Posted by Andy Morley on April 20, 1999 at 19:00:49:
In Reply to: Re: Grammar ( was Re: Then, it happened...) posted by Anne LeVeque on April 20, 1999 at 17:26:16:
I'm glad Ed wasn't politically astute as a schoolboy when it came to managing his schoolteacher. Some kids I knew were very good at that sort of thing. I recall them as squeaky-clean, plump, pink, washed and scrubbed, girls with pigtails, boys with oh-so-carefully-brushed hair, always getting the other children in trouble, looking as if they'd be very much at home at a vicar's tea-party (could these be what Anne's word describes..?) I'd hate to think there were many of those in a tribe whose domestic gods include Cap'n Nancy.
Schoolteachers like most professionals come in 'excellent', 'mediocre' and 'downright useless'. It sounds as if the one in question was on the dull side of mediocre. Technically she may have been right; my children begin sentences with 'Then' in their school essays to the point of tedium, and I am sure that this is a widespread characteristic of juvenile writing. By picking it up and incorporating it into his idiom, Ransome was probably helping to make his books more accessible to the childish reader. What the schoolteacher should have pointed out was that there is a world of difference between a skilled author doing that for stylistic reasons, and a child doing it because they haven't yet learned better.
As for tide on the Norfolk (that's Norfolk East Anglia folks!) Broads, there isn't very much compared with most truly 'maritime' river systems. It does run fairly strongly around Yarmouth, which includes Breydon Water, but elsewhere it has more impact on water levels than on current. The latter is more of an inconvenience than a journey-stopper. The former, though only a couple of feet at most, can make all the difference if you're trying to get a wherry through Potter Heigham bridge. Or even a motor cruiser come to that. There are no 'gators on the Broads yet, though there is rumoured to be one in Birmingham (Warwickshire, not Alabama). However, if your quant gets stuck in the mud and you don't let go, you risk a mangling from the screws of the densely packed motor boats.