Posted by Allan Lang on June 08, 2000 at 02:40:07 from 203.87.64.25:
In Reply to: Re: When were the birthdays of the S, A, D's? posted by Dave W on June 03, 2000 at 22:16:00:
I was aware of Bill Wright's article, but I ignored that knowledge for the purposes of my analysis, starting from what was written in the books.
Nevertheless, there is not that much disagreement in our estimates for most characters (@ the time of S&A). The only difference is in the ages we assign to Peggy (BW:11½ AL:just 10) and Dot (BW:10 AL:9 - nearly 10). And Dot isn't really a difference, because I don't think BW is considering her to be as old as Susan (10½) - so our estimate is the same to within a few months.
So how old is Peggy: 18 months older than Dot (BW), or 6 months (AL)?
In Picts & Martyrs it is revealed that Paggy and Dot have the same shoe size when Sammy the policeman finds that footprints (Dot's) found after the burglary fit Peggy's shoes. True, Nancy says "Dot's got biggish hoofs for her size", but:
1) that's "biggish", not "thunderingly enormous"
2) "for her size" implies that Dot is not physically large, making it unlikely her feet would be the same size as Peggy's if there was 18 months difference in their ages.
3) Also, when Sammy compared Nancy's foot to the print: "And of course my hoof was too big." So, as there was a large difference ("And of course"), if Nancy and Peggy were close in age, Nancy would be more likely to say "Peggy's got smallish hoofs for her size".
So I still go with the idea that Peggy is younger than Susan, close to Dot's age, and more than a year younger than Nancy.
I think it is likely that although Arthur Ransome's notes before writing S&A had Peggy's age at 12, she "grew" younger. If not in S&A certainly in the later books.
Anyway, Arthur's notes for S&A aren't canon. Remember, they had Bridgit (Vicky) aged 1½, which would make it kind of hard to celebrate her birthday.