Good cloth copy in a good if somewhat edge-torn (with some loss) and dust-toned dust-wrapper, now mylar-sleeved. This Swallows and Amazons is decent enough: but probably best savoured on the small screen after tea on a rainy Sunday.First Edition. This is despite the deployment of a failed “man overboard” rescue manoeuvre – although in trying this out, the children have in fact perfected it, and it is to come in useful when there is a real man-overboard emergency. And in fact nothing in the film rivals the very real catastrophe of the children’s wicker basket full of picnic food being lost overboard. Perhaps what there is to like about it is the simple, almost action-free shots of people sailing their little craft across the rippling lakes. There’s no point updating the story, of course, and in fact the girls do in any case take a reasonably bold and assertive role in the adventure. Swallows and Amazons was always treasured for its innocent charm, and maybe Golding’s Lord of the Flies made this kind of story unfashionable even before our modern preoccupation with the danger that unaccompanied children can be in.

A high-spirited battle commences, complicated by the unlikely danger they are in from the adult world of espionage. And the children beg to be allowed to sail to an island in the middle of the lake in Mr Jackson’s dinghy, the “Swallow”, and camp there – only to find that two other children, Nancy (Seren Hawkes) and Peggy (Hannah Jayne Thorp) have already staked a claim to it, and have a dinghy of their own, called the “Amazon”. The family arrive at their cottage run by a hatchet-faced comedy yokel couple, Mr and Mrs Jackson, played deadpan by Harry Enfield and Jessica Hynes. On the way, the children chance across the mysterious Mr Flint ( Rafe Spall) who appears to be being hunted down by an equally enigmatic figure played by Andrew Scott – and the casting of these two principals should probably tip us off as to which of them is the good guy. They are Susan (Orla Hill), Roger (Bobby McCulloch), John (Dane Hughes) and Tatty (Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen) – her name was “Titty” in the original, and rather coyly changed. Kelly Macdonald plays Mrs Walker, who is taking her boisterous four children away for a summer holiday in the idyllic Lakeland fells while her husband, an officer in the Royal Navy, is away in the far east. Innocent charm … the children by the lake.

Swallows and amazons first edition