We Didn't Mean to go to Sea (1937)
Synopsis and Further Information on We Didn't Mean to go to Sea
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Synopsis The Swallows have arrived in Pin Mill with their mother and younger sister Brigit, to await their father's imminent return from duty in Hong Kong. They immediately earn the friendship and gratitude of Jim Brading, owner of the Goblin, by helping to secure his yacht from a potential accident. Jim has a couple of days free himself, and he offers to take the Swallows on a cruise around the River Orwell and and Harwich Harbour. Having received glowing references about Jim, the Swallows mother agrees - on the promise their solomn promise that they won't go out to sea. Their cruise goes like clockwork until the Goblin runs out of petrol near the mouth of the harbour. Jim anchors and rows ashore for fuel, leaving the Swallows marooned onboard. He doesn't return and, when fog closes in, Goblin drags her anchor and drifts out to sea where buoys, shoals and seasickness await. John is forced to summon all of his knowledge, as well as discover new strength of character, as he takes the Goblin further and further out to sea. It is a voyage where the Swallows have to face rain, wind, darkeness and exhaustion, together with the threat of collision, the challenge of rescuing a shipwrecked sailor and the need to take on a foreign pilot on an unknown shore - all the time fearing that their father might already be arriving in Harwich, where their mother would be waiting with no idea where they were... |
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For a more detailed synopsis of the Swallows and Amazons series, see Approaching Arthur Ransome by Peter Hunt. ISBN 0-224-03288-7. Jonathan Cape, 1991. | ||
| Further Information Ransome was inspired to write We Didn't Mean to go to Sea after moving in 1935 to live near the River Orwell. One reason for the move was that he and Evgenia did mean to go to sea, something they hadn't done in a yacht of their own since they'd built and sailed Racundra in the Baltic. The move to Suffolk was quickly followed by the purchase of a 7 ton Hillyard Cutter named Electron, which Ransome renamed Nancy Blackett. It was Nancy that thrust a new, East Coast plot upon him, and Nancy herself that appeared in his seventh Swallows and Amazons novel as the Goblin. We Didn't Mean to go to Sea is firmly set in the real world, with every detail of Pin Mill, the River Orwell, Harwich Harbour and the North Sea recorded as accurately as Ransome's personal knowledge and research could allow. He actually took Nancy across the North Sea to Flushing in order to check tides, buoys and lightships. However, by the time he wrote We Didn't Mean to go to Sea, a gap was beginning to open up between his fictional world and that in which he wrote. Fictionally, the Goblin's voyage takes place in either the summer of 1931 or 1932. Ransome, however, only began working on We Didn't Mean to go to Sea in November 1936, a gap illustrated by one minor error of detail. As the Goblin returns to Harwich, Ransome mentions that the Swallows saw the tall wireless masts at Bawdsey, even though these experimental radar masts were brand new in early 1937 and certainly did not exist some five or six years earlier. |
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For a more detailed study of the background to the Swallows and Amazons Series, see Amazon Publication's The Best of Childhood, 2004. The Best of Childhood is available to current TARS Members from the Society Stall. | ||
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