Why should I feel nostalgic for a childhood I never had? The Lake District, in which Arthur Ransome set his book Swallows and Amazons, is a world away from the north London suburbs of my youth.
In Swallows, the four Walker children have an infinite landscape of rolling hills and mysterious lakes in which to play. They have parents who let them roam wild and camp out over night. And they are polite, well-spoken and well-educated enough to make casual comparisons between their adventure and the Spanish conquistadors.
Yet by the end of this Bristol Old Vic stage adaptation of Ransome's 1929 classic children's story - which arrives in the West End with deserving support from the National Theatre - I found myself unexpectedly experiencing a deep affection for a pre-war, bucolic England I never knew.
And the reason has everything to do with the thoroughly modern way in which Tom Morris's production resurrects Ransome's old-fashioned world. The stage is populated by a core cast of adults playing children, a device that touchingly reveals the child in all of us. But there are also multi-tasking stagehands who double as the musicians who play Neil Hannon's score.
