Looking back over the columns I have written in August in recent years, I find that several have drawn inspiration from my summer reading.
This year is no exception and, not for the first time, while revisiting an old favourite, I have learnt something new about the Middle East too. On this occasion, it’s been a rather convoluted process, full of happenstance and serendipity.
Last week, I spent a few days visiting a family of relatives by marriage from the Syrian city of Aleppo who have found refuge in Sweden, where they are adapting to a new, and very different, life.
On my journey back to Gothenburg airport, I stopped briefly at a lake and, to my delight, found a pair of divers – or loons– swimming sedately close to the shoreline. I have enjoyed birdwatching for decades but it’s the first time I have seen divers and, quite naturally, my mind turned to a book I have loved since childhood, Great Northern?, by the once hugely-popular British children’s author, Arthur Ransome.
Between 1930 and 1947, Ransome wrote a dozen books about several families of children who, growing up together, enjoyed adventures in places as different as the British Lake District, the Baltic and the China Sea. The first in the series, Swallows and Amazons, has been made into a film. The last, Great Northern? is an exciting tale – “a gripping yarn” would be an older term – about the discovery of the first-ever breeding pair of Great Northern Divers – or Common Loon – in Britain.
On reaching home in Jersey, I promptly grabbed the book from the bookshelf to read it yet again. I may have failed, thus far, to transmit my love of Ransome’s books to my family, but I continue to reread them myself.
I made an effort as well to learn more about the author. I knew he had been a keen fisherman and had written other books.
What I had almost forgotten, though, was that he had been one of the few western journalists to witness the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Indeed, he was suspected for many years of being a communist spy, although he actually had good relations both with the British authorities and with the Bolshevik leaders.
He met many top leaders, including Lenin and Trotsky, observed many of the key events and, to cap it all, had a passionate affair with Trotsky’s secretary whom he eventually married and took to Britain. Ransome died in 1967. His wife, Evangelina, survived him by a few years.
How remarkable that a man who not only witnessed one of the great political events of the 20th century but also had an interesting, albeit minor, walk-on role in the drama, became, less than a decade later, the apparently apolitical author of one of Britain’s best-loved series of children’s books.
In my research, I also learnt that one of the groups of quintessentially English children around whom Swallows and Amazons and the books that followed were based, were not English at all.
Their mother was, indeed, part-English, part-Irish, but their father was an Armenian doctor from Aleppo named Ernest Altounyan, who had married into a family with whom Ransome was closely acquainted.
The Altounyan children grew up to win renown as writers and doctors, with their father playing a not-insignificant role in the emergence of independent Syria after the Second World War, before falling out with its government and moving to Britain for the rest of his life.
It’s a convoluted path indeed, from my Syrian relatives via rare birds, decades-old children’s stories and Trotsky’s secretary and back once again to Aleppo and the Altounyans, covering nearly a century of fiction and fact.
What it does suggest though, to me at least, is that the relationships and shared histories of Europe and the Arab world are deeper and much more diverse than is generally recognised. Perhaps, on both sides, it is time they were better known, better understood.
Peter Hellyer is a consultant specialising in the UAE’s history and culture
