I was about 5 or 6 when I first went to Tring Zoological Museum. It was an overcast spring day and the grey weather seemed to suit the dusty atmosphere of the building. We took a route through the collection that started by loosely following an activity sheet on thin blue paper. I tailed off from this after a while and wandered around by myself. It was quiet there and I spent most of the time alone, only occasionally bumping into my older brother who, typically, seemed to be racing around at high speed because, as I imagined, he probably knew about all of this stuff already.

I remember being particularly struck by the butterflies. Having walked up a dark rickety wooden staircase I entered a room that resembled some kind of office. It contained huge plan chests and inside there were hundreds of butterflies, pinned down under glass with their beautiful, almost luminescent, wings spread. The colours were so bright it was hard to believe that they were all dead; unlike the moths which were excitingly big but composed of grey dust and pallid fur.

Other rooms were larger and less well lit by yellow glowing lights. They contained glass vitrines of varying sizes depending on the size of the animals that were inside. I was small and felt smaller beneath the gaze of the flea-bitten dead; bears with their arms raised and their jaws spread to reveal sharp hungry teeth, lions fixed in eternal silent roars, birds perched high up and peering down.

I couldn’t quite work out what I was supposed to make of all of it. Part of me thought I should not be sure whether the animals were dead or alive and therefore I should be scared. The other part of me thought I should be impressed by the fact that there were all these different creatures housed in a building in Tring. But I just remember feeling confused and a bit sad to be in the midst of so much death.

In one room there was a Dodo. It stood in front of a painted background that depicted the scene from which it came. Everything was tinged with a mustard colour, making the contents of the glass container look aged and worn. I felt a sense of pity that was coupled with the guilt that pity tends to induce. The Dodo looked so fake. All the more so because it seemed to have been reconstructed out of parts salvaged from other animals. Looking at the creature I became confused and surmised that the physical reconstruction of the model Dodo was an attempt at imagining something which had never in fact existed. To me, the Dodo was as mystical an animal as Dragons, Unicorns and the Loch Ness Monster and, somehow, this seemed to fit in perfectly with the rest of the exhibits and the museum itself.