When I was a child, my grandparents’ house was within skipping distance (I was rarely seen without my trusty skipping rope in those far-off days), and my favourite pastime was ‘helping’ Grandad in his garden.
He had this amazing shed, which smelt deliciously of turps and wood shavings and earth, and was hung with tools on every wall – tools I was told never to touch so I didn’t because, had I done so, I would have been banned from the shed, and I’d have hated that. It was a different matter in the greenhouse, though, where he kept a vast number of geraniums, and actively encouraged me to touch those in order to release the lovely pungent lem-ony smell. The only thing I didn’t like was the huge spiders, but Grandad, a builder, used to laugh at the look on my face as he let them run around in the long hairs on his muscular, tanned arms. Yuk!
When I was about 8, and had just had my birthday, I went into Grandad’s garden and found him putting the finishing touches to a tiny picket fence bordering a small plot of newly-dug earth.
‘An extra present,’ he said, pointing to it with his screwdriver. ‘Your very own garden.’
I loved that garden, and it was soon full of geraniums and other non-geranium plants supplied as ‘babies’ by Grandad. I was also immensely proud of it, so it was with a strong sense of outrage that I discovered that one of my precious plants was being eaten alive. I knew who the culprit was, though, and went in search of same. I knew because Grandad had once mistakenly asked me to pick the caterpillars off his cabbages and didn’t notice, until I’d virtually de-leafed six of them, that my methods were a bit heavy handed. On that occasion he’d given me a jam jar and told me to put the offending creatures into it and that he would ‘deal with them’ later.
So, once I’d found the culprit, I went in search of Grandad and his jam jar. All I found was a note on the greenhouse door: ‘Katy. I’ve had to go out. Please shut the gate when you leave.’ I found the jam jar, shut the gate when I left, and took the caterpillar – a rather pretty one, I had to admit – home to Mum.
Marching into the kitchen, I held up the jam jar. ‘Mum! This caterpillar has been eating my geraniums.’ I held up a chewed leaf as evidence. ‘I don’t know what Grandad does with the caterpillars I find in the cabbages, but I want you to deal with this one.’
‘Deal with it?’ Mum said. ‘Do you mean, kill it?’
So that was what Grandad did! Recovering quickly, I nodded firmly.
She took the jam jar from my hand and smiled at the caterpillar, then removed it from the jar and told me to open my hand. It started to walk about, quite at home immediately, and I found myself rather liking the tickling of its tiny feet. But that would never do!
‘Mum!’ I said, but she shook her head.
‘Why should I kill something that was only finding something to eat?’
‘Well, what can I do with it?’ I asked.
She thought for a while, then said, ‘There are two things you can do. You can take it back to Grandad’s and throw it into his part of the garden, or you can forgive it and make a pet of it.’
‘Forgive a caterpillar? Make it a pet?’
Mum nodded, and within minutes my new, forgiven ‘pet’ was crawling around in the bottom of a huge jam jar with the remainder of the geranium leaf for food, and holes punched in the lid to allow air to circulate.
And a fascinating pet he (or she) turned out to be. I kept the pot clean, brought new leaves as necessary, and waited, as Mum had suggested I do, to see what would happen next.
It seemed a long time coming, but can’t have been more than a week, then, one day, my caterpillar had gone from the jar. Mum, called urgently from hanging out the washing, said nothing but unscrewed the lid, and there, hanging like a shivelled nut, was a creature I’d never put in there!
‘Stop feeding it’, she said. ‘And just wait.’
A while later (and I honestly can’t remember how long it was), I was playing in our garden when Mum called me inside.
‘Quick! Come and see what’s happening to your caterpillar.’
Mum had the top of the jar in her hand. The shrivelled nut was quite clearly trying to wriggle out of its skin. Mum put the lid on the table, and we sat down to watch.
It has to be one of the most exciting sights of nature, to see a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis, and we were both enthralled as the crumpled insect shook off its unbecoming skin and then stood, flexing its ever-expanding wings until it rested for a while before taking off round the kitchen.
When it finally flew out into the garden I looked at Mum, who was smiling.
‘It occurs to me,’ she said slowly and thoughtfully, ‘that beautiful things can happen when we forgive.’
When I was a child, my grandparents’ house was within skipping distance (I was rarely seen without my trusty skipping rope in those far-off days), and my favourite pastime was ‘helping’ Grandad in his garden. 
