Just how old is Lorna's mother?

Her Lorna's aunt is 37 and she says Lorna's mum is 19 years older which would make her 56. But later we are told she had Lorna who is now 13/14 when she was 40, so at best she is 54.

Is EBD's lack of math skills rearing it's ugly head?

And exactly how old are her brothers and sisters?

Cheers,
Joyce

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It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how - Dr Seuss

I have pondered that a few times myself and can only conclude it is EBD's lack of maths skills.

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You're scared of mice and spiders, but oh-so-much greater is your fear that one day the two species will cross-breed to form an all-powerful race of mice-spiders, who will immobilize human beings in giant webs in order to steal cheese.

It all depends on what the date is compared to the birthdays of the various parties. I'm three years (and a month) older than my sister, but for one month of every year I appear to be four years older than her - I would never say that I'm 4 years older, though. Because I'm not.

So, "19 years older" and "had Lorna when she was 40" could both be correct, but depending on when the aunt and the mother and Lorna each have their birthdays, those calculated numbers of 56 and 54 could both really mean she's about 55.

Several years of family tree research, where the censuses always ask you how old you are, not when you were born, and the date of the census changes every time, make me want to cut EBD some slack on this one.

Ok, that makes sense. And in my family my brother gets to be three years older than me for all of two weeks every year.

But EBD gets it wrong by more two years. It just seems weird that no editor picked her up on this. Or maybe they did and she just said the equivalent of "whatever"

Cheers,
Joyce

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It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how - Dr Seuss

I have a feeling that publishers didn't really bother about editing children's books back then - not with GO type books, anyway.

We even know the name of one of EMBD's editors, John L Blair, because Leader is dedicated to him, but I suspect children's books were edited fairly rigorously only for spelling etc, not for continuity, even between the text and the artwork - I'm sure I wasn't the only child reader who looked at an illustration or a dustjacket and muttered something like "But she didn't have dark hair, that was her sister", or in the case of the CS Swiss books "but they didn't wear brown ginghams by then" - mostly down to the artists having to work to tight deadlines with insufficient briefing to go on, of course.

Or them just choosing some other random illustration from another book to save money.

Worse though are the books with specially done illustrations that are awful and feature people who look like no human ever. These were very common in the 80s and 90s I think (we still had to use them in my school in the 90s and 00s).

I remember one book showing someone going up a flight of stairs where the artist had just forgotten to draw one of their legs.

Gives new meaning to "being legless"!



Or maybe they were given no briefing at all and only had previous covers as a guide.

Cheers,
Joyce

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It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how - Dr Seuss

Or even no previous versions, being first editions! I was thinking in particular of the dustjacket of Wins the Trick, which shows the girls in reddish-brown and white gingham frocks, fifteen books* after the move to Switzerland.

*Taking out Tom and Rosalie, since they were book-published adrift from their date.

If you took having Lorna at 40 as meaning she became pregnant with Lorna when she was 40, she may have been 41 at the birth

I do say I'm 3 years older than my brother even though it's actually 2 years and 10 months, because for the majority of the time I am 3 years older

So if you have the age gap between the sisters being 18 and a half years rather than exactly 19

So if you have Auntie Kath having just turned 37 but Lorna's mum not having had her birthday she would be 55 rather than 56

The dresses on the covers on Wins the Trick are summer ginghams and IIRC they could be any colour. On the whole, I agree though - there are some odd mistakes in the illustrations.

That brought back memories of my German O-level oral exam in 1980 where there was a drawing of a classroom and the examiner was asking me to show I knew the vocabulary by pointing to objects in the picture and asking me what they were. There was a plain long thing rectangle which I could not fathom at all and I had to explain that it was not that I didn't know the German word, but just that I didn't know what it was supposed to be. The examiner took pity and told me in English that it was a ruler, which was fine - I was immediately able to give the German word but I still maintain to this day that it was just a plain long thin rectangle!

I think the oddest uniform illustration is the striped blazers on The Chalet Book for Girls and on one of the jackets for Three go to the CS

Yes, couldn't agree more - I nearly mentioned them, only it's a bit OT, really.

While we're here, though: Yes, but all three girls are wearing brown and white ginghams on the d/j of Wins the Trick and it's fairly certain that two of them are Len and Con. Surely by that time they'd outgrown any they could have brought from England, and they couldn't inherit Joey's old ones as those had been used to make frocks for the MacDonald twins. There are also girls wearing identical gingham frocks on the frontispiece.

I've just looked it up, since I didn't remember the cover. Surely that's a pony tail that Len has!!??

(Mistakes with uniforms aside, the original hb cover illustrations usually have the characters looking exactly how I imagine them, so I should think the artists must have been fairly well briefed.)

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Thoughts of a writer and historian

Maybe! I always think it's an interestingly ambiguous hairstyle - certainly looks like a pony-tail at the top, but further down could be read as plaited, given that Dorothy Brook seems to render plaits in a fairly bumpy way judging by the next girl (who I assume is Con). Or perhaps it's just that Len's curls could be brushed round into a sort of roll, and it really is a pony-tail...

I must admit I quite like those blazers

Yes, I looked quite hard trying to see if it was plaited or just brushed to look like that.

But it's tied quite high on the back of her head, which definitely suggests pony tail to me! Normal tying back would be at the nape of the neck.

Think I'll start a thread on the hb covers, since I've now spent far too much time looking at them.

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Thoughts of a writer and historian

Yes please - especially as I think they're all available online to look at.

Done, in Lemon Biscuits.

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Thoughts of a writer and historian