Posted by Peter Ceresole on August 08, 2008 at 08:38:17 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Great Northern & Characters as Adults posted by Matthew on August 07, 2008 at 20:55:10:
I would love to have tea on wildcat island with them, Or go on a sailing adventure with them. other books have not done that for me.
Possibly AR was a better writer, maybe he imagined his characters more fully?
Don't know how AR did it. but the swallows and Amazons are real people to me.
Probably because they were real to him too, even if thay actually came to life under his pen.
You say you'd like to know more about their home lives; actually there's quite a lot in the books about that, including for instance conversations in the igloo in WH, or at the start of SW. But that's not what the books were about; AR included enough to make his characters real, but he wasn't trying to create a total world in detail...
That comes from your own imagination. And it changes with time, as you change. I always imagined what the children were actually like, but that image of them changed as I grew up and simply as I knew more. And of course sometimes the reality exceeds the imagination. Roger, interested in engines and grease, turns out, as Roger Altounyan, to be all that and more. Look him up on Google; he became a flying instructor and later a research biochemist involved in the discovery and development of Intal, the asthma drug, and the Spinhaler for its application.
But that's fact. I used to imagine conversations with Titty or Dorothea, sitting on a crumbling pier in the Suffolk salt marshes or, for some strange reason, Dagenham on the Essex mud; or on Coniston, on the pier at Brantwood (maybe because I've been there).
You don't need to know a whole lot to enjoy meetings in your imagination, and I think AR gives you enough clues to start your own inventions.