Swallodale

[watervole]

 There's  a reason Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome is a classic. It's a very well written book. (part of the Swallows and Amazon's series)

It's set in the Lake District and is set around children sailing boats and camping - and I wish I could be in that world...

It's one of those novels where nothing happens on a grand scale - afterwards, you wonder what the plot was - and then you realise the difference between having a plot and telling a good story.

 

Lots of things happen in Swallowdale, but they happen on a smaller scale. More like a series of episodes. The images that linger in the mind are Titty and Roger exploring, and inventing their own rules as to how to explore, how to avoid inconvenient things like roads, how to leave secret signals, etc.  Or Titty meeting the woodsmen and riding on the timber haulage

 

Sometimes, it's the setting, and the realisation of how far it now is in the past.  It's a world where cars are still few and far between: where milk comes in a jug, not a tetrapack; where timber is extracted from woods and hauled out be horses; where a shipyard has steam boxes for bending planks.  The Lake District is less crowded and there's a feeling of space which would be hard to imagine now.

 

1930, when the book was written, is less than a century ago, and yet is different in so many ways.