Well, I’m thinking of the rabbit scene. Dick and Dorothea are my favourite characters in the Swallows and Amazons series; I may have grown up in the country, but I wouldn’t know where to start with skinning a rabbit either.
And Ransome’s trick of overlaying an imaginary landscape on a real one – well, an imaginary-real one – is masterful. I honestly believe that these were among the best children’s books of the last century.
Kathleen Jowitt 