Why does this exist?
Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series has been written about thousands of times. You can search for and find dozens of blogs or analysis pages or general musings just like this one, written and in most cases abandoned all across the world wide web (or 'The Internet' as everyone seems to call it today because why not just ignore thousands of ports and protocols that aren't TCP/IP on 80 and 443. Sorry, not sorry; computer scientist).
So why am I sitting here, using vi to edit a barebones static html page, about a book series that was old before I was even born?
Simply put, because I love the books, and the characters in those books. Ransome is, unsurprisingly, not writing any more of them, so I'm left with thinking about the books that we have.
I've started re-reading them again, maybe for the tenth time, but this time around I find they are affecting me more than even they used to. I am touched by a desire to do more than just read and re-shelve them; I want to explore them, and the author and the world around them, I want to imagine what might have happened in that world, but wasn't committed to paper. I want to talk to other people that have a passion for these stories. I am not ready to re-shelve them so quickly, to put Susan and John and Nancy and Peggy and the Coots and the Eels aside for other distractions, this time around.
A little about me and how I came upon these books. I was born in the mid 1970s, and I found a full set of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series on my father's bookshelf when I was perhaps ten years old. Some were the green cloth hardbound versions, some were later softcovers.
I have been a voracious reader for most of my life, and in those days, when you were limited to reading what you had as physical books, I did not get to the library as often as I needed (as it was a 20 minute drive away) and so gradually worked my way through my dad's collection of books when I had space in my reading queue. I remember reading A. E. van Vogt and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while listening to my Sesame Street Christmas record. The Swallows and Amazons series turned out to be the most formative literary work in my life.
Growing up in rural Nova Scotia there was a lot of time available for dreaming and playing pretend in the back yard, in the field across the road, or in the woods behind my house (which were shared with horses and cows from a nearby farm). My family often went camping and skiing and owned a sailboat. Loon, I believe it was called, and about 14'. We apparently sailed it a few times on the lake down the road from our house but I was too young to remember. We canoed, we fished, etc. I was raised in the woods and on lakes, both wet and frozen.
I loved Treasure Island and other books of adventure, of course. But Swallows and Amazons was a bit unique, in that it was the first book I remember enjoying that was fiction, while also wholly possible, that is to say, there was nothing in that book that I could not imagine doing in my own life. My Side of the Mountain seemed impossible for an adult, let alone a kid. The Famous Five series, while fun, were unrealistic, and I recall them depending on situations that were never going to happen to real kids. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, both of which I still have on my bookshelf (my kids did not find them as engrossing as I), featured kids being more than kids; heroic protagonists triumphing over antagonists, rather than children doing things children can do. In fact, I actually was a bit turned off by Peter Duck and Missee Lee until later in life I realized that they were 'meta stories', fictional stories created by the fictional characters of Swallows and Amazons, which explained why they were so much larger than life.
I devoured the series, and then went on to plan a camping trip to an island on the nearby lake (none of the older neighborhood children would go, my parents deemed it too dangerous or difficult for a child of my age, etc), I attempted to build a Winter Holiday style stone 'igloo' in the woods behind my house (we did not have nearly enough stones, and what I did build seemed dangerous), I started to build an ice-racer sled like in Winter Holiday, (I had a working sailing rig done but the rest never materialized), I took sailing lessons, learning to sail in Flying Juniors. I got a bow and practiced archery (I still have a number of bows). I went 'mining' with hammers and chisels anywhere I could find exposed rock. Much of the inspiration for my interests in those days came from the Swallows and Amazons series. It's not so surprising, there was no internet and we had only two channels on TV in the woods where I lived.
Our family bought a cottage, and I convinced my parents to buy a sailboat (a Sunfish, which I named Dragonfly). I sailed on the lake where the cottage was located, which had a perfect island for camping, which I did there many times with different friends. I lived the closest life I could to that of the Swallows and Amazons. My parents joked that I would never marry any girl who didn't wear hiking boots as daily footware (spoiler alert: I did).
I grew older, and got a motorcycle (and then another, and then another), and chased girls, and went away to take computer science in university, and was too busy working in the summers and hanging out with friends to do much else, and so gradually left the lake and its small island behind. My parents moved their primary residence to the cottage, and then later sold it and moved back into town as they aged; my sister and I had both left the province for various reasons by this time.
I have re-read the series every 5-10 years or so. My originals fell apart, I bought another set. I wasn't much engaging in wilderness camping adventures, but rather retreating to reading and dreaming about them when life got too hectic.
I got married, to a wonderful girl who was raised almost entirely in cities, and I moved to Toronto, in Ontario, to work at a university (at which resides this webpage), and started once again to go camping with friends. I got a canoe and went shark (pike) fishing, and I still consider buying a sailboat nearly every spring. I built a boat, an annapolis wherry, and took my kids rowing and canoeing and fishing. I visited my parents in Nova Scotia, and their friends took us sailing on their small yacht on the ocean. It was wonderful, I felt like I was leaving Lowestoft on Wild Cat with Peter Duck. For all that I grew up in Nova Scotia, I had actually spent almost no time in boats on the ocean itself, my family was strictly limited to lakes and rivers (aside from some canoeing on the Bay of Fundy I did in university). The ocean can be quite scary to be honest, and a serious (and expensive) commitment to boat around on, in knowledge, time, and money. I'd still love to do it someday. Imagine sailing down from Halifax to the Caribbean; on your own schedule, completely free. Alternatively, imagine being seasick a lot, and being dashed on a lee coast in a storm. Adventure!
I went on a trip to Wales with my sister and parents. We stayed in a cottage in Beddgelert. I fell in a river. My sister and I roamed the moors and climbed Mount Snowden (aka Yr Wyddfa) and I pretended, despite being around 30 years old, that it was Kangchenjunga. Like the Swallows and the Amazons did, I looked to the Isle of Man. I suggested that we could drive up to the lake country so I could see Windermere and Coniston Water, but it was deemed too far by my dad, who was the only one with an international license at the time. I vowed to return, and visit the lakes. I still do. I think I haven't actually done so because I'm afraid that I will be disappointed, that it will be too modern, too touristy, and I will feel like an interloper. But still, to never dip my hand into Coniston Water is unimaginable.
I am almost 50 years old now, and re-reading the series again, because once again life, with two teenage boys, a busy and sometimes stressful employment, and rising costs of everything, in a world seeemingly bent on turning into the corporate dystopias I read about in so many cautionary science fiction books, feels sometimes like too much and I needed an escape. This time things feel different.
The books resonate with me more than ever, and not only that, I'm curious about everything related to it. Ransome's life. The cultural state of England at the time. Where the gaps in the story might be filled in with a combination of historical knowledge and imagination. I started looking at when the copyright runs out on the series (which it has in Canada, but that doesn't count) and I began to entertain the idea of writing my own stories to expand the world and let the characters live on, even if nobody read them but me. I suspect some of this comes from finally accepting that my kids aren't much interested in the sort of lifestyle the Swallows and Amazons (and I) enjoyed.
So I began to not just read, but analyze the books. After I read a book, I go back again and parse it, take notes, record timelines. I consider character motivations. I am hooked, and drawn into history once again, by Nancy Blackett.
You see, whenever I was acting out things from the books, whenever I self-inserted into the stories, when I identified with a character it was always Nancy. Gender didn't matter. When as kids I made my neighbors play Swallows and Amazons, despite them never having read the books, I was Nancy. She was wonderful, even when she was flawed. I have never loved a character more. I honestly find it difficult to imagine that she did not really exist, she has been so fleshed-out in my mind. People have said that she is -too- perfect, a 'golden child', that the Amazons are not based on real people in Ransome's life, and so he made them (Nancy, specifically) exactly what he wanted them to be, but she's not perfect at all. At times the veneer of boisterous confidence cracks and worry, empathy, and doubt are entirely visible. She's fully human, just brash and fearless. Which I admire. To me, she has the most dynamic character - her motivations are not always clear, she's unpredictable, she's the most likely to pull everyone off on a tangent, except perhaps for Titty, who is the other best character.
Speaking of Titty, I remember in grade 6, so I was 11 or 12 years old, I brought in the first book to my class. The teacher, with whom I clashed regularly as I did not like authority and she was a bit of a tyrant, read a book aloud regularly and agreed to read Swallows and Amazons at my request. Every time she said 'Titty' the class laughed. At the end of the first chapter, Mrs Johnson gave me back the book and said, and I remember it with crystal clarity to this day, "I'm sorry Neil, I think they are just not ready for this yet." We had a special moment of connection which has stayed with me always. Thank you, Mrs Johnson. This same scenario apparenly resulted in Titty being changed to Tatty in the most recent film adaptation of Swallows and Amazons, but as it was complete crap that felt the need to add spies and other over-the-top nonsense, I reject it entirely.
So, to keep my thoughts in some sort of order, and to tie all the threads together, I'll be writing here while I read through the series. As I write this, I have finished Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, and currently the crew of the Wild Cat are anchored at Cowes, with Black Jake lurking somewhere ahead, in Peter Duck. But I will start back at the beginning, with Swallows and Amazons. I'm not sure yet what form this will take. I'm sure it will evolve.
I intend at least to develop a historical timeline around the series, and track the ages of all the major characters. In order to do this, I will have to establish some dates for the three holiday times (summer, winter, easter). According to the education act at the time, exact dates was up to local education authorities, and we do find that the children sometimes arrive at the lake at different times, even within the same family. So we'll standardize on something reasonable. It's worth noting that in those day, most kids left school at age 14 (it was mandatory to that age) but had the option of staying on at a variety of types of schools (grammar, public, private, etc) until age 18. All of the main families in the series (Walkers, Blacketts and Callums) seem quite affluent so it's reasonable to expect they all attend paid boarding school. Until after WW2 the school regulations were byzantine and it's really impossible to plot out what sort of school and when all the various families of children attended. But we need standardized dates.
Summer Holidays (seven weeks)
Mid July to end of 1st week September
Winter Holidays (three weeks)
Mid December to end of 1st week of January
Easter Holidays (three weeks)
First three weeks of April
I also intend to create some proper maps, tracking paths for each book. This has proven more difficult (well, at least time consuming) than I anticpated because I do not want to copy other people's work, and creating a map of the lake and environs in vector graphics is a lot of work for someone who does not really 'do' graphics, like myself. I shudder to think of the map of The Broads ahead of me, but I always wanted to properly track the Margoletta. I might have to find some way to scan a real map as a basis for that one. At this point, I have a basic map of the lake done but it's a horrendous amount of time for very little return so far, mostly because I'm so incompetent with graphics.
I have three books about the books, as it were, to read as well:
In Search of Swallows and Amazons : Arthur Ransome's Lakeland
- Roger Wardale
Finished. A good book about real life places that inspired Ransome's imagined Lakes District from the books. Not much commentary on the books themselves though.
Approaching Arthur Ransome
- Peter Hunt
Great. It's opened my eyes to some perspectives I hadn't considered, (probably because I view the books through rose-colored glasses) like the fact that by Secret Water the Amazons, or Nancy at least, have not really evolved or matured and still wants to play war while the Swallows, having grown after the events of We Didn't Mean... have buckled down to the responsibility of mapping and completing tasks assigned by their father. This schism has come to the point that the Swallows are beginning to feel incompatible with the Amazons, and the Amazons likewise and so they turn to be closer to the Eels. In my opinion, The Picts and the Martyrs somewhat serves as the Amazons 'growth' book, with Nancy playing hostess, responsible for the summer holiday enjoyment of the D's, worried about the loss of the G.A., etc. I feel that in Great Northern? Nancy is much more mature than in Secret Water but we're now moving outside of a short book review and into my own thoughts on Amazon maturity...
It also touches on the fact that in general, other than this maturity, which Hunt suggests is somewhat absent in the later Great Northern? there really isn't any emotional growth in any of the characters thoughout the books. I don't know if I agree entirely with that, but certainly Nancy and John at 16 aren't significantly different than they were at 12 and having two teens of my own I can state that their 16 years old selves probably wouldn't even recognize their 12 year old selves.
Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint's Trunk
- Christina Hardyment
An excellent book. The scouting of real locations is interesting, of course, but more interesting to me is all the contact with real people that may have inspired Ransome. The never-before published section "Their Own Story" was a wonderful surprise and is worth the price of admission alone.
Individual analysis, book by book.