Posted by Paul on August 12, 2003 at 22:30:30 from 206.149.148.98 user Paul133.
Background: After my post of just over a week ago asking if there was an archive of old Tarboard messages (to which Ian E-N kindly responded and remade the archive, the address of which is posted again below), I downloaded the entire archives and unzipped the files. In looking for something that would let me search thousands of .htm files more easily (and more quickly) than the one in Windows, I discovered a great free program called X1. It has other uses such as searching for emails and doing web searches, but I discovered that it is extremely useful for searching through the Tarboard archives. So now I can see if a topic has already been discussed ad nauseum and if so what was said, etc. It works remarkably well, searching through 10,721 files (that's just the Tarboard archives) in seconds to find messages which discuss certain things. If you would like to download it for free, just click on the "X1" link and it will take you to the website.
Anyway, now that I've said all that, the question I would like to pose to you all is a seeming contradiction about Commander (or Captain) Walker, when he is on leave and when he is not. After looking through the archives, I can say that exactly the same question has already been asked (by Rachel Klapman in November 1998) but unfortunately, there were no replies to her message.
The contradiction is between a sentence in the first chapter of Coot Club and references throughout We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea. In the first chapter of Coot Club, when the D's are on the train and have just met Tom Dudgeon, we are told: "After that winter holiday they had set their hearts on learning, but it was no good going north at Easter, for the Blacketts were away with their uncle, and the Walkers were in the south with their father, who was home in England on leave." However, throughout We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, we definitely get the impression that the Swallows' father is coming back to England after being away and not seeing them for a long time. This is shown by a sentence right near the beginning of Chapter XXII of We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, where we are told: "It had been a long time since they had seen him, but Daddy had not changed a bit." (Unfortunately, I don't have the "magic search" capability of Ed Kiser, whose interesting and informative posts I have particularly enjoyed reading in the archive, so I can't give any more exact references or quotes in support of this.)
So how do these two pieces fit together? Surely "Daddy" would not have returned home on leave at Easter, only to travel all the way back to China (or is it Hong Kong?) for a few months and then all the way back again to England to be posted at Shotley? Or was it simply that AR wrote that sentence in Coot Club and forgot about it or simply ignored it when he came to write We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea?