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Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome

May3

After my Little Britches binge-read, I returned to the other series that is capturing my heart, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons adventures. In Winter Holiday, the Swallows—John, Susan, Titty, and Roger Walker—and the Amazons—Captain Nancy and First Mate Peggy—are joined by two new companions, Dick and Dorothea, aka The D’s. Dick and his sister Dot are from the big city, but they have come for a visit to the Dixon farm during the winter holidays.

The Lake District is all abuzz because it looks as if, for the first time in many years, the lake is going to freeze completely to allow for skating and winter sports all up and down the lake that is usually the site of the children’s summer sport of sailing. In spite of mumps and miscommunications and an imminent date of return to school, the children manage to have a grand adventure as they pretend to be Arctic explorers on an expedition to the North Pole.

Their role model is said to be someone name Nansen, an explorer of whom, in my ignorance, I had never heard. I looked him up, and he is a real Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, who led an expedition across Greenland in 1888-89 and also attempted an expedition to the North Pole in 1895, reaching a farther north latitude than anyone else had done at the time. Nansen’s ship was called the Fram, and the children in Winter Holiday name their Arctic vessel, borrowed from Uncle Jim/Captain Flint and frozen in port, The Fram also.

Winter Holiday is a great adventure story, and it will make even those of us who are not acclimated to real winter weather and icy adventures wish for a little bit of ice and snow to build an igloo or mount an expedition to the Pole, either North or South. It made me think of winter fondly, for a little while anyway.

Captain Nancy really comes into her own in this book as the leader of this gang of explorers and adventurers, even though she’s somewhat sidelined for most of the book. You can’t keep a good man—or woman—down, and Captain Nancy is still bossing and pushing and imagining new exploits and adventures, even when she’s physically removed from the action in the story. I also liked being properly introduced to the D’s, even though I read the stories out of order and had already met them in Pigeon Post. Dreamy, scientific Dick and imaginative writer-to-be Dorothy make good additions to the already established cast of characters.

Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome

Apr17

Pigeon Post is the sixth in the twelve book series of novels about a group of adventurous British children who call themselves the Swallows and the Amazons (and later the D’s are added). The children–John, Susan, Titty, and Roger (the Swallows); Peggy and Nancy Blackett (the Amazons); and Dorothea and Dick (the D’s)—are living what has most recently been named a “free-range childhood.” Their parents are responsible and supervising from a distance, but the children are allowed to camp, cook outdoors, sail boats, pretend, explore, hike, and climb with only minimal adult interference. The negotiations the children go through with their parents and other adults to enable them to do these things are an important and interesting part of the story.

In this installment of the Swallows’ and Amazons’ adventures, the children have decided to form a prospecting and mining company to find gold on the nearby High Topps, a stretch of high moors called “fells” in the book. Because of drought conditions and the danger of fires, the children must go through some extensive exploration and negotiation before they are allowed to actually camp near the High Topps instead of in the Blacketts’ garden, but once they actually make camp on the edge of the fells and begin to explore old, abandoned workings or mines for gold, the story really becomes exciting. The “pigeon post” comes into play because the children use three homing pigeons to stay in touch with their parents at home and send daily status updates to keep the adults informed and happy.

The book contains a lot of mining, engineering, and chemistry information. These children are adventurous children, but they are also studious and quite industrious. In this article at a website called allthingsransome.net, The Chemistry of Pigeon Post, a fan of Ransome’s books writes about the chemistry that is explicated and illustrated in the book. Of course, even the article contains a warning, as should the book itself, probably.

“An important caution: chemistry experiments can be very hazardous and shouldn’t be performed except under well controlled and supervised conditions and preferably in a well equipped laboratory. Reading about Dick making up aqua regia and pouring it on to his unknown powder in Captain Flint’s study makes me quiver! Things were certainly different back then when it came to chemical safety!”

I don’t know what the exact balance between freedom to explore and protection should be for children, but if our children nowadays are over-protected then Ransome’s children may well have been not protected enough. They certainly do some rather dangerous things in the book and manage to survive anyway.

Pigeon Post was the book that won for its author the first Carnegie Medal. The British Library Association presented Ransome with the inaugural Carnegie Medal at its annual conference in June 1936. I thoroughly enjoyed Pigeon Post, and I think my next Ransome read will be Winter Holiday, the fourth book in the series, which is also the book that introduces Dick and Dorothea Callum. (Yes, I’ve managed to read the books out of order.) I’ve already read: Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, Peter Duck, and Secret Water.

William Wordsworth, b. April 7, 1770

Apr7

April is National Poetry Month.

Wordsworth on poetry: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Spontaneous, powerful, emotional, and tranquil—all at the same time? I’m not sure I could do all that together, which is probably one reason I’m not a poet. One of many.

Wordsworth on The Poet: “What is a Poet?. . . He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”

Wordsworth on nature study: “Come forth into the light of things,/Let Nature be your teacher.”

William Hazlitt on Wordsworth: “He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read them; the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them; the great despise. The fashionable may ridicule them: but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die.”

As for me, I used to call him “Wordswords” because I thought him much too high-flown and wordy. I still rather think so, but I’m not so sure that it’s a deficit in Wordsworth that I don’t appreciate his poetry more. Maybe it’s a deficit in my ability to appreciate good poetry. Anyway, here’s one that I do rather enjoy, about looking out upon the sleeping city of London:

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

And another: Lucy II.

The Stranger from the Sea by Winston Graham

Jan19

This eighth installment of the Poldark Saga begins with King George III and his final descent into madness in 1810, and it ends with a marriage proposal for one of the Poldarks, refused, in 1811. Ten years have passed since the ending of the seventh book in the series, The Angry Tide. The growing-up years of Ross and Demelza’s children—Clowance, Jeremy, and little Bella—have been largely happy and uneventful. The Ross Poldark family are neither immensely rich nor poor, neither socially active nor reclusive, and finally comfortable and happy. Ross and Demelza are comfortable in their marriage; the enmity between George Warleggan and Ross Poldark has moved into a phase of distant truce, after the death of Elizabeth Warleggan at the end of The Angry Tide. Ross’s tin mine produces an adequate living, but not too much.

George Warleggan continues in this book to be rich, although he nearly loses his fortune in a bad investment decision. Ross Poldark continues to be idealistic and somewhat eccentric. Demelza is still salt of the earth and beautiful and commonsensical, all at the same time. In fact, all of the old characters from the previous seven novels make an appearance, each one playing his part. But the focus has shifted in this book to the younger generation: Ross and Demelza’s children, Valentine Warleggan, Geoffrey Charles Poldark, the progeny of the Sawle villagers, and other turn of the century young adults who are now coming of age and making their own decisions about love, friendship, and business.

Then, there’s the “stranger from the sea”, one Stephen Carrington, rescued from drowning by Jeremy Poldark and friends. It’s a bit odd that the book is named for Stephen Carrington, and I wonder who had the authority to give titles to these books, the author or the publisher? If Mr. Carrington were not the eponymous “stranger” of the title, he would not be nearly so important a character in the book as he seems, given the reference. Stephen Carrington is certainly mysterious throughout the book; I never did know whether to believe a word he said, even though he was a likable, perhaps harmless, liar. But the story is really about Jeremy and Clowance, not Carrington or any one of the other suitors attracted to Clowance, and certainly not either of Jeremy’s erstwhile flames. Jeremy is really more in love with steam engines than with with girls, although he manages to have loved and lost (a girl) by the end of the book.

I find the history woven into these novels—the Napoleonic wars, the madness of King George, the political maneuverings of Whigs and Tories, the Industrial revolution—by Mr. Graham to be fascinating, and the picture Graham draws of a society in the midst of upheaval and change is excellently well done. I recommend all of the Poldark Saga novels that I’ve read so far, and I plan to read the next one, The Miller’s Dance, post-haste in hopes of finding out what will happen to Miss Clowance Poldark and Master Jeremy Poldark as they come into adulthood.

12 British Children’s Books I’d Like to Read in 2018

Jan12

I’ve been an Anglophile ever since I was a child, when many of my favorite reads were written by British authors: C.S. Lewis, Philippa Pearce, E. Nesbit, JRR Tolkien, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne.

I also read some lovely award-winning and classic British children’s books last year: The Little Grey Men by BB, Minnow on the Say by Philippa Pearce, The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett, and of course, four of the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome.

This year I’d like to read:

Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome (and any others of the Swallows and Amazons books that I can get my hands on).

Ameliaranne and the Green Umbrella by Constance Heward. Classic story from 1920. Ameliaranne, “whose family is very poor, goes to a party and tries to bring back all of her food-cakes, tangerines, sweets-hidden in her umbrella to feed her ailing brothers and sisters.” I may not be able to find an affordable copy of this one, and it may not be available from the library. I guess I could read it online, but I don’t particularly enjoy reading books that way.

Autumn Term by Antonia Forest. Classic boarding school fiction. “Twins Nicola and Lawrie arrive at their new school determined to do even better than their distinguished elder sisters, but things don’t turn out quite as planned.”

Borka: The Adventures of a Goose With No Feathers by John Burningham.

The Camels Are Coming (Biggles) by W.E. Johns. I’ve been meaning to read one of the books in this series about a WWI flying ace for a long time. 2018 is the year.

The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden. I have a copy of this book about a Romany (gypsy) girl.

The Little Duke by Charlotte Yonge. Recommended at Ambleside Online.

(something, to be decided) by Enid Blyton. Suggestions?

Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall. Also a part of the Ambleside Online curriculum.

The Peppermint Pig by Nina Bawden.

Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian.

The Railway Children by E. Nesbit. I had planned to read this particular Nesbit title in 2017 along with an online reading group that I follow, but I didn’t. So this year for sure.

Are there any other British children’s classics that you would recommend?

Christmas in Cornwall, 1789

Dec1

From Winston Graham’s second Poldark novel, Demelza:

“It was a fine night and an hour before Sawle Church choir had been up to the door singing carols. Demelza had never had much to do with religion but she still said the prayers her mother taught her, adding a postscript of her own to keep them abreast of the times; and at Christmas she had always felt an inward impulse to go to church. Something in the ancient wisdom of the story and the fey beauty of the carols tugged at her emotions; and with a suitable invitation she would have been willing to join the choir. She specially wanted to help them this evening, hearing their depleted voices struggling through ‘Remember, O thou Man’. But even her enjoyment of the two carols was a little spoiled by anxiety as to how she had best behave when they knocked on the door. She sent Jane Gimlett for the cakes she had made that afternoon and took down a couple of bottles of canary wine from Ross’s cupboard.

**********
Demelza nervously gave them all a drink and took one herself; she would almost sooner have entertained Sir Hugh Bodrogan than these humble choristers; at least she knew where where she was with him. She pressed cakes upon them and refilled their glasses and when they rose to go she gave them a handful of silver—about nine shillings in all—and the carolers crowded out into the misty moonlit night, flushed and merry and opulent. There they gathered round the lantern and gave her one more carol for luck before filing off up the valley towards Grambler.”

Lassie Come-Home by Eric Knight

Aug9

I finally read this justly famous and best-selling dog story, and the first surprise was the title. It’s not “Lassie, come home!”, a plea or a command for Lassie to return to home and hearth, as I always thought it was. Instead, “Lassie Come-Home” is a nickname for the faithful collie who does return home, through many miles and obstacles, from the highlands of Scotland all the way back to the Yorkshire country family in the south of England who were her original masters. Lassie is a “come-home dog” in the Yorkshire vernacular.

Perhaps Lassie Come-Home is the template for many books that came after: The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, A Dog’s Way Home by Bobbie Pyron, and other stories of faithful dogs and other animals finding their way home after a series of adventures and difficulties. Or maybe the plot mirrors Black Beauty and other earlier books that show faithful animals making their way back home to the owners they love. Lassie’s journey home is certainly an adventurous one.

The author note in the back of my book says:

“Lassie first appeared in a short story published by the Saturday Evening Post in 1938. The story was so popular that Mr. Knight expanded it into a full-length book, which was published in 1940 and instantly became a best-seller. In 1942 the MGM movie based on the book launched the career of Elizabeth Taylor.”

All those survivors of economic depression and war-weary readers and movie-goers most likely needed a hopeful story about overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, the kind of victory through suffering that is depicted in Lassie Come-Home. The story itself is pretty incredible: a dog somehow finds his way home form Scotland to Yorkshire, 400 miles as the crow flies or over 1000 miles with the obstacles such as lakes and rivers that Lassie has to skirt around or find a way over.

Eric Knight was born in England (in the Yorkshire country that her writes about), came to the United States as a teenager, and died in an airplane crash while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II—but not before giving us this classic dog story. It’s well-written, hopeful, and —-spoiler here—the dog doesn’t die!

A Traveller in Time by Allison Uttley

May30

If ever the term “time slip” applied to a book, it’s this one: Penelope Taberner Cameron slips in and out of two time periods, the twentieth century and the late sixteenth century, like butter slipping about on a plate. She never knows exactly when or how she will slip out of her own time at Thackers, the Derbyshire farm that belongs to her great aunt and uncle, and into another time, the time of Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Spanish Armada. And no one in either period seems to worry too much about Penelope’s odd absences and re-appearances. It’s a sort of ghostly time travel, although it’s clear that Penelope never becomes a “ghost” in either time that she visits.

This British classic was published in 1939, and the pacing and language reflect the publishing date. Penelope’s adventures, and indeed her personality, are rather languid and slow-moving, even though the excitement of a plot to rescue Mary Queen of Scots from her English captivity does something to enliven the novel. A lot of time is spent describing farm life in the 1930’s as Penelope and her sister and brother come to spend their summer holiday, and then an even longer term, with Aunt Tissie and Uncle Barnabas. Then, there’s also a lot of description of what it was like to live in Elizabethan England. I can see how some children and teens would grow impatient with all of the descriptive passages, but I loved it all, as well as the historical aspects of the novel.

There was a BBC series of five episodes made in 1978 based on this book by Ms. Uttley, but it’s not widely available outside of Britain. Alison Uttley was also a prolific author of very popular books for younger children in England, including a series of books about Sam Pig and another about Little Grey Rabbit.

Wikipedia contrasts time slip novels like A Traveller in Time, where the protagonist has no control or agency in going from one time to another, and time travel books, in which characters use a device like a time machine or a magic talisman to make the time travel happen. Even with time travel books, however, the device often gets lost or malfunctions, leaving the characters marooned in another time period. In Traveller in Time, Penelope worries about getting stuck in the 1500’s, and at one climactic point she almost dies while she’s visiting the sixteenth century, an event which she thinks would surely cause her to also die in the twentieth century. Time slipping and time traveling is fun to read about, but I think it would make my head hurt if it actually happened to me.

If you could time slip or time travel, what time period would you like to visit? What is your favorite time slip or time travel book? (Mine are the Connie Willis books: The Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout and All Clear.)

The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett

May25

Published in 1937, The Family From One End Street and Some of Their Adventures by author/illustrator Eve Garnett broke new ground by detailing the joys and sometimes misadventures of a large working class British family. “Mrs. Ruggles was a Washerwoman and her husband was a Dustman.” (A dustman for us Americans who don’t collect “dust” or rubbish is a garbage collector.) The Ruggles family consists of Rosie and Jo, the parents, and seven children: Lily Rose, Kate, the twins James and John, little Jo, Peg, and baby William. “The neighbors pities Jo and Rosie for having such a large family and called it ‘Victorian’; but the Dustman and his wife were proud of their numerous girls and boys, all-growing-up-fine-and-strong-one-behind-the-other-like-steps-in-a-ladder-and-able-to-wear-each-others-clothes-right-down-to-the-baby . . .”

From the beginning chapter that introduces the family and tells about how all the children were born and named to the concluding chapter in which the entire family takes a much-anticipated bank holiday in London, the story is a very British, very enjoyable look at a happy family. Tolstoy said that happy families are all alike, implying that they are not very interesting, but the Ruggleses are generally happy and fun to read about. The language is both British and somewhat dated, but an intelligent eleven year old should be able to puzzle it out, even an American child. And these are poor/lower class children of the 1930’s, loved but not hovered over, so they do things like stowaway on a boat or take a ride with a wealthy couple in a motorcar or try to help with the ironing—with disastrous results. Each child gets his or her own story or chapter in the book, vignettes that distinguish the children from one another and let readers follow along on their various and sundry adventures. The book would make a lovely read aloud, as long as the reader could do a proper British accent.

Speaking of British accents and the like, The Family From One End Street won the Carnegie Medal in 1937 for the children’s book of most outstanding literary quality published in the UK. It is an outstanding book, but its award as a sort of “book of the year” for British children in 1937 illustrates the problem with choosing the best books in the moment, before time and thoughtful appreciation and criticism have been brought to bear upon the staying power and literary quality of a given year’s crop of titles.

Also published in Britain in 1937? The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien.

The Mantlemass Chronicles by Barbara Willard

Mar22

I purchased another one of Barbara Willard’s Mantlemass books to go in my library, the last one that I was lacking, even though I haven’t yet read all of this series. This one is called A Cold Wind Blowing, and it begins in the year 1536 as King Henry VIII, in a fit of pique and acquisitiveness at the Pope’s inconsiderate and uncooperative decision to deny him a divorce, sets about destroying the monasteries and seizing their assets. The Medley family, the family that is the focus of all this series of historical fiction books, takes in a sort of refugee from all the unrest named Isabella. Isabella has a mysterious past, and her secrets threaten the entire family’s safety and happiness.

I’ve read the first two books in this series, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the Mantlemass Chronicles:

The Lark and the Laurel (1485)
The Sprig of Broom (1485)
The Eldest Son (1534)
A Cold Wind Blowing (1536)
The Iron Lily (1557)
A Flight of Swans (1588)
Harrow and Harvest (1642)

These books take us through English history from the Battle of Bosworth, to the reign of the Tudor kings, to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, to the Spanish Armada, to another English civil war between Cromwell’s Roundheads and the king’s men, Cavaliers. During all these great events the families in and around the manor house Mantlemass—Mallorys, Medleys, Plashets, and Hollands—pursue their own ends and keep their own secrets.