‘Very flat, Norfolk’
Sir Noël Coward
MY history with the Norfolk Broads can be politely accounted as ‘uneven’. It commences with Arthur Ransome and the perils of a middle-class childhood. You never escape the reading. If your parents don’t direct you, school does. Consequently, I ended up reading Ransome’s Coot Club, in which Dick and Dorothea Callum visit the Norfolk Broads and encounter the titular Coot Club, a gang of local children formed to protect birds and their nests from egg collectors and other disturbances. Children protecting birds? I signed. Signed hard.
Only a year or so later, I was invited to go boating
