Reading and Rollerblading

For some time now the preferred, not to say the downright insisted-upon reading in our house has been the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. I've written about these books before; they're longtime favorites in our house, and I'm happy to see that Helier and Crispina enjoy them as much as Epiphany and Amicus did.

There's a kind of surface prosaic-ness about these stories which is offputting to some people: chapter after chapter of people doing nothing but puttering around with ropes and tents, and then making tea and eating corned beef out of tins. It's possible, too, in our era, to find Susan, the older-sister character, unsympathetic if not actually maddening, as her consistent function is to cook, clean up, and worry endlessly about whether the younger siblings, Titty and Roger, go to bed on time and keep their feet dry. And you know you couldn't write a book nowadays with a character called Titty, no matter how many times you tried to explain that really, it's short for Letitia (as I imagine it must be). Actually, it's hard to imagine being able to publish, now, a book about normal, everyday children doing what normal, everyday children do normally, every day -- or used to. Therein lies one problem. Children don't do nothing any more, even in their holidays. They take lessons. They play sports. They go to camps. What used to be thought of as free time is taken up, from morning till night, with what grownups believe are worthwhile things for children to be doing, in safe and supervised settings. Nobody turns children loose in sailboats to camp by themselves on islands in lakes -- for one thing, drug addicts have probably found all the lake isles already and littered them with used needles, just as they've done to the parks. For another, there's the specter of the CPS hovering over all our shoulders. If a mother can be arrested for leaving her child in a car, never out of her sight, for maybe three minutes on a freezing day in order to let her other children put money in a Salvation Army bucket -- well, I'm getting carried away here, but you can see, can't you, that if someone were to write a story, now, about children allowed to camp alone on an island, they'd have to have magic powers or inhabit another planet, and the story would be labeled "fantasy." There's not much premise left to ordinary real-world childhood.

All that aside, we've been reading these stories since just after Christmas. They've expanded our vocabulary in a particular direction: port and starboard, fore and aft, bows and stern and mainsail and sheets and shrouds. Much of Helier and Crispina's reading and writing instruction has come straight from these books. I write the words on the lined primary-school paper, and they trace and copy while I read aloud. Yesterday Helier wanted to write Goblin, the name of the boat in our current installment, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, but instead of merely copying it, as I'd asked him to, he drew a picture of a sailing ship, complete with boom, portholes, and other authentic details, and wrote Goblin along her side, where her name would properly go. This was the first time I'd seen him draw anything not related to Star Wars, and I actually stopped reading -- I think I stopped breathing -- to watch him do it.

Meanwhile, we continue to unpack the boxes stacked in our glassed-in back porch, and yesterday Helier and Crispina dug out two pairs of skates: one pair of white lace-up boot-style skates, which used to be Epiphany's, and Amicus's old rollerblades. We don't have any pavement for skating, which is a mercy, given the proficiency level we're working with here, but I let them skate in the kitchen where about the only thing they can do is fall into the corner of the table or the counter and rip their faces open, so perhaps I should have thought more about that, but it's too late now. All day long they clattered around on the linoleum, falling down with noisy but harmless bumps and struggling up again, laughing like lunatics.

I was working on things and paying no attention to them, until I realized suddenly that at some point while I wasn't listening they'd moved on from the stage of mastering the skates (though I wouldn't say that "mastered" quite describes the relationship as it stands) to the stage of pretending with them. They were skating, clunkily, side by side along the kitchen floor, each with one arm stuck straight out to the side. "Stand by to go about!" Helier would say. Then together they'd shout, "Ready about!" and switch arms.

Eventually they caught me watching them. "We're being sailboats, Mom,"Helier said. "These are our booms. Stand by to go about!" Again they ready-abouted, switching arms. I thought of the opening to the first book in the series, in which Roger, seven years old, is pretending to be a sailboat, beating up a field against the wind to the gate where his mother stands holding the telegram which gives the children their father's permission to sail and camp on their own. At a subsequent moment in the book, Roger reflects on the change in himself, from a boy pretending to be a boat to a boy sailing in an actual boat -- doing the very thing he had only pretended before. To my mind that's a potent revelation about something in childhood: the way that a child's pretending both grows from and stokes a desire for some real action or experience. I wonder, actually, whether it's possible for a child to grow up knowing what it is that he desires, or that he can desire something -- something to do, that is -- without time and a certain amount of benign parental neglect in which to nurture some private imaginary vision.

Of course in these stories, the boys, John and Roger, have predetermined destinies: they're both bound for the Navy, like their father. They don't envision a limitless horizon of adulthood. They know what they'll be doing the rest of their lives (though in the early 1930s, when the stories are set, they can't know anything about the war in which -- if they weren't fictional characters -- they'd be almost certain to participate). Still, rather than a schedule of formal sailing lessons, and perhaps competitions, designed to groom them for success in later life, they're turned loose with a boat, on a lake, to do more or less what they want as long as they aren't "duffers." And so they have the freedom to fall in love with the real things of life, because they're doing real things on a small, safe scale, even as they invest them with larger imaginative significance. This seems right to me as a depiction of childhood and of what's possible in it and beautiful about it: the right proportion of the exotic to the mundane, of danger to safety. And because their parents trust them to keep promises, to be honest and good, and above all, not to be "duffers," they do, and they are, and they aren't, as much as possible, at any rate. All this to me is a far purer and sweeter, and an infinitely more real magical premise than that of a Harry Potter or an Artemis Fowl -- though we read those, too; we read pretty much everything. As Chesterton says, in Orthodoxy:

In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal . . . You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.

The world of Swallows and Amazons isn't a mad one. It's a child's world, quiet and sheltered and kind, but full of startling and unexpected things, some of them real and some of them made up out of the child's own head. A hero among imaginary dragons -- or pirates -- is still a hero; a hero sailing unexpectedly at night across a real sea, with a brother and sisters to keep safe, is a hero whose courage and resourcefulness ought to move us to tears of admiration. This is the answer which classical education, with its emphasis on "the good, the beautiful, and the true," offers to the charge that these things don't prepare a child for "life in the modern world" -- better learn to be a hero in the midst of madness, than to be a lunatic, and ordinary.