PBOTD 15th October: Josephine Pullein-Thompson - The Radney Riding Club

-
I wonder if children today will ever understand the frustrations of living in pre-internet world? Before the world wide web, you simply couldn't find everything you wanted with a quick Google search. Finding secondhand books, for a start, could take years, if you even managed it at all. When I was a child, what books I read depended on:

a. Whether the local library had them
b. Whether our (rather limited) supply of local bookshops had them
c. Whether a noble relative living elsewhere found the book
d. Whether I hit the jackpot at a jumble sale (vanishingly rare)
e.  Whether I could borrow the book from a friend - not something that happened often as none of my friends were pony book fans.

Publishers of course want you to buy their books, so as well as handy lists of the books in a series, they used to put page long descriptions of other books you might like at the end of the book.  These, to me, were hideously tantalising. I knew Monica Edwards' Punchbowl Midnight existed, because I'd seen it listed, but I didn't see a copy until I was in my forties. That's a gap of a good thirty years since I'd found out the book existed. And The Radney Riding Club was the same. I knew it was out there, but I didn't see one (Six Ponies was the same).


I don't think today's children will ever understand the huge excitement; the thrill, of finally, after decades, getting your hands on a book you'd longed to read as a child but never found. Because for them, everything is obtainable: in some cases as long as you're prepared to pay for it, but every book is out there, somewhere, and getting it is often a case of simply being prepared to wait the few days before it's delivered. Not decades.


I think out of all the books I'd longed to read as a child, The Radney Riding Club and Six Ponies were the ones that gave me the greatest pleasure to find. In an ideal world I admit I would have preferred not to wait decades, but that did make the sheer joy of reading them at last all the more intense.

And fortunately both books were very well worth it. I'd never known that Noel and Henry had ventured out from the shelter of Major Holbrooke's estate, which they do in Radney, as it's set at Henry's home. There was an entirely different set of characters, most of whom didn't appear in the other books.

I think, for me, this book will always be coloured by how long I had to wait for it. Reading it was all the sweeter for having had to wait.

~  0  ~

More on Josephine Pullein-Thompson

Comments

Christina Wilsdon said…
One of the first things I did as the Internet became a 'thing' was track down the one "Jill" title I didn't have. A noble relative had indeed supplied the other 8 books, bringing them back to the States for me when I was a little kid in the 1960s, but I had to wait til the '90s before I found it online at a small place in Scotland called, I think, The Little Yellow Bookshop. I even paid for it in cash, mailing some leftover money from a trip to the UK from years prior! Now, of course, it'd be a cinch to find a zillion copies of it online, but although I certainly don't endorse having to wait several decades to finish reading the series, well, it certainly added a frisson of adventure and discovery to my office-chair life :)
15 October 2014 at 14:46
Jane Badger said…
Even now finally finding something on the internet is good. Mind you, I expect your final reading of Jill Has Two Ponies was rather more exciting than when I finally tracked down Mrs Peter Waits' The Right Hand Man - sadly the thrill of finally finding it was far greater than the thrill of reading it.
20 October 2014 at 11:54
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