Readers of yesterday’s blog will know that I’m currently making my way through the Swallows and Amazons series of books, alternating them with the Strike-Ellacott series. Readers here and listeners to the Rowling Studies podcast will know that I have long had a particular interest in the biography of J. K. Rowling. Little as we know about Rowling, what we do know add a lot of depth and richness to the story telling. Reading about Robin’s experiences working as a temp. holds a great deal more authority, knowing that Rowling also worked as a temp. in London.

I knew precisely nothing about Arthur Ransome prior to reading the first two books, but the vivid make believe world that the children make (particularly Roger and Titty) had me pretty convinced that these were reminiscences of the author’s childhood games, perhaps from a man who never grew up. It was a conversation with Beatrice Groves (who with John Granger has frequently steered me well for my next read) that there exists a house in the Lake District that the ‘real’ Roger used to live in.

Wonderfully, the children were based on an Anglo-Syrian family, that Ransome met in the Lake District, and later visited in Aleppo. The first book was dedicated to them, and the eldest sister later recalled that “Titty and Roger were very true to life”.

During his childhood, the Altounyans visited their British grandparents (his grandfather was W. G. Collingwood) in the Lake District where they met the writer Arthur Ransome. Ransome named some of the primary characters in his famous book, Swallows and Amazons, after Altounyan and three of his four sisters; Roger became Roger Walker the ship’s boy. Ransome later stayed with the family in Aleppo, bringing them a small dinghy to sail, and writing most of Peter Duck there.

Roger Altounyan – Wikipedia

If I had relied on the text, my image would have been off. Ransome was a very talented communicator and observer of children, not a man-child with a vivid recollection. A Captain Flint in the childhood games of others. Now when I read the stories I can imagine little Roger Altounyan, in England for the first time, with bossy, but fun-loving older sisters.

Its about time for my Audible re-listen to the Robert Galbraith Strike-Ellacott series, and I needed to find something new to listen to in between each volume. Much like Jane Austen’s Emma, I am an inveterate list maker and months (…years) before I am due to finally get round a new book, I have planned my programme. I like to alternate re-reads (or re-listens) with new books and also alternate heavy, or concentrated reads, with something lighter. This time around my palate cleanser for the first four Cormoran Strike books, were the first four volumes of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

Although I can find no evidence that J. K. Rowling has read them, so many people in the UK have, that they have become something of a shared cultural touchstone in the manner of Harry Potter. Before reading the first book, I knew that the stories were about four children in the small sailing boat Swallow, and two others in the sailing boat Amazon, who start off as enemies and later as allies, having adventures in the Lake District and Norfolk Broads. If pressed, I would have guessed that the crew of the Amazon were a pair of tomboy girls, and that the stories were set in the 1930’s. It says something for their cultural pervasiveness that all of these assumptions turned out to be correct.

Arthur Ransome was, from 1930 to the early 1960s, what J.K. Rowling is today: author of a series of children’s books which shaped the imagination of a generation. Rooted in the heyday of the British Empire, Swallows and Amazons and its sequels described a nostalgic Utopia.

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome
by Roland Chambers

This is a series where children are granted the freedom to explore, adventure, and learn through their own resourcefulness. The story revolves around the Walker children: John, Susan, Titty, and Roger, who are the children of an off stage destroyer captain in the Royal Navy. Known as the Swallows, after their boat, they are on holiday in the Lake District. They set up camp on an island they name Wild Cat Island, where they encounter another set of children, the Blackett sisters: Nancy and Peggy, who call themselves the Amazons, after their own vessel. The narrative follows their adventures involving sailing, camping, and a playful rivalry that turns into a shared quest involving a mysterious uncle and a hidden treasure. Much like Harry Potter, this is a world within a world, where the fantastical exists alongside the mundane. Here the fantasy exist explicitly inside the imagination of the children, at least in the first two books. Tins of corned beef becomes pemmican, a food used by explorers, and the most visible local hill becomes the peak of Darien. The epigraph to Swallows and Amazons chapter 1, is from On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats, the most famous sonnet in English other than those by Shakespeare.

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

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.