Page 23 | AIBU to let them camp on an island overnight?

chomalungma · 2020-08-01T17:01:56+00:00

(Inspired by another thread) We are on holiday in the Lake District. Lovely cottage. DH is working away. DC's have seen a lovely island and want to go camping there for a few nights. Light a campfire, cook for themselves. They'll get there by sailing boat. Youngest is 6 and oldest is 14. Would you let them go?

GreatAuntMaria · 04/08/2020 15:58

I always liked the names Nancy - or is it Peggy? - recites on top of Kanchenjunga - Scawfell and Skiddaw and Helvellyn and Ill Bell and High Street.

Ransome would have expected his readers to know the poem Titty references, and also Casabianca, but I bet very few ten year olds today, or their parents, know them. Have many parents here gone and looked them up after reading the book with their children?

DappledThings · 04/08/2020 16:03

I knew Casabianca because it was in my Ladybird book of Favourite Poems!

GreatAuntMaria · 04/08/2020 16:17

I can see it would be easy to learn, but I can't imagine Captain Nancy being able to recite it straight-faced. I'd be tempted to ham it up myself, and I'm not an Amazon pirate.

missclimpson · 04/08/2020 17:29

Casabianca - The Boy Stood On the Burning Deck? We all knew that in my fifties childhood - and all the very rude versions too. 😂😂😂
The one I remember...
The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck
Picking his nose like mad
He rolled it up in little balls
And flicked them at his Dad.
I am sure the Amazons would have been much too scared of Great Aunt Maria to recite that....

Feralkidsatthecampsite · 04/08/2020 17:30

The boy stood on the burning deck
His body all aquiver
He gave a cough
His leg fell off
And floated down the river.

My dm never told me bedtime stories..

GreatAuntMaria · 04/08/2020 17:37

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled
The fire had burned his trousers off
And turned his bum quite red.

Can't remember where I learned that.

missclimpson · 04/08/2020 17:38

The boy stood on the burning deck
Playing a game of cricket,
The ball flew down his trouser leg
And hit his middle wicket.

CountFosco · 04/08/2020 18:53

The action in Howard's End is all driven by a telegram.

Excellent thread OP. Although having a 7yo (who can swim) there's no way I'd let him camp on an island, he's nowhere near as sensible as Roger.

The children's book that shocks me most now for the negligent parenting are the Llittle House on the Prairie books. In Plum Creek Ma and Pa go into town and leave the girls alone for a night. Laura was 7 or 8.

GreatAuntMaria · 04/08/2020 20:22

John Buchan fans, I learned by chance today that his granddaughter Ursula Buchan has published a biography Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Link is to Amazon because the blurb is interesting; other booksellers are available. I've just downloaded the e-book from my local library.

JasperRising · 04/08/2020 21:00

@CountFosco

The action in Howard's End is all driven by a telegram.

Excellent thread OP. Although having a 7yo (who can swim) there's no way I'd let him camp on an island, he's nowhere near as sensible as Roger.

The children's book that shocks me most now for the negligent parenting are the Llittle House on the Prairie books. In Plum Creek Ma and Pa go into town and leave the girls alone for a night. Laura was 7 or 8.

Not to mention Laura's cousin who is getting married at 14? (Can't remember the name of that book it was one of my least favourite). And then she goes off to teach school at 15 - and because bushes technically a year too young to be a teacher the inspector just gives her a lower grade certificate... And she teaches kids older than herself and I can't remember if it is that first job or one of the later ones where she is sleeping in the corner of the house with the couple in a clearly abusive relationship.

Can you imagine the MN pearl clutching if ppl were posting about experiences of pioneer lifestyle and parenting??? Not to mention the extremely racist attitudes towards the indigenous tribes they encounter.

chubbyhotchoc · 04/08/2020 21:01

Is this a joke? No

imissthesouth · 04/08/2020 21:09

No way! Who knows what could happen. Tell them you can all stay there but they're not to stay unsupervised

GreatAuntMaria · 04/08/2020 21:10

Not to mention Laura's cousin who is getting married at 14?

It's not so long ago (1950s) that it was possible to marry at thirteen in some US states. There was a scandal when the rock star Jerry Lee Lewis was revealed to have married his thirteen year old cousin.

But the age of consent in England/the UK (not sure about Scottish law on that point) was only raised to sixteen in the 1880s.

(And 23 pages in and still people post without having read beyond the op.)

Original poster

chomalungma · 04/08/2020 21:19

@imissthesouth

No way! Who knows what could happen. Tell them you can all stay there but they're not to stay unsupervised

It's ok. Turns out I've planned a great system so they're checking in everyday.

OP posts:

EBearhug · 04/08/2020 22:06

The children's book that shocks me most now for the negligent parenting are the Llittle House on the Prairie books. In Plum Creek Ma and Pa go into town and leave the girls alone for a night. Laura was 7 or 8.

And that was with all the horrifically nasty bits they experienced taken out.

I loved all the LIW books, but my mother (who had not come across them before I did) read them quite differently, and remarked on how terrible it must have been for Caroline/Ma - every time she gets settled, Charles/Pa decides they have to go west again, and set up in a precarious life again, no stability. I just identified with Laura and all the excitement she had, but I can see more where my Mum was coming from, having lived with little stability at times as an adult (but with no dependents.)

imissthesouth · 04/08/2020 22:17

@chomalungma
As long as they're safe and having fun!

Original poster

chomalungma · 04/08/2020 22:24

As long as they're safe and having fun

Well, they're not duffers.

OP posts:

CountFosco · 04/08/2020 22:47

Yes, I do feel sorry for Ma married to a man like Pa. Laura apparently didn't talk to her mother after her father died so something has been left out of the books. Although knowing that fact her depiction of her parents becomes more interesting. An unreliable narrator probably.

RedNun · 04/08/2020 23:04

Yes, as a child reader, all our sympathies are with fun, adventurous Pa and tomboy Laura, but as an adult mine are largely with Ma’s desperate attempts to bring up her daughters with some kind of stability, education and exposure to other people’s society.

Yes, and the Ingalls’ real life was far more brutal than the fictionalised accounts — there was a little brother who died aged nine months, and a period running a rough hotel in Iowa, and a fair amount of contact with the kind of violence you’d associate with lawless frontier towns. You can see why Ma was desperate to try to bring the girls up as ‘ladies’ and her fussing about sunbonnets and the china shepherdess.

JasperRising · 05/08/2020 00:06

@RedNun

Yes, as a child reader, all our sympathies are with fun, adventurous Pa and tomboy Laura, but as an adult mine are largely with Ma’s desperate attempts to bring up her daughters with some kind of stability, education and exposure to other people’s society.

Yes, and the Ingalls’ real life was far more brutal than the fictionalised accounts — there was a little brother who died aged nine months, and a period running a rough hotel in Iowa, and a fair amount of contact with the kind of violence you’d associate with lawless frontier towns. You can see why Ma was desperate to try to bring the girls up as ‘ladies’ and her fussing about sunbonnets and the china shepherdess.

Yes, I remember reading something about the running a hotel stage of their life and I think the timelines of the first three books are all shuffled around if I remember correctly.

Even when they are settled for a bit they are still flitting between claim and town not settled at all. I never like the book immediately after she marries (the first four years?) because it just felt like everything went horribly wrong. Now I suspect that just shows how much the early books were sanitised, and that if they were told from Ma's perspective they would have been more like Laura's post marriage book.

CatandtheFiddle · 05/08/2020 07:36

Is this a joke?

sashh · 05/08/2020 07:50

PablosHoney

I was attempting to start a game of Mornington Crescent - the MC threads always have people complaining they don't understand.

It's not so long ago (1950s) that it was possible to marry at thirteen in some US states.

More recently than that - today it is still legal in 13 states, and some others allow child marriage in certain circumstances eg pregnancy or parental consent.

PablosHoney · 05/08/2020 13:58

It’s not so much the not understanding, I don’t know what Mornington Crescent is either, it was the posters (Not OP) calling people who didn’t get it illiterate and stupid 🤷‍♀️

RedNun · 05/08/2020 14:10

It’s not so much the not understanding, I don’t know what Mornington Crescent is either, it was the posters (Not OP) calling people who didn’t get it illiterate and stupid

But the fourth reply to the OP explicitly identified the thread as a joke based on Swallows and Amazons.

PablosHoney · 05/08/2020 14:22

This will be the last time I say this, Not everyone reads every single post, not everyone has read Swallows and Amazons, jeez! If you read every post why haven’t you read my other responses so I don’t have to say it all again? If I wanted to start a thread about something specific I would title it accordingly so people didn’t waste their time responding to it only to be laughed at for not understanding but that’s just me.