Swallows and Amazons
is the first book in the Swallows and Amazons series by English
author Arthur Ransome; it was first published in 1930, with the
action taking place in the summer of 1929 in the Lake District. The
book introduces central protagonists John, Susan, Titty and Roger
Walker (Swallows) and their mother and baby sister, as well as Nancy
and Peggy Blackett (Amazons) and their uncle Jim, commonly referred
to as Captain Flint.
At the time, Ransome
had been working as a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, but
decided to become a full-time author rather than go abroad as a
foreign correspondent. He did continue to write part-time for the
press, however.
The book was
inspired by a summer spent by Ransome teaching the children of his
friends, the Altounyans, to sail. Three of the Altounyan children's
names are adopted directly for the Walker family. Ransome and Ernest
Altounyan bought two small dinghies called Swallow and Mavis. Ransome
kept Swallow until he sold it a number of years later, while Mavis
remained in the Altounyan family and is now on permanent display in
the Ruskin Museum. However, later in life Ransome tried to downplay
the Altounyan connections, changing the initial dedication of
Swallows and Amazons and writing a new foreword which gave other
sources. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 57 on the BBC's
survey The Big Read.
The book relates the
outdoor adventures and play of two families of children. These
involve sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and piracy. The Walker
children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) are staying at a farm near a
lake in the Lake District of England, during the school holidays.
They sail a borrowed dinghy named Swallow and meet the Blackett
children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail a dinghy named Amazon. The
Walkers camp on an island in the lake while the Blacketts live in
their house nearby. When the children meet, they agree to join forces
against a common enemy - the Blacketts' uncle James Turner whom they
call "Captain Flint" (after the character in Treasure
Island). Turner, normally an ally of his nieces, has withdrawn from
their company in order to write his memoirs, and has become decidedly
unfriendly. Furthermore, when the Blacketts let off a firework on his
houseboat roof, it is the Walkers who get the blame. He refuses even
to listen when they try to pass on a warning to him about burglars in
the area.
In order to
determine who should be the overall leader in their campaign against
Captain Flint, the Blacketts and the Walkers have a contest to see
which can capture the others' boat. As part of their strategy the
Walkers make a dangerous crossing of the lake by night, and John is
later cautioned by his mother for this reckless act. The Walkers
nevertheless win the contest - thanks to Titty who seizes the Amazon
when the Blacketts come to Wild Cat Island. During the same night
Titty hears suspicious voices coming from a different island -
Cormorant Island - and in the morning it transpires that Turner's
houseboat has been burgled. Turner again blames the Walkers, but is
finally convinced that he is mistaken and feels he was wrong to
distance himself from his nieces' adventures all summer. The
Swallows, Amazons and Turner investigate Cormorant Island, but they
cannot find Turner's missing trunk.
The following day
there is a mock battle between Turner and the children, after which
Turner is tried for his crimes and forced to walk the plank on his
own houseboat. They agree at the post-battle feast that on the final
day of their holidays Titty and Roger will go back to Cormorant
Island while the others go fishing. Titty finds the trunk, which
contains the memoirs on which Turner had been working, and is
rewarded with Turner's green parrot.
James Turner appears
in some ways to be modelled on Ransome himself. The story, set in
August 1929, includes a good deal of everyday Lakeland life from the
farmers to charcoal burners working in the woods; corned beef, which
the children fancifully refer to as pemmican, and ginger beer and
lemonade, which they call grog, appear as regular food stuff for the
campers; island life also allows for occasional references to the
story of Robinson Crusoe.
A British film
Swallows and Amazons is scheduled for release in 2016, with director
Philippa Lowthorpe. The film features Sherlock's Andrew Scott, plus
Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen as the renamed Tatty.
Swallows
and Amazons review – sails on merrily, despite spy ballast
3 / 5 stars
Children
messing about in boats is not enough for this adaptation, which
injects an adult espionage twist more Famous Five than Arthur Ransome
Peter Bradshaw
Sunday 24 July 2016
17.30 BST
Arthur Ransome’s
wholesome prewar classic of children’s literature is all about
fresh-faced girls and boys sailing dinghies around the Lake District
with no health-and-safety nonsense about flotation jackets. The 1930
novel is now given a good-natured, if self-conscious period
adaptation that grafts on a new grownup plotline of treachery and
derring-do, probably closer to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or John
Buchan.
It is as if the
children’s innocent fantasy world of pirates and adventurers isn’t
enough. The action must be ramped up. They have to get real baddies
to vanquish, but this new and implausible line in melodrama is taken
at the same pace and treated the same way as the children’s
innocuous high-jinks. There is even a frankly bizarre and not
entirely logical chase sequence aboard a train in which sinister
trench-coated figures behave strangely – to say the very least –
though somehow without drawing attention to themselves.
Kelly Macdonald
plays Mrs Walker, who is taking her boisterous four children away for
a summer holiday in the idyllic Lakeland fells while her husband, an
officer in the Royal Navy, is away in the far east. They are Susan
(Orla Hill), Roger (Bobby McCulloch), John (Dane Hughes) and Tatty
(Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen) – her name was “Titty” in the
original, and rather coyly changed.
On the way, the
children chance across the mysterious Mr Flint (Rafe Spall) who
appears to be being hunted down by an equally enigmatic figure played
by Andrew Scott – and the casting of these two principals should
probably tip us off as to which of them is the good guy.
The family arrive at
their cottage run by a hatchet-faced comedy yokel couple, Mr and Mrs
Jackson, played deadpan by Harry Enfield and Jessica Hynes. And the
children beg to be allowed to sail to an island in the middle of the
lake in Mr Jackson’s dinghy, the “Swallow”, and camp there –
only to find that two other children, Nancy (Seren Hawkes) and Peggy
(Hannah Jayne Thorp) have already staked a claim to it, and have a
dinghy of their own, called the “Amazon”. A high-spirited battle
commences, complicated by the unlikely danger they are in from the
adult world of espionage.
Swallows and Amazons
was always treasured for its innocent charm, and maybe Golding’s
Lord of the Flies made this kind of story unfashionable even before
our modern preoccupation with the danger that unaccompanied children
can be in. There’s no point updating the story, of course, and in
fact the girls do in any case take a reasonably bold and assertive
role in the adventure. Perhaps what there is to like about it is the
simple, almost action-free shots of people sailing their little craft
across the rippling lakes. And in fact nothing in the film rivals the
very real catastrophe of the children’s wicker basket full of
picnic food being lost overboard. This is despite the deployment of a
failed “man overboard” rescue manoeuvre – although in trying
this out, the children have in fact perfected it, and it is to come
in useful when there is a real man-overboard emergency.
This Swallows and
Amazons is decent enough: but probably best savoured on the small
screen after tea on a rainy Sunday.
 |
Backwards
to the future: how Britain’s nostalgia industry is thriving
From
the new film of Swallows and Amazons to Harry Potter, Britain is
obsessed with a past that never existed. What is this endless
Downtonisation all about?
Stuart Jeffries
Monday 25 July 2016
18.02 BST
Ron Howard had a
theory about why the US sitcom Happy Days was such a hit. The
Oscar-winning director, who played Richie Cunningham in the show,
argued that central to its appeal was that it was set in the 1950s,
before Vietnam, drugs and hippies, when teenagers were civil to their
elders. Happy Days – which ran from 1974 to 1984 – was, he told
me, a return to lost innocence before Watergate. It put the 50s back
into the 70s and made people happier.
The new film
adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s novel Swallows and Amazons, starring
Rafe Spall, Kelly Macdonald and Andrew Scott, has a similar nostalgic
function. It takes us back to 1935, a time before multicultural
Britain, swinging London, gay marriages, gender fluidity, online
avatars and goggles for conker contests.
It’s set in an era
before the Sodom and Gomorrah of onesies and flip-flops, when there
were only two kinds of nightwear – winceyette nighties and
winceyette pyjamas – and there was never any question of you
wearing either if you went to the shops.
Most importantly,
director Philippa Lowthorpe and writer Andrea Gibb take us back to
the time when the Great Outdoors was a place for wholesome
prepubescent rampaging rather than one so overrun with stabbings,
abductions and drug scores not to mention health and safety
infractions, that today’s fearful parents have decided for the most
part to keep their little twerps indoors. Better our Vitamin
D-deprived kids are under lock and key, safely eviscerating aliens
during PS4 Doom marathons.
At the press
screening for Swallows and Amazons, Gibb said her adaptation sought
to address our anxieties over helicopter parenting. That certainly is
what gives Ransome’s story relevance to our anxious, nostalgic
society. We have apparently raised – as the father of the four
sibling heroes of Swallows and Amazons would say – a generation of
duffers.
At the start, the
four Walker children are heading off for a Lake District holiday with
their mother, while their father is away with the Royal Navy. The
removal of the patriarch is a recurring plot device in nostalgic
children’s literature that involves urban kids finding themselves
giddily adrift in rural England. Think of Edith Nesbit’s The
Railway Children (in which the Edwardian paterfamilias is falsely
imprisoned as a spy) or, more recently, Michelle Magorian’s
Goodnight Mister Tom (in which a second world war evacuee finds a
surrogate father in a grumpy village widower). Both were made into
stirringly nostalgic films set in a simpler, gentler England.
Perhaps, if you
believe the premise of such books and their adaptations, only when
parents are away can children play. Even Harry Potter, though an
orphan, comes to imaginative life the further the Hogwarts Express
races him away from the quotidian dullness of his muggle family. And
how striking it is that the Hogwarts Express is a lovely old steam
train rather than a grisly Pendolino. For all that JK Rowling’s
franchise starts in the early 1990s, its charmed world time travels
back to an earlier Britain of retro locos and school gowns.
In Swallows and
Amazons, the Walker siblings, once installed in their lakeside rental
owned by a couple of satisfyingly lo-fi rustics called the Jacksons,
demand that they be allowed to sail across the deepest lake in
England and camp out on the island in the middle. Kelly Macdonald’s
Mrs Walker agonises over the risks of death by burning and drowning
such autonomy would entail, but eventually agrees. “I don’t want
them frightened of the world,” she says. “If life was always
early to bed, we’d never learn ’owt,” counsels Jessica Hynes’s
Mrs Jackson.
And so the Walker
siblings set off on theirawfully big adventure, one that would have
present-day health and safety ideologues crying into their
risk-averse muesli. Will they survive? Are canvas plimsols and
knitted sleeveless sweaters really what one should wear for an
excursion in Cumbria? Go see the film and find out.
Swallows and Amazons
could be seen as part of a reactionary nostalgic industry, part of
the Downtonising tendency. To Downtonise the past is to rid a book or
film or TV drama of the things that some in the audience might
dislike about the present – black people, uppity proles, uppity
Poles, women who don’t know their place, kids who have exchanged
their right to graze their knees outdoors for the right to contract
carpal tunnel syndrome indoors.
The tendency to
reverse backwards into the future is a particularly British
phenomenon. “Fifty years from now,” said John Major in 1993,
“Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county
grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools
fillers and – as George Orwell said – ‘old maids bicycling to
holy communion through the morning mist’ and if we get our way –
Shakespeare still read even in school.” Wouldn’t you like to live
there? Me neither.
Conservatives have
regularly used an apparently gilded past age as an alibi for
rubbishing the present. It is the basis of one of our most successful
export industries. In 1981, for instance, Jeremy Irons narrated the
lyrical introduction to Charles Sturridge’s ITV adaptation of
Brideshead Revisited: “Oxford in those days was still a city of
aquatint. When the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high
and clear over the gables and cupolas, she exhaled the soft airs of
centuries of youth.”
Evelyn Waugh’s
1945 novel already dripped with nostalgia for a pre-war England and
its allied oleaginous underlings (think Sebastian Flyte’s
ever-so-’umble barber). Sturridge effectively put that nostalgia to
work in Thatcher’s Britain. Just as Waugh’s novel, behind its
lament for lost innocence, expressed posh contempt for upstart prole
scum, so its TV adaptation was handily broadcast at a time when it
could serve the reactionaryagenda of a Conservative government that
spent the 80s destroying the organised working classes.
Thirty years later,
Downton Abbey similarly aided a later Tory government with its
depiction of Edwardian England as one in which the lower orders knew
their place and were contented with their lot. It fitted into the
reactionary Keep Calm and Carry On ethos that has permeated austerity
Britain from 2008 onwards, urging political quietism on those
suffering most from George Osborne’s public expenditure cuts. No
wonder the Tories gave that Downton creator and inveterate snob
Julian Fellowes a knighthood. Kirstie Allsopp should have been made a
dame, too, for her craft programme which, so far as I understood it,
had the subtext: crochet your way out of recession like they did in
the 1930s, whiney proles.
But British period
drama doesn’t always have a reactionary agenda. It is striking that
Lowthorpe worked as a director on Call the Midwife, the BBC series
set in London’s East End in the late 1950s and early 1960s based on
Jennifer Worth’s memoirs. Since 2012, it has been broadcast in the
Sunday-evening vintage slot. With its sweet midwives in cardies and
starched uniforms, it fits into that slot perfectly and courts the
Downton demographic perfectly. But, as Radio Times’ Alison Graham
argued, it should “take its place as the torchbearer of feminism on
television”, since it has dealt with domestic abuse, illegal
abortion, rape, the pill, women enslaved by dull marriages, poverty
and big families. “I believe the series should be shown to teenage
girls in schools across the country,” argued Graham.
Swallows and
Amazons, similarly, comes on cosy and nostalgic, but then wrongfoots
us. Lowthorpe and Gibb’s adaptation cunningly punches up the
subversive storyline of the Amazons. Lowthorpe rightly points out
that the proto-feminist girl gang are startlingly modern (and
apparently in keeping with Ransome’s counter-zeitgeisty views on
women). “They are definitely not your archetypal 1930s girl, and
for that they are wonderful,” says Lowthorpe. “They’re like
warriors, and they are funny and brave and up to no good.”
Otherwise, though,
the film helps make the past seem, not a foreign country, but a
better realm than the rubbish one we have inflicted on our enfeebled
offspring. It chimes with recent rose-tinted eulogies to childhood of
simpler times, captured in the following viral email:
“Congratulations to all my friends who were born in the 1940s, 50s
and 60s…. We ate white bread and real butter; drank cows’ milk
and soft drinks with sugar; but we weren’t overweight because... we
were always outside playing!” The corollary? Modern life is
rubbish.
It’s an abiding
theme. In her memoir of a growing up in suburban Ruislip in the
1950s, Michele Hanson wrote: “So what did ‘play’ mean back
then? There was barely any telly, no mobiles, iPhones or iPlayers, no
internet, computer games, PlayStations and no pop stars. We had only
the simplest of equipment: jacks, marbles, skipping-ropes, bats,
balls and bicycles. Most of the time, my friends and I made our own
games up: making perfume from rose petals, brewing ginger beer,
holding snail races, picking blackberries, making dens in the woods.”
The conviction that
the past was better speaks to our current anxieties. If Philippa
Lowthorpe and Andrea Gibb are looking for another book to adapt for a
film corrective to modern life, they should try Robin Stevens’s
cunning series of novels Murder Most Unladylike, set in a boarding
school in 1935, about two girls who run a detective agency. “Bother,”
says Hazel in Murder Most Unladylike at one point. “Daisy, my
pullover’s in the gym.” Bother? Pullovers? Is there any thing
more vexing than misplacing one’s knitwear? Not in this corner of
Downtonshire there isn’t.
Stevens’s genius
is to produce a mash-up of English fiction from the 1930s, 40s and
50s, borrowing the boarding-school setting (from Enid Blyton’s St
Clare novels no doubt) and erasing the unpalatable bits (PG
Wodehouse’s occasional racist stereotyping, say, or Blyton’s
insistence in the Famous Five mysteries that Anne is a wannabe
housewife to Dick and Julian, or Waugh’s posh-boy wail against the
rise of the common man).
But like Lowthorpe
and Gibb’s retread of Swallows and Amazons, Stevens wants to have
her twee and subvert it. Her heroines Daisy and Hazel are
proto-feminists like the Amazons, girls out of time gently
challenging the patriarchy. What’s more, instead of dramatising the
past as a means of going back to a time in Britain before
immigration, Stevens time-travels to right a racist wrong. The book’s
narrator is Hazel Wong, the daughter of a Hong Kong businessman, who
yearns to become the Chinese Sherlock Holmes. In a lovely scene in
First Class Murder, nasty Little Englanders travelling on the Orient
Express assume that Mr Wong must be a servant. He, marvellously, and
with great dignity, exposes their racist assumptions.
One reason Stevens’s
books are so successful is because, while part of a lucrativeBritish
nostalgia industry, they aren’t really about depicting the past
authentically but about recreating it to escape a present we don’t
like much. Her books teem with polite girls in boaters, white
ankle-socks and sensible plaits – the whole sartorial panoply of a
bygone age.
It’s hard to read
them, or watch the new film of Swallows and Amazons, without thinking
how much kinder, better-dressed, and simpler the world was in 1935.
Why can’t we have those times back? Because they never happened.
And Happy Days didn’t exist until we invented them.
• Swallows and
Amazons is released in the UK on 19 August
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