Arthur Ransome - Coot Club, The Big Six, etc.

[Barnard]

Although the entire Swallows and Amazons series is really good, the best book is We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea. In my opinion this is a masterpiece.

[timv]

The masterly atmospheric description of the children adrift in the fog is Ransome at his best - and he also has his characters, even the most competent ones, showing real fears and self-doubts. John Walker, the eldest, is constantly worrying about whether he was right to take the yacht, drifting down the channel from Shotley (Suffolk, near Harwich, at the mouth of the River Orwell) out to sea in an outgoing tide in thick fog, right out to sea so as to avoid the risk of their running aground on the mud if he tries to turn round and head back up the river without knowing where he is; Susan tries to stay confident to calm the younger ones down but is close to a breakdown at one point when it gets dark and John still refuses to turn round in case they get more lost and/or run aground. Unlike a lot of children's authors' 'unrealistically' confident and capable teenagers in adventure stories, Ransome showed his as putting on a 'front'; he is a sharp contrast with the lack of emotion or doubt showed by the gun-toting young adventurers in the contemporary 1940s books of , for example, Gwendolen Courtney. Perhaps the nearest that Enid comes to Ransome's brave but secretly more nervy heroes in a major 'trial' is the second Adventurous Four book?

Ransome lived near the site of the 'going adrift' incident In We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea at the time of writing this book, in a flat at Harkstead Hall near Shotley. He regularly sailed from Pin Mill which appears in the book - as does his real life friend there, Mary Powell, and her famous cakes. 'Jim Brading' is thought by Ransome's 1985 biographer Hugh Brogan to be based on Ransome's real life young sailing companion Jim Clay, and the yacht 'Goblin' to be based on Ransome's own boat. Indeed, the author even sailed his yacht along the exact route used in the book as far as Flushing in Holland, partly at night as the children do in the book, to get the facts right; the scary encounter with the oblivious ferry that nearly runs the children's yacht down happened to him . A major case of dedication to making sure the book was accurate!

[Courtenay]

I think that's one of my mum's favourites too — she has the whole series, or very nearly! I've still only read the first book, which is something I must rectify one day...

[Barnard]

We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea is the greatest children’s novel ever written. It is not far off the greatest novel ever written. It is a highly recommended read.

[Anita Bensoussane]

We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea is one of my favourites too, Barnard (welcome to the forums, by the way!) It's interesting to hear that Arthur Ransome took the same route in his yacht, Tim. No wonder the story feels so tense and so real.

[Katharine]

Moved from another topic.


I've just finished reading 'Peter Duck' by Arthur Ransome.

I've read several of the books in the series before, but don't remember reading that one. I know a couple of 'purists' who don't rate this book as highly as the others in the series, however I quite enjoyed it.

I found it a bit hard going at the start - the chapters seemed very long and there was a lot of technical boating jargon, however once the adventure/plot got going I was hooked. So much so in fact that I'm feeling rather bleary eyed today as I ended up staying up until gone midnight last night because I wanted to know how it finished.

My next book will be an Enid Blyton collection of short stories - I feel I need something a little more gentle.

[timv]

'Peter Duck' is an intriguing story, which was clearly at least partly written by Ransome before he published the second Swallows and Amazons book 'Swallowdale' (which precedes PD in the publication order) as bits of its story and some characters are referenced there, but as a story made up in the winter holidays after the action of 'Swallows and Amazons' by the children - primarily by Titty Walker. The original PD himself is referenced as a doll in sailor costume owned by T; and the PD book was sub-titled by Ransome as 'Their Own Story' which agrees with this idea. The swashbuckling search for real treasure, the Caribbean setting, and the villainous Black Jake are thus originally intended as a sign of the children using their imaginations and referencing 'Treasure Island' by RL Stevenson as a source - the book is a two-layered story, a story by the main S and A families then presented later as a 'real' story that is seemingly actually occurring in the same world as the S and A 'domestic' UK adventures. This double layer of stories within the fictional world of an author is unusual and clever, and AR probably repeats it in 'Missee Lee' given the latter's exotic location (S China) and characters and the links to AR's own overseas trips as a journalist.

Later research on Ransome's papers revealed that he had originally intended the book as published to be preceded by a first chapter where the Walkers and Blacketts are staying at a wherry (a large sailed cargo boat used on the Broads and in the North Sea to carry goods and local produce around) on the Broads for a Christmas holiday with 'Captain Flint' when they cannot go sailing in bad weather so they make up a story about a summer voyage to the Caribbean - and the story of Peter Duck is that story, led by Nancy with her enthusiasm for pirates. Peter Duck is the retired sailor who is helping Captain Flint man the wherry and take it up and down the rivers , and he makes suggestions for the story - and gets put in it. But the original PD was in fact a real person, a retired Estonian sailor called Captain Sehmel who crewed AR's yacht 'Racundra' when he was sailing on the Gulf of Bothnia and off the Estonian coast in the early 1920s while based in Tallinn, capital of Estonia, as the 'Guardian's correspondent on events in the fledgling USSR. Due to the security situation in Russia, WW1 and Russian Civil War reporter Ransome preferred to live in safer Estonia, and just go to Russia on journalistic interview missions - and he was living with his then girlfriend (and later second wife) Evgenia, Trotsky's former secretary who he had had to get out of Russia for her safety and could not go back once Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over.

Captain Sehmel had in fact sailed as a young man on British 'clipper' ships taking corn and tea from the Far East to the UK, as PD does in the book, and PD's rude comments about steamships were taken from life. The Estonian/ Baltic links of PD are little known now, but have appeared in AR's biographies and in a book on the background to AR's stories in 1984? by BBC journalist Chrstina Hardyment ('AR and Captain Flint's Trunk') .

[Katharine]

Thanks for sharing the background info to Peter Duck.

I'd already read Swallowdale so was aware that Peter Duck was supposed to be an imaginary character. I'm not sure whether a preceding chapter would have worked or not. When I first started reading the book, I had in the back of my mind that it wasn't 'real', but then I started to question it a little - would Nancy really have been happy to have a story made up about her where she was very seasick for the first day?

I can't recall what they were now, but I'm sure there were one or two other little bits that made me think it was odd if the children were talking about themselves, the comments didn't seem to quite fit.

I thought the descriptions of the storms were amazing - I wonder if Arthur Ransome had experienced something like them himself.

The one think I felt lacking slightly from the book was food, although perhaps given the length of the book, it was just as well it didn't get padded out with lots of descriptions of meals. There were some references, but mostly to hot cups of tea. I suppose I'm more used to Enid's style - I think most of her books usually had children preparing and/or eating meals of some description.

[Debbie]

I love Peter Duck and my son did too.

It does have a very different feel to the other stories, except Missee Lee, which is one of my least favourite AR books.
I read it before I heard the explanation that the children had made up the story (as with ML) , but when I realised that it made sense except for one thing, which is exactly what Katharine says: Would Captain Nancy really have accepted that she was sea sick?

In Missee Lee my similar question is: would Roger really have been happy to have his monkey blamed for the sinking of the ship? Even if the others wanted it, I'm sure Susan would have told them they were upsetting Roger and they would have given way.