I come to you today to open to your perusing one of the best speculative fiction series I have ever read. The series combines historical fiction (at least, it is historical to us, today), children’s literature, piratical adventures, communication with alien planets, train journeys, boat journeys, wildlife preservation, science, mining, firefighting, exploration of foreign climes, naval hierarchy, and cannibalism.
The series covers a wide range of children:
The four Walker children, who are only children for half of the series, and for the other half are a brave captain, an organised and sometimes officious but always helpful first mate, a hard working if sometimes distracted able seaman, and a ship’s boy… who becomes an able seaman halfway through the series. Well, and they spend time being explorers, savages, mining prospectors, and aliens from mars.
The two Blackett girls… who spend some of the series (a small and unfortunate part) as Ruth and Margaret, and the most of the rest of the series (but not all, as they become quite wild savages and courageous explorers for some of the series) as Nancy and Peggy, bold and tyrannical pirates.
The two ‘D’s’, Dick and Dorthea, who cover many of the above roles, but keep lapsing into a very distracted authoress and an even more distracted scientist.
The Death and Glories, three young boys who go from being pirates to very real and not at all speculative salvage men, rescuing rich idiots from sinking boats and getting their (very real) cut from the salvage operation. Oh, and they are criminal masterminds when they aren’t be detectives.
The Mastodon, Daisy, Dum, and Dee… savages who have an interesting relationship with certain missionaries (living with them as boring English children for parts of the year), who are fond of eating and pretending to be eels, and capturing and eating trespassers (particularly if they are fat, young, and like the idea as long as it isn’t too scary).
Port and Starboard, founding and active members of an ecological society called the ‘Coot Club’, who spend their time sailing up and down the river and checking on nesting birds when they aren’t racing up and down that same river with their ‘Aged Parent’, or helping him get his lawyer stuff together each morning.
Tom, another founding member of the Coot Club, who is also a notorious fugitive known for setting loose a very obnoxious motor cruiser which had moored right next to the nest of just hatching cootlings, and preventing their parents from feeding them. Also known for captaining a sailboat down the river for some foreign (not from Norfolk, anyway) tourists.
The series also covers a wide range of locations: From the peak of Kanchenjunga (I may or may not have spelled that correctly), various pirate locations in foreign climes, Mars, various rivers, bays, and lakes in England, the English channel and Holland, and even the Amazon river and Rio!
I had an unfortunate childhood: I did not discover these wonderful books until I was about fifty years old. But I heartily recommend them to any and everyone interested in children’s literature and fantastic writing. The author, as I hope I have managed to communicate, had an incredible talent for taking children riding along on a train, and transporting them mid-sentence to a war zone thousands of miles away, or the far side of the moon, or…
The books are also wonderful as an antidote to modern parenting. Indeed, I would recommend that they only be read by parents who are sitting down and not suffering from any kind of heart or digestive difficulties. Because these parents do things right. Not perfectly, by any means. And hopefully even children done right don’t come close to dying every single summer. But, as the father of the Walker children says:
BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Link
The Swallows and Amazons series,
By Arthur Ransome
One of my favorite series growing up. It lead to a lifelong passion for sailing!