Away to the westwards was a dark strip of cloud, with clear greenish sky beneath it. Suddenly we noticed what looked like a straight indiarubber tube connecting the dark cloud with the sea and moving rapidly between cloud and sea, towards us, as it seemed. It was of course very hard to judge its distance, but we thought it must be something over half a mile in height. I closed the companionway hatch but the Ancient said there was small use in doing that, ‘for if one of them water spouts touches a ship it’ll break it like a matchbox’.
To illustrate the impact of these adventures on later stories, contrast the incident above with this fictitious encounter with a waterspout in Peter Duck:
The waterspout was changing shape with every moment. It was like a tremendous indiarubber tube connecting sky and sea …
‘Close all hatches!’ Captain Flint suddenly saw how very near the waterspout was going to pass. ‘If that thing hits us, it isn’t the hatches’ll save us’ said Peter Duck quietly. ‘Smashed to match-board we’ll be, with that weight of water on top of us.’
By September, Racundra was once again laid up for the winter, this time in Reval, as bad weather had made the last part of the trip back to Riga impossible. Arthur and Evgenia did not realise it, but the next time they sailed the Racundra, it would be as man and wife, for in April 1924 the divorce from Ivy Walker became absolute. It is clear, even on this dramatic day, what the plans were for the summer, for he wrote to Evgenia from England with wild enthusiasm:
My dearly beloved old madam, All Clear at last. I signed documents yesterday. Today at one, we exchanged documents with the other side. I am tired completely out but feel a sort of undercurrent of hope and the feeling that now we can make a fresh start. TELL SEHMEL TO VARNISH THE FISHING BOAT AND PUT IT IN THE WATER! MAKE HIM GET IT READY AT ONCE SO THAT IT HAS TIME TO DRY.
Any fresh start that Arthur proposed clearly involved sailing. On the morning of 10 May, the couple were married at the British Consulate in Reval and from the consulate the newlyweds rushed off to the shipyard carrying an enormous tin barrel of paint for Racundra’s topsides. On 15 May, they were back on the water, cruising to Riga. From Riga, the Ransomes determined to have a honeymoon cruise, heading inland up the Bolderaa River (now known as the Lieupe River) to the town of Mitau, many miles inland. By now, Ransome had perfected the art of coercing the recalcitrant little engine into action and this was just as well, for he would need it on the tortuous, marshy and often deeply confusing waterways of the Latvian interior. The cruise did not get off to a good start, for even as the newlyweds were being waved off by the Ancient, who had opted to remain at home for this romantic voyage, Racundra’s engine conked out and it was some time before they were back on their way. Ransome’s log of the trip alludes to endless fishing and an almost ceaseless quest for milk for their porridge every morning, entailing any number of picturesque encounters with rustic local folk along the way. All the while the little yacht threaded the maze of marsh, reeds, and river, often coming across ruined factories, a harsh reminder of the devastation that had swept through this region only a few years before. Yet on the whole, the river trip was most picturesque, and a romantic way to spend a honeymoon, as this log entry suggests:
We chose a gap in the reeds and pulled the dinghy ashore on a flat, gravelly area all set up for camping with the remains of a fireplace and a log seat. The Cook set to work on supper while I put up the tent on the edge of the pine forest. We had no light. Our torch batteries had failed, and we had found none in the shops. No matter. It was a clear night, the moon was rising and we had a good camp fire. We ate chicken and drank champagne.
Despite idyllic evenings like this, days of relentless rain made for trying times as well. It was during one of these depressing episodes that the previously stoical Evgenia cracked:
The cook says there is no point living in Racundra. She says that only children are glad to live in a ship. That there is nothing to see, nothing to write about, that she is sick of wind and rain and living in a small cabin; that I grow worse with age, and that proper authors live at home and write books out of their heads.
On September 4, the final catastrophe came, which (temporarily at least) split the honeymooners asunder, as Ransome’s log notes:
The cruise has ended or is on the point of death. I am alone in Racundra. Or rather not quite alone. I am alone with a mouse, which has sent the whole six foot three of the cook, hitherto undaunted by anything but calms, in headlong flight to Riga. The discovery was made this morning. I woke at five and heard what I thought was an unmistakeable mouse, but, believing it rather good luck, besides a miracle, I said nothing about it and went fishing. When I came back I mentioned it and got into rather a row for even pretending such a thing. I went fishing again and in about an hour heard the foghorn going from Racundra so hurried back. The cook keeps things for darning under her mattress. A pair of half darned stockings had been found there, gnawed all to pieces. The Cook was convinced and was for starting for Riga at once. This determination was presently petrified and steel bound when she found a crowd of its footprints, little three toed paddy marks, in the sour cream. We started just as we were with the dinghy full of fishing rods and tackles.
At half past six we were just coming near Dubbeln where for a hundred yards or so the railway skirts the river. I shouted to a man to know when the next train went for Riga. We had twenty minutes. The cook was dressed for Riga in ten. In fifteen we were close to the station, which is on the very bank of the river. I rounded up, dropped the anchor and rowed like the boatrace for the embankment. The Cook hared it up and crossed the line just in front of the engine and was gone and I paddled back to Racundra, got my anchor again, chose a decentish berth, anchored again for the night, stowed the sails, ate two three quarter pound perch of my own catching and a large bar of chocolate, opened a bottle of beer, which still stands beside me, and settled down a little breathless, to recount these alarums and excursions. The cruise is all but over. The Cook has gone, and I am the hero left to face the raging lion in a mouse’s skin.
Presently, the shamefaced Evgenia returned with two mousetraps and the cruise did resume, if only in order to get the Racundra back safely to Riga in order to lay her up. If it sounds like Arthur’s second marriage was already on the rocks, this was not the case. Evgenia had always possessed a sharp temper, but the many years of happy marriage ahead of them is proof that this flight from the mouse was simply a temporary hitch. Yet the marriage was to sound the death knell for the partnership between the Ransomes and Racundra. This inland cruise was to be their last. That winter, the pair headed to England where Ransome’s beloved mother met Evgenia for the first time and made her most welcome. Shortly after this, the couple bought a beautiful cottage, Low Ludderburn, situated high in the South Lakes, and commanding fine views over both Ambleside and also south to Morecambe Bay, where a tiny strip of sea was visible. It was everything Arthur had ever dreamed of. If he had once written that, ‘The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage’, then he was evidently happily resigned to this fate. After all, he was now 40 and had been living a more or less itinerant life since he was 29. The one fly in the ointment was that he had little choice but to sell Racundra, for his divorce, coupled with the purchase of a new house, had to be paid for in some manner. Racundra had to go.
The gallant little vessel was advertised for sale in Yachting Monthly and her eventual purchaser was one K Adlard Coles, also an aspiring author, who later became a successful publisher (in fact, it is his name that appears on the spine of this book). He planned to sail Racundra to England and write about the trip, just as Ransome had hoped to do. Ransome sold her with the caveat that she should be renamed, and Coles’ subsequent book was later published as Close Hauled. The to-ing and fro-ing of correspondence between Ransome and Coles is quite entertaining and reveals Ransome as amusing and tolerant where a misunderstanding over money (Coles underpaid Ransome by £30) would have left some fe
eling bitter. Not so, and he was keen to help Coles along his way:
The Ancient will rig and get Racundra ready for sea in a very few days AFTER your arrival. It is quite useless to tell him to do anything before that as he simply won’t do it.
He will ship with you for the passage for England if he likes you, not otherwise. He is called Captain Sehmel by me. Other people address him less respectfully and get less out of him. He is an extremely charming old man and makes himself very useful.
In the end, Sehmel did not ship with Coles, but it doesn’t seem as though there was anything personal in it and Coles recalls that he was clearly very upset to see the Racundra sail out of his life, standing at the pier in Reval waving her off with a handkerchief until she was all but out of sight. In the meantime, Ransome settled down to life ashore almost full time, apart from the odd sailing trip on Coniston aboard Swallow, a small lug-rigged dinghy he shared with the Barbara and Ernest Altounyan and their five children, Taqui, Susan, Titty, Roger and Bridget. Barbara was one of the Collingwood clan, and Arthur had become friends with Ernest many years before while he had been in Coniston pursuing Barbara (and after being rebuffed by Barbara Arthur fruitlessly pursued another of the Collingwood girls, Dora). During this period the two had enjoyed a number of sailing trips on Coniston. Subsequently, Arthur had been in frantic contact with Ernest while trying to work out how to sail Slug all those years ago.
The Ransomes and Altounyans enjoyed many pleasant summer days sailing both the Swallow and the Mavis (this boat became the Amazon in Swallows and Amazons). Ransome was still working freelance for the Manchester Guardian, but he was mulling over new writing projects and, sitting in his workroom, high in the fells, he came up with a new children’s story centred around the sailing adventures of the Swallow and the Altounyan family. Ransome himself made an appearance as ‘Captain Flint’ or ‘Uncle Jim’, a bald, irascible old man who the children believe to be a ‘retired pirate’ and harass accordingly. In a very short time he had the bare bones for the plot of Swallows and Amazons and in 1930, when Arthur was 46, the book was published to very good reviews. Ransome had finally found his niche. It wasn’t until the publication of the third book in the series, Peter Duck, that success was totally assured, but after that the books became a phenomenon – the Harry Potter of their day, one might say, and he continued to mine this rich seam, catering for his audience of ‘brats’ as he termed them, until 1945. At this point a crisis of confidence in his own work – not helped by Evgenia’s rapier criticism – brought him to a grinding halt. He never wrote another work of fiction, although he tinkered with his autobiography for many years to come.
Following Arthur’s success came boats, and plenty of them. His first sizeable replacement for Racundra was the Nancy Blackett, a handy little cutter which he kept at Pin Mill, Suffolk. She was destined to appear as the Goblin in We didn’t mean to go to Sea. Next came the Selina King, a very beautiful canoe-sterned cutter, built especially for the Ransomes. His next yacht was to be Peter Duck, built with old age and easy handling in mind and described by Ransome as a ‘nautical bath chair’. He was never terribly fond of this vessel and she was followed by another small sloop, the Lottie Blossom, which he kept in Chichester harbour.
What is perhaps surprising was that Arthur never returned to his first love, Racundra. During the period in which Ransome’s fame was growing, the old boat was knocking around the South Coast. After being brought over to England by Adlard Coles, she had been re–rigged with a much larger Bermudan sail plan. What this took away from her in terms of ease of handling, it added greatly to her performance. Coles had struggled on the trip home to the UK, simply because the Racundra needed a pretty stiff breeze to get her going at all. The engine was as despised by Coles as it had been by Ransome, and was renamed by him the ‘smelly monster’. Shortly after arriving back in the UK, Coles put Racundra – temporarily named Anette II – up for sale for £350 and even had the nerve to try to sell her back to Ransome, which was pretty cheeky considering he hadn’t even paid for her in full the first time around. Some years later, Ransome himself saw her in Chichester harbour and, although Evgenia couldn’t bear to look at her, Ransome had a poke around and found that, ‘She was still the same old boat. Someone had built a ridiculous dog house on her cabin top, but otherwise she looked as smart as ever.’
For many years she was owned by the MP JM Baldock and then she disappeared. In 1976, she was rediscovered by the well-known cruising yachtsman Rod Pickering, lying in a dilapidated state in Tangier Harbour. Pickering purchased her and set about restoring her. His plan was to sail her to the UK via the Cape Verde Islands and the West Indies. Sadly, he only made it as far as Caracas, where in 1982 she hit a reef and foundered off the Venezuelan coast. The crew survived but it was the end of the old boat. Nevertheless, it is perhaps fitting that the vessel that inspired so many scenes from Ransome’s Peter Duck, which was based in the Caribbean, should find her way there and end up resting her bones on some exotic shore.
By the time Racundra plunged to her watery grave, Ransome was already long in his own. He died in 1965 at the respectable age of 80. Evgenia battled on until 1973, dying at the age of 81. She stayed at least partly true to her old Bolshevik leanings by steadfastly refusing any suggestion she should get a servant to help her around the house. It is easy to underestimate Ransome’s nautical writing: after all, it was specifically aimed at children. Yet reading his descriptions of life afloat, both in dinghies and yachts, is like taking all the best things out of every sailing trip you have ever undertaken and compressing them into one memory. You need those kind of sepia-tinted dreams as you scrape antifoul and barnacles from the underside of your yacht, or hunch against a chilly easterly breeze laced with drizzle in order to catch the 4am tide. At that moment, it’s important to remember how magical Ransome made it all sound.
In almost all areas of his life, Ransome was an optimist. He had witnessed much of the difficulties and hard knocks that life can throw up, but he had a way of seeing the sunny side, the romance in even the most trying situation, and translating that into writing. Given this talent, the first-hand observer of the Russian revolution had run the danger of being perceived as a Bolshevik traitor, swept up in the emotion of such a remarkable event, but it is invaluable in a writer of nautical fiction. Some see Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons as absurd escapism to a place that never existed; yet between the two wars, in a country wracked by depression, people needed to dream of a world with the hard edges removed. Perhaps the secret of the enduring success of the books is that we still do.
Tobias Smollett
Grudging grandfather of the nautical novel
There has to be a first time for everything, and when you are looking at the nautical novel, you’d have to say that Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, published in 1748, set out the blueprint from which so many other writers created their own seafaring stories. Smollett was able to evoke life afloat in a manner that none had been capable of before. Guided through the musty lower decks and wooden walls of an eighteenth-century naval vessel by Smollett’s skilful pen, you can almost hear the groaning of the great wooden walls, get a whiff of tar, oakum and bilgewater and witness first hand the terror of a storm and the simple-hearted generosity of Jack Tar in his native domain. Prior to Smollett, a sea voyage was generally a rather incidental irritation to the plotline of a book; in his hands it came alive and was peopled with sailors of great character, comedy and cruelty, while the sea became a living thing, and a capricious mistress at that.
So what brought about this sea change? The answer is very simple: Smollett had first-hand experience of the foibles and quirks of the sea, having studied life afloat in great detail during his years serving as a surgeon’s mate in the Royal Navy. Armed with this knowledge and experience, he was in an enviable position to paint a realistic picture, and he did so with great panache, pulling no punches in his portrayal of all its bawdy, brutal unwholesomeness. So who was Smollett? His name stil
l resonates with some literati, but to most of us he is a forgotten figure. He was a Scotsman, born just outside Glasgow in 1721. His family was part of the established gentry of the area but Tobias was the youngest son of a youngest son and, as such, had little to look forward to by way of an inheritance. It was probably this fact that prompted him to train as a surgeon, learning his trade in Glasgow. Surgeons these days are considered to sit somewhere near the pinnacle of their profession, but in Smollett’s time things were rather different. Surgeons were looked down on by physicians, who considered themselves far too important to deal with any of the unsavoury blood and guts side of medicine and rarely actually even touched a patient. It was also only physicians that were allowed to use the title of ‘Doctor’ in those days, surgeons satisfying themselves with being a simple ‘Mr’.
This snobbery was of only minor interest to young Smollett, for he harboured far greater ambitions. It was his dream to become a playwright, which back in the eighteenth century was akin to dreaming of going to Hollywood and becoming a scriptwriter. Smollett had reason to be confident of success, however, for in the spare hours that his medical apprenticeship allowed him, he wrote a play called The Regicide, centred on an imagined assassination of King James I. By the time it was completed he was certain that he had struck theatrical gold with this rollercoaster of a play in ten sizzling scenes. He simply needed to get it placed in a theatre in order to make his fortune, and it may well have been this very ambition that prompted Smollett to hotfoot it to London in 1739, his masterpiece tucked into his back pocket, success all but assured.
Sea Fever Page 31