Posted by Katharine on October 13, 2003 at 21:43:01 from 81.96.140.205 user Katharine.
In Reply to: D's the real heroes? - rootless cosmopolitans posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on October 13, 2003 at 20:51:38:
The passage you quote, where John tries to give the island as their address, certainly takes on a new significance in that context!
"AR's experience of the Lakes was of the D's kind; he must have noticed that the Altounyans had a different relationship with the landscape and I wonder if this inspired the first book?"
I have been wondering about that too. As you say, AR's relationship is of the Ds' kind in the sense that he was a child from an academic and (I think) consistently situated home who went there for holidays. But AR's relationship with the landscape was certainly emotional, if we believe the author's note, dated 1958, in which Ransome describes spending his holidays at the south end of Coniston as a child:
'We adored the place....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 skyline of great hills beneath it.....'
Of course, what complicates this is the suggestion I have read once or twice, that AR changed the 'how I came to write Swallows and Amazons' story, from saying it was written for and about the Altounyan children, to emphasising his own childhood experiences more. I have not read the biographies and correspondence so I don't feel qualified to judge which version rings more true. But it makes it harder to work out exactly what the difference was between Ransome's experience of the lake, and the Altounyans' experience.
Come to think of it, in this passage he is constituting himself as a Captain Flint character - off roaming round the world but always thinking about the lake, just like Captain Flint who comes back from overseas in WH when he hears that the lake is freezing.