Wonders of Norfolk

Matt Howard on the treasures of Norwich Castle Museum, and a childhood discovering life outside himself

Norwich Castle was built by the Normans as a Royal Palace 900 years ago

I’ve been thinking about my foundational, essential places, where I began to encounter and think about other species. The first were in the village I grew up, Hethersett, which is a few miles west of Norwich. There’s a duck pond there that teemed with mallard — so much so that even in our garden, three quarters of a mile into suburbia, mallard would crowd and mither for food. I loved being among them. In spring, ducklings were simply everywhere. Then a couple of years later, when I was about six or seven, the small wood about half a mile further out became our world. My brother, Mark, is three years older than I am and it was the mid-1980s, so that was where we would go unsupervised with our gang of friends to range wild, making dens, fires — all of us allowed to play with knives. That didn’t have any particular focus on species, and of course there would have been damage done with our makings, but nevertheless it was about a sort of kinship with what was most live and vital. It was somewhere porous, a burrow for the imagination and I can still feel that weight of reluctance as we all dragged ourselves back home for tea to separate homes down the various closes where we lived.

Fishing came later. We went to many local places, though Wade’s Pit, an old gravel workings was to become our constant. There was the first focused place of pursuit and encountering of other lives: roach, rudd, perch, gudgeon, and once, a dead tench that lapped up to the bank of the swim where I fished. (Over 30 years later the latent force of that fish surfaced again out of the undertow of memory into a poem).

But I’ve been thinking how this fascination didn’t just happen outdoors. It was also an interior pursuit, fostered most in those formative years by regular visits to Norwich Castle Museum. I’ve been visiting in different guises for over 40 years now, but I still remember the old layout, the dioramas of human history in Norfolk that used to be off to the left of the main foyer: Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and maybe some Roman Legionaries. That and many other exhibits have since long gone, but off to the right, the Natural History Galleries persist, relatively recently refurbished but mostly unchanged. Walking them again now it’s impossible not to be confronted by how tragically beautiful all this is.