love among the butterflies

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There's a charity shop in Wymondham that has a library of second hand books upstairs, and I probably found Love Among the Butterflies there. Margaret Fountaine was a Victorian lady with an adventurous heart and a love for cataloguing butterflies and men. When she died, in 1940 (by the roadside in Trinidad), she left approximately 22,000 Diurnal Lepidoptera to the Norwich Castle Museum, and a box that wasn't to be opened until 15 April, 1978. Thirty-odd years later, her secret memoirs were lifted from the vaults, comprising of over a million neatly penned words. Finding myself needing to read autobiography over fiction at the moment, I finally got around to reading this much cut-down version, published by Penguin, and edited (and rather immodestly commented on) by W. F. Carter.


I really like Margaret Fountaine. I can relate to her spending hours sketching Norwich cathedral in the hope she'd make a connection with chorister, Septimus, and I identify with the grief she so often prescribed herself. Like myself, she photographed cruelly, and (unlike me) takes her lack of beauty in good humour. "No, you are not beautiful," the Baron once told her. "But you are very pretty, have pretty eyes, a very pretty complexion and," (herein lay the secret of the whole matter, Margaret thinks) "you have nice hair." And she continues to report she was quite okay with that, 'for had he said that I was beautiful, my own commonsense would have told me he was only lying.'
Yesterday I felt so ill I couldn't talk or walk, write or make music. I looked out of my window and regarded the scene with disdain, for sometimes the same scene had been pleasing and I held that against it. There was nothing to do but pace, and even then, catching my foot on a persistent nail I have repeatedly hammered back into the floorboards, reminded me of a black night I spent with a bloody foot and crushed heart.
So in the end, I spoke to a middle-aged lady stranger on the telephone, who had to interrupt me to ask my age. "It's okay," I sniffed. "Don't worry, I'm actually 28. I know I sound young."
After that, walking didn't seem such a bad idea after all, and I set off in the direction of Eaton, stopping at Budgens to buy Ribena and a bar of fair trade chocolate, which I sucked squares of at various stages of my journey. My aim was to find Margaret Fountaine's Norwich places of residence: Eaton Grange and later, Eaton Lodge.
I hadn't done much research so my journey was fairly instinctive. I presumed she'd have lived with her family in 'villa' style residences. Her first Norwich abode, Eaton Grange, would have had to have been built before 1870 and Eaton Lodge, before 1880. I zigzagged up the Newmarket Road. I knew she had spent time with 'fashionable society' after coming of age, and one can only attribute such a label to the Newmarket Road, Judges Walk, top of Unthank, top of Christchurch area. A boundary lassoed around the houses.
And how beautiful those villas are. I felt more content in the company of them than I had in a long while; it brought back a time in my past, not so far gone, when I'd do that walk every other day wearing L'artisan's Bois Farine perfume. So many of those houses are exactly as they would have been - though I was disheartened to find many had lost their names in exchange for a number.
I discovered Eaton Hill house - now decrepit and falling down. Eagle eyes told me it was a younger house than I was seeking anyway. I also found Norwich High School for Girls is called Eaton Grove.
I lingered around Upton Road, and perhaps rightly so, because the internet has since told me there is an Eaton Grange there, set back from the road, now part of a hospital. This would fit, because the journey she first took in arriving in Norwich seemed more wiggly than straight up Newmarket Road. She spoke of seeing a church she didn't much care for because it looked more like a chapel, with a small spire. She called this 'New Eaton Church', but I suspect this to be the nearby Eaton Christ Church (even though it's not in Eaton), which would have been new, then.


I shall have to continue this another time; work calls. Princess Haiku said...

This is an interesting discussion and I have that book somewhere in my stacks of books to be read. Will give it a try.

23 November 2008 07:48

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