Spies and Amazons
A new BBC adaptation of the children’s classic has been spiced up with two Russian agents. But the bigger twist is that the book’s author may have been a REAL Soviet spy
Swallows and amazons, arthur Ransome’s classic 1930 novel celebrating childhood innocence, the power of imagination and the beauty of nature, has been given a bizarre makeover by the BBC, robbing it of much of its charm.
Ransome set his famous story in the golden summer of 1929. His young adventurers, modelled on the children of his friends Dora and Ernest altounyan, were allowed to spend the whole of their holiday in the lake District unfettered by what we now know as health and safety constraints.
They sailed their dinghy, the swallow, set up camp on an island, fought mock battles with their friends, and invented a thrilling parallel universe full of pirates.
Now the BBC has made a film which moves the story to 1935, and introduces a preposterous pair of Russian spies into the sunkissed lakeland idyll that Ransome created for his semi-fictional walker family.
at an early screening I saw, as the walker children’s wicker picnic hamper went disastrously overboard during their voyage to wild Cat Island at the start of their great adventure, the hearts of many in the grownup audience surely sank with it.
By then there had already been a gun-wielding chase along the top of a train that owed far more to John Buchan’s espionage thriller The Thirty-Nine steps, or even Ian Fleming’s From Russia with love, than to Ransome’s beguiling story.
andrew scott, the Irish actor who plays Moriarty in the BBC series sherlock, is the lead spy, who, with a cartoonishly shady accomplice, plots to kidnap Jim Turner (Rafe spall), the grumpy man the children re-name Captain Flint.
In the book, Turner, who is gradually teased out of his grumpiness and gamely agrees to walk the plank, is an author struggling with writer’s block and seems intended as Ransome’s alter ego.
BuT in this misconceived film, which also stars Harry Enfield, he is a secret agent, codenamed s76, who has stolen soviet ‘rocket plans’.
scott’s character spends much of the time watching Turner through binoculars, lapsing for no clear reason from perfect English into Russian, and saying cod- sinister things such as: ‘He’ll have to make contact with his superiors soon.’
By adding these distinctly unconvincing spies, director Philippa lowthorpe and writer andrea Gibb have done what Ransome never did: they have underestimated the young audience that will go and see this film.
Ransome, who wrote 11 more children’s adventure novels after swallows and amazons, was the J. K. Rowling of his day. His devoted readers included the future Queen Elizabeth, as well as other distinguished authors, among them J. R. R. Tolkien and a. a. Milne.
and yet, raised on a diet of Harry Potter and The lord of The Rings rather than the corned beef and ginger beer that loom so large in Ransome’s books, children now are a sophisticated and demanding lot. I doubt whether they will buy such a pair of cardboard cut-outs.
Nonetheless, Gibb did not pluck the spy idea entirely from the ether. It was inspired by Ransome’s own extraordinary life, a life in which he met and was dazzled by the soviet dictator lenin, fell madly in love with and later married the leading Communist leon Trotsky’s secretary, was recruited by MI6 (and given the codename s76), and may have been a soviet double agent.
The author Roland Chambers, at the end of The last Englishman, his meticulously researched 2009 biography of Ransome, concludes that ‘there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence’ to support the view that Ransome, while working for British Intelligence in the 1920s, was also ‘consciously serving the interests of a hostile power’.
Ransome was born in 1884 in leeds, into an affluent middle-class family; his father was a university professor. In childhood Ransome developed powerful passions — for photography, ventriloquism, hares, conjuring and carpentry, among other things — but the most enduring was for the lake District.
He had been introduced to its glories by his father, who had grown up on the shores of Morecambe Bay. Yet could it be that the England he so adored, he also betrayed?
already a novelist, prolific essayist and author of a well- received biography of oscar wilde, by 1917 Ransome had also become a journalist. Having tried and failed to get a job with the Daily Mail, he covered the Russian revolution and subsequent civil war as a correspondent for the left-leaning Daily News.
The aims of the revolutionaries excited him, and he began to swing to the left. a female Russian friend reported that he formed a loathing for ‘the bourgeoisie’, and also noted that ‘for England he seemed to have a queer mixture of contempt, dislike and love’. she added he ‘was clever, yet childlike, very sincere and kind and romantic.’
Towards the end of 1917, Ransome landed a rare interview with Trotsky, then the soviet Commissar of war.
The resulting newspaper article caused such a stir in london that the Foreign secretary, arthur Balfour, sent a telegram to the British Embassy in Petrograd, asking if this Ransome fellow might be willing to act as a go-between Britain and Russia’s new power-brokers.
But for Ransome himself the encounter had made a quite different impact. He had become instantly smitten with Trotsky’s ‘tall and jolly’ personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna shelepina. He had always been impressionable. Chambers records that ‘by 1908, virtually every woman of Ransome’s acquaintance had either laughed or sighed as he protested his devotion’. But one had accepted him. when he met Evgenia he was already married, albeit unhappily, to a solicitor’s daughter, Ivy walker. They had a daughter, Tabitha.
This inconvenience did not stop Ransome from setting up home with Evgenia, and in 1924, after Ivy reluctantly granted him a divorce, they got married. In the meantime, his intimate knowledge of Russian affairs, in more ways than one, had made him a prime target for recruitment by MI6. He even had access to lenin, who impressed him hugely.
Coincidentally, the man who helped enlist him for the secret service was the urbane Clifford sharp, son- in- law of one of Ransome’s favourite children’s authors, E. Nesbit. (It is a quirk of history that the runaway success of The Railway Children film in 1970, the delightful adaptation of Nesbit’s book, inspired a movie of swallows and amazons four years later.)
Even now, it is not clear how useful Ransome was to British Intelligence, any more than we know for sure whether he was secretly feeding information back to the soviets. Either way, it was plainly a remarkable period in his life, but that doesn’t mean that the latest version of his timeless classic needs spies.
actually, though, swallows and amazons is not quite timeless, because another contentious issue in the new film is the renaming of one character, apparently so as not to offend modern sensibilities.
To three of the walker children, Ransome gave the same names as the offspring of his friends Dora and Ernest: John, susan and Roger. But the pluckiest, he called Titty.
As loNG ago as 1963, the name caused the BBC a dilemma. In a TV adaptation that year, Titty became Kitty. In the 1974 film, she stayed Titty. Now, she has become Tatty, and is played by Teddie- Rose Malleson-allen, the half- sister of the singer lily allen.
who knows what Ransome, who died in 1967, would have made of the way the BBC have reimagined his story?
we do know that he could be fiercely critical of other people’s storytelling efforts: in 1909, he lambasted Kenneth Grahame’s new book The wind In The willows, writing: ‘If we judge the book by its aim, it is a failure, like a speech to Hottentots [a derogatory reference to africans] made in Chinese.’
still, he must surely have approved of Grahame’s famous line: ‘There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’
what a shame the BBC seems to take the same view of messing about with a classic children’s novel.