Butterfly Collecting in the Hindu Kush

As a young child I had a complete fascination with butterflies. Whenever I saw a butterfly pass, I would follow it as far as I could, hoping to see it settle on a shrub or a source of nectar so I could slowly inch forward and get a close up view of the shimmering wings in the sun. I often used to go down to a favourite spot on the foreshore where butterflies, most commonly Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells, would settle on the warm hulls of upturned dinghies in the sun. To me they shone like jewels, and in some way those childhood hours watching butterflies in the sun are stored away in my memory, as some folks might store stamp collections or fine paintings.
Fortunately I was born and brought up long before we had heard of information technology. We spent much of our childhoods out of doors in boats or making dens out of haybales. One time I found a large nest of caterpillars of the Peacock butterfly. We had a sort of dolls hospital which was the perfect size; my parents arranged for our neighbour Les to modify it so that it had clear perspex windows at the front and a sheet of perforated zinc at the back to allow fresh air to flow through it. This became my first cage and with a regular supply of fresh stinging nettles I fed up the caterpillars until they pupated into lime grey and pale fawn chrysalids with shiny golden points to them. One summer's day I woke around dawn to find they were started to break out of their cases and hanging upside down from the cage roof to dry their wings. An hour or two later, one by one, they flew off into the bright morning.
Some years later when we went on a family holiday to the New Forest, we drove home by way of Bexleyheath on the London Kent border. It was here that a hero of mine, L.Hugh Newman, lived in a more or less conventional detached Victorian house with a large garden. I must have read half his published works of which my favourite was "The Butterfly Farmer". The house and garden was stacked with every bit of butterfly collecting and rearing paraphernalia you could imagine; muslin sleeves on mulberry bushes, teeming with silk moth caterpillars, drawers full of butterflies and moths killed and pinned to cork boards, sweep nets with brass ferrules....
I don't remember all that many of the details of that visit but I do remember that Mr Newman spent a good hour showing us around his house and extensive garden, opening shoeboxes full of unusual chrysalids and pupae sent in from collectors overseas and cages around bushes covered in exotic caterpillars. I recall coming home with a few pupae of the Elephant Hawk Moth, a magnificent insect that I had never seen, and burying them in under leaf mould and moss in a shoebox until they hatched.
It must have been some time after this that my Dad came across a second hand copy of L. Hugh Newman's "Linger and Look" in the local market. We used to collect old books then, especially those that had ornately decorative and embossed covers. This one didn't, it has a rather plain leaf green cover. But when I opened it up, there was a surprise inside. My father had made me a collage on the flyleaf. And about forty five years later, here it is...