This has been the best season for white butterflies for many years, and watching those three species throughout the summer reminds me of a bizarre incident during my season year at grammar school.

To the south of and adjacent to the school was a large garden which that year had been sown with cabbages to supplement the school lunch menu. This was at a time when the application of pesticides was still some years in the future.

During July, many large white butterflies laid eggbatches on the cabbages and the caterpillars all matured shortly after the school broke up for the summer holidays.

The deserted building was then infiltrated by hordes of larvae. In through open windows they crawled, seeking a safe place to pupate and chose to settle en masse on walls, ceilings and behind radiators. A fair proportion had been paracitised by tiny wasps, which pupated themselves in tiny yellow cocoons alondside their host chrysalids.

A week later, a firm of decorators moved in to paint the school interior. Incredibly, without making any attempt to remove pupae encrusting the surfaces, the painters worked away regardless covering everything in sight under two coats of pale cream emulsion!

Just imagine the scene that confronted us upon our return to our classrooms for the start of autumn term. Every surface bore a mass of little cream elongated blisters where the pupae had been entombed!

Of course, none survived the toxic coating, not even the wasp grubs.

Those walls remained like that for the following four years until I finished my school days!

Recently I returned to my old school to deliver an illustrated talk. The subject? butterflies of course!

I entered my old classroom which seemed to have shrunk in my absence and on an impulse, peeped behind a radiator next to my old school desk. Adhering to the dusty wall were two long-forgotten mummified pupae—more than 40 years after the event! Amazing!

Nowadays those decorators would find difficulty in being listed in the pages of Chequer Trade!

The large white butterfly, our only so called ‘pest’ species, has been targeted by chemicals and since 1955 severely depleted by a persistent virus infection.

An event like I have described could not happen again, so pity the poor Cabbage White—it has much to contend with. The picture shows a large white bending her abdomen laying a batch of eggs.

Some years ago I won butterfly limerick competition with this entry:

A farmer once tried all he might

To rid his crops of the Large White.

Day and night did he toil

Till he poisoned the soil

His cabbages died — serves him quite right!