The Butterfly Lion

Bertie is one of three primary characters in The Butterfly Lion. He is long dead by the time Michael encounters Millie Andrews, who tells his story in third-person narration. Because Millie was Bertie’s spouse, Bertie is depicted lovingly and delicately.

Bertie is born in Timbavati, South Africa to an English mother and cattle-farming father. Once he can walk, his family builds a fence around their farmhouse and barn to keep the child safe from wild animals. This causes Bertie to feel confined and cut off from the exciting African veldt. He is lonely and isolated until he and his mother rescue an orphaned white lion cub and raise it in their compound.

Bertie is sent to boarding school in England, where he soon learns his mother has died and his father has remarried. His lion is sold to a French circus owner, and he is alone again, and desperate to be reunited with his lion. Thus orphaned, Bertie befriends a young girl named Millie and endures boarding school so he can visit her every Sunday. They fall in love, and although Bertie goes away to college and then to fight in WWI, they remain close and eventually marry. Bertie is reunited with his lion after the war, and he returns triumphantly to England with both the lion and Millie.

Bertie is an explorer: often restless, eager for adventure, curious and driven to defy his father, willing to risk a beating to escape his boarding school in England, and brave enough to enlist in the army in wartime. His selflessness is revealed in his treatment of the lion cub, and in his heroic rescue of two fellow soldiers during WWI. Bertie is also capable of deep and sustained love, as shown with the lion that he bonds with for life, and with Millie, whom he loves for decades. Once the lion dies, Bertie decides to create the lion monument in his honor—a way to capture some of his undying loyalty to the animal.

Millie Andrews is one of three main characters in The Butterfly Lion. She appears first in the frame tale as an elderly woman walking her dog Jack, when she encounters young Michael in the garden of her massive estate. She tells the runaway boy about her deceased husband Bertie, their pet lion, and their life together, in an embedded narrative. The coming-of-age stories of Bertie and Millie, which chronicle the two growing into adulthood and eventually old age, teach Michael lessons about loyalty, steadfastness, and remembrance.

Millie grows up isolated, lonely, and alone: “My mother had died giving birth to me, and Father was rarely at home” (58). She dislikes her governess, Miss Tulips, whom she calls “Nolips.” She has no friends because she does not attend school, and has no relationship with her father. Only when she meets and befriends Bertie, who is escaping from boarding school, does she find companionship. In typical British fashion, Millie instructs Bertie to endure the hardship of his childhood, which she also tells Morpurgo: “You’ve got to stick it out, see things through, do what’s got to be done, no matter what” (16).

Millie and Bertie form a lasting friendship that blossoms into love. Millie is one of the novel’s examples of steadfastness: When she and Bertie are separated by WWI, she completely uproots her life to become a nurse and find him even as he finds his lion. The trio return victorious to England, marry, and live happily ever after.

Bertie’s unnamed mother is as an English woman who dislikes living on a secluded farm in South Africa in the late 1890s. She has only one child, and alludes to an inability to have other children: “After all, it’s not as if he’s going to have any brothers and sisters, is it?” (36).

Throughout Bertie’s childhood, his mother is often ill with malaria and has mental health conditions. However, the discovery of the lion cub briefly revives her. In an uncharacteristic moment, when Bertie’s mother finds Bertie outside the fence fighting off a pack of hyenas to protect the cub, she grabs a rifle and rescues the boy and the cub. Later, she stands up to her controlling husband and pleads for the boy to keep the cub: “And she spoke as Bertie had never heard her speak before, her voice strong, determined” (36).

For a while, the presence of the cub restores some measure of peace to the household: “For both mother and son, the lion had brought new life to their days, life and laughter” (40). However, when Bertie and the lion are sent away by her husband, Bertie’s mother dies—Bertie assumes from grief: “She had Malaria, but I think she really died of a broken heart” (66).

Bertie’s unnamed father is a South African cattle rancher who spends his days attempting to impose order on the landscape: “Bertie’s father was more often than not away from home with his men, guarding the cattle” (21). He builds a high fence around his farmhouse to keep his wife and child safe, and to confine them. He is emotionally distant from his wife, aside from one encounter Bertie witnesses: “It was the only time Bertie had ever seen him kiss her” (37).

When Bertie turns eight, his father sends him to England for a formal education at a boarding school. Once he and the lion are gone, Bertie’s mother dies of a broken heart and Bertie quickly remarries. He never sees his son again.

Bertie and his mother are afraid of Bertie’s father, who forbids them to leave the compound. When Bertie’s father announces that the lion will be sold, Bertie finds the strength to confront his father: “It was the only time in his life Bertie had ever shouted at his father” (45).

The novel portrays Bertie’s father as a coldhearted and cruel man, using him to exemplify the British colonial project in South Africa. Rather than admiring the wilderness, Bertie’s father is at pains to bend it to his will: He shoots the lioness, orphaning the cub, demands that his son go to school in England, and has little sympathy for his suffering wife.

Millie does not have a relationship with her father, whom she describes as “rarely at home” (59). He hires a nanny, cook, and governess, but otherwise neglects his daughter, leaving her to endure a lonely childhood on the family’s massive estate. At the beginning of World War I, Millie’s father appears in military uniform and never returns. Millie doesn’t find it strange that she cannot properly mourn the man she barely interacted with: “[I]t is difficult to grieve for someone you never really knew, and my father had always been a strange to me” (75).

Millie’s mother dies in childbirth, so Millie is raised by Nanny Mason, a maternal presence who supplies the parental warmth otherwise lacking in Millie’s life: “[S]he was more than just a nanny to me, she was a mother to me, and a wonderful one too, the best I could have had, the best anyone could have had” (58). Millie and Nanny Mason share a close and continuous relationship for the rest of their lives. When Millie’s father dies in The Great War, Nanny Mason stays with Millie. Eventually, Millie confides her love of Bertie to her nanny, “who dried my tears and told me to pray, and that she would too” (89), again demonstrating her deep love for her charge. Once Millie and Bertie are married, the nanny comes to live with them: “Nanny Mason stayed on with the three of us—‘her three children,’ she called us—until she retired to the seaside in Devon” (112).

Millie’s early education is directed by a live-in governess named Miss Tulips, whom she finds cold and unpleasant: “[E]veryone called her ‘Nolips’ because she was so thin-lipped and severe. She moved around the house like a cold shadow” (58). Millie dislikes her governess profoundly. Once Bertie enters her life, Millie knows that if the governess discovers she is spending time with a boy escapee from the nearby boarding school, she’ll be in trouble. Millie’s only escape from Nolips during the week comes in the form of walks with Nanny Mason, and the Sunday visits from Bertie.

The white lion is never given a name by Bertie, who asserts that wild things do not need names; fittingly, when he leaves the veldt and is exhibited as an exotic creature in the circus, the lion is given the name The White Prince.

When the white lion is a cub, Bertie’s father kills its lioness mother. Although Bertie and his mother rescue it from a pack of hyenas with the best of intentions, their subsequent domestication of the animal means that the lion cannot return to the wild. When Bertie tries to reintroduce the animal into the bush veldt to save it from life in the circus, the cub nearly starves and returns to Bertie’s farmhouse.

Bertie is separated from the lion for the majority of the story. When he at last encounters the white lion again, the lion remembers him, follows him, and they resume their relationship as it was in their childhood. After the lion dies, Bertie is bereft but decides to channel his grief into a positive direction by creating a unique memorial for the lion—an image carved into the white chalk of the hill where the lion is buried. The exposed chalk attracts blue butterflies that recreate the shape of the lion when they land there, giving rise to the “butterfly lion” of the novel’s title.