Chapter 2
It was just before dusk and the warm undergrowth was alive with moving eyes, opening and closing as the Common Evening Browns flapped softly about in their hundreds. A young man kept netting them, examining them, and letting them go.
‘The variation on the underside is mind-boggling, isn’t it?’ he called over to a man in his thirties lighting a fire by two tents at the edge of the jungle. ‘Mottling – chocolate zigzags – leaf patterns – ocelli… Literally, no two are the same, yet they’re the same species!’
‘Yes…’
‘Hello, look at that – I’ve put up a warringtonii.’
‘Catch it! Is it a male?’
The young man stared into the open net, at the bottom of which hung a dark velvety shape.
‘I should say. I can smell it…’
‘Mark it, then, record, and release. The female must be here somewhere. Perhaps tomorrow morning.’
The two entomologists ate their tinned beans, sausages and processed cheese on the jungle side of the fire, from where they could observe a few huts and a wharf by the sea about a mile off. The elder (Senior Assistant Lepidopterist Peregrine Barratt) reached over to his rucksack and extracted a flat bottle of whisky. The younger (research assistant Toby Yates) was fingering a dried Striped Kukri Snake that he had come across earlier in the day. It had clearly died where it lay, because it looked like a large pretzel.
‘There they are, Perry!’ he exclaimed.
A launch swept round the bay and moored at the wharf.
‘Darn it,’ spat Barratt, ‘we’ll have to put this away, and tidy the camp up a bit, CUBE-fashion…’
He took the bottle to his tent, where he hid it in his sleeping bag, and they both aligned their pots, cooking utensils, nets, rifle and rucksacks as laid down in the Cramford University Borneo Expedition rulebook.
Five minutes later, a battered US Army Jeep drew up. The driver was a lumpy woman; next to her sat a hunched old man. Five people got out. The old man, the driver and another young woman went over to the fire, whilst a very tall man and a short, middle-aged woman hung back behind them.
‘Hello, Colin!’ Barratt addressed the old man. ‘And Sandra – Donna – hello…’
The old man was just short of medium height, wore steel-framed glasses, a khaki short-sleeved shirt and forage cap, and sported a leather pouch on his belt. He delivered ‘smiling eyes’ and a sort of nervous, wide open grin. Barratt and Yates stood by their fire, the latter still holding his snake.
‘Everything all right, Perry?’
‘Very good, Colin, so far – very productive. This is Toby Yates, the research assistant we took on in Cramford.’
‘Ah yes. We haven’t met. How do you do.’
‘I am very pleased to be on the expedition, Mr Warrington. Thank you.’
The ‘professor’ shifted on his feet and puffed up and down slightly, as though impatient.
‘Well, meet my assistants in the Department, Sandra Mounds and Donna Pearson.’
Yates smiled and nodded.
‘I hope you are not thinking of taking that snake home with you?’
‘Er…’ Yates looked at it.
‘Because specimens are not personal property and we only capture butterflies.’
‘Of course, Mr Warrington.’
‘Well, we’ll get settled at Alaska and see you tomorrow morning.’
They all got back into the Jeep and drove off.
‘Alaska?’ asked Yates.
Barratt laughed: ‘Don’t ask me! It’s just the collection of wartime huts that CUBE has had since the 1950s. Apparently F-Floret gave them that name in order to keep their existence secret – confidential.’
They settled round the fire.
‘By the way, Perry. Why is he only a Mister?’
‘Ah. It’s because he was a conscientious objector during the War and by the time he’d finished his service in India he was too old to do a Ph.D. He didn’t get the Chair, either. But he is the Horsfield Reader in Lepidopterology.’
‘It’s amazing to think that he discovered and described the Unguentary Crow at the age of twenty-seven.’
(For the other 23 chapters you will have to buy the collection of stories White Bow/Ghoune published this autumn!)
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
