Posted by Mike Jones on December 06, 2014 at 13:40:01 user Mike_Jones.
In Reply to: Re: Grandparents posted by Peter Hyland on December 06, 2014 at 12:28:10:
Missing parents are often a necessary plot device. Family holidays would be a disaster; in SW it takes the deux ex machina of the First Lord of the Admiralty to get things moving. And uncles and aunts provide a necessary injection of adult authority without too much emotional entanglement.
One parent families would also have been relatively common in real life. The Great War, Spanish flu', less developed industrial safety rules, absence of antibiotics..... Life for adults was just more hazardous in those days.