Swallows and Amazons
by Arthur Ransome
(London: Vintage, 2012)
His elder brother John had said only that morning that steamships were just engines in tin boxes. Sail was the thing.
Pages 1-2.
Though John and Susan were both well able to manage a sailing boat, Titty and Roger had only begun to learn how to sail when their father had been home on leave a year before.
Page 9.
In the boathouse below the farm there was the Swallow a sailing boat, a very little one, and there was also a big, heavy rowing boat. But no one wants to row who has ever sailed. If there had been no island, no sailing boat, and if the lake had not been so large, the children, no doubt, would have been happy enough to paddle about with oars in the bay by the boathouse. But with a lake as big as a small sea, a fourteen-foot dinghy with a brown sail waiting in the boathouse, and the little wooded island waiting for explorers, nothing but a sailing voyage of discovery seemed worth thinking about.
Page 9.
There is always something to learn about a boat that you have not sailed before.
Page 20.
Good steering is impossible when you are looking two ways at once.
Page 39.
Since yesterday the field path and the gate into the wood on the way to Darien and the farm at Holly Howe had all turned into foreign country. They were quite different places now that you came to them by water from an island of your own. They were not at all what they had been when you lived there and saw the island far away over the water. Coming back to them was almost the same thing as exploration. It was like exploring a place that you have seen in a dream, where everything is just where you expect it and yet everything is a surprise.
Page 83.
Soon they were nearing their island, and just as Holly Howe had seemed strange, so now the island seemed home. It was delightful to see it coming neater, and to think of the tents and the camp, and to see smoke blowing away over the trees and to know that it came from the mate’s fire.
Page 87.
They lay there, making plans as if they were going to be on the island all their lives.
Page 92.
She picked a stone off the bottom to make sure that she had really been there.
Page 96.
The first days had gone by on which the beginning of the morning light had ben enough to waken the explorers. They had grown used to sleeping in a tent.
Page 125.
Yesterday seemed unreal and wasted.
Page 125.
He splashed out into the water and swam hard for a minute or two. This was better than washing.
Page 126.
After swimming, a bit of cake is very welcome.
Page 127.
The four explorers of the Swallow stood facing the two pirate girls from the Amazon. The Amazons were bigger than most of the Swallows. One of them was bigger than Captain John. The other was about the same size. If it had come to a fight, it might have been a very near thing.
Page 138.
It is much more difficult to be fierce sitting down than standing up.
Page 144.
Toffee does not help talking, and for a little time no one said anything.
Page 157.
Galumphing, which is partly jumping and partly galloping, is a quick way of going downhill.
Page 197.
It is surprising what a mess a ship is in after carrying a cargo of any kind.
Pages 206-207.
The others were flashing their torches t once, but they were not much good in the sunlight. Roger and Titty went into the mate’s tent and crawled under the groundsheet to get some darkness.
Page 232.
The high hills on each side of the lake tended to make the winds blow up or down it. So they made two plans only, one for a southerly wind and one for a northerly.
Page 240.
Who would wave a flag to be rescued if they ad a desert island of their own? That was the thing that spoilt Robinson Crusoe. In the end he came home. There never ought to be an end.
Page 257.
Somehow there was always more time to do things when you were along.
Page 258.
Landing on an island without making a fire is waste of an island.
Page 271.
For the first time in their lives all three of them had wished to hurry the sinking sun upon its way.
Page 272.
Even making tea and boiling two eggs and eating them and a lot of bun loaf and marmalade did not seem to take as long as it does when there is something else that you are in a hurry to do next.
Page 286.
It is never safe to say that nothing more can happen.
Page 296.
Here eyes closed once or twice. She tried to keep them open with her fingers. ‘I’m going to sleep again,’ she said. ‘I know I am.’
She was right.
Page 299.
The spirits of the Swallow’s crew had risen very much now that they were at sea once more and not fumbling in the dark with reed-beds and water lilies. There is nothing like sea-room to cheer a sailor’s heart.
Page 307.
These natives! Friendly though they were, there w as never any knowing what mischief they might do.
Page 340.
Natives were like that, useful in a way, but sometimes a bother. They all held together, a huge network of gossip and scouting, through the meshes of which it was difficult for explorers and pirates to slip.
Page 341.
‘Miss Susan and Miss Titty!’ Mrs. Dixon could not have found a better way of showing how deep is the gulf that exists between native life and real life than by so describing the mate and the able-seaman.
Page 342.
Susan was in a very native mood that day, as Able-seaman Titty observed. Perhaps the adventures of the night were heavier on her conscience than on those of the other Swallows. Perhaps she needed sleep. Her mood showed itself in not allowing Roger and Titty to bathe the moment they had finished their breakfast-dinner meal of Grape Nuts, eggs, bread and marmalade, bread and pemmican, bunloaf and marmalade, bananas fresh from the tree (the Amazons had only eaten two each, and there were still plenty on the bunch), seed-cake and tea. Also washing up had to be done at once in a very native manner. And when that was done there were buttons to sew on.
Pages 343-344.
“Any place is secret if nobody else is there.”
Page 349.
It was no good opening pemmican tins when there was nearly the whole of a tongue to be eaten.
Page 395.
At that moment Captain Flint, roaring, ‘Death or Glory!’ charged up the companion-way. He had gone down again through the forehatch and run through the cabin. He came up whirling tow scarlet cushions round his head. But in hand-to-hand fighting like this it is not weapons that count, but hands. Captain Flint’s were large, but he had only two of them. The Swallows’ were small, but they had eight.
Page 409.
‘It’s much better to find treasure than just to sit catching fish,’ said Titty.
Page 435.
Stone after stone was pulled away. The box had been put under the tree, in the hollow where the roots had been, and then covered with big loose stones, of which there were plenty on all sides.
Page 441.
Never any of you start writing books. It isn’t worth it.
Page 449.
Titty … wanted to be alone. She had had one idea firm in her head and had held to it when everyone thought she was wrong; and now, when everybody knew she had been right, just for a minute or two she did not want to do any talking.
Pages 450-451.
Day after day had been dry and clear and, even when there had been clouds, there had also been sunshine and wind to drive their shadows, chasing each other, over the bright heather and bracken of the hills. Now that it was time for the Swallows to go, there cam a sudden change of weather to remind them that the summer too was near its end. All that last day there had been the heaviness of thunder in the air.
Page 463.
They tents of the Swallows were hung on ropes between trees and held down by stones in pockets along the bottom edges of the tent walls. The trees were blown this way and that and the rope now slackened, now tightened up again so hard that in the captain’s tent the stones shifted and rattled in the pockets.
Pages 467-468.
The weather outside seemed to matter less now that they were all together.
Page 472.
They could hear the crashing of breakers on the outer shoals and along the steep western shore. Titty slipped away from the others and crawled to the edge of the low cliff that ran along that shore, and crouched there, facing into the wind. Spray from the waves breaking beneath her was blown into her face. Flashes of lightning lit up the whole lake and showed great waves stretching right across it with white curling tops. Then more lightning showed her the fields and woods and hills on the other side of the lake, beyond the raging water.
Page 475.
‘Well,’ said Susan, ‘if you were wet before, you’re a lot wetter now. And nothing to change into.’
‘It was worth it,’ said Titty.
Page 475.
Patches of blue sky were showing overhead and patches of sunlight on the hills. Ragged clouds were blowing away. There was a wonderful smell of wet earth. The storm was over.
Page 479.
‘There’s no room in anybody for a cold if they’re full up with hot porridge, so I always say.’
Page 482.
‘Their father seems to think they are not duffers, but sometimes I’m not so sure.’
Page 483.
Mr. Dixon, who was waiting down by the boat, had said ‘Good morning,’ when he came, and now he said ‘Good day to you,’ as he rowed Mrs. Dixon away. He was always a very silent native.
Page 486.
It would have been very dreadful to be swept home in a flood of natives, even of the nicest sort. Half the pleasure of visiting distant countries is sailing home afterwards. Besides, she had to say goodbye to the island.
Page 487.
The camp looked much smaller. There were pale, unhealthy patches where the Swallows’ tents had stood and bleached the grass under the groundsheets by hiding it from the sun. the Amazons’ tent stood alone and forlorn without its companions.
Page 490.
The Swallows and Amazons looked sadly round their camping ground. There was now nothing but the fireplace with its feebly burning fire, the square pale patches where the tents had been, the parrot’s cage in a patch of sunlight, and Susan’s kettle and a few mugs and the pemmican tin and the bunloaf and John’s tin box, to show that it had ever been the home of the explorers and their pirate friends.
Page 491.
Titty took the parrot all over the island, so that when they got hoe it would remember her favourite places.
Page 492.
Slowly the fleet slipped past Wild Cat Island. The island was once more the uninhabited island that Titty had watched for so many days from the Peak of Darien. And yet, it was not that island. John, looking at it, remembered the harbour and the leading lights and his swim all round it, and the climbing of the great tree. For Roger it would always be the place where he had swum for the first time. For Susan it was the camp and housekeeping and cooking for a large family. Titty thought of it as Robinson Crusoe’s island. It was her island more than anyone’s because she had been alone on it. She remembered the path she had cleared, the waking in the dark, and hearing the owl.
Page 499.