Arthur Ransome – nature writer?

This essay was originally written as a guest blog post for Land Lines, an AHRC funded project looking at British Nature Writing 1789-2014.

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There was really only ever one book that I was going to nominate in the Land Lines nature writing poll – Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I first read Swallows and Amazons. However, the memory of reading the books is inextricably linked with the memory of a row of hardback books in Whitehaven library. I probably loved the Jonathan Cape covers as much as the stories, with their simple one colour design filled with black and white illustrations – fragments of the story to come. That memory provides the clue to my age – I must have been less than ten years old as that was when we moved away from Cumbria.

This is the immediate thing that strikes me about Swallows and Amazons as my choice – it’s deeply nostalgic – for the books themselves (and indeed the library) and an early childhood that cannot possibly have been as I remember it – all walks by the lake and sunny weather. For one thing the west coast of Cumbria is no rural idyll – there are harsh realities about poor public transport and a lack of opportunities that ten year old me simply didn’t grasp. Nonetheless it is, in part, this fantasy of childhood that makes rereading Swallows and Amazons so magical to this day. The gap between the Walkers and the Blacketts and me felt quite slight – those were the adventures I could have had. This sense was of course heightened by familiarity with the landscape – these were places I knew right there on the page in front of me. To a child there’s something quite thrilling about that. Ransome’s Lake Country is a mixture of Lake Windermere and the area around Coniston Water – allowing him to mix up a lake, islands, woodlands, mountains, moors and streams as necessary – and I recognised all those elements.

This nostalgic feeling is perhaps no surprise as Ransome’s own nostalgia fed into the writing of the books. In 1958 he wrote:

I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons… it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston… We adored the place… While away from it, as children and grown-ups, we dreamt about it… Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.

Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884, spending the summers in the Lake District on holiday with his family. The descriptions of this time are full of nature rambles with his father, exploring, fishing and helping on the farm. However the holidays in Cumbria came to an end with the death of Ransome’s father in 1897, when Ransome was just 13. He attended Rugby school and later abandoned his college course in Leeds to become a publisher’s office boy in London. In 1913 he escaped an unhappy marriage and the routine of ordinary life by going to Russia to learn the language so he could study the country’s folklore. When war broke out the following year he became a war correspondent travelling in Russia, China and Egypt. He was well placed to report on the Russian Revolution and his excellent contacts led to him being accused of spying for both the Bolsheviks and Britain. He eventually returned to England in 1924 with his second wife, Evgenia. He worked as a foreign correspondent and also wrote an angling column – both for the Manchester Guardian. In 1929 and in poor health he resigned from the newspaper – turning down the job of Berlin correspondent in the process – and he and Evgenia settled in his beloved Lake District.

Swallows and Amazons was published in 1930 – the first in his enduringly popular series. It is essentially an island adventure story and like all good island adventure stories comes complete with a pirate and his parrot. it’s packed full of exploring, camping, sailing and adventures. There’s night sailing, a war, a storm and campfire cookery. The adults are mostly kept at arms length. The Walkers / Swallows (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) are staying in the Lake District on holiday and are given permission to camp out on an island on the lake. There they meet the Amazons (Nancy and Peggy Blackett) who live locally. It is the Amazons’ Uncle Jim who becomes Captain Flint the retired pirate.

The relentlessly outdoorsy nature of the book’s adventures might qualify it for the best nature writing book alone. You almost believe that based on descriptions from the book alone you are capable of sailing, pitching a tent, lighting a fire or fishing. Certainly you’re tempted to get outside and give the whole thing a try – scrambling eggs in the frying pan over the fire and making mattresses out of hay bales.

Picking up my battered paperback copy and rereading Swallows and Amazons I was struck by three elements that make the case for Swallows and Amazons as nature writing even stronger.

Firstly, they are full of vignettes of rural life. There are two farms in Swallows and Amazons – Holly Howe and Dixon’s. We see Mrs Dixon scrubbing the slate floor in the dairy and Mr Jackson not letting them burn the hay from the mattresses in the Amazons’ tent as it makes good food for his cows. When John rows to the farm in the mornings, Mrs Dixon ‘went off with the can and brought it back bubbling and warm with new milk.’ The Swallows also visit the charcoal burners in the high woods, finding ‘a great mound of earth with little jets of blue wood-smoke spirting from it’ - they learn ‘the slower the fire the better the charcoal.’ These details bring a working landscape to life – this isn’t just a place of childhood adventures and Ransome makes sure we know that. ‘Up in the woods on the high hillside smoke was rising. They could hear the noise of the charcoal burners’ axes in the now quiet air.’

Secondly, Ransome understands how important it is to name things. Before you even get to the story you see the map (‘illustrated by the author with help from Miss Nancy Blackett’) with High Greenland, Unexplored Arctic, the River Amazon, Octopus Lagoon and Wildcat Island. These are not the names that the adults in the book use and this confers a power and ownership to the children. ‘We’ll make a chart of our own,’ says John, ‘and every year we’ll put in the part of it we have explored until we know it all.’ Over the course of the book we, with them, discover Rio Bay, Darien, Cormorant Island and Look-Out Point. We are told that Rio is ‘inhabited entirely by natives who had no idea that this was its name’ and this separate world is key to the way that the book works. The children add names to the map and those names mean something. It is a far cry from the instant accessibility of Google Maps and knowledge at the touch of a button but it is a real understanding of what places can come to mean.

Thirdly, Swallows and Amazons is packed full of descriptions of nature and landscape. Here it is better to let the book speak for itself.

There are birds – this is Titty watching a dipper, ‘It bobbed, as if it were making a bow, or a quick, careless kind of curtsey. It did not dive like a cormorant, but dropped in, like someone who does not know how to dive jumping in at the deep end of a swimming bath.’ And talking of cormorants with their ‘India rubber necks’ Ransome writes ‘ It perched on one of the boughs, and threw its head up, and swallowed the fish. The other birds were waving their long necks and yawning.’

The woodland isn’t just one solid mass, it’s made up of identifiable trees. ‘Sometimes it was a wonder how the little trees themselves clung on among the rocks. There were all sorts of trees. Here and there was a tall pine, but most of the trees were oaks and beeches and hazels and mountain ash.’

I could pick countless descriptions of the landscape of Ransome’s lake country to illustrate the point but two will do. ‘The blue lake under the clear summer sky stretched away into the big hills. Away to the south the lake narrowed and narrowed until it became a winding river through green lowlands.’ illustrates perfectly the scope of Ransome’s vision for the backdrop to the adventures whilst ‘The dark came fast overhead. Stars shone out. Owls were calling. The edges of the lake disappeared under the hills, great black masses, pressing up into the starry sky. Then clouds came up over the stars and they could not even see where the hills ended and the sky began.’ is familiar to anyone who has experienced how quickly disorientating pitch darkness can fall in areas free from light pollution.

It was a joy to reread Swallows and Amazons prior to writing this – there was the simple pleasure of being taken back to childhood and the way the plot romps along filled with characters who even now could almost be friends. There was also something I didn’t expect – I was reading with new eyes and reflecting on the question of whether Arthur Ransome could be called a nature writer and I found new details and a richness that I didn’t remember.

Books we love in childhood become part of us – even in adulthood boats with white sails are always Amazon, those with brown sails are Swallow and red caps belong to Nancy and Peggy Blackett. The books still sit on my bookshelf. Beyond a love of the stories themselves, Arthur Ransome also helped inspire a lasting love of the countryside and that eventually would lead me to my current role with a local rural and environmental charity.

Swallows and Amazons might be a fantasy but like the best fantasies it is grounded in reality - can it truly be called nature writing? Yes, I think it can and I’m looking forward to rereading more of Ransome’s work in this light. I think I’ll start with my other favourite, Winter Holiday…

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Further reading:

The Life of Arthur Ransome - Hugh Brogan

The World of Arthur Ransome – Christina Hardyment