Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

Have you written a pony book? Writing a book is one thing, but thinking of a title for it is quite another. Do you tell the reader exactly what they’re going to get, or do you hint at it? Publishers in the past worked on the fair assumption that if you were looking for a pony book, the word ‘pony’ shoe-horned into the title would probably do the trick. And going by the evidence of the eighty years of so that the pony book has been going, they were not wrong. What do we want? We want a pony (and there’s a title for you for free, because as far as I know, no one’s snaffled that one, nor, oddly enough, He Wanted a Pony ). Diana Pullein-Thompson kicked off her solo publishing career with I Wanted a Pony and Peggie Cannam followed with She Wanted a Pony . There were titles that addressed the fantasy of owning a pony: the iconic Wish for a Pony, followed by Dream Pony (a popular title, this one), joined by A Very Special Pony , The Magic Pony and The Paradise Pony an...

We have an ancestral pony book: it has been in the family for decades. It’s Gypsy Tells Her Story , by Leslie A Newman. I remember it in my grandmother’s bookshelves. It sat there, unread even by me, who had ferreted Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies out of the same bookcase and read it to death, together with a good helping of my grandfather’s Hammond Innes thrillers. Gypsy was the one book in that bookcase my grandmother actively encouraged me to read. She wanted me to read it because of its religious significance: Gypsy the horse tells her story of being ridden along the same route as founder of Methodism John Wesley on his early travels preaching, and the book is dedicated to “the boys and girls of Methodism.” I loved my grandmother dearly but this was one of the few things she and I didn’t see eye to eye on. If I hadn’t known the book’s religious connection, I’d have picked it up and read it, but I did. My grandmother never overtly told me why I was supposed to read it, bu...

The Pony Book: How to Get that Pony, part one Coincidence I never did get my own pony, but I wanted one. One of my nieces, when much younger, asked an aunt who had walked up through their garden at Christmas “Did you see a pony in the garden? Because I did ask for one.” Some years later, she did get a pony, but that year she had the empty feeling familiar to so many pony obsessed children: no pony had magically appeared in the garden, the garden shed, or the garage.  Father Christmas and parents remained deaf.  She, like me, had to be content with reading about ponies: you might not have a pony of your own, but you could enter into the world of those who did. The books we read as children let us fulfil our dreams. I never could (and still can’t) talk to animals, but with Dr Dolittle and Narnia I was in worlds where I could. I enjoyed my school career as a state school child, but I still loved the midnight feast stuffed boarding school life of Malory Towers and St C...

In the 1980s, there was this: and now, there's this: Thank goodness for Photoshop. Thanks to Hannah Fleetwood for this.

If you managed to negotiate part one of the be-your-own-pony-book-hero exam, here is part 2. Probability Paper A. Rank the following outcomes in order of probability, showing your working: An evil tempered stallion has entered the yard: a.  The livery yard owner warns you against going anywhere near the horse.  So you don’t. b.  You creep up to the yard in the dead of night and sneak into the evil stallion’s box to lay soft hands on his neck.  You know the two of you have a special connection. c.  After much struggle, you and you alone rescue the evil stallion, but it will take you at least 12 books before you have any sort of connection.   d.  The evil stallion is to be put down as he is Beyond Saving.  You and your friends come up with a cunning plan to save him. B. Work out, using examples, the probability of the following appearing in a book published during the last ten years: a.  Unicorns b.  Mythical sky ponies c...

Daughter has gone off to do her latest GCSE science module exams today, with our big question of the day being "Can you resit a resit?" Answer comes there none. For those of us for whom the exam season is a thankfully far distant memory, but who yearn to share their offspring's pain, or revisit their revision-strewn youth, here is an entrance exam to the world of the pony book. English A.  What part should poetry play in the fully rounded pony book hero’s life? 1.  You quote poetry in a dashing way as you sweep around the countryside on your pony – you thrill to the way the cadence of the words matches the rhythm of your pony’s movement. 2.  You have learned by heart John Betjeman's Hunter Trials , and that will do nicely, thank you very much. 3.  What is poetry? B.  You have gone to visit a cousin.  She thoughtfully puts out a selection of literature on the bedside table for you.  What would your ideal selection be? 1.  School stories...

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 been reading some of the early animal literature in the Hockliffe Collection , a collection of children's literature which is available on the net. There's rather more about dogs and cats - Mary Martha Sherwood's The Little Woodman and his Dog Caesar (1818), described as being as "thoroughly entertaining and as heavily didactic as it is possible to be," and Mary Pilkington's Marvellous Adventures; or, the Vicissitudes of a Cat (1802) being just two, but there is one about a pony. This is The Memoirs of Dick, the Little Poney (1799 - Anon). Later children's literature about horses, most notably Black Beauty, does not shy away from cruelty, and leaves readers in little doubt about the miseries of the bearing rein or long and hideous hours of over work. It is strangely shy, though, about gelding. Black Beauty must presumably have been gelded - the vast majority of male horses are - but the subject is simply never mentioned. For Black Beau...

I admit I was never much of a one for comics as a child. My sister took Bunty , and I used to flick through it. We had a couple of ancient Bunty annuals bought for us from a jumble sale. I flicked through those too if I'd read everything else within reach. I like pictures as much as the next person, but what I really like are words; tons of them - great long streams, packing out a story, and I like something I can settle into, not something that's over and done with in a few minutes. Earlier this week I had an unexpected package. I have never grown out of the thrill of a parcel arriving in the post, which is quite convenient when your job involves you buying books (for research purposes, natch), which means parcels arriving in the post. Usually I have a pretty good idea of what's due, but I had no idea what was in the parcel that I picked up on Tuesday was, though I was intrigued, as I recognised the writing: Vanessa from Fidra's. I opened it up, and there wer...

You can tell I'm having a bit of difficulty getting down to work this afternoon can't you? Thanks to Juxtabook for the heads up on this. I did a wordle on part of my Chestnut Hill review, and here it is: If you fancy a worldle, this is the link .

Jessie Haas is writing a book about pony books (it will be published in 2009 and is, at the moment, called Horse Crazy), about which we've been corresponding, and she told me recently about a book she read called The Ginger Horse by Maureen Daly, which I've never read, but "has a girl hitting her teen years and starting to think that her boy friend really is smarter and stronger and more important" (quote from Jessie). That started me thinking about sexist attitudes in pony books. I suppose one of the reasons pony books are so very popular with girls is that they show girls as strong and capable, or as equal partners with boys. I'm going to pick the books I've read recently as examples (though I may be self-selecting here, as I've been reading titles by authors I already knew I liked). So, Veronica Westlake's The Mug's Game has a heroine who is initially a bit of a wimp being initiated by the twin girls with whom she goes to live into a country l...

The two bits I'm about to quote say it all, I think. "When I was a child," said Mrs. Pyke, "I was the youngest rider to hounds in the county. I remember the MFH once lifted me on to my pony himself, and there I sat in my litle habit with my long fair curls hanging down to my waist. Children had the loveliest hair in those days." Personally I thought (a) it was impossible to picture Mrs. Pyke as a child at all, and (b) that curls down to your waist must have looked pretty awful all waving in the breeze like floating cork-screws. I'm sure Mrs Darcy would have had something to say about it. I mean, there are always plaits." [Jill's Gymkhana, Ruby Ferguson] and "Jess turned to see Vicki, the owner of the riding stables, standing at the open stable door. Jess secretly hero-worshipped Vicki. She was everything Jess wanted to be when she grew up. Tanned and slim, with thick dark hair and stunning silver-grey eyes, she always looked amazing. Vicki was...

Before I get any further, this is nothing whatsoever to do with Monica Edwards' Outsider . I've been reading Mary Gervaise's A Pony for Belinda , which I found a gentle and undemanding read. Belinda is portrayed right from the off as an outsider and oddity: she is going through agonies at a tea party, in which the children there are dressed in jeans, while she is in a frilly dress. They go to school: she is educated by her grandmother and the Vicar. They are easy in each other's company: she sees almost nothing of other children and sees no reason why she should. It turns out that Belinda is living with her grandmother after an horrific accident when Belinda was a baby. Her mother took her down to the beach but was caught by the tide. Belinda was rescued but her mother was not. Belinda was all her grandmother had left, so stayed with her rather than rejoin her father, brother and two sisters, and so they all stay, separated, until her family moved to the country and t...

When I did O' Level English Lit, one of the very few technical expressions that stuck in my head was suspension of disbelief. It's such a grand description for the simple act of leaping headfirst into a book and living in it until you've finished. It is a phrase that's been nudging at me for a while recently, as I've read a few pony books over the holidays that have tried my disbelief somewhat. The main one was Jackie and the Missing Showjumper by J M Berrisford. I know it seems as if I only mention this poor woman in order to put the boot in, but stay with me. The story involves Jackie and her sidekick Babs, both of them all of 13, who are going to spend the Christmas period looking after two showjumpers belonging to a"top-of-the-charts country singer." JMB herself recognised the struggle many of her readers were going to have with the essential dippiness of her plot, and she goes to some lengths to explain how the situation has arisen: the singer can...

I don't know whether Follyfoot was ever repeated: for me it's a creature of the 1970s, which happened on weekend teatimes. I watched Follyfoot of course, because it had horses in it, but I never liked it, or the books, as much as Monica Dickens' World's End series. It was the hopelessness of some of the story lines, I think, that got me. It depressed me, and I like a bit of fight with my stories. Dora in particular I found difficult, though I suppose the desperate fight the Farm had to stay afloat, and its awful cases were at least realistic. When I was doing the Monica Dickens page for the website, I came across this site : whose owners obviously didn't suffer from my dislike! So, if you are at all interested in Follyfoot, this really is the site for you. I always thought the World's End series would make a good television series. It was one of my absolute favourites as a child. I cherished my Piccolo paperbacks, and I still have them (have not yet manag...

Well actually it isn't, not even remotely. I was reading Pullein-Thompson Archive's excellent blog , in which the question of ponies in pony books dying came up, and that set me thinking. I think it's in DPT's Pony to School in which Seaspray, Pier's and Tilly's grey pony, dies of tetanus. This made a terrific impression on me at the time, as I can't think, offhand, of any other pony book I read as a child in which a pony dies, and I think it was a particularly strong bit of writing on DPT's part. People are killed off, though generally before the book starts (Jill's father, Carmen's parents in Sheila Chapman's books). Heartland is unusual I suppose in establishing the heroine's mother as a character before killing her off in the first book. There is of course Ginger, in Black Beauty, which in some ways I think is the least miserable of the deaths: you feel relief that Ginger's awful sufferings are at last over, although there is ...

I was inspired by reading this post on another blog, as I have a few candidates of my own for this. It's quite rare that I fail to finish a book, but I did with Joan Dicken's Jill and Prince the Pony, which is real grade A stinker. I doubt even as a pony-mad child if I could have struggled through the waves of boredom which the pedestrian plot and characterisation roused in me, but as an adult I just couldn't. I failed. Others I struggle with are Judith M Berrisford's A Pony in the Family series. This is supposed to be an educational series, teaching children how to look after ponies and ride. The educational bits are triggered when the hapless younger sister gets something wrong, which is when her hideously sanctimonious elder sister sails in and patronises her until any realistically written character would have shoved the elder girl face first into the muck heap and made sure she stayed there for a while. But no, she takes it all. The whole think makes me...

Does anyone have any idea what this book is? My correspondent says it isn't a Jill book. This is what she can remember: This book is written in the first person: and opens with the girl almost ready to give up riding after a bad lesson. She and her friend are riding along on their bikes discussing the lesson. Once she's home, she finds a letter from her aunt inviting her and her friend to come and look after the aunt's riding school. The two girls go and run a very successful camp for the riding school pupils. The book ends with the girls being invited to come and run the riding school in their school holidays. The person who asked thought the book was the first in a series.

I can cry at pretty much anything (I was never good, but became far, far worse once I had the children.) My family are now very used to my welling up at emotional moments in films, and they all turn round expectantly at particularly mushy moments, whilst I gulp and try (and usually fail) to give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Again. When I read Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate , I so sympathised with Linda, who is endlessly made to cry by being taunted about the match by her tougher siblings: - 'A little, houseless match, it has no roof, no thatch, It lies alone, it makes no moan, that little, houseless match.' My absolute prime weepy moment isn't actually a pony book at all: it's E Nesbitt's The Railway Children . Even typing it is enough. It's the "Daddy, my Daddy," bit at the end. But pony books do their bit too to add to the dampness. I have great difficulty reading Black Beauty when he meets Ginger again, and then the cart with...

I've had a very interesting email on pony books, heroines and wealth, and I'm going to quote from it directly - it was in response to my earlier post about a poor but nasty pony book heroine: ... an impoverished pony-owner being resentful and bitter and never reforming is the obnoxious Charlie Dewhurst in Three Ponies and Shannan. This seems to me to be the exact opposite of the classic pony book. Charlie Dewhurst should be the heroine; she has a lot in common with other pony book heroines. Like Misty in Jackie won a Pony, Jingle used to pull a cart before taking up a career as a riding pony. Charlie is the daughter of a country parson, and they are always poor, although the families are generally happy (as in A Stable for Jill and any number of Lorna Hill novels). In a traditional pony book, the fifteen pound Jingle would triumph over the three hundred pound Serenade. Although Christina does not win the jumping she does prove herself to be as good as any poor groomless child ...