PBOTD: 11th February, Shirley Faulkner-Horne - Pat and Her Polo Pony

-
Shirley Faulkner-Horne's Pat and Her Polo Pony - The Power of a Charm is today's Pony Book of the Day. The heroine, Pat, was one of those children who cropped up fairly often in inter-war books: the child of parents living in India who was shipped back to the mother country for the sake either of their health, or their education. Pat's father, it must be said, only serves in India because he can't afford to hunt and play polo in England.

Country Life, first edition, 1939
Pat is sent off to stay with cousins she's never ever met, dreading it as they are horse mad and she is petrified of ponies, after she broke her arm in a fall. In another sign of the times, her uncle is a vicar who is able to keep several ponies, something very difficult to achieve on a vicar's salary these days. 

This book has a strong moral bias, though at times it does seem conveniently to forget it. It's hard work, politeness and grit that gets you somewhere, and that's what comes to Pat's aid (as well as the charm her ayah gave her) when it comes to looking after her cousin's New Forest, Star, when she's ill. Pat, once she gets down to it, is a phenomenal achiever, getting the Pony Club B with 84% after riding for only six months. Her father's so impressed by this feat he says she can buy a pony, and Pat decides to buy a pony and train it to play polo at the local club. 

Pat gets this pony, Nala, by deliberately turning on the tears when she's at the dealer's. This grates, but not as much as the episode where she persuades a regimental groom to lie that the pony her father wants to ride in a polo match is lame, so he'll be forced to choose Nala. It's not incredibly impressive to get what you want by being manipulative, but making someone else lie, when you're in a position of power over them because your father is their superior officer, really irks. 

Pat and her Polo Pony is, however, the first, and so far one of the few, books to feature polo. Polo, with its need to have more than one pony, is generally beyond most pony owners, and it's remained a minority sport in the pony book field. 
Junior Country Life Library edition
Pat and Her Polo Pony was published by Country Life in 1939. At that time, Country Life produced considerably more than just the Country Life magazine. They published Riding magazine, and had their own publishing arm too. Country Life reprinted many of their children's books as part of the Junior Country Life Library, usually with the cover illustration from the original, with a coloured band surrounding it, and Pat made an appearance as a Junioir Country Life Library title. As far as I know, it wasn't republished after that.


~  0 ~

For more on Shirley Faulkner-Horne and her works, she has a page on my website.
If you'd like to see the Junior Country  Life in most of its glory (I don't have pictures of all the titles, by any means), you can see that here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rollkur and the blue tongue

-
I've been meaning to write about this all week, but reading the exclusive in Horse and Hound about the controversy tipped me over the edge. For my non-horsy readers, rollkur is a training/warming up technique used by some dressage riders. It basically involves riding the horse with its jaw pulled in virtually to its chest, in order to increase suppleness. Patrik Kittel , a Swedish competitor in Odense was videoed riding his horse in this way. If you watch the video , you'll see the horse's tongue hanging out - blue. It takes a while before the rider notices this. When he does, he stops, puts the horse's tongue back in, and carries on. There are two things which bother me about this. Firstly, I am fully aware large sections of the dressage world, and some of its brighest stars, consider rollkur perfectly ok, but the FEI guidelines state this practice should only be for short periods, allowing the horse to rest. Patrick Kittel apparently rode the horse for two hou
Read more

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more