Ron Howard had a theory about why the US sitcom “Happy Days” was such a hit. The Oscar-winning director, who played Richie Cunningham in the show, argued that central to its appeal was that it was set in the 1950s, before Vietnam, drugs and hippies, when teenagers were civil to their elders. “Happy Days” — which ran from 1974 to 1984 — was, he told me , a return to lost innocence before Watergate. It put the 1950s back into the 1970s and made people happier.
The new film adaptation of Arthur Ransome’s novel “Swallows and Amazons”, starring Rafe Spall, Kelly Macdonald and Andrew Scott, has a similar nostalgic function. It takes us back to 1935, a time before multicultural Britain, swinging London, online avatars and goggles for conker contests.
It’s set in an era before onesies and flip-flops, when there were only two kinds of nightwear — winceyette nighties and winceyette pyjamas — and there was never any question of you wearing either if you went to the shops.
Most importantly, director Philippa Lowthorpe and writer Andrea Gibb take us back to the time when the Great Outdoors was a place for wholesome prepubescent rampaging rather than one so overrun with stabbings, abductions and drug scores not to mention health and safety infractions, that today’s fearful parents have decided for the most part to keep their little twerps indoors. Better Vitamin D-deprived kids are under lock and key, safely eviscerating aliens during PS4 Doom marathons.
At the press screening for “Swallows and Amazons”, Gibb said her adaptation sought to address people’s anxieties over helicopter parenting. That certainly is what gives Ransome’s story relevance to the anxious, nostalgic Birtish society. We have apparently raised — as the father of the four sibling heroes of “Swallows and Amazons” would say — a generation of duffers.
At the start, the four Walker children are heading off for a Lake District holiday with their mother, while their father is away with the Royal Navy. The removal of the patriarch is a recurring plot device in nostalgic children’s literature that involves urban kids finding themselves giddily adrift in rural England. Think of Edith Nesbit’s “The Railway Children” (in which the Edwardian paterfamilias is falsely imprisoned as a spy) or, more recently, Michelle Magorian’s “Goodnight Mister Tom” (in which a Second World War evacuee finds a surrogate father in a grumpy village widower). Both were made into stirringly nostalgic films set in a simpler, gentler England.
Perhaps, if you believe the premise of such books and their adaptations, only when parents are away can children play. Even Harry Potter, though an orphan, comes to imaginative life the further the Hogwarts Express races him away from the quotidian dullness of his muggle family. And how striking it is that the Hogwarts Express is a lovely old steam train rather than a grisly Pendolino. For all that J.K. Rowling’s franchise starts in the early 1990s, its charmed world time travels back to an earlier Britain of retro locos and school gowns.
In “Swallows and Amazons”, the Walker siblings, once installed in their lakeside rental owned by a couple of satisfyingly lo-fi rustics called the Jacksons, demand that they be allowed to sail across the deepest lake in England and camp out on the island in the middle. Kelly Macdonald’s Mrs Walker agonises over the risks of death by burning and drowning such autonomy would entail, but eventually agrees. “I don’t want them frightened of the world,” she says. “If life was always early to bed, we’d never learn ‘owt,” counsels Jessica Hynes’s Mrs Jackson.
And so the Walker siblings set off on their awfully big adventure, one that would have present-day health and safety ideologues crying into their risk-averse muesli. Will they survive? Are canvas plimsols and knitted sleeveless sweaters really what one should wear for an excursion in Cumbria? Go see the film and find out.
“Swallows and Amazons” could be seen as part of a reactionary nostalgic industry, part of the Downtonising tendency. To Downtonise the past is to rid a book or film or TV drama of the things that some in the audience might dislike about the present — black people, uppity proles, uppity Poles, women who don’t know their place, kids who have exchanged their right to graze their knees outdoors for the right to contract carpal tunnel syndrome indoors.
The tendency to reverse backwards into the future is a particularly British phenomenon. “Fifty years from now,” said John Major in 1993, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and — as George Orwell said — ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’ and if we get our way — Shakespeare still read even in school.” Wouldn’t you like to live there? Me neither.
Conservatives have regularly used an apparently gilded past age as an alibi for rubbishing the present. It is the basis of one of our most successful export industries. In 1981, for instance, Jeremy Irons narrated the lyrical introduction to Charles Sturridge’s ITV adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited”: “Oxford in those days was still a city of aquatint. When the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over the gables and cupolas, she exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.”
Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel already dripped with nostalgia for a pre-war England and its allied oleaginous underlings (think Sebastian Flyte’s ever-so-’umble barber). Sturridge effectively put that nostalgia to work in Thatcher’s Britain. Just as Waugh’s novel, behind its lament for lost innocence, expressed posh contempt for upstart prole scum, so its TV adaptation was handily broadcast at a time when it could serve the reactionary agenda of a Conservative government that spent the 1980s destroying the organised working classes.
Thirty years later, “Downton Abbey” similarly aided a later Tory government with its depiction of Edwardian England as one in which the lower orders knew their place and were contented with their lot. It fitted into the reactionary Keep Calm and Carry On ethos that has permeated austerity Britain from 2008 onwards, urging political quietism on those suffering most from George Osborne’s public expenditure cuts. No wonder the Tories gave that “Downton” creator and inveterate snob Julian Fellowes a knighthood. Kirstie Allsopp should have been made a dame, too, for her craft programme which, so far as I understood it, had the subtext: crochet your way out of recession like they did in the 1930s, whiney proles.
But British period drama doesn’t always have a reactionary agenda. It is striking that Lowthorpe worked as a director on “Call the Midwife”, the BBC series set in London’s East End in the late 1950s and early 1960s based on Jennifer Worth’s memoirs. Since 2012, it has been broadcast in the Sunday-evening vintage slot. With its sweet midwives in cardies and starched uniforms, it fits into that slot perfectly and courts the “Downton” demographic perfectly. But, as Radio Times’ Alison Graham argued, it should “take its place as the torchbearer of feminism on television”, since it has dealt with domestic abuse, illegal abortion, rape, the pill, women enslaved by dull marriages, poverty and big families. “I believe the series should be shown to teenage girls in schools across the country,” argued Graham.
“Swallows and Amazons”, similarly, comes on cosy and nostalgic, but then wrongfoots us. Lowthorpe and Gibb’s adaptation cunningly punches up the subversive storyline of the Amazons. Lowthorpe rightly points out that the proto-feminist girl gang are startlingly modern (and apparently in keeping with Ransome’s counter-zeitgeisty views on women). “They are definitely not your archetypal 1930s girl, and for that they are wonderful,” says Lowthorpe. “They’re like warriors, and they are funny and brave and up to no good.”
Otherwise, though, the film helps make the past seem, not a foreign country, but a better realm than the rubbish one we have inflicted on our enfeebled offspring. It chimes with recent rose-tinted eulogies to childhood of simpler times, captured in the following viral e-mail: “Congratulations to all my friends who were born in the 1940s, 50s and 60s ... We ate white bread and real butter; drank cows’ milk and soft drinks with sugar; but we weren’t overweight because ... we were always outside playing!” The corollary? Modern life is rubbish.
It’s an abiding theme. In her memoir of a growing up in suburban Ruislip in the 1950s, Michele Hanson wrote: “So what did ‘play’ mean back then? There was barely any telly, no mobiles, iPhones or iPlayers, no internet, computer games, PlayStations and no pop stars. We had only the simplest of equipment: jacks, marbles, skipping-ropes, bats, balls and bicycles. Most of the time, my friends and I made our own games up: making perfume from rose petals, brewing ginger beer, holding snail races, picking blackberries, making dens in the woods.”
The conviction that the past was better speaks to our current anxieties. If Philippa Lowthorpe and Andrea Gibb are looking for another book to adapt for a film corrective to modern life, they should try Robin Stevens’s cunning series of novels “Murder Most Unladylike”, set in a boarding school in 1935, about two girls who run a detective agency. “Bother,” says Hazel in “Murder Most Unladylike” at one point. “Daisy, my pullover’s in the gym.” Bother? Pullovers? Is there any thing more vexing than misplacing one’s knitwear? Not in this corner of Downtonshire there isn’t.
Stevens’s genius is to produce a mash-up of English fiction from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, borrowing the boarding-school setting (from Enid Blyton’s St Clare novels no doubt) and erasing the unpalatable bits (P.G. Wodehouse’s occasional racist stereotyping, say, or Blyton’s insistence in the Famous Five mysteries that Anne is a wannabe housewife to Dick and Julian, or Waugh’s posh-boy wail against the rise of the common man).
But like Lowthorpe and Gibb’s retread of “Swallows and Amazons”, Stevens wants to have her twee and subvert it. Her heroines Daisy and Hazel are proto-feminists like the Amazons, girls out of time gently challenging the patriarchy. What’s more, instead of dramatising the past as a means of going back to a time in Britain before immigration, Stevens time-travels to right a racist wrong. The book’s narrator is Hazel Wong, the daughter of a Hong Kong businessman, who yearns to become the Chinese Sherlock Holmes. In a lovely scene in “First Class Murder”, nasty Little Englanders travelling on the Orient Express assume that Mr Wong must be a servant. He, marvellously, and with great dignity, exposes their racist assumptions.
One reason Stevens’s books are so successful is because, while part of a lucrative British nostalgia industry, they aren’t really about depicting the past authentically but about recreating it to escape a present we don’t like much. Her books teem with polite girls in boaters, white ankle-socks and sensible plaits — the whole sartorial panoply of a bygone age.
It’s hard to read them, or watch the new film of “Swallows and Amazons”, without thinking how much kinder, better-dressed, and simpler the world was in 1935. Why can’t we have those times back? Because they never happened. And “Happy Days” didn’t exist until we invented them.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
“Swallows and Amazons” releases in the UK on August 19.
