My books were always going to be stuffed with boats. My grandfather was a Cardiff Bay ship-owner, whose requisitioned ships were all sunk in World War Two. His French wife was born in La Rochelle, one of the prettiest ports on the Atlantic coast, where my other grandparents also lived. One of my ancestors captained a ship at Trafalgar. My parents spent six months of Mum’s pregnancy with me in Greece, where Dad was working for some ‘not altogether honest’ ship-owners.
From my earliest age then, boats have been the stuff of legend, and none more so than those I read about in books. Two of my childhood favourites are included in this list. Of the three others, two more are books for children which I read as an adult. I include them because both took me on the sort of all-consuming adventure which proves that the joy of books for young people doesn’t have to stop when you grow up . . .
Here, then, are some of my favourite and most formative boat stories:
The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton
It’s hard to overstate the influence Blyton had on me as a reader. I’ve tried re-reading her as an adult, and alas the magic has gone. But as a child, she was the first author I came across who gave her child protagonists complete agency, and that was electrifying. I envied her heroes everything: their freedom, their picnics, their island, their adventures. Most of all, I envied George her (nameless) rowing boat, and the confidence with which she handled it. The Secret of Golden Island owes a lot to her.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
The third (or fourth, depending on how you list them) book in The Chronicles of Narnia. The eponymous ship’s prow is shaped like the head of a dragon, the stem like a dragon’s tail. She carries Lucy, Edmund and their reluctant cousin Eustace on a great quest which has a sort of dreamlike quality. I didn’t long for the Dawn Treader in the way I longed for George’s boat, but I was mesmerised by her (and there is a dragon ship in The Rescue of Ravenwood).
Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier
Fun fact, du Maurier wrote this during the war, when people needed cheering up. As it worked then, so it does now: I reach for it again and again in times of trouble. And when I first read it as a teenager, it completely swept me away. Oh, to be Donna with her Frenchman on the deck of La Mouette, laughing in the face of danger! Real life just couldn’t compare.
Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson
A perfect book, combining high stakes adventure with Ibbotson’s meticulous plotting and trademark wicked humour and emotional truth. The passages in which Finn and Maia explore the Amazon in his steam launch, the Arabella, are particularly magical. Here is a boat that you can live in, a home, a whole world. Even reading it as an adult, I wanted it for my own.
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
La Belle Sauvage is eleven-year-old Malcolm’s canoe, in which he carries baby Lyra through a terrible flood to safety. I love the contrast between the epic journey and the simplicity of the small brave boat that makes it possible. One of the inspirations for my own Voyage of the Sparrowhawk.
What will two children do to win an island? From Costa-winning author of Voyage of the Sparrowhawk.
Natasha Farrant is the author of the Costa Award winning novel, Voyage of the Sparrowhawk, bestselling middle-grade novel, The Children of Castle Rock, the acclaimed Bluebell Gadsby series and Carnegie-longlisted and Branford Boase-shortlisted YA historical novel The Things We Did For Love. She was shortlisted for the Queen of Teen Award 2014. She lives in London with her family.
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