Book description
'Let fly jib sheet! Slack away main! Fenders out!'
Dick and Dorothea - also known as The Ds - arrive in Norfolk
all ready to learn how to sail. They couldn't hope for a better
teacher than Tom Dudgeon. But Tom is in a spot of trouble. After
seeing the beastly Margoletta moored clean across the
nests of his beloved coots, Tom set the motorcruiser adrift. Now the
enemy have offered a bounty on his head. Can they save the birds' nest
from almost certain destruction? Will they avoid being caught by the
awful Hullabaloos? Only some brave friends and quick thinking stands
between them and disaster.
Includes exclusive material: In 'The Backstory' you can test your
knowledge of the book, learn about the adventurous author and get some
handy facts about birds and boats.
Vintage Children's Classics is a twenty-first century classics list
aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives. Discover
timeless favourites from The Jungle Book and Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland to modern classics such as The Boy
in the Striped Pyjamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Night-Time.
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 twelve
Swallows And Amazons
books, in 1930. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his
book,
Pigeon Post
. He died in 1967.
