Contemporary Reviews of Winter Holiday


 

Times Literary Supplement, 23rd November 1933. (Anonymous)

The previous review read:

A Christmas Moon, by E.E.C. Matthews (Burns, Oates 3s 6d net), tells how a family of children were condemned by a series of accidents to spend Christmas alone. It is one of those tales, liked by some children, in which everybody behaves well and gets what he or she wants as a reward.

From internal evidence, it appears that the reviewer had not previously read either Swallows and Amazons or Swallowdale.

A very different kind of book, though it also deals with the adventures of a party of children in the snowy season of the year, is WINTER HOLIDAY, by Arthur Ransome (Jonathan Cape, 7s 6d net). Those who read "Peter Duck" last year have been looking forward eagerly to Mr Ransome's next story, and we can promise them that they will not be disappointed. They must be warned, however, that although "Winter Holiday" is about the same children who appeared in "Peter Duck" (with two new children added) it differs from that enchanting story in a an important particular. In last year's book the children had an adventure which every grown-up person would say could not have happened to them in present-day life. It is true that it was related with such convincing realism that only a grown-up who had never been a child could fail to be carried away by it when actually reading the book: but after laying it down most parents probably rubbed their eyes, said that it must all have been a dream or a "make up" and discouraged their offspring from hoping for similar adventures. But no one can say that "Winter Holiday is improbable. It is about some boys and girls who were spending a part of the Christmas holidays near one of the English lakes, and who were detained for an extra month by quarantine for mumps. Every parent of schoolchildren will recognize the severe realism of the details about health certificates. Yet it is full of a strange glamour which imaginative people of all ages will feel. In reading it we see the landscape and the events through the eyes of the characters in the book. Young readers will find themselves taking part in signalling to the Martians and going to the North Pole, and old readers will be carried back in their minds to those wonderful games of childhood when the whole world of everyday things was doubled with another more glamorous world into which they could transport themselves at a moment's notice and in which they led a heroic life. Miss Nancy Blackett's charming illustrations contribute a great deal to the fascination of the book; she is herself one of the characters in the story, and makes us see how things looked to them. One could hardly have a better story about children.

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The Listener, 29th November 1933. (Amabel William-Ellis)


Like Mr. Lofting's Return, Mr. Arthur Ransome's Winter Holiday is one of a series, and like Mr. Lofting's modern instance, his new book shows no falling off but rather an improvement. Mr. Ransome's verisimilitude is incomparable. He has a sweet beguiling air that makes you believe every word. With his grave, scholarly, flexible style he makes the reader sure that it was not only possible, but inevitable, that the children of whom he writes should have just those superbly exciting and yet reasonable adventures, and should run just those risks with the full approval of their elders. His style is probably the best of any living writer for children, his characterisation is excellent, and his power of invention never seems to slacken. It would be interesting to try and arrive at some notion of how he does it. Two ingredients no doubt are his very skilful mixing of objective and subjective reality, and his Defoe-like piling-up of small detail. But, prying apart Mr. Ransome's book should this year be the first on the Christmas pile of any boy or girl from ten to fourteen.

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The Spectator, 1st December 1933. (Anonymous)

The "same girl" referred to in the second sentence of this review is one who had previously been quoted as saying that Prairie Anchorage by Marjorie Medary was "a very odd book somehow." The book was reviewed together with Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle's Return


But the two best books of children's fiction this year are, as they were last, the new Lofting and the new Ransome. Of Winter Holiday the same girl writes:

"It's a good book. I knew it would be, his always are. It brings in some new people as well as 'The Swallows and Amazons," they are the 'D's' (Dorothea and Dick. The D's personally are slightly white-mousish and townish. Dick wears glasses and is very keen on astronomy. Dorothea has plaits and is fond of writing stories and imagining that things that are really happening are out of stories. They see the Swallows and Amazons rowing about on the lake and are very envious. That night they go up to an old barn on the hill . . . "

This reviewer continues to report at length, but the present reviewer has had enough to perceive that the story is now well away. It remains to be remarked that Mr. Ransome's style is highly distinguished, his narrative hair-raising, credible, and amusing, and that, in short, his book is (as last year) by far the best story produced for the Christmas pleasure of boys or girls in their teens.

Only those who annually inspect, in mass, the offering laid by the Press and the Muses before our children will know what it means to add that here are two really entertaining books that are in perfect taste, and calculated to leave the child reader more, and not less, ready to enjoy life and literature.

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The Observer, 3rd December 1933. (Humbert Wolfe)


It is bad to write down to children. It is worse to write down to books written to their address. Their literature should demand of the critic as cool a standard as that directed to the books of the older world. No doubt he will have difficulty in adjusting his clumsier mind to the delicate and abrupt judgments of the nursery and the schoolroom, but at least it is his duty to attempt this.

Accordingly when I approached this long list I sought to put aside the natural uprush of feeling at the vision of so many bright covers. Memories of white tables round a Christmas tree gaily adorned with the ancestors of these volumes had sternly to be suppressed. "Let us above all be calm," I murmured to myself, "and in any case not over-eat." Shutting my eyes, therefore, to the glitter of the glass-balls and the candles, I opened the first of my list -- "Winter Holiday." Mr. Ransome was no unfamiliar author to me. The question here was whether he could maintain his Test match form. The first chapter was convincing proof that he was entitled to inclusion in the side again. The story is the best kind of adventure story. It is not one of those absurdities in which a boy of fifteen saves an army from destruction by his precocious abilities. It is a tale of two parties of children spending a winter holiday on farms by the side of a great lake under the elbows of mountains. These happy young persons -- by the beneficent intervention of mumps -- are given long weeks of ice and snow in which to build an igloo, and to explore the vast and frozen reaches of the lake in their North Polar expedition.

Henty used to announce that his stories were founded in fact. Here much more excitingly is fact founded on fiction. Every step taken by the children is possible, and everyone is transmuted into romance by deliberate purpose.The sledges are real, but the huskies are human. The igloo is a clumsy hut in a wood-clearing made Eskimo by the snow, the adult skaters are naturally transformed into seals, while the house-boat frozen into the ice is inevitably "The Fram." Nothing that the children do is beyond the reach of a group provided that parents are sufficiently benevolent, and provided that winter, a frozen lake, and mumps connive to perfect adventure. Moreover, the whole is written in the quiet unquestioning manner of a sensible child. It is possible that I may be wrong, but nevertheless I venture to maintain that this is the best children's book of this Christmas.

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Manchester Guardian , 7th December 1933 ('R.K.')


At the head of the list one does not find much difficulty in placing Mr. Arthur Ransome's new tale for young and old -- "Winter Holiday." The lake which has already been the scene of "Swallows and Amazons" adventures and may be recognised by the discerning as Windermere is frozen over hard on this occasion. Miss Nancy Blackett, or Captain Nancy, had complained "Dark at tea-time and sleeping indoors; nothing ever happens in the winter holidays." Then the frost set in and the snow fell, so what happened was an expedition to the North Pole. Those who falsely imagine they know their Lakes are not, perhaps, aware that the North Pole is quite close to Ambleside pier, that there are interesting Eskimo settlements on the margin of the lake, and that Polar bears abound on the fells. Mr. Ransome's achievement is a most attractive one. He has done what children often cannot do -- namely brought a sustained and sustaining imagination to bear on the games and make-believe of childhood, weaving them into a coherent story. While perfectly conscious of the make-believe we fall in wholeheartedly with his every new invention.

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Times 8th December 1933 (Anonymous)


Parents seeking books for their schoolchildren to read in the unoccupied moments of the Christmas holidays will be delighted to know that Mr. Arthur Ransome has written another story. WINTER HOLIDAY (Cape, 7s. 6d. net) is about the same young people who are already known as "Swallows and Amazons," and who accompanied Peter Duck on his remarkable adventures last year. There are no pirates in this book, however, and the thrilling episodes in it are such as might happen to any boy or girl with tolerant parents and plenty of imagination.

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New York Herald Tribune, 18th March 1934 (Ma\ry Lamberton Becker


I hate to think a respected publishing house like J.B. Lippincott would organise the recent Cold Spell as advance publicity for Arthur Ransome's new Swallowdale book, but it certainly came in well on the wake of the Big Snow. Being here, it remains to cllo off the coming hot summer and afford at any time of year bracing entertainment for all who are or who who have been actively young.

The wonder is that these Swallows and Amazons books not only keep up so well but manage to convince their public that they get teadily better. There ws first the brilliant entrnce of the two sail-boats and their crews in "Swallows and Amazons," when these groups of children were permitted to spend in the English lake country the sort of summer children most want and least often get -- a season devoted to self-organised, serious play, completely unsupervised but sympathetically supported. The adventures of Captain John, Mate Susan, Ableseaman Titty and Ship's Boy Roger (who swims with one foot on the bottom) carried on into "Swallowdale," the story of a secret valley.

In "Peter Duck" they took to blue water in a real ship, combining the best features of "Treasure Island" and the Bastables. The three books fitted into the time of year when children really live and grow -- the endless freedom of the summer vacation. Now, at an unexpected season, comes "Winter Holiday" to fill the brief period breaking the school year at Chritmas time. Nancy's involuntary thoughtfulness in getting mumps ensures a full month for everybody; young readers on both sides of the Atlantic will be grateful to her.

These readers will have a sharp shock on the first page; happily it will be brief. There is not a sign of Swallows or Amazons. Instead, in the familiar countryside, now under snow, we meet two chidrn nobody heard of before: Dick and Dorothea. To be sure, they are related, not too distantly, to the Bastables. Dick is an astronomer. He has a spyglass -- I mean telescope -- and a notebook, of which the entries on one page are given:

Water H2O
Sulphuric Acid H2SO4
Speed of Light 186,000 miles per second
Mother's birthday -- March 17th
Jupiter is the one with the moons
Mars is the red one
Flag on Beckfoot -- Start for Pole

Dorothea is a novelist. Both take their life-works with the absorbed seriousness ten-years-old reserves for work it does not have to do -- in other words, the right kind of play. Naturally they use their scientific equipment to signal Mars -- or, as crass outsiders might call it, a house at some distance in the snow. To their delight, Mars responds. It is -- ah, this is something like -- it is inhabited by Captain John Walker, of the Swallow, Nancy Blackett, mate of the Amazon, and the entire ship's company of either craft. Before the end of the holiday even Captain Flint has joined the party. Meanwhile, an igloo has been built and lived in, elaborate signal codes devised, a cragfast sheep (polar bear) rescued, and the deep purpose of the season, an expedition to the North Pole, brought off by heroic and sustained efforts.

There is something beautfully, satisfyingly lasting about all this. I shall not soon forget the moment in an earlier volume when a like enterprise has been accomplished -- the ascent of Kanchenjunga. People over fourteen might fall into the vulgar error of thinking this a lake country hill, but while there is the Everest expedition to read about, and intrepid children to put it instantly into action, Kanchenjunga it is. On the summit they find a cache left a generation before: their mother, their uncle had that day climbed the Matterhorn.

I believe that if these books about Swallows and Amazons live -- and I cannot imgine their not living a long time -- it will be because they lay hold on the underlying continuity of imaginative play, the heartfelt constructive make-believe that carries children along from one generation to another as a cable used once to carry along a car. One of the most touching, loving experiences of parenthood is seeing one's children caught up and carried along by one's own dear habits of play. That is one of the reasons why the mother in this story, however firmly the children keep her in her adult place as an Eskimo, not an explorer, is reccognized by all of them as a good Eskimo. It is far more important that a parent should understand the nature and serious importance of a child's play than that he should attempt to share it. Such an attempt is usually egotistic: it is almost always futile. But if he can remember what it was like to play like that, and uphold it from the sidelines, he has every chance of being not only a valuable but a popular parent.

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New York Times Book Review, 15th April 1934. (Anonymous)


"Winter Holiday," the fourth book dealing with the children who have already figured in "Swallows and Amazons," "Swallowdale" and "Peter Duck" seems to indicate that Mr. Ransome will be able to go on indefinitely keeping us informed ot the doings of this enterprising group of young people. This is no sequel written for the sake of adding another volume to a series. It reads as though the author had further information to share with us about the adventures of these very real boys and girls, adventures which have such a sustained and consistent quality of imagination that the reader, like the children of the story, is all by convinced that the make-believe is real.

The other three books tell of Summer holidays: in this one the setting is pale, Winter fields, dark woods and distant snow-capped hills, and the children we meet on the first page are not our old friends, the Walkers and Blacketts, but Dorothea and Dick Callum, who are spending the last week of the Winter holidays at Dixon's Farm. Kindred spirits and intrepid adventures, however, cannot be kept apart for long. Dick and Dorothea have as many absorbing interests as the Swallows and Amazons themselves. Dorothea is an author: the tiny notebook in her pocket contains the heading "Frost and Snow: Romance by D. Callum. Chapter I." And though, after the two bands join forces, Dorothea has little time for literary composition, settings and beginnings of other stories are constantly in her mind. Dick's tastes are scientific: he too has a notebook of which one page reads as follows:

Water H2O
Sulphuric Acid H2SO4
Speed of Light 186,000 miles per second
Mother's birthday -- March 17th
Jupiter is the one with the moons
Mars is the red one
Flag on Beckfoot -- Start for Pole

His predominant interest for the time being is in astronomy and he has come equipped with telescope and star book. Having found a suitable place for an observatory the next step was to get into communication with another planet. They tried signaling towards the lighted windows of the white farmhouse (Mars, they called it), where they knew the other children were staying. To their great delight "the Martians" answer, for Captain Peggy Blackett and the others were not the sort to resist a signal from the unknown. When the children meet the next day friendly relations are soon established and the Swallows and Amazons explain that they are in the middle of planning a polar expedition. The explorers built an igloo to serve as a base, the houseboat that belongs to Nancy's and Peggy's uncle, the Captain Flint of the earlier stories, becomes "the Fram" frozen into Arctic ice, the rescue of a "cragfast sheep" is, at Titty's suggestion, counted as an adventure with a polar bear. The week bids fair to be well filled when suddenly, and fortunately the explorers feel, Captain Nancy Blackett comes down with the mumps and the result is an extra month's holiday for them all. The plans for the expedition go on -- Nancy is not too ill to issue directions, with the help of semaphore signals -- and the quarantine is lifted in time for them all to participate in what proves to be a really exciting dash for the Pole.

In this as in his other stories, Arthur Ransome has caught the spirit of imaginative play. His characters have the entire absorption in what they are doing, the complete lack of self-consciousness and the independence of intelligent, unspoiled children who are left alone to use their imagination and to exercise their ingenuity without too much supervision. Yet one feels that the adults in the story supply a background of genuine understanding that comes from a sense of humour and a lively recollection of their own youth. There is zest in the way Mr. Ransome tells a story and some excellent characterisation in the portraits of the eight children. Dorothea and Dick, who have something of the engaging qualities of Titty and Roger, are worthy additions to the original half dozen.

"Winter Holiday," like its predecessors, is an outdoor story. It is full of the feeling of frosty air, snow-covered slopes with blue cloud shadows, of short Winter afternoons,stars at night, frozen brooks and snowy woods and clearings. The author shares with the reader his own enjoyment of well-known and well-loved country. In addition it is a rare pleasure to find a book written for children with real charm of style.

Helene Carter's illustrations have imaginative feeling for Winter and out of doors.

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I am grateful to Wayne G. Hammond for help in identifying the sources of these reviews