We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea

The seventh of the Arthur Ransome books about the Swallows and the Amazons, and I really think it is the best * Sunday Times *
The most exciting of the whole Swallows and Amazon series * New Statesman *
This book is Ransome at the top of his form * Observer *
The book is a record of an uncovenanted voyage, which ended in Holland, of the rain and wind, the darkness and the wild water, the escapes from buoys and from ships crossing in the night, the courage and resource of the children * Evening Standard *
Perhaps the best of all … Just what does happen is told with all the wealth of practical detail and satisfying sense of reality which make Mr Ransome so unfailingly successful * Punch *

Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884. His life was marked by adventure from an early age, even being carried to the summit of the Old Man of Coniston as a baby. He traveled to Russia in 1913 to study folklore, and at the outset of World War I in 1914, he began working as a foreign correspondent for the Daily News. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, he transitioned to journalism, serving as a special correspondent for The Guardian. He engaged in chess games with Lenin and married Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotsky’s personal secretary.

Upon returning to England, Ransome purchased a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District, where he commenced writing children’s stories. In a 1958 author’s note, Ransome reflected on the origins of Swallows and Amazons: “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 twelve Swallows and Amazons books in 1930. In 1936, he received the inaugural Carnegie Medal for his book Pigeon Post. Arthur Ransome passed away in 1967.

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