Swallows and Amazons

[ghostfriendly]

Just watched a musical of Swallows and Amazons at the Old Vic, Bristol. All the Blytonesque 'lashings of ginger beer' ethos, with the imagination and spirit of Peter Pan and lot of self-consious humour.

The sets were rather good as well, with a trolley, wooden prow and mast being used for the ships, combined with a stagehand splashing water over

Comments

[cereswunderkind]

Happy to admit it. An early version of Pirates of the Archipelago / Tides of Glory had Annie and her crew find a mysterious boy marooned on an island. He'd been left there accidentally by the 'Down, or something along those lines.

The other thing (apart from camping and sailing) that the S & A do is make up stories about themselves and I'm happy to admit to nicking that idea.

A true Swallows and Amazons in space would involve small spacecraft and secret asteroids, perhaps. Robert Heinlein's books for YAs are not too far distant from that concept.

S & A plot summary - "A solitary bachelor is inexorably drawn into the violent fantasy world of two underage gangs." As true now as ever it was...

[ghostfriendly]

Nice summary...guess I'll have to read it. Kids with some imagination would be why I liked Just William more than Famous Five etc; the latter have so many real adventures they never really need to use their imaginations.

[cereswunderkind]

The quality of the S&A books varies. In particular, I've never really liked the fantasy stories, like Missee Lee or Peter Duck - even if I nicked their idea of having characters make up stories about themselves and tell them to each other. The whimsy overpowers the story for me. I suspect that their old-fashioned attitudes to non-British characters may make them unreadable now.

My favourite of the series is We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea. In this story the mild adventures of S&A, Secret Water, etc, become very real as the Walker family are swept out into the North Sea and have to keep cool heads and use their seacraft to survive a genuinely life-or-death situation.