PBOTD 25th October: Pat Leitch - To Save a Pony

-
I can't believe that I haven't already covered this book, but I haven't. It's Patricia Leitch's first book, To Save a Pony (1960), published under the name Pat Leitch in 1960. The Dallas family re-locate to Scotland and start a riding school in order to keep the wolf from the door. The family, including youngest child Jane, go to a local horse sale to find ponies, and Jane sees a pony she is desperate to save.

The conventional pony story would at this point either have Jane spending her little all on the pony (because she conveniently has savings, probably augmented by what she can beg from her siblings) or frantically coming up with some money making scheme in order to make the money to buy the pony. This scheme is, ultimately, successful. Jane tries to take the route of raising money, but it doesn't go according to the pony book plan. 




No miraculous means to buy the pony appear, and Jane has to wait until the end of the book before she sees the pony again, when she discovers her condemned to the dreadful pony book fate of pulling a cart. But Jane is writing a pony book, and she is sure that if she can only get the manuscript to a publisher, it will provide her with enough money to buy the pony. (This had worked for other pony book heroines; Josephine Pullein-Thompson’s Christabel in I Had Two Ponies for one). Gregory, who runs the riding school and has lived with the family since he was five, challenges Jane.
“And where will you get twenty pounds from? No, don’t tell me. I can guess. Your book!”
‘Well, why not?’ I demanded.
‘Jane! Jane! Jane! Will you never grow up? Things like that just don’t happen. You’ve got to face up to it that life is brutal and hard and not a fairy tale with you as the principal fairy godmother.”
Jane's book is rejected. 

She does, in the end, get the money, but only by conquering her fear and doing what she has flatly refused to do before: jump a pony in a show. An author refusing to allow the pony book heroine to be “the principal fairy godmother” was almost heretical at the time: pony book after pony book saw miserable ponies rescued by the strenuous efforts of the heroine. In Patricia Leitch’s world, which was a more realistic one than most, girls do not necessarily get ponies.

~  0  ~


More on Pat (Patricia) Leitch

Comments

Anonymous said…
One of my favourite books as a child. Jane is not the youngest Dallas child - that wwould be Stephen.
21 September 2021 at 12:49
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