Posted by Peter Ceresole on July 19, 2014 at 04:09:51 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Udal Bridge posted by Ed Kiser on July 17, 2014 at 06:39:17:
those photos help to
bring a reality to the fiction of Ransome's imagination making
his story settings even more realistic.
Yes. And I find that Google Street View does a great deal; I can look at Low Ludderburn, and go up to the window in the converted barn where AR wrote, and look at the garage he and Evgenia built for Rattletrap. I can also look at 'Strickland Junction' and see the wall he drew in PP, and look at Lanehead close to.
As they were for you, the children were real to me when I was small. Much later, it's the world of AR that fascinated me- still does. Because I was born in December '39, and enjoyed the war as a child in London, then lived through the post-war reconstruction and worked on questions of the Cold War and NATO- all of that the consequence of the '30s, which were the decade that formed me and my life, and were such a creative time (Eliot; Turing; Einstein and Bohr making the universe first understandable, then incomprehensible; Stalin and Hitler the ghastly twins) all of them. And AR's history and his books provide a window into that time. I really enjoyed using Street View to look for the clinic from which Jim fled, in WD, in one of my all time favourite chapters in all the books (I never really found the clinic, but found a few candidates).
After all, AR was a master craftsman and storyteller, but it's what we bring to the reading that counts for so much... And his genius was that it encourages us to bring it.