Posted by Ed Kiser on December 24, 2014 at 08:23:30 user Kisered.
In Reply to: Re: Arthur Ransome Favourite Quotations posted by Peter Hyland on December 24, 2014 at 01:48:02:
Dave...
An excellent compilation - and a difficult task to put it together, because there is that nagging problem of what got left out. Hard to say "no" to the words that have become so dear to so many of us all.
In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy said, there at the ending, "There's no place like home."
Somehow that has significance resembling that of AR when he had Susan say, at the end of SD:
"Isn't it a blessing to get home?"
Perhaps it is, in a way, a sad ending, as throughout that book, SD, they were "making do" with having lost Swallow, and of course, without Swallow, that meant no Wild Cat Island. It is that island, there to be really on their own, separated by the water from "natives" - (which of course did come by boat to visit anyhow) - where they could do their own Thing. We, as readers, shared their desire to get back to Wild Cat Island.
Swallowdale started off promising that return to the island, but that was cut short by the accident. In Winter Holiday, when they went skating down to Spitzbergen (Wild Cat Island), the D's noticed that the others started skating faster as they got near to that place, as if it had a magnetic pull on them. Of course, they had never camped on the island, so could not truly feel its importance to the others, but they did note how the others reacted.
In each of these Lake District stories, there is that lure to get back to the island, a hope that was never really satisfied, at least not by the readers, for it seems that any further camping on the island was never described in these stories, after Swallows and Amazons (where the love of the island was originally created) and that teasing bit at the start of Swallowdale. Further adventures of our childhood friends were perhaps hinted at, but we were not invited to come along and share in those joys.
Swallowdale ends with the promise of new adventures on the island, but we are not to be a part of them. "Well," said Nancy, "the holidays have really begun now." What new adventures were in store for our friends, we can only try to imagine, but we were not invited to share in these. But perhaps we are blessed to not have any attempt by AR to have a sequel to S&A on Wild Cat Island as it would either overshadow the previous book's aura, of fall short itself.
So let us be grateful for those glimpses into the lives of our childhood friends given to us by AR, and for the imagination he has stirred in us as we try to imagine "what happened then."
Ed Kiser, Kentucky