Secret waters: Reliving author Arthur Ransome's literary journey along the Essex coast

When I was a boy, Arthur Ransome was the kind of man I wanted to grow up to be. He was in turn a sailor, an enthusiastic first-hand observer of Russia's Bolshevik revolution and a British spy. After escaping from a loveless marriage, he ended up marrying Trotsky's secretary Evgenia and took her to the Lake District where he wrote the best-selling Swallows and Amazons series, the books for which he is remembered today.

Many of the adventures were set in the Lakes, but my favourite is the one set at the other end of the country: Secret Water.

Just 45 miles from the M25 is a wilderness so deep and so remote that you could travel across it all day and not see a soul. The flat islands, creeks and marshes to the north of Walton-on-the-Naze, immortalised in Secret Water, comprise the antidote to commuter-belt dreariness elsewhere in Essex.

Ransome's book deals with two groups of children – the Swallows and the Amazons – who are cast ashore for a week by over-worked parents to fend for themselves and map the area. These explorers meet "savages", in the shape of another group of children who call themselves the Eels. Although there are other parents around ("the Missionaries") they occupy the shadowy world of adulthood and remain insignificant.

Recently, I pulled out my old copy of Secret Water and glanced at the inscription. It had belonged to my brother, Denys, when he was about 10 years old. I started reading, and slowly a realisation dawned on me. In Ransome's drawings the yacht, Goblin, that had carried the children to the island looked curiously familiar. The Swallows' family were staying in a rented cottage in Pin Mill on the banks of the river Orwell – wasn't that where Denys now kept his boat on a mooring? I knew that he had recently bought an old wooden yacht so I telephoned him and arranged for a couple of days sailing off the Essex coast.

When I arrived at the boat she looked the image of the Goblin: a wooden single-masted sloop, she had once been a rich man's fancy. When built, she would have cost the same as the house we grew up in. Vastly more characterful than the plastic boats of today, these deep-hulled old yachts feel firmer and more stable in the choppy North Sea. Inside there is so much hand-carved joinery it is rather like sailing in a piece of furniture.

Ransome had based Goblin largely on his own boat, Nancy Blackett, named after one of the characters in the books. As I boarded my brother's boat, I felt as if I was stepping back into an idealised version of the 1930s. Smells of varnish, cordage and tea rose from below, and the English sunshine made the teak decking hot underfoot. Denys protested that he had little recollection of the book, and certainly wasn't consciously trying to recreate a childhood dream. And yet...

We ghosted down the river past the last low hills of Suffolk, past the great cranes and gantries of the container port of Felixstowe and past a ferry and cruise ship. We felt smugly superior to the tourists on board.

Soon the north Essex coast emerged from the heat-haze. An enormous sky met the North Sea with a pencil-thin line of land in between. Soon that too disappeared and I found it very hard to steer a straight course in the featureless sea. Denys called up the location of various buoys from his chart table and soon I was able to get a fix on one of the great bobbing steel canisters that lollop in the swell as you drift past. Their names sing out in the cadence of the Radio 4 shipping forecast: Landguard, Crab Knoll, Cliff Foot.

Turning back towards the coast, we searched for the buoy that marks the entrance to Secret Water. The original tarred barrel has only recently been replaced, and I felt a creeping sensation of the fictional book growing into a factual reality. As Ransome wrote: "Ahead, the land seemed hardly above the level of the sea, just a long low line above the water."

The water and the land lie so closely stretched together that they change places every tide. It's a fascinating sensation to glide between the two. The old Thames barges used to steer across these waterways until they touched the bottom, then they "tacked", or went about (hence the expression "touch and go"). This captures exactly the trepidation you feel as you wring the last few feet of depth before you go about, and slide across the wind in the other direction.

Before long we found our anchorage for the night. Chain rumbled into the water and the anchor dug itself into the mud as the boat gently drifted back in the ebbing tide. Silence. We sipped tea. Somewhere across the marshes a curlew called a long bubbling cry. Darkness fell. Out there, the great glistening flats of mud were being exposed to the night. Land was emerging from the water in a slow vegetable heave. But in 12 hours the water would be back.

In Secret Water the children slowly fill in a map from a rough outline sketched by Commander Walker, their father. The children explored and surveyed their domain in exactly the same way the British Empire had been accumulated on charts. Using small dinghies they reconnoitered creeks they called the North West Passage and the Red Sea: names redolent of British endeavours long before their time.

Denys and I were anchored just to the east of the real-life Horsey Island, which becomes Swallow Island and is the first to be mapped. After landing the children unwrap their provisions: "Three tins of pemmican... Six tins of sardines... One tin of golden syrup... One stone jar of marmalade... Six boxes of eggs." In the centre of the island is still the farm, which the children call a "native kraal". To the north is Peewit Island, which becomes Peewitland.

The correspondences with the real landscape are close. To the south is the Wade, a causeway to the Town, which is covered at high tide. The three youngest children find themselves trapped in the middle by the rising water and are rescued only in the nick of time. Today's Health and Safety Executive would be appalled. The children are rescued by The Mastodon, another child who lives aboard a derelict barge. The huge circular footprints of the giant mud-shoes which enable him to walk across the soft mud lead to his nickname. A few rotting timbers still survive from " Speedy", his ironically named residence. Ransome's children never existed, of course, except in his mind. But to me they are as real as the low-lying islands, the mud, and the tide.

When my father was the age of an Amazon, one of his teachers was the poet W H Auden, who later called the 1930s "a low, dishonest decade". To adults, perhaps, it was, but to Ransome's fictional children it seems an age of innocence. What parent would now leave their young children (including a six-year-old, Bridget) to camp on an island unsupervised? With small boats, campfires and marshes that flood at high tide these children had ample opportunities to harm themselves, but all they succeeded in doing was to become self-reliant, confident and well-balanced individuals. I feel sorry for today's children who don't have the chance to play outdoors because of imagined dangers. The true danger now is to their souls. The last two lines of William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" go: "I am the master of my fate:/ I am the captain of my soul."

Will they be able to say that?

Traveller's guide

GETTING THERE

The nearest train station to Pin Mill is Ipswich, which – along with Walton-on-the-Naze and the East of England in general – is served by One Railway (National Rail Enquiries: 0845 748 4950; www.nationalrail.co.uk).

STAYING THERE

Alma Cottage at Pin Mill (01453 872 551; www.stilwell.co.uk) is available to rent, from £230 per week. It features in the book Secret Water as the cottage where the family stays.

SAILING THERE

Boat charter is available from several companies, including Ipswich-based Seaborne Charter (01473 736 625; seabornecharter.co.uk); Britannia Sailing (01473 787 019; www.britanniasailingschool.co.uk), based in Shotley, near Ipswich; and North Sea Yachting (01473 232 221; www.northseayachting.com), based in Walton-on-the-Naze.

Timeline

18 January 1884: Arthur Mitchell Ransome is born in Leeds.

1909: Marries Ivy Constance Walker, with whom he has one daughter, Tabitha.

1913: Leaves his wife and daughter to travel to Russia, where he studies folklore and later reports for radical newspaper the Daily News on the war and the 1917 Russian Revolution.

1919: Begins writing for the Manchester Guardian and the Observer as a correspondant in Russia and the Baltic States.

1924: Marries his second wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina.

1929: Moves back to Britain permanently and settles in the Lake District.

1930: Writes Swallows and Amazons, the first in the series of 12 books, all published between 1930 and 1947.

3 June 1967: Ransome dies and is buried in Rusland, in the Lake District.

BETH MELLOR

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