Patrick's future

[alliekiwi.livejournal.com]

I've started re-reading Falconer's Lure and came across the following snippet:

~*~*~

Patrick said suddenly, "Oh dear. I do wish it was six years from now."

"Six years?" said Nicola, who sometimes wished it was this time next week, but had never looked that far ahead.

"Yes. Well. In six years, I'll have finished school, I'll have done National Service, and if Dad's still M.P. I can come back here and look after things. And then Jon and I can keep hawkes properly.

pg 52/53 GGB edition

~*~*~

That made me wonder about how AF changed things to suit the times, yet retained some things that were already 'canon' despite them being 'out of time'.

For example, when the red uniforms came back in, the book they were mentioned in was written *past* the time rationing finished in the early 1950s in Real Life? That was Falconer's Lure as well, but haven't reached that bit in the book, yet. I know the book is set in 1948, and clothes rationing ended in 1949...but the book was written/published in 1955.

What I'm leading up to here is... will Patrick do his National Service, despite that going out before potential later books would have been written, and presumably set? Especially since it had already been mentioned that he was going to do it? Or would AF have just ignored that?

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

National Service remained in force in the UK until 1960 - the last intake served until 1963. But I think this particular thing would have been quietly dropped by the later books, as it wasn't something he was already doing, unlike Peter being at Dartmouth.

[kit120.livejournal.com]

This hardly rates as a problem. National Service might have been abolished in the 4 years before Patrick became 18 even if the books had a realistic time scheme.

The time settings didn't bother me until 'Attic Term'; probably because lumping together any time after the war wasn't a problem until the books entered my lifetime.

The biggest problem I have with the timing is that Ginty has to phone the operator to get through to Patrick and it is the operator who gives away the fact that she's been phoning every night. That didn't strike me as realistic for the 1970s.

[antfan.livejournal.com]

in general, the weird timeline thing doesn't worry me - at least with the middle/later books. But going back recently to read the GGB editions of Falconer's Lure and Marlows and the Traitor - which I hadn't read for years and years - they did seem incredibly dated, to the extend that I didn't feel I recognised the characters. I mean, it's not references to national service or the blitz that bother me, but the Marlows seem such an upstanding, proper, stiff upper lip naval family. They just don't seem themselves somehow, and I don't know whether it's superficial - like them addressing Mrs Marlow very properly as Mother or Mummy instead of Mum/Ma - or whether it is more than that. Does anybody else feel the characters really do change throughout the books - I mean more than the fact they are obviously growing older? I feel they grow into their skins - become more nuanced somehow - in later books.

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

The only change that really bugs me is all those brothers of Mrs Marlow's having been killed in the First War, which does kind of make fic starring Mme Orly and set in the 1970s (which I am sort-of trying to do) rather difficult, as she would be about 110 years old..... and Pam Marlow would have required the sort of miracle granted to Hannah or Elisabeth to have any of those children, never mind all of them. I suppose I could get away with having them just killed in the War....

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

It's easy. You just have to not think about the timeline. At all. Ever. Otherwise your head will start to hurt and you'll need to sit down and have a cup of tea.

I'd say if you're writing a story about Patrick you could legitimately

(a) have him do National Service

(b) work out when it would be following normally chronology from the end of Run Away Home and not have him do National Service

or (c) follow AF's own style and set your story in 2007. In which case no National Service.

In my post-RAH story, I chose none of these because I wanted to have the Falklands War play a part so that fixed my timeline.