Flying between extremes

Revisiting the Norfolk of his childhood bright, but not as early as planned on an April morning, John Lewis-Stempel is entranced by the wildlife of the Broads and spots a crane so large it renders his binoculars redundant Illustration by Michael Frith

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 on the Broads. Coot Club for real! However, the auguries were never good. The invitation was kind, but from a family on the other side of my parents' divorce and freighted with perturbation. Whereas I expected a wooden yachta red-sailed whenry-we traversed the waters in a synthetic, motorised cabin cruiser. There was no tranquillity on the Broads, only the relentless traffic of plastic boats up and down marked, diesel-iridescent waterways and the speed limit of 5mph noted in breach rather than in observance. At night in my 'bunk', our small cruiser rocked and yawed in the wash of larger cruisers, which I learned to call dismissively 'gin palaces'.