There is so much detail in the diaries – which are very readable and very enjoyable – that it's impossible to give a comprehensive view of Margaret and her life, but I must mention WF Cater, who edited the diaries skilfully, providing resumés of the sections which were left out. He tracked down people who had known Margaret and, thanks to his researches,the book includes some fascinating details about Margaret, her family, and Khalil. 

More butterflies from Plymouth Museum!

Taking a Wrong Turning

The long and winding road... it was the first
time we had ever seen grass growing in the
middle of the road!

Today's Saturday Snapshot is a kind of follow-up on last week's, because on the way back from Bigbury Beach and Burgh Island we took a wrong turning, and instead of driving along the'A' road we wanted, we found ourselves on a single track country lane, with grass growing in the middle! Parts of it were so overgrown it was like being in an ancient hollow way.

The Man Of The House was driving, and Elder Daughter was navigating, with the aid of her SatNav, which is usually very reliable. However, it failed to differentiate between 'bear left' and 'turn left' so somewhere along the line the Man Of The House, who possesses a very good sense of direction (unlike me and Elder Daughter), failed to continue along the main road (which gently curved around to the left) and instead turned into what looked like the world's narrowest road, with burgeoning greenery on either side - and overhead - and grass where one would normally expect to find a central white line.

This one is a bit blurred (it's not easy taking pictures in a
moving car, even if you are travelling very slowly, but you
you can see how the land is built up at the side of the road

Having landed us in seemingly uncharted territory, Voice of the SatNav became uncharacteristically silent – there was not even the standard message about re-computing our route. At this point my imagination got the better of me, and I began to wonder if our route finder was really a Discworld-style machine powered by two bad-tempered imps taking turn and turn about on an oversized bicycle (rather than a state-of-the-art, hi-tech gadget using a satellite to tell us the way). Right now, I decided, the imps had both stopped pedaling, and were searching through a pile of maps and reference books, whilst quarreling furiously over who was to blame – one of the, both of them, or us!

Eventually, some decisiom having been reached, a disembodied voice urged us to Keep Right On To the End Of the Road (or words to that effect), which made me hope our satellite guide would burst into song but, sadly, no tune was forthcoming. However, it's an idea SatNav manufacturers would do well to consider. Just think how much more interesting a journey would be with carefully selected musical accompaniments (all suitable suggestions will be gratefully received). 

This shot is even more blurred, but it's kind of
arty, and I rather like it, because it gives a sense
of the tunnel effect of the vegetation.

Anyway, since the road was much too narrow to even think about turning round – let alone trying such a manoeuvre – we had no alternative but to follow instructions, and we crawled along very slowly, in a very low gear. Fortunately the few cars we encountered travelling in the opposte direction were equally cautious, and there were passing points, where the road was slightly wider on each side, and you could avoid hitting anyone by pulling into the hedge!

I took photos through the car window, as an experiment, to try and show what the road was like. When we got home I looked at a map, but I'm still not sure where we went! However, I do wonder of sections of the route could have been an old hollow way  - a sunken lane, with trees and bushes growing on earth banks on each side, and forming an arch overhead, which makes it feel as if you are driving through a tunnel. Hollow ways (which I think are also known as green ways or green lanes) are ancient roadways and, apparently,  there are a lot of them in Devon, so I like to think we were following a track established in the distant past.

For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/ 

... And higher...

The sides got higher...

Back to normality!

Computer Update

Yay! I have a laptop that works! Not new, but as good as, hopefully. I went to look at new ones yesterday, spotted one I liked, at a really good price, and asked if it would still be available, at that price, today. Having been assured it would, I went away to investigate my finances (like the Provincial Lady, rather than checking to see how my account stands I have to look at the way it totters). Anyway, I returned to the shop this morning to purchase the desired model, only to discover that overnight the price had risen by 10 per cent!

I was very upset, especially as the service was appalling on both visits. Today we waited and waited and waited to be served. The assistant was very unhelpful and off-hand, and said special offers are changed every Friday, and staff are aware of that. Now 10 per cent may not sound a huge increase, and I have to admit it was still less than the recommended price, but it's money I don't have, and the assistant made me feel as though he thought I was lying (and he kept saying 'should of' when he meant 'should have', which further enraged me). So I walked out without buying anything.

Then The Man Of The House came up trumps, and dug out Elder Daughter's old laptop, which is still fully operational. He spent the whole afternoon working on it, installed updates, made it go faster,cleaned it up, and transferred documents and photographs from the hard drive on my old, defunct laptop, and the hard drive on Younger Daughter's old, defunct laptop (which I've been using since mine died).

I still need to check my files and pictures, weed out anything I don't want, and make sure there are no duplicates - a spot of electronic housekeeping is definitely in order. But, fingers crossed, I can reconnect myself with the wonderful world of technology, and proper blog posts will follow in due course.

Literary Landscapes and Broken Computers

September is here, and I am all behind-hand with everything, and my posts have been a little erratic – but the past few weeks seem to have been a permanent holiday, and we have had a wonderful time. First we took a trip to Cumbria, where I did lots of reading, but internet connections were virtually non-existent, so blogging was difficult. Then my mother came to stay, which was lovely, and then we went down to Devon to visit our elder daughter, and my laptop ceased to function at all. The Man Of The House got it up and running again once we were back home, and it operated, in somewhat idiosyncratic fashion, for a couple of days before deciding enough was enough. And, since it will not respond to instructions (you can turn it on, but that’s as far as it goes) I cannot use it or access anything on it, including my notes on the books I’ve read!

It was actually my younger daughter’s old computer, which I have been using because the monitor on my own machine is broken, it overheats, half the keys don’t work properly unless you hit them again and again and again, and it is v-e-r-y-v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w... So now I have two laptops, neither of which is any good. Anyway, in a bid to restore something resembling normal service, I am struggling to use the one with the broken monitor, but I am so cross about modern technology I can’t think straight, so this post is a bit of a mish-mash.

Visiting places always sets me thinking about the history, the people who lived there, and any literary connections there may be. Devon was easy: EM Delafield, author of the incomparable Provincial Lady, and Joyce Dennys, who wrote the equally funny ‘Henrietta’s War’, both lived in the county (Kentisbeare and Buddleigh Salterton), and I’m hoping to go to both places on a future trip.

Agatha Christie lived in Devon, and set
some of her novels there.

But, as I mentioned in my last (http://goo.gl/UR1qO), we did visit Bigbury-on-Sea, where we looked across the beach to Burgh Island, with its art deco hotel, which was the setting for two of her novels. And we walked on Dartmoor, on a bleak, windy day which, of course, made me think of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson striding across the moor in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ , with its description of spooky Grimpen Mire.

Poet Ted Hughes (another of my favourites) hailed from Yorkshire, but lived in the Devon for many years, and the landscape inspired much of his work. And, of course, at the other end of the county is Exmoor, and the Valley of the Rocks, immortalised by RD Blackmoor in ‘Lorna Doone’, which is a fantastic read, and if you haven’t read it, you should.

‘Westward Ho!’, another tale of romance and adventure, was so popular that a village in Devon was named after it, complete with apostrophe! I just downloaded this from Project Gutenburg, for my Kindle, and realised that Charles Kingsley also wrote ‘Hereward, the Last of the English’, which I read and loved as a child, so I downloaded that too.

Finding literary connections with Cumbria sounds simple – after all, there are the Lakes, with Beatrix Potter (her home is a delight, and you can see the dolls’ house featured in Two Bad Mice) and Wordsworth (we once went to Dove Cottage, which was much smaller than I expected). Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (whose work I’ve always preferred) lived at Keswick for a time. Later on in the 19^th century, John Ruskin - whose wife Effie ran off with Millais, the pre-Raphaelite painter - lived at Brantwood, overlooking Coniston Water, and there’s an interesting little museum about him in Coniston village. Coniston and Windermere feature in Arthur Ransome’s classic children’s stories, while Arthur Wainwright’s Guides are a joy to read, even if you are not a serious walker.

The end paper in Arthur Ransome's 'Swallows and Amazons'
shows the landscape he created, based on the Lake District.
Wildcat Islan is really Peel Island, in Coniston Water.

Melvyn Bragg, Broadcaster, journalist and novelist Melvyn Bragg born in Carlisle, set many of his novels in and around the Lake District. Much as I always enjoy his radio programmes, I have tried and failed to read his novels and never got beyond the first few pages.  

An illustration from The Tale of Two Bad Mice,
showing Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca inside
he dolls' house. We once saw the original huse
inside High Top, Beatrix Potter's former home.

We always stay in Barrow in Furness, where The Man Of The House was brought up and, as he always reminds me, until the new-fangled county of Cumbria was created, the Furness Peninsula was originally part of Lancashire, while the Lakes stretched across Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, so the area is hard to place geographically. It would have been nice to find a writer from Furness, but the nearest to a ‘local’ author is poet Norman Nicholson, who died in 1987, and lived all his life in Millom, on the Duddon estuary. We went there once, years ago, and I keep meaning to go back, because I like Nicholson’s poetry, and think his work should be better known.

So there we are, a quick literary tour. I am sure there are there are authors and books I have forgotten to mention with connections to Devon or Cumbria, so if you think of something I should read, please add a comment!

An Island Fit For a Crime Queen

Burgh Island Hotel inspired one of Agatha Christie's most
famous crime mysteries

This wonderful art deco hotel is on Burgh Island, in Devon, and was the setting for two novels by crime queen Agatha Christie, who lived in Devon and stayed at the hotel on occasions. We admired the building, which looks a bit like a 1930s cruise ship, but we stayed with our Elder Daughter, who has just moved to Plymouth. Her boyfriend (I should say partner) teaches at one of the city's secondary schools, while she has just finished her training and any day now will start her first job as a nurse in the main hospital down there.

Our Younger Daughter travelled with us, which was nice, because it's a while since the four of us have been together. The Man Of The House and I had a fabulous time enjoying our daughters' company, and we all had a lovely meal out to celebrate Younger Daughter's forthcoming birthday. The area was completely new to both of us, so we had a great time exploring and managed to pack a lot into a few days, but still have plenty of places to see on future visits. The only downside was my ailing laptop, which went on strike and ceased to function at all. We are now back home, and it is working in what can only be described as an idiosyncratic fashion, but has refused point blank to let me download photographs from my camera, so I have been forced to store them on another computer.

I'm not very good at taking photos of people, but I rather like
this one of my daughters paddling. Lucy (the elder) is on the
right, and Emily (the younger) is on the left.

Anyway, that's quite enough of me and my family. Back to Burgh Island, which is around 300 yards from Bigbury Beach, and you can walk to it when the tide is on the way out - Elder Daughter and her boyfriend have done it, and walked on the island, which is about a mile around In addition to the hotel there are three houses, and a pub called the Pilchard Inn. However, when we went to the beach the tide was on the way in, and we were worried we might get stranded there until the tide turned. The Burgh Island Hotel has a special tractor, where seating for the driver and passengers is raised on tall wheels, high above the sand and water, so everyone can cross the causeway safely, without getting wet.

Burgh Island was once known as St Michael's Island, and there was a monastery where monks brewed mead and caught pilchards, but after the Dissolution fishermen moved in and turned what was left of the chapel into a 'huers hut', where a 'hue and cry' was sounded to alert everyone when the pilchard shoals were sighted. Look-out posts of a different type were built during WW2, when it was feared the Germans might try to establish a beachhead there. Anti-tank defences were established, with two defensive 'pill boxes' and an observation post.

The rocks along the sure were full of fissures and clefts, and
weathered into sharp points and pinnacles, made of
thin layers, like slate or shale.

The island's reputation for attracting celebrities seems to date back to the 1890s when music hall star George H Chirgwin built a wooden house and invited guests to weekend parties, but the present hotel was created by film maker Archibold Nettlefold who bought the whole island in 1927. For just over a decade it was one of the most fashionable and popular places for the glittering social elite of the day: as well as Agatha Christie, guests included Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, and Noel Coward.

But the war changed all that. The RAF used it for airmen recovering from wounds, and the two top floors suffered bomb damage. Repairs were carried out, but after the war it was turned into self- catering holiday flats. It was restored in the 1990s and the early years of this century, and remains best known as the setting for Christie's books 'And Then There Were None', and 'Evil Under The Sun'. A TV version of the latter, starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, was filmed on location at Burgh Island and Burgh Island Hotel.

The lower part of the rock was smoothed by waves, and
you could see the twisted strata. Some of the looked like
the feet of giant creatures stuck in the sand.

The golden sands of the beach at Bigbury-on-Sea are popular with families and surfers, and it got quite busy, despite the bitterly cold wind. Many of the visitors set up a home-from-home on the sand, with tents, windbreaks, chairs, tables and barbecues. Mostly they were made of sterner stuff than us, and were clad in traditional beach attire, which must have been chilly, to say the least. We stayed warmly clad, but shed footwear to go paddling, walked along the sand, and sat in the shelter of some rocks to eat our picnic. For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/ 

A view of the island, showing the hotel on the left, and the
Pilchard Inn on the right.