Posted by Colin Turner on October 04, 2000 at 00:58:54 from dialup3-23.alcom.co.uk:
In Reply to: Urinating in the lake…. posted by John Nicholson on September 29, 2000 at 17:37:55:
Arthur Ransome is hardly unique among writers of children's literature in ignoring bodily functions and disposal of the results.
It would take a brave writer to risk the subject during the 1930s and it's my impression that even today's authors show some reticence about it.
My mental database of children's fiction is still chugging away in the background but, so far, all I can recall is Nick Willow's revulsion at having to use the spider-infested outside lavatory in Nina Bawden's "Carrie's War" (published c1975?) I have a vague memory of a reference to poo in another novel, either by Robert Westall or Bernard Ashley but nothing else springs to mind.
I can admit to a mild curiosity about toilet arrangements when I read Peter Duck as a child but my present feeling is that constant references to the Walkers' daily motions would rapidly become as tedious as AR's descriptions of their many al-fresco meals.
AR always makes his characters dispose of food waste in an environmentally friendly way but from today's conservationist view-point I can't help but be uneasy at the casual way in which the houseboat rubbish is consigned to the bottom of the lake. (In Winter Holiday?) I suppose the alternative would be a farmhouse rubbish tip.
Colin Turner