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Swallows and Amazons for Ever!

The train from the south drew in to the junction with the line that led to the hills. We changed, and already there was freshness in the air on a day of azure skies and deep shadows. I went to admire the Puffing Billy that was to haul us on the last leg of our journey, inhaling the intoxicating cocktail of hot oil and steam that engines exude. The whistle blew, I ran back to the carriage, the doors slammed, and we clanked our way west with the setting sun. I hurried from side to side of the carriage.

The narrow green valley with its dry-stone walls, rocky outcrops and black-faced sheep seemed to close around us, the purple fells to rise. There was a flash of silver from the lake far below and the train drew into the terminus to the cry of ‘All change’. In the station yard an ancient car was waiting, almost as old as the Amazons’ Rattletrap. Moments later we were dropping down steeply into Bowness-on-Windermere, the stone village the Swallows and Amazons called Rio. There was the bay with the skiffs drawn upon the shingle, the weather bleached green of the boat-builders’ sheds, a couple of landing stages and the steamer pier. Beyond lay the silver expanse of the lake shimmering in the August sun. I thought of Titty in Pigeon Post:

Far away over the water, glittering in the evening sun, she had seen the white speck that had sent Nancy hurrying back to the car. Two years had slipped back in a moment, and once again she was seeing for the first time the little white sail of the Amazon pirates.

I was 12 and had come at last to Swallows and Amazons country. The journey from the south and into the Westmorland hills to the lake in the north was just as Ransome had described it. So, too, were Rio and its bay and its islands and the high enclosing hills. I looked west across the lake, trying to make o

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The train from the south drew in to the junction with the line that led to the hills. We changed, and already there was freshness in the air on a day of azure skies and deep shadows. I went to admire the Puffing Billy that was to haul us on the last leg of our journey, inhaling the intoxicating cocktail of hot oil and steam that engines exude. The whistle blew, I ran back to the carriage, the doors slammed, and we clanked our way west with the setting sun. I hurried from side to side of the carriage.

The narrow green valley with its dry-stone walls, rocky outcrops and black-faced sheep seemed to close around us, the purple fells to rise. There was a flash of silver from the lake far below and the train drew into the terminus to the cry of ‘All change’. In the station yard an ancient car was waiting, almost as old as the Amazons’ Rattletrap. Moments later we were dropping down steeply into Bowness-on-Windermere, the stone village the Swallows and Amazons called Rio. There was the bay with the skiffs drawn upon the shingle, the weather bleached green of the boat-builders’ sheds, a couple of landing stages and the steamer pier. Beyond lay the silver expanse of the lake shimmering in the August sun. I thought of Titty in Pigeon Post:
Far away over the water, glittering in the evening sun, she had seen the white speck that had sent Nancy hurrying back to the car. Two years had slipped back in a moment, and once again she was seeing for the first time the little white sail of the Amazon pirates.
I was 12 and had come at last to Swallows and Amazons country. The journey from the south and into the Westmorland hills to the lake in the north was just as Ransome had described it. So, too, were Rio and its bay and its islands and the high enclosing hills. I looked west across the lake, trying to make out the promontory that hid the Amazons’ home of Beckfoot, to spot the flagstaff that in Winter Holiday had beckoned Dick and Dorothea Callum to the North Pole. Where was the headland and where was the staff? I gazed along the western shore of the lake where the evergreen woods ran down to the water as far as my eye could see. But of the Beckfoot promontory and the flagstaff I could see no sign at all. Swallows and Amazons runs in the family. My mother was growing up in the Thirties when Ransome’s series was first published. After the first volume in 1930 – Swallows and Amazons itself – she awaited with ever greater anticipation the books that followed year after year. Her father would read them aloud to her, to her sister and – later – to their brother. In the Fifties my mother in turn read them to me and to my older siblings. We were enchanted. Later the books proved one of the first things my wife and I discovered we had in common. Now I am reading them to our own children. So they are read, generation after generation, by fathers and mothers to sons and daughters all over the world. Yet the central concept of the books is of children gloriously unencumbered by their parents. Bob, the father of the Blackett children, Nancy and Peggy, is dead. The father of the Walkers – John, Susan, Titty and Roger – is in the Royal Navy and almost invariably on the high seas. Professor Callum, Dick and Dorothea’s father, never tears himself away from his archaeology to broach the world of the books and is forever off-stage. Mrs Blackett and Mrs Walker are usually content to oversee the activities of their children from the side of the lake. In situations where adults are a necessary evil (firing cannons, dynamiting for gold, chartering yachts, taking umbrage) their roles are fulfilled by real or surrogate uncles and aunts: the Blacketts’ Uncle Jim; Mrs Barrable in the two books set on the Norfolk Broads, Coot Club and The Big Six; Jim Brading in We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, Cook and the Great Aunt in The Picts and the Martyrs. Mostly the children are allowed to do what they – and I – naturally aspired to: being in charge of their own lives. What an idea. Left to their own devices, the children cast themselves in the most romantic roles that I, as a boy, could imagine. They are warring tribes in Swallows and Amazons, explorers in Swallowdale, treasure hunters in Peter Duck, Arctic pioneers in Winter Holiday, gold miners in Pigeon Post, and – throughout the series but spectacularly so in We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea – master mariners. They imagine themselves as Captain and Mate, Able Seaman and Ship’s Boy. This isn’t just play-acting: the dangers are genuine enough, particularly in the lastmentioned tale. In Swallows and Amazons the Walkers’ father puts it pithily in the famous telegram giving his children permission to camp on Wild Cat Island: ‘BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS. IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN.’ Ransome dipped his pen in the deepest well of childhood: the desire to be grown up. The counterpoint to this romanticism is Ransome’s masterly sense of time and place, plot and character. Using skills developed over a quarter of a century of writing stories before his annus mirabilis of 1930, Ransome etched into my imagination the English Lake District. He had been schooled by the lake as a child, spent his holidays there, and lived some of his adult life in the magical kingdom to which Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey had brought fame during the Napoleonic Wars. In deceptively simple prose, Ransome sets his scenes as precisely as would a guidebook. One of his strengths is for concrete, telling detail. The number of steps on the staircase in Dixon’s farmhouse, the species of trees in the woods above Tyson’s Farm, the pemmican and bun-loaf and pirate grog consumed for supper. Another is for appearances. Beckfoot and Holly Howe, the igloo and the Dog’s Home, the houseboat and its cabin are visualized with the utmost care. Yet another is the passion for practicalities. Read the books and you’ll find out precisely how to pitch tents, find sources of clean water, create pools in which to wash and wash up, build fireplaces, make pigeons ring bells, construct blast furnaces and above all learn how to sail. I know many people whose enthusiasm for – and knowledge of – sailing is entirely derived from these books. In Winter Holiday Ransome recreates the great frosts of his youth in 1895 and manhood in 1929, and allows the mantle of snow to fall on his adventurers: the fish frozen in the ice and the hot chestnuts on sale in Rio Bay. Pigeon Post evokes the Cumbrian drought of 1933, with the lake many feet below its normal level, the becks parched, the High Topps dry as tinder. As to the Blacketts, the Walkers and the Callums, there’s a character trait in each of these meticulous and carefully differentiated creations with which every child can identify: Nancy, the mainspring and life-force of the series, a tomboy and natural leader; John, conscientious, solid, sensible, responsible; Titty, imaginative and sensitive; Roger, the best small boy this side of Richmal Crompton’s William; Susan, the surrogate adult whose maturity gives the real adults confidence that all will be well with the children. Who hasn’t felt the mortification of Titty in Swallowdale when she lets slip the wax image of the Great Aunt into the flames, or shared Roger’s timor mortis during the night search for the Callums on the frozen lake in Winter Holiday?
‘Hoo!’ said Roger when they were half way between the island and the shore. ‘Hoooooo!’ He said no more, and there was no need. Everybody knew what he meant. Cold and loneliness and something more. Out there, on that enormous sheet of ice, with no other living thing in sight, they all understood the owlish cry.
The adventures work least well when Ransome strays furthest from the lake and credibility (for instance in Missee Lee, in which the children are shipwrecked off the coast of China). In Swallows and Amazons it feels no more than fortunate that Titty overhears the burglars who have just raided the houseboat. For Roger hammering away in the old copperworking in Pigeon Post, it’s merely fortuitous that the old miners stopped just a few inches short of the seam. Four children alone in a small yacht half way across the North Sea in a gale: that’s the thrilling – and somewhat unlikely – premise of We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. Yet so carefully has Ransome taken us through the individual steps that lead up to this drama that the sense is one of utter inevitability. In Ransome there is little disbelief to suspend. As he put it himself, ‘The reason why my brats like my books is that they are all something that happens today and might happen to themselves given only some small modifications in their circumstances.’ Above all, though, the series conjures up a vision of the just, creative, adventurous and happy childhood that everyone wants. Captain Flint’s trunk is recovered, Swallow is mended, the adventurers reach the Pole, precious metal is discovered, the Great Aunt is reconciled to Mrs Blackett’s upbringing of Nancy and Peggy. The Swallows sail right across the North Sea. So that summer I set out each day to find the places where these things had happened, cherishing a secret hope I would meet Nancy and Peggy, Titty, Susan, Roger and John. I was disappointed. I found Rio and Long Island and what might have passed for Cormorant Island. I went high up on the fells with my sister and returned with the prize of a lump of quartz bearing a streak of copper that I possess to this day. But Holly Howe, Dixon’s Farm, the Observatory, Wild Cat Island and of course the flagstaff at Beckfoot simply didn’t seem there to be found. (This was long before Christina Hardyment published her literary detective work on Ransome’s settings: Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk, (1984). This supported his claim that all the places featured are there to be found, though not necessarily in the places indicated in the books and shown in the series’ splendid endpapers.) One unhappy evening I found a copy of the local phone directory. I thumbed desperately through the pages. No Blacketts or Walkers were listed. On the day we left I was close to tears. It was raining as we drew out of the station (as it does in the Lake District rather more than Ransome implies). I couldn’t believe that the stories and the vision they expressed weren’t true. Years passed. In so far as children ever grow up I grew up. At any rate I got older and began to write books of my own. Well into middle age I became a father myself and after Maisy Mouse and Angelina Ballerina I rediscovered A. A. Milne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, C. S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll. Then came the frabjous day when the children had reached the age at which I could read them Swallows and Amazons. Over the past three years I have read them the whole series twice. Now I know the books a little better and perhaps I have even reached an age when I can glimpse what they mean and, more precisely, what sort of truth they embody. Was it Jean Cocteau who spoke of poetry as the lie that always tells the truth? So later this year, I will take the children (now the same age as Titty and Roger) to the lake in the north. We’ll go down to the little village the Walkers and the Blacketts call Rio, and there we’ll look west across the shimmering lake to its far shores. And I know now that this time I will see the flagstaff at Beckfoot that hastened Dick and Dorothea to the Pole. For I had been on quite the wrong tack on my first visit all those years ago. The Blacketts, the Walkers and the Callums may never have taken corporeal form but they are – I now realize – quite timeless imaginative creations. Swallows and Amazons are, after all, for ever.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 18 © Jim Ring 2008


Comments & Reviews

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  1. Paul Stephenson says:

    I’d loved the Lakes since childhood but never read ‘Swallows and Amazons’ till this autumn – at 71. The rest now beckon!

  2. Paul Stephenson says:

    I’ve loved the Lakes since childhood but only just, at the age of 71, read Swallows and Amazons. The other titles now beckon!

  3. Anne Jardim says:

    I lived in Antigua as a child and grew up on the Ransomes. In later life I collected them – the Cape editions, and the Godines in first edition complete with mapping errors. I named 2 boats after them: Missee Lee, a Sisu 22 with a name board carved with dragons, and a sailboat, a Herreshoff 24 named Peter Duck with a slightly less flashy nameboard. On their home river, the Piscataqua in Maine, they were hard to miss.
    Jim Ring’s evocative memoir is almost painful to read.

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