Posted by John Nichols on February 22, 2006 at 04:25:45 from 24.250.128.237 user Mcneacail.
In Reply to: Re: AR Locations posted by Brad Henry on February 21, 2006 at 05:48:38:
We all made a very good tea, as the saying goes. I said we didn't have tea as a meal at home, rather it's a brief interval in the living room during which you struggle to balance your cup. All agreed one has to sit up to table for proper enjoyment of the meal. The rum butter frosting made him say that the Lakes farm people make it. The best time is when you've been hunting on foot--not on horses because the hill country is too rough--and you find yourself 15 or 20 miles from home and are frozen. You can stop in at an outlying farm. You're given a mug of hot rum with a large lump of butter rapidly disappearing in a melting swirl, the best thing in the world. Then you're put to sleep "under a mattress", which means a feather bed, and it's impossible to catch a cold. I asked him if old Mr. and Mrs. Swainson, a marvellous farm couple in his books, were real, but he said, "That's the one kind question I don't answer, the 'Are they real?' ones." Later he said he didn't mind telling me that Wild Cat Island is a combination of two islands, one of which is on Coniston Water. The other one on Windermere doesn't have the good harbor, which he appropriated from the C.W. island. Cormorant Island is really there. He admitted he took the actual geography and "gave it a stir," but that everything really exists somewhere: Horseshoe Cove, Swallowdale, the passages through Kanchenjunga, and K. itself, which is Coniston Old Man and which he moved 8 miles out of its way for his purposes.