Posted by Peter Ceresole on December 27, 2008 at 09:44:50 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: Daddy ? posted by John on December 27, 2008 at 06:35:20:
IMHO, Commander/Captain Walker is AR's creation. He seems just a bit too perfect to me.
That's true of all the characters, to some extent; AR was a craftsman building stories, and although he borrowed happily from reality, for instance with Roger who seems, in some ways, to have been pretty accurately drawn, if there wasn't a handy Altounian who fitted the bill, AR would modify or create one. It's why the books are so good; they and the characters are pure products of AR's imagination, with happy references to some reality. If there was no real person available, AR would invent, for instance, Dick... Or Dot... Or Daddy. The children were more fully realised than the Commander because they had much bigger parts, but they were all functional creations in the stories. And of course, they served an important role in AR's own mythology of the Lakes, and childhood.
It seems to me that Daddy was AR's ideal father, that Mummy was the ideal mother; gentle, competent, experienced in the ways of the Outback.
So although it's fun and sometimes productive to look for the original inspiration for the characters and scenes, the best part of it is the exercising of our imaginations, so that we recreate AR's world in our minds.
And, allowing for Geek Points, that's the virtue of Beckfoot Plumbing.