Posted by Peter Ceresole on January 05, 2013 at 09:52:41 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Winter Holiday 1939 posted by Peter Hyland on January 04, 2013 at 09:32:52:
I think Peter C and I are roughly the same age
I'm 73 and happy to have made it this far...
so when he recalls that his mother read ‘Swallowdale’ to him, I am curious to know how she had heard of AR’s books.
I've looked back through my lot, and 'Swallowdale', the one my mum read to me, has on the blank page after the front map and the title page, an inscription (which I had never consciously read before now) which says 'Peter/ with love & best wishes/ from/ Dorothy/ Christmas 1947'. This was a friend of my mum's, Dorothy Shand, a lovely woman who I remember playing with- I still occasionally see her daughter, still a friend. I don't think that my own parents would have known about AR at the time.
My own parents, presumably of about the same age, had never read Ransome books
Mine almost certainly hadn't either; they were both Swiss, brought up there and in France, and had only moved to London in 1936 when my dad took a job with Swiss Railways at 11b Lower Regent Street. At the time it was full of travel companies which had huge display models of steam ships in their windows, which fascinated me when I came to see him at work during and immediately after the war.
My next AR book was SA, and looking at that, onto the flyleaf is stuck a label saying 'FORM PRIZE/ Lower IV/ 8th April 1949'. Wow, I must have been so good... But that one, I remember they asked me what book I'd like and I said SA.