Smoke and Mirrors (was Surrounding landscape... )

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Posted by Jock on March 14, 2008 at 12:23:39 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.

In Reply to: Re: Surrounding landscape Locations for Beckfoot posted by Owen Roberts on March 14, 2008 at 23:52:40:

Thanks Owen for jogging my memory, I remembered that AR had used the mirror image/
back to front device somewhere, but had forgotten where. Now here's another curious
coincidence. There were originally three Amazons. An early AR draft shows them as:


  1. Jane - 13
  2. Mary/Ruth - 12
  3. Tom - 3
Now apply the mirror so that Tom becomes the eldest:

  1. Tom - 13
  2. Mary/Ruth - 12
  3. Jane - 3
Now compare to the Crossley children in 1916:

  1. Anthony - 13
  2. Ruth - 7
  3. Pamela - 3

Now, the fact that there were three Crossley's and originally three Amazons could
just be another coincidence, as could the fact that the range of their ages is identical.
But I've often wondered about the back-to-front nature of the Amazons, because in
my experience it's the eldest in a family of children who is/are the most rule-
governed and conformist (consider John and Susan) and the youngest who is/are the
most precocious and independently minded. Yet of all of AR's principal characters,
it is Nancy who usually gets her own way. Sometimes Peggy seems such a baby in
comparison, particularly during thunderstorms! Now look at the Crossley family
in 1922:


  1. Anthony - 19
  2. Ruth - 13
  3. Pamela - 9
Ruth is not the oldest child, but is the eldest daughter and is likely to have been used
to getting her own way. We know her father gave her a sailing dinghy and a motor
car! Pamela is sufficiently younger than Ruth to make it likely that she regarded
the latter as a role model. Suddenly the likely characters of the Crossley girls seem
to merge into our Nancy and Peggy! If Pamela was AR's model for Peggy it's only
natural that he would have bumped up her age by three years. Captain Nancy would
have seemed a lot less ferocious with a 9 year old pirate companion and the Amazons'
night expedition to Wild Cat Island would have been entirely unrealistic.

And so a final table, according to AR's notes, at the start of SA the Amazons are:


  1. Nancy/Ruth - 13
  2. Peggy - 12

I am indebted to Iain Hobbs for sharing with me his research into the Crossley family.

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