Ransome - Winter Holiday

SIGNAL STATION AND OBSERVATORY

WINTER HOLIDAY

by

ARTHUR RANSOME

ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR

Dark at tea-time and sleeping indoors: nothing

ever happens in the winter holidays.

NANCY BLACKETT.

JONATHAN CAPE

THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE

LONDON

FIRST PUBLISHED 1933

REPRINTED 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938,

1939, 1941 (TWICE), 1942 (TWICE),

1943 (TWICE), 1944 (TWICE), 1945, 1946,

1948, 1949 (TWICE), 1953, 1955, 1957, 1961,

1964, 1969, 1978

JONATHAN CAPE LTD, 30 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON WC1

ISBN 0 224 60634 4

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

LOWE AND BRYDONE PRINTERS LIMITED

THETFORD, NORFOLK

I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows andAmazons . The answer is that it had its beginning long, long agowhen, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of ourholidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We played inor on the lake or on the hills above it, finding friends in thefarmers and shepherds and charcoal-burners whose smoke rosefrom the coppice woods along the shore. We adored the place.Coming to it, we used to run down to the lake, dip our hands inand wish, as if we had just seen the new moon. Going away fromit, we were half drowned in tears. While away from it, as childrenand as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No matter where I was,wandering about the world, I used at night to look for the NorthStar and, in my minds eye, could see the beloved skyline of greathills beneath it. Swallows and Amazons grew out of those oldmemories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.

A. R.

Haverthwaite

May 19th, 1958

Steps sounded on the wooden stairs, and counting, Seven andeight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and thats thedozen. Mrs Dixon was coming to tell the Callum children thatit was time to get up. They had come to Dixons Farm only thenight before. Mrs Dixon had been their mothers nurse when shewas a little girl, and Dorothea and Dick had come to stay at thefarm for the last week of the winter holidays.

For some time already they had been lying half asleep, listeningto the strange noises down in the yard, so very different from theroar of the traffic in the streets at home. They heard the gruntingof the pigs, the clucking of hens, the anxious quacking of ducks,the hiss of an angry gander, the mooing of cows and the regulartrilling of the milk spirting into a bucket. Now, waked properlyby Mrs Dixon, they were out of bed and into each others rooms,to find that the two windows looked out on exactly the same view,a corner of the farmyard, a low stone wall, a gate, and beyond it afrosty field sloping down to the lake, an island covered with trees,and away on the farther shore, the wooded side of the fells andfarther still the snow-covered tops of the big hills sparkling in thefirst of the morning sun. Therell be ice in the jugs this morning,Mrs Dixon had said, and Ive brought you up a can of hot waterapiece. No need to start the day freezing.

A few minutes later they were hurrying downstairs. (There are twelve steps, said Dick, she was quite right.) They camedown into the big farm kitchen, where Mrs Dixon had theirbreakfast ready for them, two bowls of hot porridge on thekitchen table, that was covered with a red-and-white chequeredtable-cloth, and some rashers of bacon sizzling in the frying-panthat she was holding over the fire. Im not going to make visitorsof you, she said.

Mr Dixon, who had had his breakfast long ago, looked in atthe door but, on seeing the children, said, Good morning toyou, and shyly slipped away. Mrs Dixon laughed. Hes notone for talking, isnt Dixon, she said, and then asked what theymeant to do with themselves that day.