Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

Did you have any of these, I wonder? The books you knew existed, because you'd seen them mentioned on the dustjackets of books you had  read, but which you never managed to track down? Gillian Baxter fell into that category for me. Not one did I manage to find, not a single one until Louise Simmonds started Ozbek Books, selling vintage pony literature. Through her, at the advanced age of 40+, I finally found Gillian Baxter. She was well worth the wait. A few years after that, I interviewed Gillian, who's still involved in the horse world, and is still writing *** When you write pony books, it makes life much easier if you have ponies trotting through your own consciousness: the Black Boy you learned to ride on, or the evil Benjamin who dumped you on your first riding lesson. When I talked to her, I was struck by just how many of Gillian Baxter's equine characters were based on her own horses and ponies. Her books are full of ponies she has known or owned. But ponies...

If you'd like to know who they were, go on over to the Horsecrossings blog , where I waffle on about unexpected horse story authors.

Having found that there was at least an element of truth in Ruby Ferguson’s Children at the Shop, I was now bitten by the bug of family research. If Ruby had indeed lived in Woolwich, how much more of what she said in Children at the Shop was true? According to the book, her father was of Danish stock.  She describes a visit to her grand Danish grandmother in The Children at the Shop : “a psychologist would say that my blurred memories of the visit to Denmark were due to an unconscious desire to forget it. I  know that I suffered quite a lot and was rather subdued for days, then managed to get over it, though I found it impossible to like my grandmother and I don’t think she liked me either.” Although the autocratic grandmother is a splendid creation, if she existed, she lived in Sydenham. In this case, it is the dustjacket of Ruby’s Apricot Sky which is nearer the truth, with its description of her father coming from a long line of Norfolk farmers. Both David ...

I wonder how many people read the blurb about the author that appears on many dustjackets? If you have a collection of Ruby Ferguson’s books, and had made a habit of reading the dustjackets, you’d very soon have ended up confused. They’re contradictory, to say the least. Many of the biographical snippets she flung out in dustjacket blurbs need to be taken with a pinch of salt; and most of all those in her “autobiography”, Children at the Shop. Ruby Ferguson’s life as portrayed by her is best described as a romance built on scraps of fact, which when one’s living is earned as a writer, is perhaps fair enough. There are not many sources for Ruby’s life: the most easily accessible are the dustjackets of some of her books, and the “autobiography” Children at the Shop. It doesn’t take long before you spot inconsistencies: on the dustjackets of Apricot Sky (1952), Ruby claimed descent from a long line of Norfolk farmers; on Jill and the Perfect Pony (1956), a Highland ancestry and a chil...

Just when you think you have a reasonable idea about an author, something pops up which makes you rethink. I've included Mary Gervaise in my book, Heroines on Horseback, and have recently written about her too . What I didn't know, until it turned up in a load of books I bought this week, was that she was a very early exponent of the girl plus pony story. In 1932, when The Twins in the Third was written, pony stories were generally stories told by the pony, and they weren't exactly numerous, being far outnumbered by the school story. The Twins in the Third is a story where the ponies are an important part of the plot. They're not central: the author could just as easily have used some other device to achieve her aim of social inclusion for twins Jean and Laurie, but ponies, and the fondness the girls feel for them are there. The book illustrates a key factor of Gervaise's writing over the years: if she didn't intend to write a girl-gets-pony story, neither did...

Author Jane Ayres, one of the contributors to the J A Allen Equestrian Fiction series, and writer of several pony series since, is re-issuing her Matty series in Kindle format. This is good news as it was previously available only in America, and the books are all fine reads. Not only that, all the profits from the books are going to Redwings Horse Sanctuary. All the books are available from Amazon , and they're £3.03 each. Jane will be doing some guest posts on this blog soon, so keep an eye open for those.

The 1950s had seen more pony books published than any other decade, but the 1960s were not far behind. It was in the 1960s that the paperback pony book really came into its own, after a rather slow start with Puffin Books, the children’s line of Penguin. Puffin printed Joanna Cannan’s Shetland pony story Hamish in 1944, as part of their Picture Puffin line, following it with classic cowboy-and-horse story Will James’ Smoky in 1945, which appeared in their usual paperback format. Pony books were a very small part of Puffin’s output.  Puffin’s first editor, Eleanor Graham, produced very few: Kaye Webb, who took over as editor in 1961, was not a fan. Nevertheless, she recognised a quality story when she saw it, and in the 1960s published gems like William Corbin’s Horse in the House , Don Stanford’s The Horsemasters and Florence Hightower’s Dark Horse of Woodfield , as well as K M Peyton’s Flambards series.  The major producer of the paperback pony book was Coll...

Were you to analyse how many pony books have been published over the last decades, and when, the 1950s come out on top. Geoffrey Trease said “In those days you could have sold Richard III if you had given it the right wrapper and called it A Pony for Richard.” This is unfortunately true.  Out of the many, many pony books which were produced in the 1950s, a lot were entirely forgettable. The picture was not all bleak:  publishers’ need to fan the flames of pony book desire led them to import several American series. Mary O’Hara’s Flicka series had already arrived in the 1940s, and has remained in print ever since. It was followed in the 1950s by Marguerite Henry’s historical horse fiction, Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series , G Rutherford Montgomery’s Golden Stallion books and any American book publishers thought they might be able to sell. In some cases they were wrong: Eunice Young Smith’s High Heels for Jennifer (1966), Dorothy Lyons’ Copper Khan (1952) and Joan...

The 1950s saw a massive increase in the number of pony books published. The war was over; rationing was coming to an end. We had never had it so good, so Harold Macmillan said. The welfare state was becoming established, employment was high. The 1950s pony book reflected the spirit of optimism of the age: they were set in an Arcadian Britain that had never existed, but perhaps, now, it might. In this post war world, riding was becoming ever more popular. In 1934, there were 103 Pony Club branches, with a membership of 8,350. By 1952, Pony Club membership had increased to 18,905, with 201 branches. PONY Magazine, started in 1949, was well into its stride, and was read by people who had no pony, nor any hope of it either.  The Pullein-Thompsons were now fully in their stride, with the Josephine’s Noel and Henry series, Diana’s Augusta and Christina,  and Christine’s Chill Valley Hounds and Phantom Horse all appearing in this decade.  The Jill series was now joined...

Or maybe not.  Michael Gove has suggested that children should be reading 50 books a year .  Being prescriptive about it is tricky.  I have two children, both of whom were read to every day, both of whom were taken to  libraries and book shops (often these were secondhand bookshops, where I used to park them with a Beano album while I searched the shelves), have a house full of books and bookish parents.   One reads endlessly.  One doesn't. If your child has an obsession about something, that could be a help.   If your child is a pony obsessive, here is the list that's come out of a recent discussion on my forum .  The brief was that a child should also be able to read complete rubbish, but the list has tended towards the better efforts in the pony book genre, rather than the drivel.  Bearing in mind the age of my forum (ie adult) it's perhaps not a surprise that many of the books were ones from our own childhood.  A good proportion of...

I've just bought this copy of Christine Pullein-Thompson's The First Rosette.   Its original owner had created this rather charming addition, as the book doesn't have its dustjacket.  The head and rosette motif is removable (it's been placed behind a removable plastic cover) but I thought I'd leave it as it was.

Liz Jones wrote The Exmoor Files, in which she takes on an ex racehorse, and blames the Pullein-Thompsons for it. They invited her to tea, and you can read about it here .

This is a curiousity, and not the sort of thing that I tend to come across very often. Amélie Rives' Trix and Over-the-Moon is a very early American horse book, written in 1908. It's not a story told by a horse, like Black Beauty; what it is in fact is a horse story with what came to be a traditional plot: girl (or woman in this case) buys tricky horse; tries to school horse; aims at showing horse successfully. Amélie Rives , the author, was a god-daughter of Robert E Lee, and was born in 1863 She spent most of her life in America's South, on her family's estate near Charlottesville. She was married to, and divorced the wealthy John Armstrong Chanler, and then married Prince Pierre Troubetskoy, a Russian. Her first book, The Quick or the Dead , scandalised America with its portrayal of a young widow pondering re-marriage shortly after the death of her husband. Whether Trix and Over-the-Moon caused any scandal, I do not know. It would certainly pull any modern reader up ...

Every now and then I happen across an author who completely blows me away, and oh, the joy when I find out that the book I've read is by no means all - all those lovely things still to be read. Antonia Forest was one such, a few years ago, when I read her Autumn Term , and Helen Griffiths is now another. One advantage of being unable to do much of any practical use over the past couple of weeks while my knee has been out of action is that I've been able to catch up on my to be read pile. To be accurate, the TBR pile is not a pile; it fills several boxes and is a fluid thing, often governed by whether or not I've sold a particular book. But, prompted by the fact someone from whom I bought a large collection of books said this one always made her cry, I picked up The Wild Heart . and was completely and utterly hooked. Helen Griffiths does not write conventional pony books: all her horse stories are set in the Spanish speaking world, and are very far from girl-gets-pony...

If you'd like to read more (in fact anything, as I haven't exactly said a lot) about my meeting with Josephine Pullein-Thompson, it is now on my website here . JPT used to tell people who wrote to her about Pony Club Camp what happened to Noel and Henry afterwards, but if you weren't one of them, all is, as they say, revealed.

which is a fairly rare thing for me, now that rail fares are so vile , but today I am going to meet Josephine Pullein-Thompson, which as you can imagine, is a darn good reason for going anywhere. The one thing that is causing a bit of dissent here is what coat do I wear. It is freezing. The hens were very reluctant to stir, and the dog was whizzing around trying to keep warm, rather than trying to nick the birds' fruit. To me, it's obvious. Lovely water-proof Barbour with wonderful fluffy liner; complete with pockets of dog biscuits. No, says OH. Your one smart coat - it is warm enough . I am a chilly mortal and nothing is ever warm enough. Besides, I say, the dog biscuits will come in useful when I am being chased through the streets of London by hordes of wild pariah dogs. I can buy myself useful time by hurling dog biscuits at them. You never know.

After a lot of huffing and puffing (including yet another load of corrupt links - why do these always surface when I am already frantic?) I have the Judith M Berrisford pages thereabouts done. For once, I have managed to find copies of nearly all her books (many, many thanks to Haffyfan, Dawn and SusanB who nobly filled gaps) - the one missing is Five Foals and Philippa, which I've just ordered. I'll be very interested to read it. As regular readers will know, I am not JMB's biggest fan. I do think though, that she was very blessed with her cover artists. The Jackie series in particular, which was illustrated by Geoffrey Whittam, is a real charmer. I haven't seen all of the books, but I presume all the covers are by him. Jackie and Babs, heroines of the Jackie series, I find are like puppies: incredibly enthusiastic, full of life, but prone to, every now and then, doing things you'd really rather they wouldn't. Ponymadbooklover, in this excellent post o...

At last, at last, the Christine Pullein-Thompson bibliography is on the website . It has been an epic task, as she wrote over 100 pony books - surely the most of any pony book author? Unless Bonnie Bryant of Saddle Club wrote more. And that would only be true if Bonnie Bryant is in fact one person rather than a load of different authors writing under that name. Huge thanks to Dawn of Pullein-Thompson archive who has been the most fantastic help. It really would have been very difficult to do it without her, as she has a much keener eye for detail than me, and also has an amazing collection which she is very happy to plunder for photos. Christine PT is though the Pullein-Thompson I am most ambivalent about. There are some titles of hers I absolutely love: The Horse Sale, Phantom Horse, I Rode a Winner , and now I am older and can cope with romance, The Impossible Horse , but there are some I find tricky. I think it's the way her characters' despair is so total. ...