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Swallows and Amazons: new film

rynner2

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Some topics are difficult to pigeonhole, and this is one:
From MI6 to tea with Trotsky: the secret life of Swallows and Amazons author Arthur Ransome
Lewis Jones
7 August 2016 • 8:00am

"Any book worth reading by children,” wrote Arthur Ransome in his autobiography, “is also worth reading by grown-up persons.” As one of the millions who loved the Swallows and Amazons books as a child, I was wary of revisiting them as a grown-up person, but I need not have been, as they remain a delight.

In clean and lively prose, with an earnest whimsy that steers just clear of the twee, Ransome charts the course of the Walker children (Captain John, Mate Susan, Able Seaman Titty and Ship’s Boy Roger: the Swallows), and the fierce local Blackett sisters (Captain Nancy and Mate Peggy: the Amazons), as they sail their way, sustained by pemmican (corned beef) and grog (ginger beer and lemonade), first to Wild Cat Island, then around the Norfolk Broads, into the North Sea, and all the way to China, where they are taught Latin by Missee Lee, the legendary pirate, “22 gong Taicoon”, and former cox of Newnham’s 2nd VIII.

The 12 books in the series are justly ranked as classics, standing with the children’s stories of Kipling, Barrie and Grahame, and are far superior to those myriad children’s books which “look like books but are not”, as Ransome put it.

He was also scathing about “so-called ‘dramatised versions’ which… offer no more than skeleton plots”, and said of the 1962 BBC series, in his diary: “Saw the ghastly mess they have made of poor old Swallows and Amazons.” I think he might have liked Philippa Lowthorpe’s forthcoming film, though, which is true to the spirit of his book, and so attentive to period detail that at one point Mrs Walker smokes a cigarette. :eek:

There is one minor change to the story, and one major one. Lest it provoke sniggers, Titty’s name has been changed to Tatty, which has infuriated the niece of Mavis Altounyan, on whom Titty was based, who thinks it was a “most disgustingly pompous thing to do”.

And in the book the Ransome character, the Blacketts’ uncle Jim Turner, aka “Captain Flint” (after the pirate created by Robert Louis Stevenson, whom Ransome much admired), has sequestered himself on his houseboat to write his memoirs. In the film he is engaged in espionage and pursued by Russian agents, which gives the story some grown-up oomph, and pays fitting tribute to the author’s wildly adventurous early life.

For Ransome was not merely a boaty old buffer with a walrus moustache who wrote children’s books. As a young journalist he reported on the Russian Revolution, was on intimate terms with its leaders and was himself an active player, which led to his recruitment by MI6.

He was born in 1884, in Leeds, where his adored father, Cyril, to whom he always felt he was “a sad disappointment”, was professor of history; he died when Arthur was 13. Like Captain John, Arthur was the eldest sibling, with a brother and two sisters. A countryman at heart, keen on shooting and fishing, every year Cyril Ransome took a cottage at Nibthwaite on Coniston Water, which became Arthur’s spiritual home.

etc...

Swallows and Amazons is out in cinemas from August 19

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/20...-trotsky-the-secret-life-of-swallows-and-ama/

Page includes video trailer for the new film.

We already have a short thread on Arthur Ransome's MI5 and Soviet links:

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/how-mi5-watched-childrens-author.20798/#post-506982
 
Swallows and Amazons: The Syria connection
By Penny Spiller BBC News

It is a well-known tale of high adventure for four children in the 1930s who set off in their sail boat one summer to reach an uninhabited island in the middle of Lake Coniston, in the English Lake District.
And Arthur Ransome's famous book about the Walker children - John, Susan, Titty and Roger - is being retold in a new film that comes out on Friday.

But the blonde-haired, quintessentially English children of the film look nothing like the four youngsters who initially inspired Swallows and Amazons. They were Taqui, Susan, Mavis (known to her family as Titty) and Roger Altounyan, an Anglo-Armenian family who lived in Aleppo in Syria.

The Altounyans met Arthur Ransome while on holiday in the Lake District in 1928, and it was their experiences of learning to sail that gave him the idea for his story.
Taqui - a girl who became John in the book, much to her disappointment - would later recall how "Uncle Arthur" helped their father Ernest buy two boats, one of them called Swallow, and would watch them from the pier.
"He would get very testy if he saw us behaving like duffers, ie, in an unseamanlike way," she wrote in her book In Aleppo Once. "Duffers" becomes a key phrase in Swallows and Amazons.

The Altounyans may have lived in Aleppo - where Ernest ran his family's renowned hospital - but they knew the Lake District well.
Their mother Dora was the daughter of William Collingwood, writing partner and secretary to the great Victorian art critic and social thinker John Ruskin, and the family home lay on the edge of Lake Coniston.
Ransome was an old friend of Collingwood, and had moved to the Lake District with his Russian wife Evgenia, who had been Trotsky's secretary when they met in Moscow.

Taqui writes that when the family headed back to Syria after their holiday in 1928, they left Ransome pondering whether he should give up his career as a foreign correspondent to write books.
It was a surprise, she says, when one morning a parcel arrived with a book called Swallows and Amazons. It carried the dedication: "To the six for whom it was written in exchange for a pair of slippers" - a reference to the parting gift they had given him of a pair of scarlet Turkish slippers.

She says Ransome later told her he had to turn her into John in order to have another boy in the story. "Titty and Roger were very true to life, Susie we thought a little too good," she wrote.

But the excitement of being the characters in a novel would wane over the years as Swallows and Amazons and its 11 follow-up books turned into a massive success. This was particularly true when the family settled in England.
"They were embarrassed about it," explains Barbara Altounyan, daughter of Roger, who is an audio biographer. "They just wanted to be like everyone else, which was hard enough for them at the time."
Her father, she says, did not mind so much. "But Titty hated it," she adds.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37049314
 
Saw it & loved it!

Great spies, even a motorbike sidecar ^ a seaplane.
 
Saw it & loved it!

Great spies, even a motorbike sidecar ^ a seaplane.
It's on here now - I must check the screening times. (The last film I saw here I could only make the afternoon showing because of my limited bus service.)
 
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