Posted by Jock on June 28, 2007 at 14:28:23 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: The Real St Trinian's posted by John Wilson on June 28, 2007 at 12:42:29:
we do not know which schools the Swallows or the D’s went to either
We certainly aren't told which schools the Swallows went to, but we do know that John and Susan were taught to sail by their father at Falmouth who presumably was based at the Falmouth Navy Base at the time. This gives us a starting point. It unlikely that the children of a Navy officer went to schools very far away. The boys would have boarded at a 'prep' school. The girls may have attended a day school or boarded... .
Ransome himself admits somewhere that he knows much more about his characters than he tells us in the books, so it seems to me to be quite legitimate to try to 'reverse engineer' this missing background.
The Altounyan children had a much more exciting early childhood and the lack of formal British schooling at the start of their education is given as the supposed reason for the initial rift between Arthur and Evgenia, and the Altounyan parents.