Book description
'Ahoy! Ahoy! Swallows! Ahoy!'
Have you ever sailed in a boat or built a camp? Have you caught
trout and cooked it yourself? The four Swallows, John, Susan, Titty
and Roger return to the lake full of such plans and they can't wait to
meet up with Nancy and Peggy, the Amazon Pirates. When the
Swallow is shipwrecked and the Amazon's fearsome Great-Aunt
makes decides to make a visit their summer seems ruined. Then they
discover a wonderful hidden valley and things take a turn for the better...
BACKSTORY: Discover the real Swallowdale, swot up on seafaring and
learn all about the adventurous author.
Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884. He had an adventurous life
- as a baby in he was carried by his father to the top of the Old Man of
Coniston, a peak that is 2,276ft high! He went to Russia in 1913 to
study folklore and in 1914, at the start of World War I he became a
foreign correspondent for the
Daily News.
In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and
was a special correspondent of the
Guardian
. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky's personal secretary,
Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. On their return to England, he bought a
cottage near Windermere in the Lake District and began writing
children's stories. In a 1958 author's note, Ransome wrote: ''I have
been often asked how I came to write
Swallows and Amazons
. The answer is that 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 played in or on the lake or on the
hills above . . . Going away from it we were half drowned in tears.
While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No
matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look
for the North Star and, in my mind's eye, could see the beloved sky-line
of great hills beneath it. Swallows grew out of those old memories. I
could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.'' He published the
first of his children's classics, the 12
Swallows And Amazons
books, in 1930. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his
book,
Pigeon Post
. He died in 1967.
