It all begins when Peter Duck, an elderly sailor once marooned on an island in the Caribbean, tells a tale to the Swallows and Amazons. He died in 1967.The intrepid Swallows (explorers John, Susan, Titty, and Roger Walker) and fearsome Amazon pirates (Nancy and Peggy Blackett) sail the high seas, outwitting a pirate and his cutthroat crew, sharks, and the ravenous creatures of Crab Island in search of buried treasure. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his book, Pigeon Post. It almost wrote itself." He published the first of his children's classics, the twelve Swallows And Amazons books, in 1930. 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 sky-line of great hills beneath it. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. Going away from it we were half drowned in tears. We played in or on the lake or on the hills above. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. In a 1958 author's note, Ransome wrote: "I have been often asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. On their return to England, he bought a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District and began writing children's stories. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky's personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and was a special correspondent of the Guardian.
He had an adventurous life - as a baby in he was carried by his father to the top of the Old Man of Coniston, a peak that is 2,276ft high! He went to Russia in 1913 to study folklore and in 1914, at the start of World War I he became a foreign correspondent for the Daily News. Arthur Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884.
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