Log Bunk Bed

Setting sail on Arthur Ransome's boat

The wind is whipping Julia Jones’s words away as she rows towards the boat that “invisibly shaped” her life. We are at Waldringfield, eight miles up the River Deben from the Suffolk coast – a description that makes this mini-adventure sound tamer than it is. A gale is blowing. The river is running fast against us and I am not at all sure that this small, smiley woman with a tanned face will ever get us to our destination, let alone get us back to shore later.

To the uninitiated, Peter Duck, the green 28ft ketch we are aiming for, looks like any wooden boat of a certain age. To fans of Arthur Ransome, patron saint of sailing, it is an object of pilgrimage. Peter Duck, a wise mariner, is the central character in one of Ransome’s books; it is also the name he gave to this “marine bath chair” which he commissioned in 1946, on which he planned to write his later works. By then, in his sixties, he was suffering from hernias, ruptures and stomach troubles. A single sail was too heavy for him to manoeuvre so Peter Duck has two masts.

“That makes it perfect for a child to handle,” says Julia, who imbibed the spirit of Ransome from the age of three when her father, a yacht agent, bought Peter Duck. She could already row by then and, aged five, was a competent sailor. On those occasions when an adult grabbed the tiller from her, she lay below deck in the bunk (correctly quarter berth) where Ransome had kept his typewriter, daydreaming of being a character from one of his books. “I could never decide whether I was capable, swashbuckling Capt Nancy Blackett or sensitive, imaginative Able Seaman Titty.”

Part of the charm of those books is that adults scarcely impinge on children’s freedom to explore. Even in the Thirties, that was probably unrealistic. But, dated though they are in some ways – with snigger-inducing lines such as: “Time for Titty and Roger to go to bed” – Ransome’s stories arouse wistful thoughts about the over-supervised lives of children nowadays.

Oh, to escape from constant exams, computer games and plasticised playgrounds to muck about on the river. What bliss to rely on your own wits and imagination to avoid being stuck on the mud, capsizing or – fancifully – being eaten by crocodiles. That yearning for adventure lies behind the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys and the BBC’s recently announced plans to televise the 12 books in the Swallows and Amazons series (including Peter Duck). The aim is to provide an adventure series which will take over in children’s lives where the Harry Potter books and films leave off.

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