PBOTD: 9th February, Hilda Boden - Pony Girl

-
Hilda Boden is an odd author. In several of her books, she starts off thinking "I will DEFEAT the pony book conventions and give them something NEW," but then she bottles out, and what started as an interesting premise fizzles out into something pretty conventional.

This is perhaps most obvious in Pony Girl (1959). There's a whole raft of pony books that start off with breathless excitement, because the protagonist if moving out of the rotten, smelly, pony-less town, and into the countryside, where everything is perfect, and there will be, if not a pony actually waiting in the field for you (see the recent The Lost Pony of Riverdale) at least the possibility of one: see Jinny, Jean et al. 

Lutterworth first edition, 1959
That is not what happens to Molly Mallory. The book opens with Molly pottering around in the idyllic Irish countryside, with the possibility of riding at a local racing stables being dangled tantalisingly before her. However, Molly's family are dirt poor, and her father's done what many of his countrymen had to do: travelled over to England to look for work. And then Molly and the rest of the family go too.

They end up in London, and they're not in one of the prettier bits either. At this point, when I first read the book, I was sniffing the literary air like a labrador after, well, food. At last something different and challenging, I thought. But then Molly just happens to find a neglected pony in a bit of land destined to have a tower block built on it, and she rehabilitates the pony, and then she rides it out of London (I admit that bit's good, though Hilda Boden's geography is a little shaky as I don't think Watford's on the way to Buckinghamshire) where Molly meets a decent, country-dwelling family, who later take on Molly, pony and the whole family in a glorious festival of paternalism. In the countryside.

Ah well. Instead of an exploration of how really and truly difficult it was for a poor girl to ride in London, we get the countryside cop out.

Genre fiction does of course tend to follow the conventions of the genre, but it's tantalising and frustrating, when the prospect of something better is whisked from under your nose. Ask the labrador when I get to the fallen bit of cheese before she does.

~  0  ~

For more on Hilda Boden, and unlike yesterday's post there is more: much, much more, try her page 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