Posted by Jock on May 20, 2005 at 00:13:21 from 84.66.54.233 user Jock.
In Reply to: Did really meet 'Peggy'? posted by ponspunt on May 17, 2005 at 13:24:09:
Mmm. PH would have us believe that you have scored a 100% hit with Pauline. But is the inspiration for a fictional character ever so clear cut? Perhaps you only met a part of Peggy? Somewhere Ransome writes that his characters - like his Lake geography - are composites. From his autobiography we learn that his unhappiest time in the lakes was at boarding school at Windmere. Perhaps the earliest genesis of the SA story began in the mind of the young Ransome while escaping (in his imagination) from the confines of the school. Check out how much of the shape of the Lake coresponds to the actual geography of Lake Windmere between Bowness and Windmere. So Cockshott Point could be the first prototype of Darien, and the view from there to Ramp Holme the first inspiration for the future Wild Cat Island.
What has this to do with Peggy? Well undoubtedly the Marshall sisters helped AR to 'flesh out' the details of the Amazons when he came to write SA. But the original prototypes? Somewhere in the dusty shoe boxes that I E-N uses to archive Tarboard is a passionately argued case that the original Amazons were a pair of piratical tomboys living down the lake from Windmere in Huyton Hill.
Now I have not worked out the chronology exactly, but from my rekoning the Huyton Hill girls were carrying out their acts of piracy (never mind about fireworks these girls SANK their father's houseboat) at about the same time that the schoolboy Ransome was suffering the indignities of his first boarding school.