Arthur Ransome's Coot Club

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in Horning, the small village on the Norfolk Broads where my parents have lived for the past thirty years. The village is the setting for Arthur Ransome’s novel COOT CLUB, first published in November 1934, and every time I walk or cycle down the village street I think of that book, and of its sequel THE BIG SIX, published in 1940.

By the Ferry Inn, Horning

COOT CLUB made a big impression on me as a child and I have a vivid recollection of being completely transported into the place where the action happens. I could see the dykes and the rivers, the reeds and the overhanging foliage, and I could almost smell them. Remembering my first reading of the book now, the settings feel as real to me as any memories of places I actually visited at the time. Ransome himself was enthusiastic about the setting. In December 1933 he wrote to his mother:

‘I wish I had a good plot for my next book. It is to be placed on the Broads, with all those rivers, and hiding places in the dykes, and the little stretches of open water. Really a lovely setting, with herons and bitterns and fish, very wild except just in the holiday months. But, as usual, though I have five youthful characters and one old lady, I haven’t a glimmering of a plot.’

 

Opposite Horning church

Well, the setting did it for me. I think that this may have been first Ransome I read, and it remains one of my favourites. And Ransome did, of course, find a plot, and an excellent one at that. The book also marks a definite change of approach on his part. COOT CLUB is the fifth in the Swallows and Amazons series, and the previous four books all relied to a greater or lesser extent on the young characters, or some of them at least,  engaging in pretending: pretending to be pirates; pretending to be at war; pretending to go on a voyage to the Arctic on a frozen lake and, in the case of PETER DUCK, making up a fantasy about pirates and treasure. 

COOT CLUB is a real-life adventure and, to drive home the point, it is set in real places. Unlike in the Lake District books Ransome makes no attempt to disguise the locations, although I’m pretty sure the houses where the characters live are imaginary. And in Dorothea we have the embodiment of the author, the pretender, busy turning everything she sees into part of a story; imagining a dozen outcomes for every situation. Tom Dudgeon, the doctor’s son who Ransome refers to in a letter as his ‘principal boy’, cannot understand these fantasies. 

‘Tom looked from one to the other. All this romance was rather puzzling. He had got into trouble with some unpleasant people who had hired the Margoletta. He had to keep out of their way because if they caught him it would be hard to prevent his father, the doctor, being dragged in . . . But somehow this Dorothea, and even Port and Starboard, who were Norfolk Coots and usually as practical as himself, were talking of his misfortune as if it were some kind of exciting story.’

St Benet's abbey

Ransome is having a bit of fun here, maybe even poking a bit of fun at himself, for he remained unhappy with COOT CLUB to the extent of being very reluctant to allow publication on its expected pre-Christmas date, feeling, perhaps, that it was really not ‘some kind of exciting story’. His publisher disagreed, writing to him in September ‘. . . you were over particular and Mrs Ransome hypercritical.’ Ransome reconsidered and the book was published on schedule, but it was two years before his next book, PIGEON POST appeared, and that gave him even more trouble. 

Part of that trouble may have been caused by his wife, Evgenia, who had once been Trotsky’s secretary (but that’s another story). She was Ransome’s harshest critic (apart from himself), and authors may like to consider the likely effect of her judgement on PIGEON POST. ‘Her verdict is that it is not very much worse than the worst of the others,’ Ransome wrote.

But even while he was struggling with PIGEON POST, Ransome was seized with enthusiasm for a new project: ‘I have seen . . . a GORGEOUS idea with first class climax inevitable and handed out on a plate . . . lovely new angle of technical approach and everything else I could wish.’ 

This was to become WE DIDN’T MEAN TO GO TO SEA, a book which, like COOT CLUB was essentially a real-life adventure and is, for me, his most entirely successful novel. Arthur Ransome wanted to help children to see life as an adventure. In the early books romance and colour are provided by such things as imagining the Old Man of Coniston to be Kanchenjunga, or the village on the lake to be Rio. In WE DIDN’T MEAN TO GO TO SEA the danger is very real and no imagination is needed to make it greater. 

The Butt and Oyster at Pin Mill, where
WE DIDN'T MEAN TO GO TO SEA begins and ends

Reading COOT CLUB again, I’m struck by the feeling of excitement that overtakes the children when they sail onto a stretch of river they’ve not seen before. I remember feeling it with them when I first read the book, and I still feel it today when I cycle down a road I haven’t been on before, or find a new path to explore, even when it’s only a few miles from my door. Arthur Ransome made me feel that adventure was truly possible, and, even better, close at hand—an attitude of mind. For that I am eternally grateful.

Paul May’s website is here.

All of Arthur Ransome’s children’s books remain in print. Arthur Ransome’s letters can be found in Hugh Brogan’s selection SIGNALLING FROM MARS which is out of print but easily obtainable and a great read.