AIBU to let them camp on an island overnight?

[chomalungma]

(Inspired by another thread)

We are on holiday in the Lake District. Lovely cottage. DH is working away. DC's have seen a lovely island and want to go camping there for a few nights. Light a campfire, cook for themselves. They'll get there by sailing boat. Youngest is 6 and oldest is 14.

Would you let them go?

@Iwantacampervan

They can always phone you in an emergency This is difficult in some parts of the Lake District in 2020.

It's even more difficult if you're a fictional character in 1929.

climpson* (Katharine Alexandra if you don’t mind) yes to buttered eggs!
With bread or rounds of toast if we’ve remembered the toasting fork.

For those that care I had 2 beers before a two course meal

@JasperRising I think @GreatAuntMaria might disagree with you

@cleopatrascorset

Having - really enjoyed - reading the book to our Roger aged kid recently.... NO. Because (1) Peter is not as sensible as he thinks (don't sail upriver as night falls!) and (2) the most unrealistic thing about the books is that they boss Roger around constantly and he never complains: any real life kid would have mutinyed by chapter 2.

Peter? I think you're getting mixed up with Narnia!

@ineedaholidaynow

I was just coming to point out that if it wasn't for me, most of The Picts and the Martyrs couldn't have happened!

I think Secret Water is my least favourite. The story is a bit thin, especially after the excitement of WDMTGTS. They don't meet any local characters, there are no subplots.

I don't think I have a favourite now. They all have something different to offer. As a child, I think I loved Swallowdale, Peter Duck and The Big Six best, but I can appreciate some of the others more now than I did then.

N

I hated Peter Duck! Never took to Great Northern and disliked Swallowdale (because it featured too much Swallows...).

Think I would go (from favourite to least favourite): Pigeon Post, Winter Holiday, Big Six, Picts and the Martyrs, Swallows and Amazons, Secret Water, Coot Club, Swallowdale, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, Peter Duck, Great Northern.

Brilliant thread. If they've been exposed to Covid-19 (or haven't had their MMR jabs), don't forget the yellow quarantine flag.

I never really liked Coot Club or the Big Six. They were the only ones that I only read twice instead of 20 times or more.

WDMTGTS is probably the one I re-read most recently and John's near despair about his responsibility for what had happened and his fear of letting everyone down was so much more apparent. As a child it was just an adventure!

Out of all the books that I have such fond memories of (and I highly recommend Lucy Mangan's Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading for remembering more) it will be S&A that disappoints me the most if the DC aren't interested.

No Missee Lee @JasperRising? I always rather liked it, though I suspect it wouldn't be a good one to re-read now!

I actually don't remember the plot of Peter Duck at all

I had an incredibly free childhood but know even my own parents would have stopped at this

Mine didn't. But then they'd been reading Arthur Ransome to me since I was about 7.

I knew there was another fantasy one! Afraid that is going to have to go down at the bottom with Peter Duck... Think I only read those last three once (and I have reread my favourites a lot)

A sailing adventure for grown ups, or older children - The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers

Oh yes! @GreatAuntMaria

I've just read a Buchan novel I had lying about but funnily enough not read yet (and I've even read his autobiography ...) The Island of the Sheep - another one where children save the day.

I really fancy some buttered eggs, but have forgotten the matches

MIssClimpson that is so unlike your usual thoroughness. And I'm not sure that Lord Peter ever meet the Walkers. Or the Blacketts, come to think of it.

But possibly he met their uncle in Africa or south America somewhere? After the war, that is.

I didn't like Peter Duck or Missee Lee

😳
Swallows and Amazons.
With adult - fine.
Without adult - not responsible enough to look after children.

Even worse, the youngest couldn't swim!!

@CatandtheFiddle Greenmantle has always been my favourite of the Richard Hannay novels.

Reading it now, a lot of what seemed to pure fiction when I read it in my teens is now current affairs.

I love all the books, but don't like Peter Duck the person, and prefer the 'real' books to the fantasy ones.

My favourites are Winter Holiday and Picts and the Martyrs. Followed by Pigeon Post, Swallowdale and Secret Water.

Then Coot Club, Swallows and Amazons and We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea. Finally The Big Six.

This is a great thread! Never read Swallows and Amazon's but will now get it to read with my kids who are currently loving Famous Five.

Pretty sure it's Windermere. The nearest town for supplies is known as Rio but I believe was based on Bowness...

Ransome mixed them all up. If you know the Lakes, then you'll know that part of the setting is around Coniston Water. Kanchenjunga is the Old Man, and there's a lot in Swallowdale that's set in the area south of Torver Common - all round Blawith Fell. Wonderful wild walking & camping to be had there. I sometimes think the Billies are in Grisedale Forest, except that the descriptions of that area feel more like the western shore of Coniston Water, particularly its south end.

Yes, Rio is Bowness (and Ransome got it's awfulness just right) but Holly How is near enough to Brantwood, for example. And the lake itself is more like Windermere.

It's interesting - Ransome lived very much in the south Lakes. Whenever I'm around the west side of Coniston Water, that feels like his territory. But if you go further north - Grasmere, & the Langdale Pikes, with the Fell Farm books read much more like Wainwright's lakes. Of course, AWW was writing his guides from the 50s, rather than the 20s & 30s when Ransome was writing. And then there's Hugh Walpole and Rogue Herries and Borrowdale.

@GreatAuntMaria Oh yes! Greenmantle, and Prester John. Read them when I was about 12 or so.

Then about 15 years later, as a starving postgrad, I was doing some paid book reviewing (oh they paid in those days) and was reading & reviewing a book about the person who might have been a model for the real* Prester John - a Christian missionary in the now-Ethiopia, fomenting revolution - all happening far earlier in history than one might have imagined.

Buchan manages to combine adventure with bush-craft, and a weirdly apocalyptic view of international politics. He headed up the Propaganda unit of the British government in WWI, and was an early adopter of using film as propaganda. Interesting man.

As was Ransome.

@CatandtheFiddle I've never read Prester John. Maybe my local library didn't have it when I was going through all the others when I was about thirteen.

Buchan is one of those authors, like Ransome, who is really good at creating a sense of place. I don't know if he'd ever been to all the places he describes in Greenmantle, but he certainly conveys the atmosphere to the reader.