I'm staying at my sister's place. She has her old set of Famous Five books lined up next to the loo.
I was more of a Secret Seven fan myself but I picked up Five Run Away Together for a quick stroll down memory lane.
George (the tomboy and don't you dare suggest anything else) has her own island, Kirrin Island, with a ruined castle and everything. They row out there to escape the tyranny of the family cook, staying for a week and rescuing the kidnapped daughter of a millionaire.
Note absence of life jackets. Also, although they pull the boat well up the beach 'because of the storms that can come up suddenly in the bay' they don't have any trouble with any pesky tides.
But apart from that, a much more realistic depiction of rowing than Titchmarsh's. Blyton doesn't use words like 'evanescent' either. And the illustrations by Eileen Soper are charming and evocative.
There is plenty of dinghy rowing and the 'catching of crabs' in Gilbert Hackforth Jones' 'Green Sailors' series of books for children. I grew up with this series as well as Arthur Ransomes 'Swallows and Amazons' books (Which I still prefer).
ReplyDeleteFor catching air with oars perhaps the best description is Moles attempts at rowing in The 'Wind In The Willows'.
Oh well said... I devoured those books when I was a youngster... everything she ever wrote (with the exception of the fairy tales) including the boarding school stories.... I like the "five investigators" best as I remember....
ReplyDeleteSteve - I chewed through them all at a rate of knots, but in retrospect I now see that having done that I moved on and never went back. That's the great thing about Blyton - she is a gateway drug to literature's hard stuff.
ReplyDeleteAlden - Wind in the Willows is the great classic of course. I always wonder when people trot out the 'messing about in boats' quote whether they realise that the next sentence describes Ratty rowing straight into the bank...
Chris, what I love about the 'Messing about in boats' quote is that as you quite correctly point out Ratty rows straight into the bank - which (speaking for myself) makes the incident an apt metaphor for the sublimity and ridiculousness of life in general and many of my own boating experiences in particular.
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