Posted by Laurence Monkhouse on March 19, 2004 at 07:24:31 from 217.137.106.60 user Laurence_.
In Reply to: Re: "The tall wireless masts at Bawdsey" posted by John Lambert on March 18, 2004 at 22:44:58:
The Amazon 1997 reprint of Ransome's early drafts "The Swallows and the Amazons" quotes his own notes for the ages in that book as:-
John 12
Susan 10
Titty 9
Roger 7
Nancy 13
Peggy 12
This would make John 13 in SD and 14 in PP/WD/SW
There is no suggestion of a missing year in the sequence. There doesn't seem to be any way of fitting in the actual dates of the Bawdsey masts - but does it matter?
If John had been much older than 14 in WD much of the point of the story would have been lost. Jim himself would have been no older than 18 if he was about to start his first year at Oxford, and nobody thought it in any way remarkable (as indeed it was not) that he was taking the Goblin single handed on overnight voyages.
When I first read the books (7 years onwards) I certainly did not feel that the characters were improbably young - I was simply inspired to emulate them, alhough I never succeeded at anything like the same level.