Posted by John Wilson on January 19, 2011 at 00:14:13 user hugo.
Reading the second volume of Geoffrey Trease’s autobiography “Laughter at the Door” (1974), two quotes reminded me of Arthur Ransome:
He says “I had not that passion for children’s society at close quarters which most people expect a children’s writer to feel”. Though he was writing about Berkshire in 1939 at the beginning of WWII, when they got some East End evacuees, complete with nits.
He went to teach teach at a private school in Gosford in Cumberland in 1940 while waiting to be called up:
I had come, all unknowing, to Bannerdale, about which, in the years to come, I was going to write. … Bannermere will not be found on any map. There is a Banner Dale, scarcely more than a mile long, just east of Saddleback and Bannerdale Crags looking down on it, but I have never seen them. My own Bannerdale, with its lake and forbidden islet and its sombre mountain Black Banner lowering over it is one of those private fantasy regions that authors, and especially children’s authors love to create. It is a pastiche, three parts Wasdale, one part Eskdale, with bits and pieces from elsewhere. The ‘Gates of Bannerdale’were taken from the Jaws of Borrowdale, ‘Black Banner’ was suggested by the real mountain, Black Sails, and my little town of ‘Winthwaite’ is Cockermouth, shifted southwards for literary convenience … Nowadays … it does not ‘exist merely in my own mind’ but exists also in the minds of a lot of people who, in childhood or later, have read the stories I laid there. Not only British children, but – oddly and gratifyingly - Japanese, Swedes, Brazilians and others equally remote.
As Wikipedia did not have an article on the first of the five Bannerdale novels, I borrowed a library stackroom copy and wrote one, including his story of being asked to write a school story about boys and girls at day-schools (not boys at boarding-schools) by two schoolgirls at Millom: