PBOTD: 18th February - Kathleen Mackenzie, Jumping Jan

-
Kathleen Mackenzie was part of the explosion of pony books which happened in the 1950s, but when you read her books, you can't help but feel her heart was elsewhere. Like Mary Gervaise, she preferred families and what happened within them to long and loving descriptions of pony care and gymkhanas.

Jumping Jan is one of her most pony-orientated books, and even here, the focus is really on the family heroine Jan is going to work for. It's not the horses that you remember after reading this book, but the family, who are splendidly vile. They are dominated by the mother, Mrs Jervis, a great beauty and a minor actress, who has married well. She no longer acts, but prefers to devote herself to creating emotional storms in the family. Mr Jervis stays well out of the way, but their children are not so lucky. The son is a liar and a cheat, who tries to pass someone else's play off as his own, and the youngest son is prone to hysteria. Eldest daughter Ellie has her own ambitions, and this she expresses in a frankly odd episode. After coming across an injured mother and baby, once the mother's been packed off to hospital, Ellie smuggles the baby back into the house and looks after it.

Jan of course, with her straightforward and sensible approach to life, is just what this family needs. Mrs Jervis' dramatics will probably never stop, but Jan leaves the rest of the family in a rather better state than when she found them. The family and their dramatics rather swamp the horse element: in fact the cover is probably the most thoroughly horsey thing about it.

The cover illustration is by Maurice Tulloch, though he didn't do the internal illustrations. They were done by Violet Morgan, who illustrated most of Kathleen Mackenzie's books (and was in fact her sister). Jumping Jan was published by Evans in 1955, and reprinted in 1960 with the same cover. It never appeared in paperback. 



~ 0  ~

For more on Kathleen Mackenzie, she has a page on my website.
If you're interested in the illustrators, you can find more on Maurice Tulloch and Violet Morgan on my website.

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