Posted by Alan Hakim on February 28, 2010 at 21:45:37 user awhakim.
In Reply to: Re: PM review on Amazon posted by Peter Ceresole on February 28, 2010 at 20:27:07:
The fact seems to be that he didn't really have a detailed internal time line for his stories.
The quote in my last item on this thread was from Amazon Publications' The Best of Childhood, which prints a list, from the AR archive, of the books' fictional dates, and the ages of the children. And I also have a photocopy of a different but similar document in his own handwriting confirming the timescale. WD is "Summer hols 1932. Fourth week", i.e. late August, leaving time for SW and BS ("Summer hols. End").
In the real world, AR bought Nancy Blackett on September 10th, 1935, and moved to Broke Farm, Levington (near Pin Mill) on October 21st. Meanwhile he had had a difficult passage in Nancy from Poole Harbour to Pin Mill in mid-September, and sailed around the coast in the Pin Mill area during the autumn.
When he started sailing again in 1936, he did the passage to Flushing on June 1st/2nd (25 hours) but stayed longer in Holland than the Swallows, arriving home on June 11th, meeting the Pommern in the early evening.
He started writing WD on November 8th, 1936, and did most of the first draft through the winter, but had various distractions (Carnegie medal, Far-Distant Oxus, Nancy) in the spring and summer - not to mention having Evgenia's devastating criticism of the second draft in July - and the final version didn't go to Cape's until September 4th, 1937.
So if the radar towers were built in 1936, he would have probably have seen them building. Perhaps as Geraint suggests, they were already complete in 1935.