Tag Archives: Swallows and Amazons

Secret Water by Arthur Ransome

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Secret Water by Arthur Ransome was first published in 1939.  It’s the eighth book in the Swallows and Amazons series and the setting is islands just off the  Essex coast.

A planned sailing trip with their father has to be postponed when he is called away on naval duty.  The children are desperately disappointed so to make up for it their father maroons them on an island and tells them to map the whole area naming any geographical  areas of interest, creeks and islands.There is a farm nearby so at least they’ll have access to fresh milk.  As ever though they’re well off for food and equipment and in no time they’re all set up in their camp. Bridget, the baby of the family, has been allowed to take part in a family adventure for the first time.

The whole place is very tidal and the mudflats appear and disappear, making it a dangerous place to be sailing around, but almost immediately they make friends with a local who can give them tips on how to cope with the tides. They name their new friend ‘the Mastodon’ as they had seen his giant footprints in the mud before they met him and had speculated as to what had made such large prints. He wears ‘splatchers’ which are like huge snow shoes but specially for walking on the mudflats safely.

It turns out that the Mastodon is part of another gang of child sailors who call themselves Eels, and the others aren’t keen on joining up with the newcomers, but of course everything works out fine in the end.

I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the books which are set in the Lake District, probably because I really dislike mudflats, and the children were always dripping with mud. There was no mention of smell, but I could smell those mudflats, because they always stink – not pleasant.

 

 

 

 

# 1936 Club – Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome

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Pigeon Post cover

I read Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome as my first book for the 1936 Club, it’s the sixth book in his Swallows and Amazons series and I can’t say that it was a favourite of mine. To be fair the the Swallows and Amazon children aren’t enjoying themselves much to begin with. It has been a dry summer and the ground is parched so there’s no water near the camping ground they intended to pitch their tents. This means that they’re having to camp out in the back garden and because of the fear of a camp fire setting the whole area on fire they aren’t even allowed to cook for themselves.

Nancy and Peggy’s Uncle Jim is on his way back home to the Lake District, he’s been having an adventure of his own in South America, searching for treasure unsuccessfully. The children hear a rumour of a long forgotten old gold mine in the nearby mountains and set about looking for it, they know it is in a cave with some heather nearby. But they’re upset by the appearance of a suspicious man that they name Squashy Hat. He’s roaming all over the hills and daubing paint on stones, they’re sure he’s also looking for the gold.

Things improve when Titty discovers that she’s able to dowse for water and they manage to dig a well which gives them good water, so they are able to camp out after all, and they can communicate with Mrs Blackett by using some carrier pigeons.

Other readers seem to have really liked this one, and it did win the Carnegie medal, but I was never going to enjoy the subject as the children went off every morning, all armed with their hammers, merrily attacking the Lake District mountains with them and crushing up loads of quartz. Even as a child I had an aversion to mines and quarries, especially quarries due to my beautiful local mountain being completely hollowed out for use as hard core for road building! I’m looking forward to reading the next one in the series though.

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

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Swallows and Amazons cover

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome is the first book in the series which is set in the Lake District, I believe it was Coniston Water and Lake Windermere that inspired Ransome to write these books. I’m fairly sure that I read one donkey’s years ago but after we visited Coniston around this time last year I thought I would start at the beginning of the series again. This book was first printed in 1930 but my copy dates from 1942 and according to the inscription it was given to Frank for his birthday on 27th of August 1943.

The Walker children John, Susan, Roger and Titty (what possessed the author?) are in the Lake District for the summer holidays. Their mother is busy with the new baby and father is away, but has given the children permission to sail to one of the islands in the lake and camp out there. Mother gets out her sewing machine and makes a couple of tents and the children are well stocked up with food and equipment. They’re dab hands at sailing too and manage their borrowed dinghy Swallow professionally.

Sailing towards the island they sail past a houseboat, complete with a small cannon, a green parrot and a man that they name Captain Flint. He doesn’t seen at all friendly. The island seems perfect but there’s evidence of previous inhabitants with a pile of wood and the remains of a fire.

It isn’t long before another boat turns up, it’s called Amazon and is skippered by two girls who live locally. Nancy and Peggy fly a pirate flag and are up for adventures. John is impressed by their sailing knowledge and it isn’t too long before they’re all friends. It turns out that Captain Flint is really their Uncle and up until this year he had been good fun, but since he has started to write a book about his travels he has changed into a curmudgeon and sees the children as his enemy.

There’s a bit of a mystery going on but really the charm of this book is that you can’t help wishing that you too are by a lake with a wee boat to sail around in, visiting various islands and just getting away from it all.

It was different times though and I imagine that if parents allowed four of their children aged from 7 to 12 to sail off and fend for themselves social services would have something to say about it!

I believe that in the modern reprints of these books the character of Titty has her name changed to Kitty. I’m wondering what Titty was supposed to be short for – maybe Felicity of Verity but presumably in 1930 it wasn’t deemed to be faintly not nice for a wee girl.

Sometimes when I read books I have a particular piece of music going through my head, for this one it was of course Deacon Blue’s Dignity.

Coniston Water and Brantwood

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After visiting Grasmere we drove on to Coniston Water on the way to our next overnight stop in Derbyshire. It was a lovely day and thankfully Coniston Water wasn’t nearly as busy as other places in the Lake District – such as Ambleside which always seems to be heaving.

We were making our way to Brantwood which is the lovely house that the writer, art critic, philosopher, philanthropist and environmentalist John Ruskin bought, it is situated high above Coniston Water and these photos were taken from the grounds at the front of the house.

Coniston Water

Coniston Water

Coniston Water

You can see in the photo below that there are lots of wee boats and yachts in the lake. This lake inspired Arthur Ransome to write his Swallows and Amazons series.
Coniston Water

And below is a photo of Brantwood, it has marvelous views of the lake. Ruskin bought this house unseen as he had often holidayed at Coniston and at a time when he was ill he thought that if only he could lie down in the water at Coniston he would get better. It must have worked as he lived here for many years.

Brantwood, Coniston

I suspect that the one thing that everyone knows about John Ruskin is that his wife had to go to court to get an annulment for non-consummation of the marriage. That harmed his reputation for a long time but that was just a small part of a long life which included many interests. He was interested in educating ordinary working people, at this time education in England was in a very poor state compared with in Scotland. He was involved with progressive schools for girls, and he also set up workshops that trained and employed people who would probably otherwise be unemployed and destitute.

I’ll show you some photos of the inside of the house soon.

Titty or Tatty? what’s in a name

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It’s a good long time since I read Swallows and Amazons and I don’t even remember one of the characters being called Titty, it can’t have struck me as being weird at the time. However her name is being changed to Tatty in a new film version which is being made by the BBC, you can read about it here. The author of the article, Nicholas Tucker has apparently written a lot about children’s literature in the past, but in this article he writes about words which were used by writers in the past, innocently, but which couldn’t be used today, such as ejaculate, meaning to exclaim, which used to be used by lots of authors including Enid Blyton if I’m remembering correctly. The word ‘screw’ in Victorian literature of course means salary, language changes all the time.

He goes on to mention that Angela Thirkell used the words ‘giant cock’ in her book The Brandons, it was of course a fairground attraction in the shape of a cockerel. Tucker seems to think that it’s unthinkable that Thirkell could have put that into her story deliberately. It smacks of those daft people who think that their generation is the one which invented sex!

Of course Thirkell put it in deliberately, and all of her readers would have had a right good snigger at it, her books are full of things like that, that’s what makes them so funny and popular in their day and now. Tucker seems to think that because Thirkell was rather snobbish and was a granddaughter of the artist Edward Burne-Jones, it means that a ‘naughty’ word would never have passed her lips! Whereas of course, her hobnobbing with rather posh people and being one of them herself makes it a dead certainty that she was a ‘bit of a goer’- as they say.

Tucker also doesn’t seem to realise that children’s books are written on two levels, one for the child and one for the adult who may be reading it to them.

I suppose he’ll be saying next that – a marquis’s son is unused to wine!