Posted by Peter Ceresole on March 02, 2010 at 19:23:27 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Re: PM review on Amazon posted by Alan Hakim on February 28, 2010 at 21:45:37:
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").
I didn't know that AR had explicitly set it all so close together. But that's what I meant when I said that the more you look the less likely it all seems. It's an absolute rush hour of adventures, and I can't believe in that aspect of them.
I've always taken the books more or less one by one. Related, of course, by the characters, but not hugger mugger in the course of a year or two. And if this creates problems with the children not aging at a reasonable rate, it's never worried me. I suspend disbelief in the series and enjoy the books almost in isolation. Not quite of course, but the relationship between the explicit date (1931) for SA, and the (inadvertent) evidence for 1936 in WDMTGTS is really of no importance to me.
It does, of course, provide wonderful opportunities for train spotting.
Beckfoot plumbing, anyone?