A sailor with strange credentials
Jeremy Swift
RACUNDRA'S THIRD CRUISE by Arthur Ransome, edited by Brian Hammett Femhurst Books, £14.95, pp. 128, ISBN 1808660891 Arthur Ransome remains an enigma. The facts of his life are well known since Hugh Brogan's excellent biography. Born in 1884, the son of a Leeds University history professor, he started work in London as a literary critic, produced well-regarded studies of Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde, and moved into journalism. In 1913 he went to Russia, learned Russian and published a book of folklore. In 1915 he was back in Russia, working for the Daily News. He reported the October Revolution from the inside, sympathising with the Bolsheviks. Escaping an unhappy first marriage, he lived with and later married Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotsky's secretary.
They lived for a time in Latvia, from where he continued to report events in Russia. Always a keen sailor, he had a boat built to his own design in Riga. He and Evgenia sailed the Baltic, and he wrote a book about one of these trips entitled Racundra's First Cruise. During the early 1920s he worked mainly as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian. In 1925, he persuaded the editor to let him write a weekly fishing column. This was immensely successful, and the best pieces were republished as Rod and Line in 1929. Another fishing book followed in 1959. He is now remembered (in a crowded field) as one of the best fishing writers of the 20th century.
Jonathan Cape, his publisher, was, however, more interested in the outline of a children's book he had given them, called Swallows and Amazons. Published in 1930, it was an immediate success and led to a series of books recounting the adventures of a band of feral children living what now seems an impossibly charmed and free life in the lakes and woods of the Norfolk Broads and the Lake District. The children inhabit a world largely remembered from Ransome's own childhood, in which sailing and fishing are the proper business of children and adults alike but where, with the
exception of an occasional thinly disguised Ransome figure, adults keep well out of the intense make-believe world created by the children. Something in Ransome's understated style and finely drawn characters has made the stories more durable than most in the genre, and these pastoral fantasies were an important influence in the childhood of many people still alive today. That they were written by a friend of Lenin, who also wrote possibly the best eye-witness account of the Russian revolution, is hard to believe.
Ransome left a large archive of letters, manuscripts and photographs in Leeds University library, which has been mined by later writers, and although the seam is now getting thin, avid Ransomites (there is of course an active Arthur Ransome Society) always welcome more. Racundra's Third Cruise is compiled from a sailing log and notes Ransome made during one of his Baltic cruises. He intended to make a book of it but left the manuscript unfinished. Brian Hammett has put the bits together, adding Ransome's own black and white photos, to make a handsome little book. The route was inland, on the Aa river. Although the subject matter is largely the kitchen-sink business of life on a small boat going up and back down a river, the wider arena is the Baltic after the first world war, where bandit warlords had been encouraged by the western Allies to chase the Bolsheviks back behind the pre-war boundaries, and in the process laid waste the newly industrialising Baltic economies. The backdrop to Ransome's cruise is a landscape of ruined factories and solitary chimneys, although the latter usually have a stork's nest on top. Trips ashore to buy milk turn into an exploration of local farmers* lives. Ransome the reporter is clearly visible behind Ransome the sailor.
For Ransome enthusiasts the key bit of new information is the incident of the mouse. Towards the end of the cruise, with tension between Ransome and Evgenia rising from living too close together, a mouse is discovered in the cabin. Ransome's new Bolshevik wife flees to shore, and is only lured back on board when a mousetrap has been bought and the mouse dispatched. What would Trotsky have made of that?
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