PBOTD 11th August: Ruby Ferguson - Jill's Pony Trek

-
The PBOTD from today are going to feature holiday stories and treks. There's a rich, rich seam of these. If there are any in particular you'd like to see me include, please let me know in the comments. I'm going to start with probably the best known of all pony book trekking adventures: Jill's Pony Trek. This is the last in the Jill series, and was published in 1962. It was published after the controversial Pony Jobs for Jill, which ends with Jill and Ann deciding to take secretarial courses and not pursue horsey careers. Despite taking a strict chronological approach with the series, Ruby Ferguson made this last story a retrospective. We never do find out whether Jill and Ann go ahead and trot off to secretarial college. What we get instead is Jill describing a story which happened in an earlier summer.


Jill and Ann are asked to go on a pony trek, and off they set, with a party of girls, including the wonderfully named Rosevale Washington (her sisters, by the way, are Altona, Shelby and Bronx).



All goes reasonably well until Jill and Ann have to leave the rest of the trek so they can visit the farrier. Once they've done this, neither of them can remember which way the rest of the trek went. They wander on, and find a farm - fortunately for the owner of the farm, who is lying there, helpless, with a broken leg. Ann and Jill duly get the woman shipped off to hospital, and stay at the farm for the night. This allows Ruby to introduce one of her great comic creations: the smothering Mrs Appleyard. It is unthinkable, she says, for the poor girls to stay at the farm overnight on their own. She's going to stay with them, and she's brought her nightie and her little alarm clock. Fortunately Mrs Appleyard's alarm clock lets her down, and she's still snoring loudly when Jill and Ann escape early the next morning. 




Jill's Pony Trek, is, as Jill says, an adventure: "We do have adventures, but they're such homely sort of ones, I mean, we never get mixed up with Interpol, or see ghost riders , or anything like that. People in books do."

I do wonder if Ruby was having a swipe at the wilder reaches of pony fiction here. 




~  0  ~

More on Ruby Ferguson

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