What should we assume?


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Posted by Peter Ceresole on March 06, 2012 at 01:35:40 user PeterC.

We've been discussing Beckfoot electricity (or lack of it) doing deep down exegesis of what AR wrote. That seems to have unearthed some explicit stuff from WH, which describes the nature of the lighting at Holly Howe, but earlier in the discussion someone pointed out quite rightly that in the first exchange of signals between the Ds and the others, AR talks of the light in the bedroom 'flashing', and there were doubts about what that implied. Now that we know that it had to be either candles or an oil lamp, 'flashing' seems a curious word to use. But AR used it, I suspect because he needed to have flashes for the signalling and he never thought about the technical details at that moment; he was speaking from the standpoint of the Ds and he was quite clear in describing what they did, moving a hurricane lantern in and out of cover in the barn. So the question arises; how much should we read into the details? It's fun to explore the ideas, but AR was a splendidly functional writer. He put in what was needed to keep the story moving on, and put in the detail when it added to the story. Otherwise he would leave the detail as understood, as in Pete's switching on the light in the scullery in BS. For us, it's interesting to explore the question of whether there was electricity in Horning in 1933, and whether a boat builder would have it fitted, but AR assumed that his readership would know about the circumstances of their own world, enough at least not to have that detail explained.

But it is such fun to mentally reconstruct the scenes, create a cinema in our minds... I think that it's important to remember that we're talking about a man who, however wonderfully gifted he was, was a chap writing to a deadline.


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