Swallows and Amazons.
Gosh! Was it really 60 years ago today that I was eight years old? Did the sun really shine all day in June back then? Did I really cycle from Westleton to Dunwich day after day, spending nights in a one man army tent on my father’s old ‘camp’ bed? Did the cafe on Dunwich beach really sell Dandelion and Burdock cordial?
A thick fog has descended over the marshes today, madness to drive over the potholed roads, so stay at home and amuse myself with just the aid of binoculars and watch ‘our’ Crane (if you are at Horsey Mere trying to count 22 of them – we have the missing one!) searching for his breakfast. Stay at home and reminisce of a time of conkers and ginger pop and dandelion and burdock, when being eight years old didn’t involve being driven to school in a chelsea tractor for fear of what might happen to you on a bus, and ‘playing’ wasn’t what you did in your bedroom by the light of x-box. Bedrooms were for sleeping, profoundly, at the end of a day of exploration – with lino floors and ice on the inside of the windows they weren’t fit for much else – or perhaps catching a chapter or two of ‘Swallows and Amazons’, still the bible for child rearing in the 50s, but read avidly by small children as inspiration for the next day.
‘Send them out’, ‘wear them out’, and tinned mandarin oranges with carnation milk for an occasional treat. Supply with rickety bicycle or small dinghy if possible. Make do with wooden box lightly fixed to old pram wheels if not. Do not feed pet guinea pig for them, nor clean its hutch, but attend ritual funeral (in an old Kilner jar!) as required as an important part of teaching them to take care of pets and feed them occasionally. Apply bandages as necessary.
Whilst doing some research in order to write this piece, I fell over a ten year old offering from the ‘Commissioner for Children’. He was concerned that children no longer had the opportunity to live with the freedoms we knew as children. His solution?
The commissioner hopes to promote the idea of supervised theme parks, where children could climb trees and indulge in creative play overseen by adult volunteers who could be drawn from the retired. He cited organisations such as the Scouts, Girlguiding, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and the Outward Bound Trust as those that offered the chance for children to learn about physical risk.
*Sigh* Risk free adventure. Surely an oxymoron?
Swallows and Amazons, all 13 editions, was quintessentially English. Those long limbed children, full of curiosity, courage, rivalry, tanned from hours in the sun, formed the mindset of a generation – this was what it meant to be English! This was the generation that grew to be fearful of an influx of ‘foreigners’, Syrian refugees arriving from war torn Aleppo on our beaches in small dinghies to take the jobs of our true Englishmen…
True to politically correct form, the BBC has decided, just before a referendum that will surely turn on just how you feel about ‘foreigners’, to resurrect ‘Swallows and Amazons’. BBC Films/Harbour films will have the result in cinemas on August 19th. Young actors and actresses that epitomise teenage ‘english’ girls and boys have been hired to play the parts of the four Walker children John, Susan, Titty and Roger, and the Blackett children.
Titty, for unfathomable reasons, has been renamed ‘Tatty’. ‘Titty’ apparently being too reminiscent of ‘breasts’ to be allowed into a film awash with nubile female teenagers. ‘Roger’ with its many connotations, was allowed to remain ‘Roger’.
Yet the casting of such very ‘English’ faces is not only surprising from the BBC but problematic from the viewpoint of authenticity. For the bronzed limbs of John, Susan, Titty and Roger didn’t come from their open air lifestyle, nor the currently existent English sun – but their patriarchal heritage.
The Altounyan children on whom Arthur Ransome based his magical tales, hailed from Aleppo in Syria…now why would the BBC not want to reflect that?
The Altounyan children.
Since the BBC are intent on updating the stories, should there not be at least one Syrian refugee in the story, preferably in a wheelchair, with an ongoing battle with the DLA to have the Dinghy adapted for him?
Perhaps they could sail off the Sea Paling coast and rescue drowning Albanian ‘tourists’?
And yes, 60 years ago, I could cycle from Westleton to Dunwich, with a wood and canvas contraption tied to my back with rope…
I couldn’t do it today.
- Cornish Lark
June 1, 2016 at 11:50 am -
Happy Birthday Anna!! xx
- Mark in Mayenne
June 1, 2016 at 11:57 am -
Happy birthday Anna Rockccoon
- Joe Public
June 1, 2016 at 12:11 pm -
Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself, eh? Happy birthday!
With age comes the experience for reminiscences.
” …. tinned mandarin oranges with carnation milk for an occasional treat.”
The daily spoonful of malt extract.
Evaporated milk – pah – the illicit teaspoonful of neat condensed milk.
And not forgetting Camp coffee.
- Ellen Coulson
June 1, 2016 at 12:20 pm -
Afraid I never read Swallows & Amazons. We never had ginger pop but remember the Corona man used to come round and mother would always buy 2 bottles.
I was 68 in January. For most of my young days we lived in half of maternal grandparents’ house. We had no electricity and no running water in the house but there was a scullery next door which had cold water tap, gas cooker and copper boiler for laundry. Toilet was quite a way down garden and emptied by Council. No toilet paper but sheets of newspaper. Used to be scary going out at night with no lights to use it – you always seemed to hear something rustling and lilac bush outside. Of course, we had tin bath in front of the fire.
Never seemed to hear of people with asthma though.
- Mudplugger
June 1, 2016 at 12:29 pm -
- Andrew Duffin
June 1, 2016 at 12:36 pm -
Happy Birthday Anna!
20 years ago I couldn’t wait to read those books to my children, and now I can’t wait to read them to my grand-daughter – unless her dad gets there first.
My grandfather gave me a copy of “Peter Duck” for my ninth birthday – I still have it. By the time I was eleven I had read all of them; the sailing dinghy followed a couple of years later (£47/10, iirc, for a kit from Bell Woodworking). Over the years it’s gradually morphed into a 12m sailing yacht, but I’m still the same little boy at heart.
Happy Days.
And no, we didn’t live in a cardboard box (“you were lucky…” etc etc)
- Stewart Cowan
June 1, 2016 at 1:03 pm -
When I was about eight, my friend (also eight) and I used to go down to the river until he turned up at my front door one evening and asked me, “Do you want to go to the R.I.V.E.R.?” as if my parents, a few yards away, were unable to spell. That put an end to my river adventures for a while.
It’s unfortunate though, what has happened, as you say. Children today don’t have the same freedom, which is probably the reason they are more likely to seek ‘adventure’ by getting drunk or stoned.
Another Pyrrhic victory for the lunatics.
Anyway. Enjoy the day. x
- Yvonne
June 1, 2016 at 6:37 pm -
I have long argued that kids need some danger. I feel that it is a consequence of being wrapped in cotton wool that once kids are of an age to get out and about they actually seek danger, setting fire to objects, throwing stones at windows (the danger of being caught), swimming in unsafe reservoirs, running in front of trains and the like. If they were able to have a certain amount to risk and danger earlier, like playing besides the river with fishing rods, the greater dangers would be less of a sought after drug.
My kids were given a fair bit of freedom, even living in a more dangerous part of the world, and have thankfully been better for it. On the other hand I was a bookworm and my adventures were mostly via Hardy Boys and such, although my bicycle got fair wear and tear.
Many Happy Returns Anna
- Stewart Cowan
June 1, 2016 at 10:15 pm -
Yes, the danger of being caught (for doing something ‘forbidden’) is probably part of the allure. If it’s denied by constant nannying and monitoring then it’ll probably have to come out eventually. I was reserved as a child and ended up on a decade-long drink binge in my 20s-30s. I did have some adventures as a child, of course, but I never, for example, climbed a decent-sized tree.
I think there’s a lot more to this agenda of mollycoddling than meets the eye. It conditions children to grow up to believe whatever they’re told, to be emotionally and spiritually dysfunctional and unable to deal with relationships when they’re adults. It’s a subversion technique to create a generation of spoiled, entitled, uninformed, easily-controlled drones whose ‘friends’ are drink, drugs, meaningless sex and other bad habits and who are therefore not a danger to the Establishment’s power.
(That’s enough sociology, Ed)
- Stewart Cowan
- Yvonne
- JuliaM
June 1, 2016 at 1:10 pm -
Many happy returns! And may you have many more.
- Fat Steve
June 1, 2016 at 1:25 pm -
Happy Birthday Anna …..though sorry you do make me really angry !
This piece of prose of its sort is frankly perfect and to think it might not endure beyond the lifetime of your web site is something of a crime….no not something of a crime…… simply criminal.
I don’t need to explain why I think it’s great …..just read T.S Eliot on literary criticism. - Carol42
June 1, 2016 at 1:27 pm -
Happy birthday Anna and many happy returns. Mine is on the 10th. My grandchildren have recently moved back to Scotland where they do have a lot more freedom and can go out to play but not as much freedom as we had sadly.
- right_writes
June 1, 2016 at 2:00 pm -
Happy birthday Anna and thanks for these memories…
I was just wondering whether sixty years ago was before global warming, since that was the year of my birth and I can’t remember?
But I do remember mandarins and evap, and strawberries and condensed milk… Ideal and Carnation thereof.
For me, no such freedoms, being raised in London suburbs, instead we used to play on an old pig farm owned by the Co-Op that we used to call “the dump”. We used to climb the trees and shake the conkers out, and chuck stones at the dumped TV sets… Unwind the wire out of transformers, and build camps out bits of old timber.
Shame upon shame, I used to hunt butterflies, kill them and set them out and then add them to my collection… I had that collection right up until my youngest daughter took it to school and it was confiscated by a lefty teacher, I really couldn’t be bothered to argue since the kids in her class had destroyed them anyway.
I also remember my last day at cubs, which was a day at Gilwell Park, where “Red Wolf”, gave me a severe telling off for being a boy and daring to climb a tree… That was the last straw, I left the WolfCubs and stayed at home to watch the rest of the World Cup matches on the TV.
And don’t forget…
Out Out Out!
- Hadleigh Fan
June 1, 2016 at 2:52 pm -
I lament the loss of Titty, who allegedly has become Tatty in the series, but then what about the generations of Dicks, Fannys and Willies? Or those inconvenient combinations of an initial or forename with a surname? Blimey, it won’t be long before the Thomases can’t call their son John!
May I recommend Russell Ash’s ‘Potty, Fartwell and Knob’ to those of you who like such names, or Christina Hardyment’s ‘Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint’s Trunk’ for anyone in search of the real locations for Ransome’s adventures in the Lake District and elsewhere, including the Broads. Incidentally, a publication on the formation of the Norfolk Broads, entitled ‘The Making of the Broads’ excites our US cousins to ribaldry, despite it having been published by the august Royal Geographical Society.
- Daedalus Parrot
June 1, 2016 at 3:03 pm -
Happy Birthday Ma’am.
If you’re intending to host a Birthday shindig for the public without clashing with one of the Queen’s many birthday ceremonies, I believe Jan 2017 is free.
All the best
- El Coyote
June 1, 2016 at 3:11 pm -
Many happy returns, and thanks for reminding me of the book series that saw me through many a rainy day in my own youth. I drove my mother mad begging her for a dinghy, but settled for a second-hand bicycle which accompanied me on many adventures. Lovely memories!
- Misa
June 1, 2016 at 3:16 pm -
Anna,
Thank you for another wonderful year.
Many happy returns! - Don Cox
June 1, 2016 at 3:44 pm -
Happy Birthday Anna !!!
I think the main reason for the loss of freedom for children is the traffic. The Political Correctness just ads to this.
When I read Ransome’s books today, I find they haven’t (for me) worn well. Hugh Lofting’s books on the other hand are still as good as ever. (Now available in a censored edition.)
- The Nasally Unblocked Dwarf
June 1, 2016 at 4:05 pm -
Happy Birthday Anna, may it long remain a habit you find hard to break and on the subject of you staying fit and well for yet another year; please note that Astaxanthin does N O T prevent summer colds. I would blow a party streamer in celebration of your big day but the friends I’m staying with only redecorated recently….
- thelastfurlong
June 1, 2016 at 5:30 pm -
Very interesting post. Brought back so many wonderful reading memories. I read every book! But I lived in Africa! The stories were what I imagined England to be like. We also grew up with Pooh, Toad, Charles Dickens, and other stuff. And we brought our kids up the same. And they had a wonderful wild upbringing on a smallholding on the edge of virgin bush full of animals. Twenty years ago my husband decided to “come home”. England was a shock for me. Everyone was so weird! And I’d never heard of health and safety till then. It took me a long time, but I did realise that there were REAL people here too – ones, that, like me, had been touched by memory of England as it used to be.
Happy birthday.
- Don Cox
June 1, 2016 at 8:21 pm -
There are still some real people in England. But there are a lot of plastic replicas, that spend their time in meetings or sending emails to one another.
- thelastfurlong
June 1, 2016 at 9:06 pm -
Heeee – yes – met those plastic people! You can tell the difference between plastic and real by the inspiration that the real people radiate. Real ones always make me feel nourished.
- thelastfurlong
- Don Cox
- Eddy
June 1, 2016 at 5:51 pm -
Happy Birthday most talented raccoon. I hope there a few more years and adventures still to come.
Can I second fat Steve’s comment and beg you to put pen to paper and write up you most adventurous life for the benefit of young raccoons still to come. They will benefit greatly from your wit and wisdom and so shall we old timers. - The Jannie
June 1, 2016 at 9:12 pm -
Happy birthday from the Home for the Bewildered. Lang may yer lum reek!
- Bandini
June 1, 2016 at 9:14 pm -
Happy Birthday, Anna. Thanks for another lovely read.
(‘Brendon Chase’ by B.B. was my ‘Swallows & Amazons’ – suitable for adults as well as children.)
- DtP
June 1, 2016 at 10:56 pm -
Last summer was strange when I heard a parent holler the name of their offspring from their doorstep, round about teatime, and I suddenly realised that used to happen all the time – it was like parental snipers picking off kids one or two at a time leaving the last one standing to kick their heels and wander home for their fishfingers, beans and chips. When parenting, and bloody good parenting to boot, consisted of ‘be home for your tea’ and job done – yeah, we’ve lost a helluva lot perhaps. Hmm.
Joyous felicitations and here’s hoping you and Mr G get messing about on the river again in perhaps more clement weather!
Hippy hoppy birthday
- Michael
June 1, 2016 at 11:46 pm -
Happy birthday!
- johnd2008
June 2, 2016 at 2:23 am -
I have an extra 10 years over you so can remember even better times. The winter of 1947 when there wasn’t even coal for the living room fire and no electricity either. Double summertime so that it was light at 10pm still. We had some fields to play in when we were tired of playing in the canal.Hometime was when the 10 o’clock milk train went past. I remember one quote from Swallows & Amazons, from the childrens father who was a naval officer abroad somewhere. He had been asked about letting the children camp on the island and his reply went: “Better drowned than duffers.If not duffers will not drown”
- michael
June 2, 2016 at 8:41 am -
Happy Birthday Anna! Brendon Chase and Island in the Pines (I think) were my favourites. I have lived abroad for 50+ years and do not wish to return to what England seems to be now. Nostalgia apart, Anna’s blog provides the solid (and well-researched) commonsense that we used to take for granted.
- David
June 2, 2016 at 9:17 am -
Onwards and upwards, ‘Carpe diem’, felix natalis.
- Opus
June 2, 2016 at 9:18 am -
How curious. Only a day or so ago I was thinking about Swallows and Amazons for the first time in decades – I read most but am not now sure which – and looked up Ransome on Wiki. My purpose – one not mentioned by Anna – was to remind myself as to whether boys and girls could and did play together. Actually, in the main, despite S&A I don’t think that they did. Perhaps more importantly S&A comes from a time when boys and girls could happily be sent off in the morning and told to get lost and not return until the evening. To that extent I could as a child and surely did identify with S&A. Appalled , frankly, now by helicopter parenting – but I speak as someone without issue..
- macheath
June 2, 2016 at 10:42 am -
Back when I was in teacher training, the mere mention of Arthur Ransome would unleash a storm of vitriolic outrage upon the unfortunate student who had thus outed him- or herself as an enemy of the people. Given the usual BBC recruiting ground, it is amazing that they found anyone who had been permitted to handle such tainted literature.
Given that, in the blinkered, binary world of the orthodox left-wingers, English children who went to boarding school and had domestic staff simply must have been hideously white (in rather the same was that ‘everyone knows’ the Virgin Mary wore blue), the casting may well have been a nod to perceived public expectation.
As for the optimistic commissioner’s ‘adult volunteers who could be drawn from the retired’, two ripostes; CRB and H&S. Having paid a fortune (and waited an eternity) for the first and been given the inevitable risk assessment forms to fill in by the second, any desire to serve the community in this capacity would surely be ebbing away fast.
Meanwhile, and slightly belatedly, many happy returns, Madame Raccoon!
(I did comment in a rather more timely fashion but it seems to have vanished into the ether – hopefully this one has better luck!)
- mike fowle
June 2, 2016 at 1:58 pm -
Happy Birthday. I loved Swallows and Amazons as a child. I would not re-read them now as the magic would probably be destroyed. If you want a modern take I recommend Julia Jones (who has Arthur Ransome’s old boat) and her Strong Winds trilogy engenders both the excitement and also the outrage at injustice that one feels as a child.
- Another Mike
June 15, 2016 at 5:56 pm -
Well, I’m 63 still regularly read all the Ransome S & A books, and the magic is the same as it was when I was a child, I also read them from a scholarly point of view being interested in Ransome’s ideas and techniques.
I did read the first of the Julia Jones’ trilogy and was most disappointed, especially as it was marketed on the back of her slim link with Ransome.
- Another Mike
- Oi you
June 2, 2016 at 3:03 pm -
I used to spend all day out with my mates, mostly in the streets surrounding my parents’ house, or the fields slightly further on, driving the farmer potty with camps made out of his hay bales, ruining our shoes as we made dams in the stream, swinging on the rope someone had hung from a tree, trying not to fall in. Oh the fun we had! The games of cowboys and indians, cops and robbers. We were so much more creative back then, no expensive toys to occupy our minds. Just the thought of lime jelly and carnation milk brings it all back…
I revisited that area a while back and my old school has been turned into a car park and those fields are now a housing estate. Ho hum. Progress, eh?
Happy birthday, by the way!
:o)
- Andrew Duffin
June 3, 2016 at 2:56 pm -
Ransome himself was a complex and interesting character.
He was married for a while to Trotsky’s secretary, no less; and it seems certain that he was some sort of intelligence agent or even double agent.
Certainly he travelled extensively in Russia.
Better drowned than duffers…what a wonderful approach to child-rearing.
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