Swallows and Amazons The Secret Life of Books

Just about halfway up the hillside,

you can see a farm with a barn attached.

That's Bank Ground Farm,

or better known in the Swallows And Amazons stories as Holly Howe.

Arthur Ransome's Swallows And Amazons

was published in 1930, and has been captivating readers ever since.

The story tells of the Walker and Blackett children,

the Swallows and Amazons of the title,

and their Lakeland summer holiday adventures.

When I first read this book as a child, I felt I was John,

captain of the swallows, a 12-year-old pining for adventure.

Risks? Of course. But that's life, isn't it?

And when I had two sons of my own,

we came back here for years to sail and to fish.

Swallows and Amazons forever!

'Ransome's much-loved classic has sold over 2.5 million copies,

'and has brought generations of fans to the wild

'and romantic setting of the Lake District.'

-So, you are a fan, are you?

-I am a fan.

I read it to my children many years ago, when they were young.

I confess, I thought I learnt enough from reading the book that

I could go off and sail a boat.

'Ransome was not just a much-loved children's author

'and illustrator. He was also a globetrotting journalist,

'who witnessed some of the most dramatic events of the 20th century.'

This is actually a letter from Lenin, giving Ransome free passage.

'But Ransome is best remembered for perfecting a new

'kind of children's fiction that chimed with the mood of the time.'

Real children doing real things in real places.

Swallows And Amazons is great in so many ways

but I want to uncover some of its secrets.

Why did Arthur Ransome write it? Who was it for?

And can we find the exact locations

where this wonderful adventure took place?

"Looking down from Titty's peak in the evening of the day

"on which they'd come to the farmhouse

"where their mother had taken lodgings,

"they'd seen the lake like an inland sea.

"And, on the lake, they'd seen the island.

"All four of them had been filled at once with the same idea.

"It was not just AN island. It was THE island, waiting for THEM.

"It was THEIR island."

No child could resist that.

Swallows And Amazons begins with a vision of a vision -

a vision of freedom and new horizons.

After spotting the island, the Walker children,

who are staying at Holly Howe farmhouse for their summer holiday

discover a small sailing dinghy named Swallow.

Geraint Lewis owns a similar boat and has kindly agreed to take me out

on Coniston Water to follow in the wake of Captain John and his crew.

Morning, John. Good to see you.

Hello. I'm looking forward to this trip.

Yes, it is a great day for a sail, I think.

-Do you want to come aboard?

-Yeah.

-This is Peggy.

Well, it's exactly the same boat that all of them would be sailing on.

Yes, pretty much. Pretty much.

She's a very traditional early 20th-century sailing dinghy.

-It's a lovely boat.

-Follow me aboard.

-"Aye, aye, Sir," I should say.

If you'd like to go to the stern.

-I will, cos he loved all these technical terms.

-He did.

He's very natural with them as well.

I mean, there was no sense that he was teaching people

how to sail and, yet, he managed to bring an awful lot of instruction

into the books, which people just pick up as part of the stories.

'Swallow, with its crew, Captain John, Mate Susan, Able Seaman Titty

'and Ship's Boy Roger, ranging in age from 12 to seven, set sail.

'Destination - the island that has enticed them

'since they first arrived.'

What's difficult about sailing on a lake?

Well, the difficulty here with Coniston is you get

a lot of gusty wind, a lot of wind changes, as we've just noticed.

When we look at this lake,

this isn't exactly the same as the book, is it?

No, the one in the book, I think, is rather larger than Coniston.

Maybe not quite as large as Windermere, but larger.

Mind your head again. Oops!

-The lake is clearly...

-OK, we're going now.

..clearly a bit different from the lake in the book.

So, we're heading now down towards Peel Island.

Yeah, we're heading south for Peel Island. It's about two miles away.

You can see it there just poking out from the land.

And this is Wild Cat Island, isn't it?

This is as close as you'll get to Wild Cat Island, really.

-This is exactly the right boat we're on.

-We are.

We're in the right boat, we're in the right place,

having a great time.

We've got a fair wind.

-Could you ask for anything more?

-It is. It's perfect.

The story of Swallows And Amazons

has its roots in Ransome's own childhood.

Born in the city of Leeds in 1884, his father, a keen countryman,

introduced him to the Lake District from a young age.

Ransome, in a later preface to Swallows And Amazons,

pays an emotional tribute to this unique landscape.

"We adored the place.

"Coming to it, we used to run down to the lake, dip our hands in,

"and wish, as if we'd just seen the new moon.

"Swallows And Amazons grew out of those old memories.

"I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself."

The Lake District has long been a source of inspiration for writers.

Professor Nicola Watson is an expert on travel writing

and children's literature.

What is it about the Lake District that's inspired writers?

I think, really, it's just been a very,

very famously beautiful place for a long time.

It starts off in the 1720s, regarded as a very ugly and dangerous place,

so defers to England or Britain, suggests that it's desolate.

But by the middle of the 1700s, and onto the late 18th century,

it becomes a famous place to go and admire the picturesque,

to go in for sketching. That brings Wordsworth.

That brings a whole new ideology of childhood in nature.

So, that's why for a children's writer,

the Lake District has been a wonderful place to work.

Yes, I think so.

Or, rather, it became a good place to bring children for holidays.

And, then, of course, when you became a children's writer yourself,

most children's writers write, in fact, about their own childhoods.

Arthur Ransome started writing when he was very young.

When he was eight, he sort of writes

the ur-Swallows And Amazons which he calls The Desert Island.

And I've got a bit here.

"The next day, they climb to the top of the lookout place

"but could see nothing of the savages.

"So they got some more provisions ready in case

"they were attacked again.

"And, sure enough, that evening, which was the 24th December,

"when they went up to the lookout place, they saw a huge

"fleet of brown-sailed canoes making straight for the island."

And so many of the words are the same, aren't they?

Whether it's the "lookout point," "provisions," "savages,"

-and, of course, "the island."

-"The island," indeed.

'It would be nearly 40 years after that first boyish story that

'Ransome began work on the book that made him famous.

'And here at the Museum Of Lakeland Arts And Industry in Kendal

'is the only known manuscript of Swallows And Amazons.'

This is the heart of the collection.

Arthur Ransome's desk, his typewriter, and all his pipes,

a vital part of the Ransome life.

And, here, we've got a completed book in manuscript form.

And he calls it The Swallows And The Amazons.

And he scratched it out on this page.

And he writes this is the rough draft in 1929.

And what's interesting was that he started work

on Swallows And Amazons in March of that year.

By the end of the year,

here he is with what looks like almost the complete version.

It's extraordinary.

And one of the early bits that everyone remembers who read

the book is the telegram.

This is the most famous telegram that ever appears in a children's book.

And it's sent by the father, who is a commander in the Royal Navy.

He's asked whether his children can go and camp on this island

for four or five days.

Is that going to be possible? And he sends back this marvellous telegram,

which is, "BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON'T DROWN."

"'Hurrah for Daddy' he shouted. 'What does it mean?' asked Susan.

"'It means Yes,' said Titty."

And what he means, of course, is that if they're duffers,

they may as well drown.

So this means they can go off on their adventure,

sailing to Wild Cat Island.

It's the beginning of this terrific adventure.

So, this is the secret harbour on Wild Cat Island.

And you have to come in very carefully here because of the rocks.

You do. The lake's high at the moment,

but there's a lot more rocks underwater...you can't see.

-It is like a natural harbour, isn't it?

-It is.

-It's very small, but it's a perfect harbour, really.

-Perfect.

Great place to hide your boat.

There we are. Wild Cat Island.

-I think we should pull the boat up and explore.

-Yeah, that's great.

It's wonderful.

And, of course, in the book, it's a much bigger island, isn't it?

I think so. The island in my imagination

is two or three times the size of this,

but it's still a perfectly formed island.

And most exciting to have a look around.

"At last, the green trees were close ahead, and Swallow was safe

"in the pool and ran her nose up the beach in the tiny bay.

"Sheltered by the trees from the north

"and by the walls of rock from any other wind.

"'What a place,' said the Able Seaman.

"'I expect somebody hid on the island hundreds of years ago

"'and kept his boat here.'

"'It's a perfect harbour,' said John."

'But after their successful landing, it soon becomes clear that

'someone else has already discovered the island.

'The rival crew are the Blackett sisters,

'in their sailing dinghy, Amazon.

'There were two real boats which were the original Swallow and Amazon.

'One actually called Swallow has sadly disappeared but the other,

'Mavis, on which Amazon is believed to have been based,

'is on display at the Ruskin Museum in Coniston.'

How wonderful!

It's still here!

And it's got the centreboard.

This is the actual boat which inspired Amazon,

the terror of the seas, crewed by the sworn enemies of the Swallow

Captain Nancy, aged 13,

and Shipmate Peggy, 12.

And this is how Ransome described their first fateful encounter.

"The four explorers of the Swallow stood facing

"the two pirate girls from the Amazon.

"The Amazons were bigger than most of the Swallows.

"One of them was bigger than Captain John.

"The other was about the same size.

"If it had come to a fight, it might have been a very near thing.

"But it did not come to a fight.

"'Let's parlay first and fight afterwards,'

"said the leader of the Amazons."

I've always liked the way the children are so confident

and optimistic.

Some of them have traditional roles,

with Captain John the obvious father figure, and Susan clearly the mother.

But the Amazon pirates are certainly not held back because they're girls.

They are bold, strong, and fiercely independent.

'Perhaps surprisingly, these virtues weren't in fact new

'to Swallows And Amazons.

'Literature aimed at young girls of the time was full

'of plucky characters and exciting action.'

The '30s is strongly interested,

especially for middle-class children,

in ways of teaching them how to be self-sufficient.

A lot of the books are about Girl Guides,

about playing Crusoe on islands.

And we also see direct references by the children to the books

-they've read. In real life.

-We do. Robinson Crusoe, the obvious one.

Robinson Crusoe is the grandfather text for the whole thing.

Although there are a lot of other sorts of reading kicking around.

Well, there's Treasure Island.

There is Treasure Island,

which is the reason that treasure is eventually found.

Coral Island, the whole idea of desert islands

and surviving on them. That's Ballantyne, of course.

And that whole 1890s discourse of true stories of exploration.

Books called things like Brave Sons Of The Empire,

which you were supposed to be emulating.

How much is the Empire and imperialism reflected

-in Swallows And Amazons?

-Oh, enormously.

I think what you have is a fantasy of maps, for one thing.

If you look at the endpapers of Swallows And Amazons,

you'll see that it is a way of describing a composite,

imaginary, imperial territory. So all the references are imperial.

Rio is there, along with the Amazon, but, so, too, is the Arctic.

Is Wild Cat Island, then, a kind of colony?

You've got reference to natives, even savages.

Oh, yes, I think so - and, of course,

it appeals immensely to children even in post-colonial times,

because one of children's problems

is they don't have very much territory of their own,

so any children's fiction tends to be built around

finding a secret den, or finding a secret escape,

or finding an island of your own,

and has been for a very, very long time.

For the young explorers in Swallows and Amazons,

all grown-ups are natives,

and there are two in particular who loom large in their thoughts -

the mysterious man on the houseboat and the Walker children's mother.

But although Mother might not exactly be "one of us",

she's definitely not "one of them".

This is Bank Ground Farm, which in the book is called Holly Howe.

The children's mother stays here.

She's perfect in every way, giving them lots of freedom,

but making sure that in the end they'll be safe.

"'Oh, no,' said Titty.

"'On desert islands, they cure everything with herbs.

"'We'll have all sorts of diseases, plagues and fevers and things,

"'that no medicine is any good for,

"'and we'll cure them with herbs that the natives show us.'

"At this point, Mother came in and settled the question.

"'No medicines,' she said.

"'Anyone who wants doctoring is invalided home.'"

But whereas Mother is a protective presence,

the Houseboat Man, who is uncle to the Amazon girls,

is anything but friendly to the Swallows.

He's convinced they're tampering with his boat.

He lives alone, except for his green parrot,

a suspicious brass cannon and a precious chest.

The Swallows decide he's a retired pirate,

and call him Captain Flint.

Captain Flint has more than a touch of Arthur Ransome -

they're both adventurers in disguise.

Ransome's life before he wrote Swallows and Amazons

could hardly have been more colourful or more dangerous.

From 1913 to 1924, Ransome lived and worked in Russia.

He was there during two of the most monumental events in history -

the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

I have come to the Brotherton Library at Leeds University

to meet an author and expert on Ransome, Christina Hardyment.

-Hello, Christina.

-Hello, John.

-The treasure house!

-Absolutely.

-Yeah.

-This is the heart of it.

-This is Arthur Ransome's own trunk.

-Gosh.

AR.

Well, I particularly like this, cos he was quite adventurous,

as you know - he loved going all over the place.

This is this rather splendid passport.

Yes, so that's - he goes off to Russia,

and we've got all these visas - look at that.

OK, what else have we got?

This is his press pass. He was a journalist for the Daily News...

-Yes.

-..which was quite a liberal, left-wing newspaper.

-And that says Moscow, 1917 - now that's a date, isn't it?

-Yes.

-Absolutely.

-So, we're talking about the October Revolution of 1917,

the Russian Revolution.

-OK.

-Well, this is the pride of the collection -

this is actually a letter from Lenin giving Ransome free passage.

And Ransome knew him well, didn't he?

He did know him well, and he knew quite a lot of people,

like Trotsky, he knew extremely well.

And there was no other journalist that had that level of contact

with the top people in Russia.

And they trusted him, and so he reported what he saw.

-He was a very honest, honourable man.

-Yes.

Did he work for both sides?

Although he was passing intelligence back to the British,

he was also telling the Bolsheviks how things were

in an honest way, but he certainly never...

There is no record of him passing crucial information to Russia,

which is the definition of a double agent.

So, why was it that Arthur Ransome just gave up journalism?

Well, his plan was to write fairy tales, or folk tales,

derived from the Russian tradition.

So, he went into journalism in Russia... Well, almost by chance.

Absolutely. He didn't want to go to cover a war or anything.

He went to Russia before there was a war, he went to Russia

because Russia was a rather fashionable place to go.

He loved folk tales, and had already written some,

but Russian - it would be rather original

to write some Russian tales.

So, far from wanting to be a spy, or even a journalist,

Arthur Ransome had always harboured an ambition

to be a writer of children's fiction,

and after 11 years of overseas adventure,

he longed to return to England.

But he didn't return alone.

While in Russia he had fallen in love

with no less a person than Trotsky's personal secretary,

Evgenia Shelepina.

This is where Ransome came with his second wife, Evgenia,

and you can see why they chose it.

What a fantastic view.

In the spring of 1925, Ransome and Evgenia

settled at Low Ludderburn, just a few miles from Lake Windermere.

Beside their new home was a large barn

which would prove to be a place of inspiration for Ransome.

After all the dangers and hardships in Russia,

Ransome was finally doing what he wanted to do -

it was here that he wrote Swallows and Amazons.

He said, "I have never had, nor ever hope to have,

"such another work room."

Arthur Ransome had come home.

For the Walker children, their home, at least for a few days,

is a clearing on Wild Cat Island.

So, here we are - we're coming to a campsite.

Where they all end up, don't they? All together.

Yes, in the end.

In the end, the Swallows have tents which rig up between the trees.

Yeah, a perfect place.

-Well, it's beautifully sheltered.

-Yeah.

And so you have your tents here,

and you have the fireplace here, I suppose.

-I think in the open area, here...

-Yeah.

-..and you'd sit around it.

It feels like a place of their own, I would say.

A sort of world of their own.

And what else can we see from here?

Well, we've got a lookout point,

where they had the lighthouse tree at the top of the island...

-Yeah.

-..and behind us, over the corner, here,

we have the landing place, where they first land on the island.

It's all in this one small kind of enclosed space...

-Yeah.

-..around us.

But the matter of ownership over Wild Cat Island

is still to be decided, and the battle is on.

In the dead of night,

as the two crews are trying to outmanoeuvre each other,

Captain Flint's chest is stolen,

containing his only copy of the book he's writing.

The war between the Swallows and the Amazons ended peacefully,

but they still had to find Captain Flint's treasure chest,

and Arthur Ransome was speaking from the heart

about the manuscript hidden inside.

He would put his Swallows and Amazons manuscript by his bed at night,

so that he could reach out and touch it,

just to make sure it was still there.

Ransome wrote the bulk of the book very quickly,

but he grappled with how to resolve the issue

of Captain Flint's stolen chest.

His revisions can be seen in the original manuscript.

There's a lot in here

where he's playing around with the narrative,

and some of the things that we're familiar with

from the finished book look very different.

There are lots of different versions of who finds the treasure,

-how they find it and when they find it.

-And WHETHER they find it.

-Well, yes.

-Is it? Whether they find it.

-Good point - but have a look at this one. Maybe start from up here.

-Yeah.

"John and Nancy were looking already,

"and now the Houseboat Man looked all over the island.

"He could find nothing."

-So, then, that looks as if it's grim, doesn't it?

-Mm.

And then, finally, "'No,' said the Houseboat Man,

"'I'm afraid it will have to be written off as a bad job.'"

-We can't have that!

-No.

-And, of course, he scrapped it.

And what does he do in the end?

Oh, it's much more exciting, because of course they go back

and they find the treasure, he's reunited with his book,

and he gives Titty the parrot as a thank you.

Hurrah!

"'We've found it! We've found it! We've found it!' shouted Titty.

"She pulled the stone right away to one side,

"and there was a torn label on the corner of the box -

"a label with a picture of a camel and a pyramid,

"and the word Cairo, plain in big letters.

"'Help, Roger,' said the able-seaman,

"'get the stones off one by one.'"

Swallows and Amazons was published in July 1930,

and it wasn't long before Ransome was being asked for a sequel.

Over the next two decades, he wrote another 11 books in the series.

The adventures of the Walker and Blackett children,

and the simple, upright virtues they embodied, struck a deep chord,

and yet Ransome's legacy wasn't totally secure.

Oddly, once the Second World War

had washed over it,

and over the series as a whole,

it in some ways became bankrupt.

So, for example, William Golding writes,

at the beginning of Lord of the Flies,

that the boys, when they're first shipwrecked,

think that it's going to be like Swallows and Amazons,

and those of you who've read Lord of the Flies know that...anything but.

On the other hand, Swallows and Amazons is, in many ways,

its own legacy - you've only got to come here to the Lake District,

as you know, to find that the boats are called Swallow,

they're called Peggy Blackett, they're called Arthur Ransome.

There's a way that people go on living in relation to this ideal

of child agency, child sufficiency, and bravery.

Goodness, in some ways - moral goodness.

Honesty wins out,

and with Captain Flint's chest and precious book found,

the Swallows and Amazons spend a last night together on the island,

but a new danger loomed.

"All that last day, there had been the heaviness of thunder in the air.

"There had been a stormy sunset

"and, though there had been but little wind,

"dark, angry clouds had lifted in the south

"until at night they shut out all the stars."

The great storm may have washed away their fantasies,

marking the end of the school holidays and a return to reality,

but the possibility of escape isn't lost forever.

For the Swallows and Amazons -

and, indeed, for the many children and natives who read this book -

it was just the start.

-Well, I'm afraid it's time to leave, John.

-Yes!

-Do you want to, er...hop aboard?

-OK.

I'll just get the painter in a sec.

There's quite a bit of water in the boat.

-Don't worry, we'll get it out later.

-Yeah, OK.

The tiller is just by your left hand.

-Keep it straight.

-I will.

Just got to push her out.

HE CHUCKLES We're away!

"Slowly, the fleet slipped past Wild Cat Island.

"The island was once more the uninhabited island

"that Titty had watched for so many days from the Peak of Darien -

"and yet it was not that island.

"John, looking at it, remembered the harbour and the leading lights,

"and his swim all around it, and the climbing of the great tree.

"For Roger, it would always be the place

"where he had swum for the first time.

"For Susan, it was the camp and housekeeping

"and cooking for a large family.

"Titty thought of it as Robinson Crusoe's island."

If you want to dig deeper into Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons,

and the other books in the series, go to...

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to the Open University.