“BETTER
DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WON’T DROWN”
I was born in Barrow-in-Furness but left before I could talk. We moved
round the country regularly. The only fixed thing in my life was coming to
Barrow and the Lake District two or three times a year. This book helped me to
pretend that I had a home here. It concerns 2 sets of children on holiday in
the south of Cumbria between the wars and the adventures they got up to in the
days before iPads and Facebook. You wouldn’t be allowed to do what they did –
too dangerous. But the telegram quotation at the top in which their father
gives them permission to sail on the lake on their own could be applied to
anybody’s life, in my opinion. This is a book for younger children but I still
go back to it. I want to live like they did.
They made a film of it this summer that also included aspects of Arthur
Ransome’s amazing life. He was a spy during the Russian revolution, but was he
working for us or them?
