Third year he hadn’t been able to escape the family, who had demanded his attendance at the family party – and then his mother had spent the entire time bemoaning the fact that, through no fault of her own, she had ended up with a blood-traitor for a son.
It had been wonderful and heart breaking at the same time. On second year, he had managed to get himself invited to James’s house for the break, and that had been the first time he had seen what a normal family was like. His first Christmas at home after that had been an absolute nightmare, so Sirius had done his best to avoid being home for the holidays after that. It was only after Hogwarts that things had got really bad – after Sirius had committed the horrible crime of being a Gryffindor. Back then, though, the punishment hadn’t been too horrible going to bed without supper and the revoking of certain privileges (that Sirius mostly didn’t care about anyway). It had been fun, despite the punishment that had followed when they’d been caught. When he and Reggie had been very young – before Sirius had gone to Hogwarts and his sorting had driven a wedge between them – they had sometimes snuck around playing little pranks on the guests (like normal children). The children hadn’t been allowed to be anything but perfect little pureblood heirs with impeccable manners. It was all about ostentation and a disturbing sense of superiority, which Sirius had hated. For the Blacks, Christmas was a time to host parties for the other pureblood families so they could rub their wealth and position in everyone’s faces.
However, later in life Ransome tried to downplay the Altounyan connections, changing the initial dedication of Swallows and Amazons and writing a new foreword which gave other sources.Sirius had never been a huge fan of Christmas. Ransome kept Swallow until he sold it a number of years later, while Mavis remained in the Altounyan family and is now on permanent display in the Windermere Steamboat Museum. Ransome and Ernest Altounyan bought two small dinghies called Swallow and Mavis. Three of the Altounyan children's names are adopted directly for the Walker family. The book was inspired by a summer spent by Ransome teaching the children of his friends, the Altounyans, to sail. He continued to write part-time for the press. It is set in the Lake District between the two World Wars.Īt the time Ransome had been working as a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, but decided to become a full-time author rather than go abroad as a foreign correspondent. Swallows and Amazons is the first book in the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome and was first published in 1930.
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