"Arthur Ransome changed my life by commissioning Peter Duck and then selling her on. She's been an influence on my life since I was three years old. My relationship with Ransome, however, has been more complicated … Intellectually, I am proud of the Ransome connection and I am happy when people want to talk about Peter Duck as Ransome's boat; look at her, touch her. John McCarthy came on board in the summer of 2011 and I could see that he was genuinely moved to be holding the tiller Ransome had held, sitting where he had sat.
While writing the "Strong Winds" series I have enjoyed re-thinking what Ransome's stories might look like in the contemporary world. How would his characters cope if faced with a Risk Assessment, for instance? How can today's children be enabled to develop independence and self-reliance? What is leadership if it's not based automatically on being the oldest and a boy? Playing with some of these ideas has been fun and my admiration for Ransome's achievement has been enhanced. Through the 1930s and into the 1940s he created a coherent alternative world of adventure and imagination that has stayed with and sustained many people through their lifetime. Many of his early readers were then inspired to go sailing themselves. Through his long and terrifying captivity in the Lebanon John McCarthy cherished the dream of learning to sail. It helped him keep his spirit and his sanity.
Emotionally, I have never felt that close to Ransome. It is Peter Duck who I love. She is an integral part of whatever it is that makes me myself. I have known since childhood that Ransome did not really warm to the yacht and I have thought the less of him because of it. Now I begin to understand that she came at the wrong time in his life, when his creativity was almost at an end, and I feel pity for him – as well as gratitude that he brought her into existence in the first place.
I was alone one Saturday on board Peter Duck. We'd had a lovely late evening sail and I was enjoying the peace of the cabin after a stressful week. I'd taken Roland Chambers's "The Last Englishman" off the bookshelf and was dipping into his account of Ransome’s involvement in the Russian Revolution and the dangerous, complex years that followed. He had fallen deeply in love with Evgenia Schelepina and by 1919-1920 he was desperate to get her out of Moscow and bring her to some sort of safety. This was not going to be easy. Ransome was already married with a daughter, he was politically suspect as a double agent, his wife refused a divorce, his mother was unsympathetic, his newspaper sacked him. He needed to keep writing and earning and spying for the British: Evgenia had to be persuaded not to smuggle any more roubles or diamonds for the Bolsheviks.
The two of them were not obviously compatible. He was sentimental, devoted, (probably irritating) and set in his ways: she was awkward, passionate, moody, opinionated and critical. Many of Ransome’s admirers have struggled to like Evgenia but theirs was a huge, lifelong love story. Sitting in the quiet evening in the sanctuary of my cabin I could feel the profound relief they must have experienced in 1921 when they finally left politics and the land behind and set out on board the ketch Racundra.
Then, for the first time, I allowed myself to imagine them, both of them, elderly and rather cross, in Peter Duck’s cabin with me. I have never done that before and it was awe-inspiring. They were more than ghosts. I could see at once what the problem had been between them and my beloved boat. They were, quite simply, too big for her – physically and in their personalities. I felt humble, protective and invisibly connected".
Revised from "Relating to Ransome” by Julia Jones, originally published for the Authors Electric Collective (9.6.2012).
Julia Jones writing on Peter Duck, while sailing to Ostend in the summer of 2012
You must be logged in to post a comment.