![]() ![]() It almost wrote itself.'' He published the first of his children's classics, the 12 S wallows and Amazons books, in 1930. No matter where I was, wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my mind's eye, could see the beloved sky-line of great hills beneath it. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. Going away from it we were half drowned in tears. ![]() ![]() We played in or on the lake or on the hills above. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. In a 1958 author's note, Ransome wrote: ''I have been often asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. On their return to England, he bought a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District and began writing children's stories. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky's personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. ![]() In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and was a special correspondent of the Guardian. 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. ARTHUR RANSOME was born in Leeds in 1884. ![]()
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