"Swallowdale" by Arthur Ransome

 In this classic children's adventure book, written in 1930. the Walker children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) and Nancy and Peggy Blackett, who sail the Amazon, continue their adventures in the Lake District. When their sailing dinghy, Swallow, is shipwrecked, the Walkers have to camp ashore and the Amazons are being forced to behave like young ladies by the visit of their Great-Aunt. But there is still room for lots of adventures including climbing the highest hill, getting lost in the fog both ashore and afloat, and racing. 

It is very much of its time in that colonialist attitudes are ingrained. These are privileged white upper-middle-class children. The role of Susan as home-maker is also potentially sexist: "That was Susan's strong point. She never allowed excitements such as sleeping in the open half-way up a mountain, or a naval battle, or a dangerous bit of exploring, to interfere with the things that really matter, such as seeing that water is really boiling before making tea with it, having breakfast at the proper time, washing as usual, and drying anything that might be damp. Really, if it had not been for Susan, half the Swallows' adventures would have been impossible." (Ch 26) But the other girl characters include Titty, the imaginative dreamer who turns their everyday adventures into magic by drawing on her knowledge of story-book pirates and explorers, and Nancy, a larger-than-life tomboy who is a match for 'Captain' John in every way. 

There are some great moments:

• "They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home." (Ch 4)
• "'You needn't mind now', said Nancy, looking at John. 'It isn't as if she was at the bottom of the sea'." (Ch 6)
• "Just think what it would have been like if you had had to swim ashore in the Arctic, in winter, with no sun and no wood to make a fire, and nothing but snow and seals and polar bears. There'd have been some proper shivering of timbers." (Ch 9)
• "Never take off too much. If you take off too little you can always take off a bit more, but if you take off too much you can never put it back." (Ch 15) Advice I have always remember (too late) throughout my long and disastrous career in DiY.

Swallowdale isn't usually remembered as a S&A book but to my mind its careful story-telling make it one of the best.

This review was written by 
the author of Motherdarling

The Swallows and Amazon series contained twelve books:

• Swallows and Amazons: Children camping on an island in a lake have sailing based adventures
• Swallowdale: More sailing adventures are threatened when the Swallow sinks
• Peter Duck: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint sail on a big yacht into the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure; pirates pursue
• Winter Holiday: the lake freezes allowing a sledge-based expedition to the 'north pole'; the 'D's are introduced
• Coot Club: The Ds join the Death and Glory kids in the Norfolk Broads but the excitement is just as great when birds have to be protected from rowdies.
• We Didn't Mean to go to Sea: The Swallows accidentally find themselves at sea in a yacht they scarcely know: for my money this is the most dramatic and exciting book of the series.
• Secret Water: The Swallows are joined by the Amazons in an expedition to map some tidal mud-flats
• The Big Six: The Death and Glory kids have to be cleared of accusations of crime; the Ds help.
• Missee Lee: The Swallows and Amazons and Captain Flint are shipwrecked near China and captured by a lady Chinese pirate with a taste for Latin.
• Pigeon Post: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds search for gold in the hills above the Lake; one of my favourites
• The Picts and the Martyrs: The Ds have to hide in the hills when the Great Aunt comes to stay with the Amazons
• Great Northern: The Swallows and Amazons and Ds and Captain Flint are protecting birds in the far north of Scotland.

Other books by this author:

• Bohemia in London
• Old Peter's Russian Tales
• Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study

"Alric of Bedanford" by Veronica Sims

When I was a kid (in the 1960s) I loved this sort of book. It is a classic boy's adventure story set in the time of the Saxons. It might not have been quite so gritty as the brilliant tales of Leon Garfield but it reminded me strongly of stories by Cynthia Harnett such as The Wool Pack and The Load of Unicorn and stories by Geoffrey Trease such as Cue for Treason, Clive King's The 22 Letters. These were wonderful stories which I as a pre-pubescent boy devoured.

Children's fiction has become more realistic and darker these days but I am sure there is still room for simple escapist adventure of this type.

The plot follows the adventures of a Saxon lad who is sent for help to the King of Mercia shortly before his home town of Bedanford (Bedford) is destroyed by Vikings. Fatherless he grows up in the Mercian court training to be a warrior. Then he is sent on a mission to Witancaester (Winchester) and subsequently sent to spy on the Danes in Grantabrycge (Cambridge). Throughout the placenames are written in the old Saxon; the book benefits from a lot of research which supports but never intrudes on the story.

The plot device by which the adventuring boy spies escaped their hostile escort was audacious to say the least.

The ending is abrupt but it promises a sequel.

There were some brilliant lines:

• "The land of dreams and dragons" (Chapter 3)
• "With this sun you'll leak sweat like an old leather bucket" (Chapter 4)
• "The solid stone of sadness that seemed to be lodged somewhere in the middle of my body." (Chapter 7)
• He "drank his ale as if the supplies were about to fail" (Chapter 17)
• "The shadows started to creep out from behind the trees" (Chapter 19)

Great fun. June 2017. Kindle.

"Huntingtower" by John Buchan

Set in the immediate aftermath of the first world war (and we are constantly reminded of the war from the scars of the protagonists to the remembered dead to the availability of Service revolvers), this is a Scottish adventure story. At the same time it is a modern myth with heavy overtones of fairy tale.

Dickson McCunn (his surname means son of a dog) has just retired having sold his very successful grocery business and decides (his wife being away at a spa hotel) to go on a ramble through the Scottish countryside. Despite his bourgeois profession he is a romantic at heart. Meeting up with a younger man, a poet who scorns romance, they embark on an expedition to take a look at a rather dishevelled stately home and discover a Russian Princess who has been locked up by villains with Bolshevik leanings who want to steal her jewels. Coincidentally, she is the Russian Princess that the poet fell in love with when he was being nursed back to health in Italy after being wounded on the front. Also by coincidence, a self-organised scout troupe made up of a Glaswegian boy gang called the Gorbals Die-Hards happen to be camping on the moor. So grocer Dickson and his boy band resolve to rescue the princess in distress.

The adventure that follows becomes even more incredible as the characters move back and forth across the moor. After springing the Princess from her perilous situation she then goes back there to do battle with the forces of evil, now reinforced from the sea.

So the plot is bizarre but what makes the book great is the wonderful descriptions of the Scottish countryside; the brilliant vernacular in which most of the characters speak (though some are speaking broader Glaswegian than others); the brilliant counterpointing of the heroic and the humdrum, the romantic and the practical, the poet and the grocer; the regular injection of humour when the book threatens to slide into farce; and the fabulous characters of Dickson, all the Die-Hards, and 'Aunt Phemie'. Even the rather silly and irrelevant poet has a trajectory to fulfil. The only poor characters are the villains who, apart from the slightly scary but farcically stupid innkeeper, are non-entities.

It is a fairy tale saddled with a silly plot but in the hands of a master storyteller like Buchan, it comes to life. April 2015; 211 pages

Books by John Buchan reviewed in this blog:

• My very favourite: a historical novel set in Scotland which proved that Buchan really could write: Witch Wood
• Weird plot, terribly un-PC but with some wonderful characters, a laugh aloud speech, and a real feel for the joys of hunting: John Macnab
• Well written but with the most ridiculously bonkers plot and some horrible classism, racism and anti-semitism: The Three Hostages 
• A wonderful description of the Scottish countryside and some fantastic characters and some brilliant counterpointing: Huntingtower
• Greenmantle: another bonkers plot with weak characters set during the First World War 

"Escape from the Antarctic" by Sir Ernest Shackleton

This tiny book tells a fraction of the story of The Endurance commanded by Shackleton which was attempting to land men for a trans-Antarctic expedition when it was caught in pack ice; after some months drifting the ship was crushed and the men had to camp on the drifting ice floe; they then got into two small boats and headed for Elephant Island where they camped. This book completes their adventures from this point.

Shackleton and five others sailed a small boat through mountainous seas 800 miles to South Georgia. Just sighting the sun through a sextant in a pitching boat in the middle of a hurricane when there was precious little sun made the navigation difficult, almost impossible. They endured days of hurricane and gale. When they reached South Georgia they had to stand away from the shore because the seas were driving the boat inland and threatened to smash it on the rocks. Finally they made landfall and captured baby albatross chicks to stew.

Then Shackleton and two others trekked across the South Georgia mountains which had never been crossed, or even explored, before. Finally they reached the whaling station and obtained relief for their crew mates. Even then it was weeks before they could charter a ship which could penetrate the newly forming pack ice and rescue the 22 men abandoned on Elephant Island.

Sometimes Shackleton gets bogged down in the details and this story is marred by only being a fraction of the full adventure but it was a delightful little read.

Selected quotes:

• "At midnight I was at the tiller and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky between the south and southwest .... a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty-six years' experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days."

• "I know that during the long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, 'Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.'" It is this paragraph that led T. S. Eliot to write in The Waste Land:

"Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you"

May 2009, 90 pages

Other books about travel and exploration reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God