Swallows, Amazons and Adventure

I’ve already posted on here about Arthur Ransome, as an early influence in my writing. As it happens, I was recently invited to speak at the Literary Weekend of the Arthur Ransome Society in Harrogate. I treated them to a modified version of a talk entitled 'Swallows, Amazons and Adventure' which I gave a few years ago at Kendal Mountain Festival.

You can read the original text of the Kendal talk on my Ransome blog, so what follows is an attempt to catch the gist. That previous Substack post is focused on his influence on me as a writer rather than the adventurous side of his life and work.

(All images are from the Harrogate presentation.)

Adventure in Ransome's Life

As a child, Arthur’s family spent summer holidays at Nibthwaite, at the foot of Coniston Water. This engendered a lifelong love of the Lakes. He often roamed the countryside on his own, and on the water, often with his fishing-mad father. This was in a rowing boat; sailing came later.

As a young man he returned to Coniston whenever possible, especially after getting to know the Collingwood family, who lived near the head of the lake, and with whom he had some of his earliest experiences of sailing.

Partly to escape from his disastrous marriage, Ransome made his first visit to Russia in 1913, ostensibly to study fairytales. Journey to the Moon is the title of the relevant chapter in his autobiography, and he also says he was heading to 'Russia and another world'. Thus far he’d shown scant interest in politics or news-journalism, but almost by chance found himself an eyewitness to the Revolutions of 1917 and much of the ensuing conflict.

In terms of 'adventure' it’s hard to beat his story of crossing the battlefront of the Civil War and approaching the 'Red' front-line calmly smoking a pipe and carrying nothing more threatening than a portable typewriter. Ransome also played chess with Lenin, whom he didn’t rate as a player, though he admired him in other ways.

In 1917, in St Petersburg, he met and fell in love with Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina. In 1919 they moved to Estonia and later to Latvia. They explored the Gulf of Finland under sail; Racundra’s First Cruise became a yachting classic. After divorce, and marriage to Evgenia, they returned to England in 1924.

For a few years he was a regular foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, visiting China and Egypt, but became worried that he was running out of time to focus on what he felt was his real calling: writing stories. I feel a certain resonance here. Of course 30 years as an outdoor writer and photographer is not a bad way to earn a crust, but I still had the urge to write fiction and have been very glad to fully indulge it in the last few years.

In 1925 Arthur and Evgenia came to live in the Lakes, at Low Ludderburn, near the foot of Windermere, and he sailed regularly with friends and their children, mostly on Coniston. Many places in the books can be directly linked to real-world locations on and around the two lakes, though the geography is extensively rearranged and names are changed. I’ve explored these connections in books and articles, as have others.

In 1929, in another leap into the unknown, he gave up being a foreign correspondent. He describes it as ‘a hinge year ... joining and dividing two different lives.’ It was the year in which he wrote Swallows and Amazons, published the following year. If his own life thereafter seems less adventurous, it wasn’t without its moments, but much of what went into the books was distilled from the experiences of the first half of his life.

This image shows a paragraph I particularly love (and Pigeon Post is only rivalled by Winter Holiday as my favourite of all Ransome’s books). I don’t think it’s an outrageous stretch to suggest that final short sentence may just be as close as we can get to the essence of adventure.

Sailing

When it came to sailing, Arthur Ransome knew his stuff. By the time of writing Swallows and Amazons, he'd been sailing on the lakes for years, and made those Baltic cruises. In later years he explored the waterways of East Anglia and crossed the Channel and North Sea.

In the books the young protagonists often sail entirely on their own. At the time of Swallows and Amazons, John, aged 11 or 12, is skippering three younger siblings. It’s all made possible by a telegram from their absent father: Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers won't drown.

For me, though I was captivated by Swallows and Amazons and the other books, I didn't get a taste of sailing until much later in life. For much of my life, I had hardly any water-borne experience, beyond punting in Cambridge. When I did get a taste of life under sail, it was on the other side of the world, joining Bridget Carter and Rod Hall on a stage of their prolonged circumnavigation. (Bridget is my partner’s sister.)

I joined them in Cairns and we sailed up the North Queensland coast and across the Gulf of Carpentaria: a very long way from anywhere Ransome ever sailed. Still, I occasionally felt like I was living a scene out of Peter Duck.  In a nice resonance, years later again, they introduced me to another Ransome-inspired author, Jon Tucker.

Mountaineering

By the time of writing Swallows and Amazons, Ransome was a highly experienced sailor, but he was never a mountaineer. As a younger man, he was a great walker, in the lowlands and on the fells, but I’ve seen no evidence that he ever experienced rock-climbing or mountaineering. This, I think, is evident in the two main 'mountaineering' episodes in the books.

The first of these is the ascent of 'Kanchenjunga' (his spelling) recounted in Swallowdale. The peak is based on Coniston Old Man, so prominent from Coniston Water or the moors around.

Why Kanchenjunga rather than Everest? Exploits on Everest would be fresh in memory, including Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance in 1924. However, Kangchenjunga (the usual spelling) was also well-known, probably more so than now. Unlike Everest, it’s readily visible from populous areas, notably around Darjeeling, and had also attracted several attempts. Doug Scott, who climbed both, rated Kangchenjunga as the most challenging of the world’s high peaks (and wrote an excellent book about it).

Then again it might just be that—as John says—'Kanchenjunga’s a gorgeous name anyhow.’

Be that as it may, the ascent of 'Kanchenjunga' in Swallowdale does not exactly follow recommended procedure. The eight children gaily proceed up the fellside, taking crags and outcrops in their stride, all tied to one rope but with no belays. It could all go horribly wrong, and very nearly does, when Roger slips (see image for what happened next).

Models are my niece and nephew in a photo from 2004.

Safety methods are even more dubious during the episode in Winter Holiday where Dick rescues a cragfast sheep by traversing a narrow, icy ledge, secured only by the rope in the hands of Titty, Roger and Dorothea, with their feet 'well dug into the snow'. They lower the sheep hand over hand and are about to do the same for Dick when the others arrive to reinforce them.

Ransome seems to have skimped his research here. Lowering someone hand-over-hand is a lot less easy than you might think, and when you reckon that they're trying to grip a rope that must have been lying in the snow…

Let's just say, as the phrase goes, 'do not try this at home'.

Bikes

Bikes aren’t exactly central in the stories, but they do play their part – they serve as ‘dromedaries’ in Pigeon Post and they're significant, as transport and from an evidentiary point of view, in The Big Six.

Still, one episode in Pigeon Post intrigues me, as Dick, on Peggy's bike, hurries to Beckfoot to attempt the final assay to prove that what they've found is gold.

The question is what his ride was actually like. It’s obviously rough, and the illustration  (one of Ransome’s most dynamic) gives a fine impression of steepness. And Dick is on a 1930’s steel ‘girl’s bike two sizes too big for him’—and with a pigeon basket strapped to the handlebars!

Having ridden many Lakeland trails on modern mountain bikes, and more recently on a gravel bike, I have a strong impression that Dick’s ride was somewhere on the ragged edge. So it was with tongue only slightly in cheek that I titled a blog post Dick Callum – Pioneer Mountain Biker?

Let’s not forget that Dick was entirely alone on this ride—and, if we can trust the chronology of the series, he’s probably no older than 11.

Exploration

The children, especially the Swallows, often see themselves as explorers, particularly in the first four Lake District books, and also in Secret Water. There's even a reference to exploration prefacing the first chapter of Swallows and Amazons, with these lines from Keats’s On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

However, the theme of exploration is never more central than in Winter Holiday. This was published in 1933, when the exploits of Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen were still fresh in collective memory. Amundsen reached the South Pole little more than 20 years earlier, in December 1911. So it may seem a little odd that Arthur Ransome never mentions any of these names.

Instead, the model is the great Norwegian, Fridtjof Nansen. This is Arthur’s homage to a personal hero. Winter Holiday explicitly references Nansen’s career as an explorer, mentioning his two classic books, The First Crossing of Greenland (1890) and Farthest North (1897), which Ransome read at an early age. He met Nansen more than once, in Rīga in 1921, when Nansen was engaged in humanitarian work, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. Ransome called him the ‘most civilised person of his generation’.

In Winter Holiday the eight young explorers commandeer Captain Flint’s houseboat, turning it into Nansen’s Fram, experiment with sailing sledges and ‘cross Greenland’.

Carefully-laid plans crumble when a signal is misread and instead of an orderly and united daytime journey, it all culminates in an exciting nocturnal dash, in three separate parties, to the 'North Pole'.

Filling in blanks on a map is also central to Secret Water. Unlike the Lake District books, the East Anglia-set ones stay generally faithful to the real geographer and the eponymous setting is closely based on Hamford Water, near Walton-on-the-Naze in Suffolk.

The Great Outdoors

Hand in hand with all these activities goes the simple fact that they spend most of their time out of doors.

Swallows and Amazons, for example, is almost entirely an outdoor book; there are a few pages of indoor preparations in Chapter 2, and only the briefest of visits to the indoor world thereafter.

Even camping, when not fully independent, causes frustration in Pigeon Post. This is partly because the site is too far from the moor where they want to go prospecting, but there’s also a strong sense of what camping should be, and it’s what we today would call ‘wild camping’, away from adults, cooking their own meals, and so on.

Many of us over a certain age think we played outdoors as kids much more than today’s youngsters do, and solid research says we aren’t just imagining it. Famously, the American writer Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods identified Nature Deficit Disorder, and directly linked it to many issues such as childhood obesity.

The Glover Report, commissioned by the UK Government, and published in 2019, also highlights the importance of access to nature for all. I think it’s fair to say the Government has done shamefully little in implementing its recommendations.

I have to point out that the cover photo is by yours truly and the location above Coniston couldn’t be more appropriate.

Observation of nature

A healthy relationship with nature is one of the deficits highlighted by many of these reports.

The natural world captivated Arthur from an early age, and his books are full of observations of nature, especially fish and birds: dippers, cormorants, coots, and Great Northern Divers. There’s a strong undercurrent of proto-environmentalism. In both Coot Club and Great Northern? bird protection is a central theme, and the villain in the latter is an egg-collector. (This practice wasn’t outlawed until 1954, seven years after Great Northern? Perhaps the book helped promote a shift in public opinion?)

In both these books, villains drive motor-boats, while heroes sail. The children also tidy up campsites and fireplaces and dispose of litter.

Independence

Arthur Ransome's books also highlight independence within a largely natural setting.
The children camp, sail, and roam the fells with little or no adult supervision. Let’s remind ourselves how young they all are (there are a few clues in the books, more among Ransome’s own notes).

In Swallows and Amazons, after receiving the 'duffers’ telegram, the Swallows go off and camp on Wild Cat Island alone. Often no adult has the slightest idea where they are. During the climactic 'war' with the Amazons, Titty is left on the island alone. Her mother pays a visit, but then rows away and leaves her alone again. She’s nine.

And meanwhile, the rest of them are sailing up and down the lake in the dark...

Risk

The children’s independence means they face genuine risks, and sometimes feel the consequences. The parental attitude seems to be well enough summed up by the famous telegram in Swallows and Amazons.

If hazard is common, genuinely life-threatening situations are rare, outwith the more fantastical Peter Duck and Missee Lee. While night sailing is obviously risky, there’s no real sense of imminent danger to life in Swallows and Amazons. Early on in Swallowdale there is a shipwreck, but very close to the shore. Though it’s shocking and dramatic, it never really seems as if anyone is about to drown. In my estimation, Dick's rescue of the cragfast sheep in Winter Holiday is where the margin of safety is stretched thinnest, though this may not come across to the average reader.

There are plenty more instances in the other books, but the most sustained level of genuine risk is surely in We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea, which sees the four Swallows, the oldest still only 13, crossing the North Sea at night in an unfamiliar yacht. This apart, however, it’s in the Lake District books, above all, where the youngsters are most fully in charge of own affairs. Maybe this is another reason why they’re my favourites?

Freedom for all

Themes like exploration and piracy are, or were, often associated with muscularity and masculinity. Some of the children’s own reference points, like Treasure Island or Farthest North, are almost exclusively male. However, Ransome’s stories feature several strong and significant female characters. In the Lake District books, there are always more girls than boys; girls are a minority only in Coot Club and The Big Six.

And they’re not there just to make up the numbers. The story is often told from the point of view of one while all, to different degrees, display competence beyond traditional female roles. Most obviously, there’s Nancy Blackett, so often the leader, but (perhaps surprisingly) she’s hardly ever the point-of-view character. Here she often gives way to Titty or Dorothea.

Titty is sensitive and imaginative, but we’ve already seen how she garrisons the island on her own (and wins the war by capturing the Amazon). Several times in later books she again takes charge of the younger ones.

Starting with Winter Holiday, the empathetic and observant Dorothea often gives us insight into the characters of the others. We see another side of her in the Norfolk Broads books, especially The Big Six, Ransome’s detective story, where she orchestrates the investigation.

I suppose Dorothea resonated with me as I too was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer; I’d like to think she gave me a bit of a nudge in that direction.

And then there’s Nancy. A unique and intriguing character, Nancy openly repudiates gender norms and all the conventional expectations embodied by the Great-Aunt. (I wrote more about this in my earlier post.)

Of course, while Ransome’s books stack up pretty well in providing positive role models for girls, they’ve often been criticised for their whiteness—and sometimes, too, for their middle-class privilege. Of course there’s truth in this, though 'privilege' is relative. The Swallows sail in a borrowed boat, and their camping gear looks almost laughably primitive by today’s standards.

Still, it’s now 94 years since the publication of Swallows and Amazons. Can Arthur Ransome's books resonate with today's youngsters, particularly those from more marginalised communities? For a hopeful note to wind up, I'll just mention that the person who chose to talk about Ransome for the R4 series Great Lives a few years ago was a gay black man, Labi Siffre. Dare we hope that there are still young people, of all backgrounds, who are finding inspiration in the works of Arthur Ransome?

And who’s providing similar inspiration today? I’ve mentioned Jon Tucker, albeit writing in an Antipodean context. I’m sure there are other successors, but a quick poll among the Kendal and Harrogate audiences didn’t suggest any.

To come full circle, I return to the question of the part Ransome's books have played in my own life. Well, I've been channelling my inner Dorothea for a while and I've published three novels so far. There are rocks and mountains in all of them, and in Book 2 there's quite a lot of sailing too. Make of that what you will.