Posted by John Nichols on April 26, 2004 at 14:17:56 from 165.91.196.181 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Re: Have you walked in Mecca? (Wild Cat Island) posted by Ian E-N on April 26, 2004 at 08:53:52:
Two weeks to the Saturday we leave for WCI and counting.
I still have to book the hotel in London,
we are going to hire a car and also the hotel in Paris,
We have been asked to Kendall on the Wednesday when we are in the Lakes and we are looking forward to meeting a fellow Ransome devotee.
Simply amazing the number of people who sent me emails directly about the trip, all seem to read the TarBoard.
Great galloping galoots. Time to go.
Let me leave with with last nights reading at the start of Thorstein of the Mere by AR:
Neither the countryside that a man knew as a child nor the book that he loved can be indifferent to him as he grows old. Even if he now lives far away from that country the child wakes in him when he thinks of a friend going there. If he lives there the child in him is never more than half asleep. In the same way, when a man has greatly loved a book he read in childhood he gets the pleasure from seeing new children reading it that he gets from seeing them gathering chestnuts or galumphing (from gallop and jump, the action being a combin-ation of both) long after chestnuts have lost their value for him and there is no longer that spring in his heart and his muscles that made him once prefer galumphing to any other form of progress. He gets that pleasure and rather more, because though he does not want to gather chestnuts or galumph he can read that book again, and reading it can shrink in weight and knowledge and be himself what once he was before ever he was submitted to the assault and battery of the world, which, when he considers it, he is surprised to have survived. Reading that book he recovers his own childhood. And to see a child reading it is to be himself a child, looking over the other child's shoulder and sharing page by page the old enthralment.
For some fortunate people the book of their childhood and the countryside in which they read it are one. The Pentlands and some of Stevenson's stories must be inseparable for some Scottish children who grew up with both at once. Then there is the Rob Roy country and the country of the Doones. For myself, the Lake Country and my own childhood would not have been what they were if I had not known Mr. W.J. Collingwood's "Thorstein of the Mere." Not many children knew it then, more than thirty years ago, not a great many have known it since (because of the limited nature of its earlier publication), but no child who knew it could think of the country north of the Sands as other than Thorstein's country. No child now grown old who knew the book can fail to be delighted at the thought that, now that Heine-mann's have published it in London, thousands of other children and their parents who know this north-west corner of England will have that country and their childhood, if only in retro-spect, touched by magic, as his was long ago. The country is the book. Years and years after, taking "Thorstein of the Mere" with me into Russia, I had my childhood and its country in my pocket and could escape into them when I wished.
When I was a child my family used to spend part of every year in a farmhouse at the southern end of Coniston, or, as it is called in the old maps, Thurston Water. To get to it we had to leave the train at Greenodd, the green point at which Swein the Northman, Thorstein's father, landed in his long boat, and then drive up the valley of the Crake, from which Coniston Old Man is seen as a steep mountain rising to a peak, not at all like the long skyline that it shows to those who approach it from the more usual entrance to the Lake District. We knew the rock by Greenodd Station from which Swein, with Unna, his wife, looked down in the moonlight on his farm about the mouths of Crake and Leven that night after he came back from his journey to Manchester ("a pretty place and, one would have thought, a strong work enough to hold against any comers: but the Saxons took it last summer from those lubberly Danes") and to Bakewell, where in spite of his resolve to own no master, he had gripped hands with Eadward, the Saxon King, and sworn to keep the peace. Manchester and Bakewell were far away, but we knew the woods, or what was left of them, above Crake's mouth where the red giant himself brought the burnt arrow to call the Northmen to war, and we knew every yard up the Crake itself, up which the boy Thorstein found his way through the steep forge where is now Spark Bridge, past the place above it where Hundi, his brother, turned back, Lowick with its rush of water, the difficult footing of the river bridge by the old Bobbin Mill, where my father used to catch sea-trout, and up by Arklid to Allan Tarn and so to the place from which Thorstein first saw Thorstein's Water, Coniston Lake, reaching away before him into the purple hills.
We knew the little howe where Thorstein saw the "huge men, red-haired and red-bearded, crane-legged and jolter-headed, clothed rudely in skins, and devouring great gobbets of flesh from a roebuck they had killed and seemed to eat with little or no cooking." Up on the fell we knew the old dwelling-places of the hillmen, and the giant's grave (marked in the Ordnance maps) where the last of them is buried. We did not suspect (what I know now) that we were reading a great book, a book that will be known and loved as long as men know and love Thorstein's country. For though it told of a thousand years ago it became so much a part of our own lives as to be more like memory than reading, and sometimes more like present than past. Often in autumn woods we saw the mane of the red-haired girl Raineach who saved Thorstein from the hillfolk, caught by the sunlight among the reddened leaves. We ourselves explored as he did. The account of the upbringing of Thorstein and his brothers seemed applicable to us, at least in the holidays: "As to book learning, they got on very well without it." So did we, for we did not count "Thorstein" a book. Its very language was not that of books, but carried with it words that were in daily use about us. It spoke of "firespots" where books would talk of fireplaces. It was full of real knowledge of the kind that did not get into books. It told of how the farmhouse fire was kept alight from end to year's end, one end of a log burning and the other sometimes outside the house door. There are men living in these parts who can remember seeing such a fire and such a firespot in the very cottage in the very cottage in which I am now writing. It told of how Swein, Thorstein's son, settled at Nibthwaite. Was not the very farm in which we lived there held by Swainsons still? No mere book could know a thing like that.
Far up the lake was Peel Island. "When you see it from the fells it looks like a ship in the midst of the blue ripples; but a ship at anchor, while all the mere moves upbank or downbank, as the wind may be. . . . And to make the likeness better still, a long, narrow calf-rock lies in the water, as if it were the cock-boat at the stern: while tall trees stood for masts and sails." We had seen it so from the high fell, and as for the calf-rock, we ran our boat in alongside it when we rowed down to the island. We knew that someone had lived there, in the narrow place between rocks in the middle of it. For twenty years I treasured an old nail found there, now gone, like so much else. And in "Thorstein of the Mere" we learnt the truth of how Thorstein and Raineach lived there during his outlawry, and how their enemies came across the ice to kill them and their babies and failed, and were driven off before ever their friends, summoned by horn and beacon, had come to their help from down the Crake.
And if the book became an actual part of the country that we knew near at hand, it threw its magic over the mysterious country that we came to know bit by bit and later, beyond the wall of fells at the head of the lake. It told of the wild valleys of Blencathra and Skiddaw. It told of Dunmail Raise where Domhnall, the last King of Cumbria, passed out of history, on the day when fair, misused Aluinn threw the gold crown of Cumbria into the Grizedale Tarn, where it lies to this day. It told of places farther still. There was a beautiful, pitiful story in it from which we children took what we could, and took more as we grew older. But always the tale came back to our own fells and the Crake and Coniston and Peel Island. What Master John Ridd must be for children about Exmoor Thorstein was for us. What "Lorna Doone" must be for those who come from Somerset and Devon "Thorstein of the Mere" must be for those who were children in Thorstein's country: and so it will be for generations yet to come, who also in these green dales under the fells will dream Unna's dream of "love abiding and labour continuing, heedless of glory and fearless of death."