Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk

For a Swallows and Amazons fan, Christina Hardyment's Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk was a pure delight from start to finish. Published in 1984, it came out forty years ago -- less than the 37 years which had passed between the publication of the final S&A book in 1947 and this labour of love.

Hardyment visits the locations of all the S&A novels and hunts for real life parallels in geography and characters. The lake of the first adventures is a combination of Coniston and Windemere, but most of the terrain seems faithfully copied from one or the other (with the exception of the Swallowdale valley, which she leaves for future readers to pin down). She is greatly aided by the contents of Ransome's trunk, now in an archive, which contains notes, drawings, maps and unpublished material, much of which is shared here.

Hardyment was also able to interview many of the children (now adults) who inspired the characters, like the Altounyan family (including the real life Titty and Brigit!) and gather their recollections of Ransome. Most of these people are sadly dead now, so it's wonderful that Hardyment took the opportunity when it was available. She explores some of the waterways by windsurfing -- much easier for a solo sailor! -- and includes many photographs of Ransome, his boats and various children posing for the book illustrations.

One marvellous inclusion is a draft first chapter for Peter Duck, showing Captain Flint and the S&As beginning to invent the story of Peter Duck, which was eventually published without this framing device, but showing how different the final book might have been.

Arthur Ransome and Capt Flint's Trunk is the kind of treasure I scour Brotherhood Books for -- a delicious treat and one I will definitely devour again.
 

The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome

 

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels are among my (sometimes problematic) faves; however I did not know very much about their author, Arthur Ransome, of whom the bald, jovial adventurer Uncle Jim Turner in the books is an obvious self-portrait.

So I was very interested to discover this autobiography, written piecemeal and late in life, though it only takes Ransome's story up to 1931 (the remaining thirty-odd years of his life are summarised in a postscript by his younger friend and colleague Rupert Hart-Davies). 

Perhaps Ransome's most intriguing years were those spent as a journalist and researcher of folklore in Russia, before and after the 1918 revolution. He was on intimate terms with many of the major players, including Lenin and Trotsky, and indeed, Trotsky's personal secretary became his second wife. Ransome claims that he was able to become so close to the Bolsheviks because he himself was completely 'unpolitical.' This contention has led to speculation that he was in fact acting as a spy during this period, though naturally there is no discussion of espionage in the autobiography. He and Evgenia made a hair-raising escape to safety into Estonia in the chaos of fighting between White and Red, with Ransome bluffing his way through the front lines and Evgenia riding on the back of a cart (according to other sources, with millions of roubles worth of diamonds smuggled in her petticoats). To be honest, the ins and outs of the revolutionary period, with its shifts in power and double-crosses, were quite hard for me to follow, but it was a good reminder that the narrative of history is difficult to discern at the time of the events -- everything is in chaos, and it's only after the dust has settled that the story becomes clear (and sometimes not even then). Who knows what the established story of our own times will be in a generation or two? The moments that seem crucial to us might end up being insignificant in the broad sweep of history, and perhaps the most important developments are the ones we are not even aware of.

Great Northern?

 

The final book in the Swallows and Amazons series, and a journey over familiar territory that has been mostly highly enjoyable and occasionally disappointing. Great Northern? is an old favourite and I enjoyed this re-read a lot. It was startling to realise that the Sea Bear has been sailing The Minch, as described so beautifully by Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways, and visiting Scottish islands, as featured in Ben Fogle's Scotland's Sacred Islands, which I've been watching on SBS, and has helped me visualise the terrain beautifully.

I love the focus on anxious Dick and the horror of his discovery that the man he thinks is a fellow bird-watcher is actually a dangerous, greedy egg-collector, and the gleeful determination of the whole crew to thwart him at all costs. I love Titty and Dorothea hanging out together, I love Roger being 'the Sleeping Beauty'. And finally, finally, Titty says something I've waited twelve books to hear:

'... Roger is so awfully cheeky and after all we are on someone else's land.'

'Explorers always are,' said Titty, 'except the ones that go into the Arctic and places like that, and even bits of the Arctic belong to Eskimos and Lapps.'

Yay! A late recognition of colonialism!

It's struck me that Peggy is the character who probably gets the least development of everyone (apart from valiantly trying to take Nancy's place in Winter Holiday). All we really know about her is that she's Susan's sous-chef, she's frightened of thunderstorms, and she's deft with her hands (in this book she makes netting, in Missee Lee she makes paper boxes). But a quick search has revealed quite a body of fan fiction devoted to Peggy Blackett, which I might check out; I'd love to know what became of Peggy.

So farewell to Swallows and Amazons, for now. I will definitely revisit Winter Holiday, We Didn't Mean to Go To Sea, The Picts and the Martyrs, The Big Six and Great Northern? again, and I definitely won't be re-reading Secret Water or Missee Lee. But overall, the world of Arthur Ransome has been a comforting place to visit.

The Picts and the Martyrs

 

Number eleven in the Swallows and Amazons series, and this one is an old favourite. The Picts and the Martyrs brings together an unlikely combination of the Blackett sisters and the younger Callums, and pushes both sets of siblings firmly out of their respective comfort zones. When judgmental Great-Aunt Maria arrives uninvited during Mrs Blackett's absence, Nancy and Peggy decide to protect their mother by acting as the perfect nieces -- which means white frocks, piano practice, reading aloud and best manners. Meanwhile the sheltered Ds have to retreat to a hut in the woods where they try their best to live as independently as possible.

It reminded me of watching Alone, seeing Dot and Dick valiantly stopping up holes in the roof with moss, cooking over an open fire, slinging their hammocks over beams and even tickling for trout in the stream. One episode which has stayed with me vividly over the years is poor Dot bravely skinning and cooking a rabbit -- there is no way I would attempt that now, let alone as an eleven or twelve year old! There is a lot of fun to be had here, with Nancy dolefully mowing 'No go' on the lawn; the postman, the doctor and others roped into the secret; Timothy being blamed for the burglary of Captain Flint's study (so tense! with Dick hiding in the armadillo hutch); and the horror of the Great-Aunt throwing all the mine samples overboard. It's a wonderful win-win ending when the Ds and the Great-Aunt are brought together at last.

I do love the Walkers but The Picts and the Martyrs doesn't suffer from their absence at all. This is one volume I'm happy to return to.

Missee Lee

When I received the whole set of Swallows and Amazons for the best Christmas ever, there was one volume missing, and Missee Lee was it. I had to buy it myself much later in a different edition to complete the set. Missee Lee, like Peter Duck, was never a favourite anyway, I much preferred the stories where fantasy and reality blended to the full flight made-up adventures in exotic locales.

So. Where to start? Missee Lee is almost unreadable to modern eyes. In the first few pages we have "Rum lot, the Chinese,"and "Don't any of you speak English?" The Chinese "smell awfully funny,"  (though Titty says,"just foreignness"), and of course they speak "gibberish." Then once we encounter Miss Lee herself, powerful and dynamic and fascinating character though she is, a female pirate who loves Latin and longs to return to Cambridge, she is ruined by speaking like this: "velly stlong man... alithmetic, tligonometly... It is ploper to lead some Loman Histoly..." Aargh!

But on top of all this, Missee Lee is just... not very good, at least at the beginning. The incidents that kick off the plot, the fire on the boat, Swallow and Amazon drifting apart in the night (is there some sailor's reason why they wouldn't have tied the two boats together?), Captain Flint locked up by the pirates -- I know it's supposed to be a story they've all made up together, but none of it rings true. Miss Lee herself is wonderful, and in the end very poignant, but her dialogue is so painful to read. Roger being the star of the Latin class is fun, but seems unlikely from what we know of Roger, and why aren't any of the girls learning Latin? Also, given that our protagonists are four girls and two boys, why does the cover show only the two boys?

I must say I was glad to get this one out of the way. It was even worse than I remembered.

The Big Six

 

Back on the Norfolk Broads, it was a pleasant surprise to find The Big Six much more enjoyable than I remembered, though again there is a bit of a slow start while the mystery is set up and the crimes committed. But once the Ds arrive, the story picks up pace. This really is Dorothea's shining hour. It's she, with her novelist's gaze, who has the psychological insight to predict what the villain will do next.

'You'd never think that Dot got such a head on her,' said Bill, as they climbed over the fence.

The three young Death and Glories are agonisingly slow to realise that they're being framed, and the reader (along with Dot) solves the 'mystery' much more quickly than they do; however, the delight of the plot is in trapping the villain and gathering the proof, rather than guessing whodunnit. It was rather shocking to be reminded what a faff taking photographs used to be, in the days before we could whip out our phones -- the flash, the exposure, the shutter speed, the chemicals, the darkroom -- it's slow and fiddly and cumbersome and frankly I'm not sure I could be bothered. Perfect for Dick, though. 

The Big Six (named after the 'Big Five' murder detectives of Scotland Yard, though this is never explained in the book) is a lot of fun.

Secret Water

 

I'm sad to report that re-reading Secret Water was an unexpectedly upsetting and uncomfortable experience. It used to be one of my favourites -- not right up there, but definitely in the second tier -- but I don't think I'll be able to go back to this one.

Secret Water is set in the Norfolk Broads, in a real landscape (you can look it up on Google maps) of islands and tidal mudflats. The Swallows are marooned by their parents for about a week and charged with making a proper map of the area, and this time, to her great delight, the baby of the family, Bridget, is allowed to camp with them. Bridget's presence is a real joy ("I'm old enough... I bled more than anyone") and adds an extra element of peril when danger looms -- she can't swim yet. The late arrival of the Amazons reunites the whole gang, and Nancy wavering between being explorer and "savage" is, well, very Nancy.

But that brings me to the uncomfortable part. There are other kids around, and instead of being explorers or pirates or prospectors, these children have chosen to be "savages," calling themselves the Children of the Eel, complete with carved totems, corroborrees (sic), human sacrifice and cannibalism. The discomforts mount. A small black buoy is referred to as a 'piccaninny.' Savages, missionaries, native kraals, mastadons, buffaloes and dhows are all jumbled together in an exotic (pan-African?) mish-mash. It's awful. At the end, Captain Walker speaks pidgin to the Eels ("You. Black man. Strong fellow...") and they speak back to him in gibberish. That was the point when I realised that I can never read Secret Water again.

Pigeon Post

 

Pigeon Post is another summer story -- the whole gang gathered at the lake, but not able to sail yet because the Walkers' mother hasn't yet arrived. So instead they are camped on the parched hillside, prospecting for gold. I must say mining has never really captured my imagination, though I love Sovereign Hill as much as the next person, but I still love Pigeon Post, perhaps because it's largely Titty's story.

One of my favourite episodes in the whole series is here, when the expedition tries dowsing for water and the only one who succeeds in getting any response from the hazel twig is Titty (though Dorothea, of course, desperately hopes it will be her...) I think this is the only vaguely paranormal event in the Swallows and Amazons universe, but there is no doubt at all that Titty experiences what she does, and that the water is really there. I love her initial fright and resistance, and her courage in overcoming her fears, which to me makes the discovery of the spring more exciting than Roger's finding of the gold (though that is fun, too). 

Titty really comes of age in this book -- she's the one who leads the others through the hill after the tunnel collapses ("Pudding Heads"), and she leads the other able-seamen in fighting the fire. I'm glad to see the developing friendship between her and Dot (I love when Dot reads her novel aloud!), and the whole mix up with Timothy the armadillo, and the lovely quiet scene at the very end when the hedgehog returns to the well. A very enjoyable installment!

Coot Club

 

No Swallows or Amazons in Coot Club, but we do have the new recruits, the Ds, who quickly make friends and begin learning to sail on the Norfolk Broads. Did Arthur Ransome realise that if he stuck to writing adventures for the summer holidays, his cast of characters would grow up long before he ran out of ideas? Coot Club is set in spring, between Winter Holiday and Pigeon Post, the next summer break.

Coot Club is packed with incident -- the crew of obnoxious Hullabaloos chasing Tom up and down river in their noisy motor cruiser; the rash Admiral, Mrs Barrable, presiding over her fleet of little boats; the twins, Port and Starboard, hitchhiking with one strange boat after another to catch the Teasel; and finally a wonderful wrecking and the heroism of the pug William, sent over the mud with a rescue line.

I didn't read Coot Club as often as the books with the Swallows and Amazons in them, but I thoroughly enjoyed this re-read. There's less imaginative play here as the twins and Tom and their younger friends, the Death and Glories, are too busy watching over nesting birds to create pretend scenarios; but Dorothea can't resist starting to write a novel, The Outlaw of the Broads, inspired by the pursuit of Tom, which she's still working on in the next book.

It was funny to notice that the same sailing hints appeared in Coot Club and Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways which I was reading at the same time!

Winter Holiday

 

Winter Holiday may not be the best of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, but it is definitely my favourite, and the one I've read the most times -- this old copy of mine is almost falling apart. In contrast to the previous three volumes, there is almost no sailing in this one, and unlike the others, it takes place in deepest winter rather than the height of summer or in tropical heat. The deep snow and hard frost of a northern English winter seemed hugely romantic to me, marooned in temperate Australia or PNG: that was one attraction.

Perhaps the most powerful appeal of Winter Holiday lay in the introduction of Dick and Dorothea Callum -- not experienced sailors and explorers like the Walkers and Blacketts, but town children, unschooled in the outdoors. If there was a place in the adventures for dreamy Dot, always writing stories in her head, and nerdy bespectacled Dick, then surely they might find a place for me?

I love the frozen lake, I love the rescue of the cragfast sheep, I love the final race to the Pole in the snowstorm. But I love even more poor Captain Nancy suffering with mumps, buying the others an extra month of holidays and trying to direct the action from her sickbed; I love Peggy trying valiantly to fill her sister's pirate boots. And I relish the scene when Captain Flint arrives at his ice-bound houseboat, taken over by Arctic expeditioners, and discovers Dick and Dot comfortably at home, surrounded by rabbit skin hats and mittens and sheepskin blankets...

I just wish Dot didn't pin all her self-esteem and pride on her brother's skills! I just know that Dot and I would be friends (though she's a far better skater than me.) And there are no 'natives' and 'savages' in this book, just seals and 'Eskimos,' which somehow doesn't seem so bad.

Peter Duck

 

I seem to have embarked on a read-through of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, which were such childhood favourites that when I received the (almost) complete set for Christmas when I was about twelve, it was the Best. Present. Ever. 

Having said that, I wasn't massively looking forward to re-reading Peter Duck, which is one of two books in the series (the other is the deeply problematic Missee Lee, which interestingly was absent from my Christmas set and had to be bought years later) which isn't a 'real life' adventure, but as Swallowdale makes clear, is made up over Christmas holidays by the Swallows and Amazons themselves, with assistance from Captain Flint -- a story within a story, with Peter Duck himself a fictional character invented by the children (meta, eh?).

However, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book! Yes, it's a fantastical adventure involving a race for pirate treasure, water spouts, stormy seas, a hurricane, some pretty scary violence and some racist language, but it retains the realist, believable atmosphere of the other more mundane adventures, with lots of practical detail about sailing (maybe too much detail for some), stores and sewing. (Though the one detail missing from the floor plan of the ship is the toilet...)

I noticed this time through that the nasty villains (one of whom is a 'big Negro,' oh dear) take out all their violence on Peter Duck and the rescued cabin boy Bill, so none of our regular protagonists suffer any injury. If it wasn't for the aforementioned racist language, which honestly I think could be edited out without much trouble this time) this is a cracking adventure story with a satisfying conclusion.

ETA: Forgot to add that Captain Flint was dozing when he had Peter Duck tell the story of Pelorus Jack, the welcoming dolphin, who was indeed real, but lived in New Zealand rather than Sydney Harbour.

Swallows and Amazons

 

One of the most exciting Christmas presents I ever received was when I was about eleven and I got a full set of the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome (except for Missee Lee, which I did manage to collect eventually and then kind of wished I hadn't). Already favourites, I then proceeded to read them all again multiple times, to the point where my copy of Swallows and Amazons (not even a particular fave) is almost falling apart. Discovered on an English holiday when I was eight, Ransome's books were a firm foundation of my childhood.

Though Swallows and Amazons is getting on for a hundred years old now, I still enjoyed most of this book. The sturdy, self-reliant children, dealing with the practical details of sailing and camping are wonderful role models, and they're not too perfect -- things do go wrong, and they make some dumb decisions (like sailing at night, a very tense chapter). And I especially love the way they effortlessly slip between reality and their imaginative world of pirates and explorers. 

But -- and it's a big but -- this time around I noticed how the children's constant references to 'natives' (ie adults) and 'savages' really grated on my nerves. I'm ashamed to say that this made no impression on me whatsoever as a child or teenage reader, and was only really brought to my attention by the estimable Michelle Cooper. Without having recently re-read the books at the time of her blog post, I suggested that someone might rewrite the novel to remove those references, because I only clearly remembered one scene where Titty (oh dear) and her mother talk about 'savages', but now I realise how thoroughly the 'native' conceit is woven through the texture of the whole book, and as Michelle correctly noted, it would be impossible to remove. It's such a shame, because the positive aspects of the book are so strong, and yet its whole fabric is stained by this dated element. I think, I hope, that the 'native' side of things tones down somewhat in later volumes? I'm going to reread the rest of the series and find out; except for Missee Lee, which is so blatantly racist that even infant me picked up on it, and I've only re-read it once.