Swallows and Amazons For Ever!

This week, I finished reading Winter Holiday, the fourth in Arthur Ransome’s lovely Swallows and Amazons series of children’s novels. I think these gentle, unassuming books, about British schoolchildren having adventures on their holidays, are remarkable for many reasons.

They are remarkable for their wealth of practical, technical detail, which gives them a lived-in and grounded quality we might not expect if we think of children’s literature primarily as a domain of airy make-believe. (In fact, my eyes sometimes glaze over as I wade through the descriptions of sailing – a fact for which the books’ heroes would certainly reproach me.)

They are also adept at characterization, in a pleasingly understated way. Ransome does not do what modern screenwriting textbooks urge, giving each character a defining scene that neatly encapsulates their most important traits upfront. After reading the first book, I doubt I could have easily rattled off many specifics about any of the Walker children; but after spending four books with them, I regularly find myself mentally responding to their actions with “What a Susan thing to do!” or “Such a Roger thing to say!”

I could also say quite a lot in praise of Ransome’s skillful plotting: each book gets off to an amiably rambling start, with little in the way of dramatic stakes or narrative thrust, yet builds organically to a climax that pulls together threads you didn’t realize were being quietly seeded in all along.

I think the Swallows and Amazons novels are most remarkable, though, for a particular quality which is at once intangible and yet very specific. G.K. Chesterton has described what I am trying to get at better than I could in the first chapter of Orthodoxy. After describing an idea for a story about an English yachtsman who miscalculates his course and winds up back in England under the mistaken impression that he has discovered a new island in the South Seas, Chesterton writes:

What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? … How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?

Chesterton defines this delicate “mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar” as “practical romance” – “the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.” And I am not certain I have ever read a book which more exactly embodies Chesterton’s description of “practical romance” than Swallows and Amazons. Indeed, a passage from the first novel – after the Walker children have first laid claim to “Wild Cat Island” – practically reads like an illustration of Chesterton’s point:

Since yesterday the field path and the gate into the wood on the way to Darien and the farm at Holly Howe had all turned into foreign country. They were quite different places now that you came to them by water from an island of your own. They were not at all what they had been when you lived there and saw the island far away over the water. Coming back to them was almost the same thing as exploration. It was like exploring a place that you have seen in a dream, where everything is just where you expect it and yet everything is a surprise.

This quality of “practical romance” is, I think, closely wound up with Ransome’s prose. Perhaps more than any other writer of children’s fiction I can think of, he strikes a fine balance between inhabiting the perspective of his child characters and maintaining the perspective of a mature narrator. He describes the experiences and feelings of children with dry, quintessentially British understatement, and yet without an ounce of adult condescension. Most delightfully, he transitions seamlessly between “real-life” and “make-believe” by describing the latter as simply and matter-of-factly as the former.

This stylistic device is established in the very first paragraph, which describes seven-year-old Roger, the youngest of the Walker family, running “in wide zigzags” up a sloping field. Ransome does not tell us that Roger is “pretending” to be a sailboat: he tells us that Roger “could not run straight against the wind because he was a sailing vessel” (emphasis mine). In fact, I seldom remember Ransome using the word “pretend”; his narratorial voice simply commits itself to what the children are imagining, and shifts gears, as it were, as freely and fluidly as a child’s mind does. Here is another favorite example of mine, from the second book, Swallowdale:

Roger blundered out into the bright sunlight, flapped his arms and blinked his eyes. Just for the moment he was being a bat disturbed at midday, but he was an explorer again and a ship’s boy before the others had noticed that he was being a bat.

The hidden beauty of the novels is that they posit only the gentlest of tension between reality and imagination. For the purposes of the Walker children’s adventures, their mother may be a “native” – but she is “the best of all natives.” The Blackett sisters’ Uncle Jim can be the pirate Captain Flint, engaged in mortal strife with his young foes, and that is delightful; but Captain Flint can also be Uncle Jim, preparing a feast for the children or helping them repair their boat’s broken mast, and that is also delightful. Real life and make-believe complement each other like partners in a dance, neither diminishing the other.

I will conclude with one of the closing passages from Winter Holiday, which perfectly encapsulates a Chestertonian “mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar”:

Dorothea crept quietly to the middle window and stood there, trying not to see the lantern’s reflection in the glass, while she looked out at the earliest beginnings of the February dawn. White snow everywhere, even on the Arctic ice, and dim dark patches in the distance marking the leafless woods. Immediately below the windows she could see deep footprints and tracks in the snow. No snow had fallen since the rescue parties had arrived, and it was easy to see what a struggle they had had. Faintly, on either side of the frozen lake, she could see the white shapes of the hills. The North Pole? Well, nothing could be more wintry or lonelier than this.

And then she turned round and looked again at the homely, comfortable scene. There was the lantern hanging from the Pole, and the bit of paper labelling the Pole for what it was. There were the sleeping explorers and Captain Flint and Mrs Blackett sleeping too. Titty was dozing again. Steam was drifting from the spout of the kettle. Nancy and Susan were debating in whispers, wanting to break up some more wood for the fire, but afraid of the noise it would make.

In two paragraphs, Ransome juxtaposes a scene of high adventure with a scene of the utmost homeliness. The genius of the Swallows and Amazons books is the way they turn effortlessly from one to the other and back again.