Re: . . about the Beckfoot plumbers - the REAL ISSUE


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Posted by Peter H on October 01, 2007 at 21:13:09 from 86.130.135.245 user Peter_H.

In Reply to: Re: . . about the Beckfoot plumbers posted by Prue Eckett on September 30, 2007 at 22:12:11:

It's terminal but not very painful...

Beckfoot Plumbingitis may be ‘terminal’ but it’s not reached its terminus yet. I now propose to hasten the whole thing forward to its ultimate end. “I’ve started so I’ll finish”. I’ve been thinking, and I reckon all this ‘plumbing’ stuff is a way of avoiding what’s behind it – the inexplicable absence of any mention of ‘sanitary arrangements’, latrines, call them what you will, in Ransome’s stories. To examine rationally the fictional Beckfoot plumbing is a just a way of avoiding this topic.

This problematic topic has been mentioned more than once before, and the answer is always given that the lavatorial arrangements in camp and aboard a boat are not necessary for the story and readers can manage quite well without express mention – it is a sort of ‘given’. I’m afraid that won’t do. There are plenty of instances where any consideration of the need for latrine facilities makes the storyline impractical.

One can start with Wild Cat Island. Because it is a small island, it does not have acres of woodland to disappear into with a spade. In fact, no mention is made of the children taking a spade with them to the island. Surely it would be essential on an island to have a ‘designated’ latrine area, otherwise things might get a little unpleasant when exploring. Remember too that the children don’t own the island and it is quite possible that others will camp there. The Swallows, and particularly Susan, are very keen not to leave litter or any sort of mess behind them.

This factor occurs again, even more pointedly, in PP. The prospectors do not take spades with them when they leave Beckfoot. When they go to dig for Titty’s Well, they have to borrow spades and pick axe from Robin Tyson. Robin “laughed when he heard they meant to dig in the wood. ‘You won’t do much with a spade, I reckon’, he said” and he lends them a crowbar. He means that the ground is too hard, stony and dry to use a spade. When they move to the camp at High Topps, there are eight children there, for about a week. The weather is hot. I don’t think I need spell out the problem. Did they each take the crow bar with them into the wood?

I could quote other examples. I hate to say this, but the only answer to all this is the ‘existentialist’ theory, ie if anything is not mentioned in AR’s text, it does not ‘exist’. Rather like Cdr Walker’s luggage, the children’s lavatorial requirements do not ‘exist’. It requires suspension of rational logic, but that is what you have to do. Once you start talking rationally about ‘bathrooms’ in AR, and everything that goes with them, you’re in trouble.



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