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Arthur Ransome
The Arthur Ransome books have been a long time companion and I always relish returning to them, enjoying sense of comfort in the company of familiar characters.
Like all of the Swallows and Amazons books Winter Holiday is about the stories children make up and how, through play they can explore and take ownership of the world. In this case the story is one of arctic exploration. I like reading it in winter as it feels more appropriate and, on starting, remembered it is topical for another reason: quarantine. The adventures are only made possible by an elongated school holday brought about by Nancy coming down with mumps.
One of the main features of this book is the addition of two new children, Dick and Dorothea. Dick and Dot (as she is known) are town children new to the lakes and both add really interesting dimensions to the story. Dorothea is a little like Titty, full of stories, but with more of an inclination to romance (in the traditional sense of story) and much more insecure. Where Titty feels confident in the adventures, having been there from the start and familiar with ships and sailing, Dorothea worries that they will not be accepted or that they do not know enough. The book starts with her and Dick looking wistfully over the lake at the Swallows and Amazons on the island and throughout Dorothea is alternately delighted by times when they feel part of the group and worried that they are not living up to expectaions. Rereading the book, I empathised a lot with her anxious eagerness to please and impress, but when I first read it I was most drawn to Dick.
Dick is a character of obsessions, a keen observer of how things work and at times seemingly unaware of the social complexities which Dot navigates. It is very easy to read him as autistic and he may be, although I doubt Ransome wrote him with that in mind. He is just as invested in the expedition as the others, but also gets caught up in stars and birds and the physics of ice yachts. As a child I was quite like Dick and, for a while, took to carrying a notebook like him in which to observe natural phenomena. A moment I am particularly fond of is when Dick rescues a cragfast sheep with the way his thoughts wobble between logic and instinctual fear brilliantly done. His observation that sitting on a ledge is just like sitting on a chair is one I have often repeated to myself. The Ds add a lot to the dynamic of the Swallows and Amazons, they are both quite different, showing another way to have adventures. They also provide an inexperienced viewpoint of the adventures, we never see the Swallows or Amazons learning their way about a boat, something in common with most readers.
Like Dot, but in a very different way, Peggy spends much of the book trying to meet expectations. Thrust into leadership in the absence of Nancy and her endless reserves of energy and creativity, she ends up shivering timbers and barbequing billy goats in her stead. This swapping of places highlights the different roles people take on in a group and the pressure we can feel to live up to others' expectations of us. I love the idea of sitting in a pub somewhere with friends talking about how the book would have been different if each of the other characters had go the mumps instead.
One of the lovely things about the series is that they are not just books about children having a good time but about their explorations and adventures as serious things that they care about and want to see through. When Nancy is delighted to have mumps because at least it will give the lake time to freeze so the others can get to the North Pole she isn't just being selfless. She is delighted that the adventure will be completed because the adventure matters. In the end their care leads them to slightly overplan, leading to complications without which the trip would barely have been an adventure at all.
The characters are beautifully distinct as usual with John and Susan's worry about the younger ones and scruples against some of Nancy's plans beautifully done. Roger provides lots of comic relief, both through his eagerness to eat at all times and his joy in calling things by their correct polar expedition names. As in other books lots of their ideas come from things they read and reading this made me want to read about Nansen's Fram in the same way it did when I was younger.
Another thread running through the book is of codes and signalling which provide inspiration for a type of play that children can do even if they aren't surrounded by the wildness of the Lakes. I remember writing notes in semaphore and taking joy in working out the ones in the book on earlier readings and again here the books make these adventures seem possible for all with imagination the key ingredient.
The map has lots of good hints about twists and turns to come, something which I always think adds to excitement when reading as you discover how it all comes together.
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