Posted by martin on April 11, 1999 at 08:22:51:
The question of AR in the new millenium raises a whole variety of interesting questions, not least for the future of TARS!
I spent my early years in a small village between hills and the sea in the south-west of England. I had a brother, two years older, and there were a boy and girl next door, one and three years older than me.
Together we searched for years for the entrance to the tunnel known to have led from their house during the Civil War. We hunted for witches in wetland woods below the village. We explored the sea and the shore, and its smugglers' cave, and the hills above us, where there was always a biscuit, a cup of tea, and treasures saved from cereal boxes for us at the Youth Hostel.
Beyond our friends' house was a farm. Mr Fox was a hard working gentleman farmer; Mrs Fox a grand lady, an audience with whom required clean hands and face, brushed hair, shoe laces tied. The works. An original GA. And there was Nanny, who had been Mr Fox's nurse and now presided over the farm kitchen. I came across Mr Fox more than twenty years later. He was now a widow, and had a small antiquarian bookshop in Plymouth. Nanny was over ninety and bedridden. He was now looking after her.
The four of us waged war on the rabbit snares set by a local landowner, a formidable lady who claimed to be able to out-ride, out-drink and out-cuss any man in the county.
We were encouraged in our war by a writer of children's books, who lived on the other side of us. She used to meet us from school, and walk the two mile grassy track over the flank of the hill with us, pulling snares as we went.
We had none of us heard of the Swallows and Amazons.
They struck a powerful chord, of course, when I came across them in my forties, reading them to our daughters.
I can't give my girls the childhood I had, but although one of them is enthusiastic about the books, and the other not, and both regard the whole TARS thing as one of Daddy's little curiosities, we're at one in enthusiasm for messing about in boats, and in the hills and woods, and birds and beasts, and generally speaking the zest for life Nancy personifies.
I've no doubt that the AR books will remain literary classics, whether or not my girls read them to their children or not. He was a great writer.
I suspect that if TARS has an important function in the new millenium, it will not lie in the literary arena, where there will be increasingly little left to be done, so much as in enabling contacts among those who appreciate the Nancy zest for life.
More camps and corroborees!