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GENERATIONS of Arthur Ransome readers have asked the same questions after finishing his Swallows and Amazons books. Are the places true? Are the people real? Christina Hardyment decided to find out. Among the boxes of papers left to Leeds University on Arthur Ransome’s death she found a large cabin trunk. Its tattered steamship labels at once betrayed its true identity. There was no doubt in her mind that it was Captain Flint’s trunk from Swallows and Amazons, which had been stolen by burglars from the houseboat and discovered by Titty on Cormorant Island. Inside there was no Mixed Moss, the book that made Captain Flint’s fortune, but instead a wealth of old logs, diaries, photographs and sketchbooks which signposted the trail towards the reality behind the stories.
Following up clues found in the Leeds archives, the author sailed in Amazon’s wake to Wild Cat Island and climbed Ransome’s Kanchenjunga near Coniston. She prospected among the old High Topps copper mines and signalled from the Winter Holiday observatory. Aided and abetted by her own four children, she went in search of Swallowdale, explored the Coot Club haunts on the Norfolk Broads, and camped in the muddy wilderness of the real Secret Water. Incidents in Ransome’s own life have been matched to those he wove into his books; the children he knew and who sailed with him have told her what they remember of him. She has talked to the children who gave their names to the Swallows, the youngest of whom took some of the photographs for the book), untangled the mystery of Nancy Blackett, met Squashy Hat’s daughter, examined the Mastodon’s splatchers at his home on Skipper Island and tracked down the real Daisy, Dum and Dee.
Until now no one could have guessed at all the influences that were brought to bear on the Swallows and Amazons adventures. Ransome’s own boats, most of which have survived and are still sailing, contributed greatly to the authenticity of his writing, though nothing reveals more about his brilliant transformation of fact into fiction than the secrets that emerge from his working notebooks – the origins of Peter Duck on a Norfolk wherry in winter, the Clay family’s contribution to We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, and the ornithologist Myles North’s part in the writing of Great Northern?
Captain Flint’s Trunk provides not only an essential companion to the Ransome books but is the story of a quest that will make magic of reality for the thousands of readers of all ages who may be tempted to follow Christina Hardyment’s trail of adventure.
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Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint's Trunk