Sandlands (23 page)

If you want to see silver-studded blues, you need to look for ants.

Symbiosis is what it's called. The caterpillar emits a sound that replicates the black ants' distress signal, prompting them to carry the caterpillar down into their nest, where they guard it and keep it safe from predators until it's ready to pupate. In return, the caterpillar secretes a syrupy substance on which the ants can feed. Mutual dependence and mutual advantage. It's win-win, as Dr Stebbings likes to say. He's full of these little phrases, the kind you get in ‘motivational' books, and he's always cheerful and smiling, even when what he's saying seems nothing to smile about.

A lot of people, if you talk about symbiosis, either look at you blankly or else they think of wildlife programmes on the television: oxpecker birds that stand on the backs of rhinos on the African savannah and eat their ticks, or that David Attenborough film of the sea anemone and the hermit crab. I've noticed most people are only really interested in wildlife if they find it cute or funny, like the scuttling hermit crabs with their outsized sea anemone jockeys, waving their poisoned tentacles to fend off octopuses. And everyone thinks of symbiosis as something in nature, something out there. They never just think about themselves. But we're all involved in symbiotic patterns all the time.

There are the obvious ones, like dogs. Joan and I feed Mungo and provide him with shelter from the cold and wet, and a cool kitchen floor where he can stretch out flat on his belly in hot weather. We twist out his ticks when he's been in the long grass at the bottom of my old garden next door. In return, he kills rats in the outhouse, and barks if anyone's coming up the path. Except Dr Stebbings, that is. When Mungo hears the doctor's car, he pricks his ears then lays his nose down on his paws, heaves his hairy ribs in a sigh and goes straight back to sleep.

Then there's the symbiosis that's invisible. Sometimes it's so small you'd need a microscope to see it, like the flora in our guts: a hundred trillion microorganisms, ten times more than the number of our own body's cells, digesting what we can't, releasing nutrients to feed both them and us. We couldn't live without them. Sometimes it's too big for us to bring in focus, like the delicate environmental balances we're busy fouling up. One butterfly flaps its wings in the forests of the Amazon and there are hurricanes we can't foresee. I talked to Joan about it, how they'd proved it all by mathematics, and she listened with a frown. ‘What if it's here,' she asked, ‘the butterfly? What if it's here on Blaxhall Common?' I told her I thought it must work here too. Maths is the same everywhere.

There are five hundred species of bacteria in the average human gut, but only nineteen butterflies of the family Lycaenidae occurring in the British Isles. Nine of those are blue. Once it would have been ten, before the Mazarine blue died out. And nine could soon be down to seven, since both the long-tailed blue and short-tailed blue are now infrequent visitors.

The small blue is barely blue at all but more of a dusty brown with just the hint of bluish veins radiating out from its body. The chalkhill blue is a pale turquoise shade that is almost aquamarine and, as its name suggests, is found in chalky uplands and not on Suffolk's sandy soil. The remaining five varieties, though, are hard to tell apart. Small and inconspicuous compared with many native butterflies, with undersides of anonymous grey or brown, their habit of closing their wings when not in flight creates good camouflage. You'd mistake them for just another dead leaf – until they flicker open to reveal that splash of brilliant blue.

 

The butterflies at the museum make me sad. We don't have only native species here – the blues and whites and hairstreaks and fritillaries, the heaths and browns and tortoiseshells, the skippers and the swallowtail. Some of our specimens must actually once have flapped their wings in the Amazon – before being pinned to a card by Charles Randolph Badderley, English sportsman-naturalist (1847–1918). Their true colours are only to be guessed at, repainted in the mind's eye from gaudy online images. Even the familiar ones are faded shadows of their real-life counterparts. The peacock, eyes dulled, has lost its vibrant plumage; the admiral's red coat is rusty and threadbare; the purple emperor no longer boasts its deep Tyrian bloom. Sunlight and the years must have done their damage before the green felt flaps were added, too late, to the glass-topped wooden cabinets.

Charles Randolph also collected birds, both native and exotic. He bequeathed to the museum four volumes of painstaking notes, observing, identifying and cataloguing his specimens before he shot and stuffed and then imprisoned them, each in its cold crystal dome. I used to hurry through the bird room when Mum left me there on Saturdays while she went to do the shopping. (
Stay here and be a good boy
.) They were too still, and I was afraid to meet the accusation in their hard, glass eyes. The only ones I could bear to look at were the goldfinches. Charles Randolph, having killed a family of five, allowed them to be together in a large, rectangular case, furnished with a branch to perch on and carpeted with leaves. Two were placed so close to each other that they almost touched, while another was captured with its wings half unfolded, as if it were about to rise in flight.

Taking the job here made a lot of sense. I was familiar with the exhibits already. I could have recited the text on most of the caption cards by heart. I knew every photograph of old Saxmundham on the Green Room walls, from Edwardian sepia to fifties black-and-white. My favourite, from 1912, shows the colonnaded front of the museum itself, looking almost identical to its present self, while before it along the high street a herd of pigs pass by, driven, no doubt, by a farmer who is out of shot, but apparently strolling at their leisure. I could already have listed the Anglo-Saxon artefacts, rescued by archaeologists from the foundations of the new estate: the coins and clasp and rings, the bronze belt buckles, the spearhead and daggers which, according to the card, are ‘suggestive of a warrior's grave'. My legs had stuck to the tip-up plastic seats in the small side room, on stuffy summer holiday afternoons, while I watched on an endless loop the flickery film of ‘Saxmundham at War'. I'd loitered inside the replica railway ticket office in the foyer, exact in every 1940s detail, even down to the stationmaster's hat, the tape inside its rim worn oily smooth from many youthful foreheads. I must have tried it on a hundred times when I was small enough for it to slip and cover my eyes so that, in darkness, I could breathe the dusty smell of it, of soot and sweat and Brasso.

Besides, it's not far to Saxmundham on the bus. Before Joan retired we used to ride in together in the mornings, me to the museum and her to Knit Knacks. We used to get the back seat if we could manage it, to give her needle room. That's what she called it when I was a kid, if I leaned too close to her on the sofa: ‘Sit up and let me have some needle room'. Back then she was always knitting something, even on the bus: wool was a vocation. At home we both have bedrooms full of vivid, multihued creations, hand-knitted before Joan's hands began to disregard the signals from her brain. Too numerous to wear, they remind me of Charles Randolph Badderley's victims: bright jays and hummingbirds and lorikeets, kingfishers and resplendent birds of paradise, piled high in cupboards and squashed into drawers.

Now, as often as not, I have the back seat to myself. Coming home I catch the 5.04, or the 5.44 if I'm picking up groceries from the list Joan gives me, for her to make our tea. She was a good cook as well as a knitter, was Joan. Her raised pork pie was famed at summer fetes and harvest teas. Lately, though, I do most of the work under her instruction. It's not so much the shaking – not since Dr Stebbings got her tablets right – as that her fingers lack the force. She hasn't the strength to grip, she says, whether it's knitting needles or the vegetable knife. So I peel and chop and grate and stir while she tells me what to do.

Sometimes even that is hard, these days. It was names that her brain began to scramble first, of people and of places, and then the ordinary names of things. ‘Wash the trellis,' she'll say, when she means the lettuce, or, ‘Shell the beef. The peef. The peas.'

Then the other important words began to slither from her grasp, the adjectives and verbs. ‘Slice the tomatoes,' she'll tell me, ‘and make them nice and skin. Nice and skid. Thid... Not thick – the other thing.'

‘Thin,' I'll say, and she'll repeat the word as if committing it to memory. ‘Thin. Slice them nice and thin.'

Still the in-between words seem to roll along all right, as if without attention on them they have to shift for themselves.

Seven thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven days I lived next door, first with Mum and Dad and later just with Mum. I moved in with Auntie Joan after Mum went into hospital, and when she died it made sense to stay on. Since then it's been almost as long again: seven thousand, eight hundred and nineteen days. That's what counts – not Dr Stebbings with his ‘not the next-of-kin'. I wish Joan had really been Mum's sister, all the same, and not just a neighbour. It would have made things easier.

‘In seven more weeks I'll have lived here half my life,' I told Joan yesterday. She smiled and nodded. ‘You're a good boy,' she said, but her eyes were glazed with tears.

 

With the help of a stick and my firm grasp under her other arm, Joan can still get out on the common for walks. Mungo trots ahead in his self-important doggy zigzags, throwing in the air for imaginary guns every bird in his vicinity. Butterflies, though, are off his radar just as he appears to be off theirs: they're mutually oblivious.

It's five years since we've seen the silver-studded blues, but we still go and look for them when the sun comes out, every July or August. There aren't many habitats left for them in Britain – only fifteen remaining places where they are known to breed. Lowland heath is what they like, with plenty of the heather on which they feed, and a sandy soil for the ants. The caterpillars need young heather, low-springing and tender, not the woody older growth. Many colonies, they say, were lost in the 1950s when myxomatosis came and swept through the population of grazing rabbits, which had kept the heather short for the butterflies. More symbiosis – with man, the scientist, wading in as usual to mess the whole thing up.

Blaxhall Common is ideal, and we always had a colony here. You had to know the place to look, between the sunken pathway and the pheasant covers, on a patch of open ground just past a cluster of silver birch. The adults don't fly far once they've emerged – no more than ten or twenty metres in any direction, according to the books – so we could always track them down. They're no size – nothing like the garden whites and tortoiseshells – and there were never major numbers of them. A small breeding colony, a few hundred adults at most. But on a blazing day, when the sun catches glints of blue as they bob and bounce above the heather like so many crazy ping-pong balls, they're an effervescence of joy. Every summer they have been there, beyond the silver birches, until these last five years.

Only the males in fact are blue. The females are a brownish-grey, on top the same as below, with little to make them stand out. All the blues are similar: the male bright blue above and drab below, the female just plain drab. There are variations in shade, but these are not to be relied upon, occurring within as well as between the species. The silver-studdeds down in Hampshire, for example, are a dull, matt mushroom colour underneath, while our Suffolk ones have a sheen of silvery grey. What distinguishes most clearly the different types of blue is the patterning that rims the wings. With silver-studded blues you have to wait until they close, and observe the underside. All the blues have a fringe of black-and-white dots but only those on the silver-studded contain at their centre the reflective, pale blue scales which catch the light like burnished metal – those telltale silver ‘eyes' the books describe. When they settle for a moment on a tuft of heather and their wings flick and quiver, as fragile as an eyelash, they wink their silver at you as if in private confirmation.
Yes,
you're right. It's me
.

We went last week to see if they were there. There had been a shower the night before, which had washed the heather free of summer dust, restoring its evergreen gloss and the sharpness of its violets and magentas. Do I mean magenta? Joan would once have named the colours with an expert's eye. The walls of Knit Knacks, lined from floor to ceiling with a honeycomb of small compartments crammed with wool, were better than a paint chart. The balls of yarns were ranged chromatically as well as by fibre, weight and ply, sweeping up through the rainbow and back down again, a visual glissando. A museum of colour. That's something else the disease is slowly stripping from her. Different shades have already started to merge and lose their clarity, she tells me, and Dr Stebbings warns that she may end up colour-blind. How will she spot butterflies when she can't tell blue from yellow?

Today there were common blues and brimstone yellows among the coppers, browns and tortoiseshells, but not the faintest whisper of a silver-studded blue.

 

I didn't study Latin or Greek at school but evidently Charles Randolph Badderley did. It's thanks to him, and the Internet, that I've picked up the odd few words. The family
Lycaenidae
, I've learned, means ‘resembling gossamer' in Greek, and it's true their wings are as delicate as cobwebs. The sub-family Polyommatinae is Latin, referring to the many eyespots appearing around their wings, while
argus
– our silver-studded friend – is Greek again. It means, appropriately, ‘shining', for their gleaming silver eyes. It's not my job, exactly, to know all that, but I like to have the facts behind the caption cards in case somebody asks. Not that the public do ask questions much, at least not about the exhibits; it's more often what time we close or where to find the toilets. But it means there's plenty of time to look things up.