The Best of Childhood: Writing the Swallows and Amazons Books

Amazon Publications, comprising five members of The Arthur Ransome Society who got together to publish works by and about the famous children's author, has been bringing out a book each year since 1992.

The latest uses only primary written sources letters, diary entries and Ransome's working notes to show how the 12 classic Swallows and Amazons tales came to be written from the point of view of Ransome himself, his publisher, his mother, his wife and his friends.

I had seen some of this material before in Signalling from Mars, The Letters of Arthur Ransome, edited by Hugh Brogan, but there is also new stuff here and the focus on the creative writing process is illuminating, both of the stories themselves and their author.

The inclusion of several contemporary reviews of Ransome's stories is welcome. A 1930 review of Swallows and Amazons makes a telling point about the children in his books: "Real themselves, they bring their world with them a world of intense, absorbed seriousness, in which the boundaries between the real and the imagined grow thin, and wonder spreads over both."

Reading Ransome's letters and diary entries reveals just how hard he found writing some of the books. Swallows and Amazons seems to have been fairly straightforward, as does The Big Six, but Winter Holiday caused him no end of problems. In 1933 he wrote to his publisher: "I have been most terribly bothered by this bookI am absolutely blessed if I know what is wrong with it, but I jolly well know that something is wrong. . there is a sort of horrid breathlessness at the end..."

Time after time over the years he writes of his works in progress in a self-denigratory fashion, declaring his output is "bilge." And yet, each book was to prove extremely successful.

There are some great insights into how he felt books should be written. It was important to have a mixture of characters - "a combination of collective interest and a fair share of the game for all the individuals, girls and boys," adding, in a tongue-in-cheek, commercially-aware fashion, that this was a "sordid grasp at as wide an audience as possible".

Asked the difference between writing for adults and children, Ransome replied that he never wrote for children. "Unless I am writing something that is good fun FOR ME, not for somebody else, I cannot write at all. The children who read my books are never addressed. I don't even know they are there. They merely hear me larking about for my own fun, not for theirs."

This well-researched book also highlights Ransome's innate sense of fun and his meticulousness.

It is a fine addition to a growing body of work by one of Lakeland's most important authors.

l The Best of Childhood is only available to members of The Arthur Ransome Society. To join, obtain an application form from Abbot Hall, at Kendal; the Windermere Steamboats and Museum; or download a form from: www.arthur-ransome.org/ar Andrew Thomas