Posted by Robert Hill on 9/29/99 from 129.11.153.35, 129.11.9.42 via proxy proxy1.leeds.ac.uk:
In Reply to: Jennings posted by Johnny Broadhead on September 27, 1999 at 10:33:48:
I read two or three of the Lone Pine books - Saucers over the Moor,
The Gay Dolphin Adventure, and possibly one other - in my early teens
in the early 1960s. I quite liked them, recognising similarities to
AR's books. I would probably have read several more if they'd been
in my local library, but they weren't, and I was not sufficiently
enthusiastic to seek them out further afield (whereas I'd decided early
in S&A that I strongly wanted to read the whole series).
Perhaps you can help me solve a small mystery. In my first ever message
to Tarboard I committed a howler by claiming that, in one of AR's books,
he thought of the D's as twins. This was because I thought I remembered
reading the phrase "Dorothea, the older by an hour". When I eventually
realised that this phrase does not occur anywhere, I wondered how I had
got the idea that it does. I formed the tentative hypothesis that I had
seen a similar phrase about the mixed-sex pair of twins (I forget their
names) in the Lone Pine books. Do you think this is possible? Do you
know of such a phrase?
Incidentally, I suspect that Malcolm Saville must have been unaware of
the fact that mixed-sex twins are never monozygotic (identical) and are
therefore no more likely to have similar characteristics than any other
brother and sister.