We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea

The Swallows are out on the water once again, this time in a bigger boat and on a bigger adventure than ever before.
     'Like to spend a night in the Goblin?'

The Swallows are staying on the Suffolk coast whilst they wait for their father to return home from China. But although the harbour is bursting with bobbing yachts, barges and steamers, this year there's no chance of any sailing for the landlocked Swallows. That is until they rescue young Jim Brading and his boat the Goblin from a sticky situation and to their delight are recruited as crew members. Mother agrees they can go, on one condition -- they absolutely must not sail out past Beach End Buoy and into the open sea.

ARTHUR RANSOME was born in Leeds in 1884. He had an adventurous life -- as a baby he was carried by his father to the top of the Old Man of Coniston, a peak that is 2,276 ft high! He went to Russia in 1913 to study folklore and in 1914, at the start of World War I he became a foreign correspondent for the Daily News. In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and was a special correspondent of the Guardian. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky's personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. On his return to England, he bought a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District and began writing children's stories. He published the first of his children's classics, the twelve Swallows and Amazons books, in 1930. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his book, Pigeon Post. He died in 1967.