I Never Cared For You - Alison Krauss
I Never Cared ForYou - Willie Nelson
Hit Medley on the Grand Ole Opry (1965) - Willie Nelson

Dick's Toolbox
Swallows and Amazons
Children’s literature in the 1950s and now
When there was no such thing as TV, you read as soon as you could stumble through the connected alphabet. Despite any evidence, I am convinced I could read before I went to school, but I don’t recall there being many children’s books in the house - though, of course, children’s books were not the large colourful industry that they are today.  Maybe there was ‘Pooh Bear’ and ‘Now We are Six’ - but was there anything else? I know that as soon as I could, I ploughed through all my parent’s books without any knowledge as to their suitability. Perhaps the illustrated Boccaccio’s ‘The Decameron’ at ten is too early, however.
Given that we were probably not that well off in my mother’s first time between husbands, the Christchurch library, standing four square on the banks of the Christchurch’s River Avon, was where we often went to supplement the limited domestic reading list. I remember going to the library and walking up its stone steps to the high, hushed and wood-panelled rooms, where some of the books in the children’s section actually smelt as if they were made from wood that had rotted for generations beneath some Heathcote bog and then bonded with reconstituted dead frogs. Were they those weird garish American Little Golden books?
I know I borrowed, but what did I read? In later years there was the Richmal Crompton ‘William’ series - much of the raucous humour I missed at the time. A good children’s book has to appeal to adults as well and William would appeal to all parents of young boys who could see their own child’s behaviour writ large. No matter how bad your child was, William could be worse. But it must have been a calculated risk: if my boy reads this and gets even more perverse ideas, where does this leave me in my pursuit of a calm and happy life?
This is an introduction to chapter three of the first book ‘Just - William’ courtesy of The Project Gutenberg.

A child I could readily identify with... and like a lot. But if children’s books are meant to be morally improving, William should have been judged a failure. William was a self-centred narcissistic sociopath. A Trumpian prototype.
And there was the W E Johns ‘Biggles’ series, with the dashing racist imperialistic British Pilot, James Bigglesworth, his faithful batman Ginger and his companion and cousin Algy. What exciting titles in the ninety-nine long list of titles! ‘Biggles flies East’. ‘Biggles flies West’. ‘Biggles flies North’. ‘Biggles flies South’. ‘Biggles flies slightly West of South’. I definitely read ‘Biggles in the South Seas’ written in 1940. But the ones on constipation ‘Biggles works it out’ and the sex-ed edition ‘Biggles Makes Ends Meet’ and ‘Biggles takes a Hand’ must have eluded my voracious reading.
The thing that interests me most is that the younger heroes and heroines of the books we read were allowed astounding levels of independence by their parents. My favourite example is ‘Swallows and Amazons’, where the four children are given free rein to sail a dinghy around a fictionalised Windermere in the Lakes District. A large and deep lake with other boats on it, in the book and in real life. John and Nancy are 12, Susan and Peggy are 11, Titty is 9 and Roger is 7. Yes, one of the girls was called Titty. The young lady in question was based on Mavis Altounyan, who had the nickname ‘Titty’ which came from the fairytale Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse, an English folktale of interesting gruesomeness where death and destruction reign supreme. Titty Mouse dies of scalding in the ninth line and Tatty Mouse is crushed by the collapse of their house in the last.
There have been two films made of the book and only in the first, and perhaps best version, is Titty actually called Titty. In the 2016 version she changes mice to become Tatty.
Now I have to be honest here. When I first read 'Swallows and Amazons' at thirteen, having heard that it was a superb book for the young reader, I was very disappointed. Too many capable girls perhaps? Too nice? But, rereading it as an adult I was enchanted - and somewhere we have the complete series of books, of which ‘We didn’t mean to go to Sea’ is a ripper. There are audiobooks too, though the best version of 'Swallows and Amazons' read by Bernard Cribbins, can now only be found on YouTube.
“Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown’ are the words on a telegram to the children’s mother, (in the first 1974 film played by Virginia McKenna), from their father who is in Malta en route to Hong Kong in answer to the children’s request for permission to take to the waters of the lake. They do and, with scarcely an adult in sight to fuss and molly-coddle over them, they camp on islands in the middle of the lake under tents they have pitched themselves, gut fish, sail in the middle of the night against other child pirates, foil thieves and blackguards from the town, and generally demonstrate survival skills of a high order. Arthur Ransome, the magnificently moustached author and illustrator of the book, had holidayed as a child in the district, though his poor eyesight and lack of athletic skill might have made emulating the children he wrote about somewhat aspirational. He settled in the Lakes District in the 1920s. His may have been an agent for MI6 in WWI and his second marriage was to Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who had worked as Trotsky's personal secretary.
He was a keen sailor whose interest in sailing and his need to provide an accurate description, made him to undertake a voyage across the North Sea to Flushing in the Netherlands in his own boat ‘Nancy Blackett’, which became the fictional Goblin in ‘We didn’t mean to go to Sea’.
The children are not duffers, and they don’t drown. Lesson learnt.