The more I read of their invented world, the more I recalled some of the adventures I had with my large group of cousins during our own school holidays, leaving the house just after breakfast and sometimes not returning until it was time for tea. They eat some odd sounding meals – it took me a while to work out that the ingredient they call pemmican is something like SPAM – but they are not so far away from civilisation that they miss out on cakes and other treats from their mother and the nearby farm. Adults are transformed into ‘natives’, the map of the lake is re-drawn with their own names assigned to its inlets and bays, the fish they catch become ‘sharks’ and the pebbles for which they dive are ‘pearls’. It’s a novel in the long tradition of ‘island stories’ but instead of travelling to far off places and encountering pirates as the kids do in Treasure Island for example, the children here base their adventures on a small island in one of the Lake District’s lakes (some local experts claim it’s Lake Windermere, others that it’s Coniston Water.) Influenced by their reading of Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island the Walker children and the Blackett girls let their imaginations roam free. But once I’d got over that barrier I began to appreciate this tale of a bunch of children who get to go off on adventures without too much interference from adults. It contained far too much about the mechanics of sailing in which I have little interest. I admit that, despite the fact it was voted in a 2003 BBC poll as one of the nation’s favourite reads, I didn’t warm to this book initially. But it was a set text on my children’s literature course so in I plunged. I never read Swallows and Amazons as a child – in fact I never heard the title mentioned even among any of my friends. Mistakes are set right, apologies given, the children become firm friends with Captain Flint and all resolve to meet again the following summer. But of course, since this is a book intended for child readers, all must come right in the end.

Initially ‘enemies’ the Swallows and the Amazons enjoy a few skirmishes until they agree to band together against a common foe – the Blacketts’ uncle James whom they call “Captain Flint” who angers them by thinking them responsible for the theft of his precious trunk. His novel relates the outdoor adventures and play of the two sets of children who are spending the summer holidays in the Lake District. Ransome, who was a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, was inspired to write the book after a summer spent giving sailing lessons to the children of some friends. It introduces the Walker children, John, Susan, Titty and Roger (the Swallows), the camp they create on Wild Cat island and their adventures with the two intrepid Blackett sisters (the Amazons). Swallows and Amazons was the first title in Arthur Ransome’s classic series of 12 novels written between 19.

Swallows and amazons novel