Heroines on horseback, p.11
Heroines on Horseback, page 11
GALLOPING ON AND ON
PONY BOOK SERIES FICTION
After Jill, more heroines trotted and galloped their way through long series. The three longest, and the most republished, did nothing to move the pony book genre on; until Patricia Leitch’s Jinny burst onto the scene in the 1970s, those of the 1950s and 1960s were the placid cobs of the pony book world: the ride was safe, but not particularly exciting. Their authors understood what to give the pony-mad child to keep her content, but did not seek to give her anything else. Mary Gervaise’s Georgia Kane was happiest in the safe confines of her family, and Judith M Berrisford’s Jackie lived in a world constrained by her need to conform. The showjumper Pat Smythe’s Three Jays series was interesting for its insight into its author’s world, but ultimately it offered nothing new. All of them provided safe and comfortable stories in which there was no danger of the characters challenging stereotypes. All made full use of the ‘fantasies of perfect friendship with an idealised companion’ Nicholas Tucker recognises as being distinctive of much pony literature. In this they were successful: all these series saw several reprints.
Mary Gervaise’s Georgia series was born out of necessity: its author specialised in school stories, whose sales were starting to flag in the 1950s, and her publisher wanted a series that would sell. The author knew something about ponies, and had already included them in some of her earlier books, such as The Twins in the Third (1932), and she decided to develop a series that combined ponies with school stories. ‘Mary Gervaise’ was one of the pseudonyms used by Joan Mary Wayne Brown (1906–98), who had a brief boarding-school education that came to an end after she got into deep trouble for bringing The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to school. She was taken away and sent to another boarding school, but was unable to go to college after she developed anaemia. Instead she started to write, and produced 66 books as Mary Gervaise. The vast majority are school stories, which she wrote almost exclusively for a twenty-year period from her first title in 1928, Tiger’s First Term. After that she wrote novels which would only count as pony books if the requirement for actual equine presence was fairly minimal. Gervaise does not relish the gymkhana, schooling or pony care; what interests her is character, both equine and human. As humans offer much more scope for character development, her books are necessarily biased towards them, and towards the idyllic family lives she relished.
Of the three series she wrote which feature ponies, the Belinda and Farthingale ones have the least pony content. Possibly because they have, as the children’s-book specialist Sue Sims says, ‘not really enough to satisfy the real pony enthusiast’, they did not have a second printing, and faded from view long before the Georgia books, which were still in print in the late 1970s. The Georgia series is the most pony-orientated (and the one I shall therefore concentrate on), and was marketed as a pony series by Armada, who republished it in paperback.
The Georgia series opens (in A Pony of your Own, 1950) with a girl so beset by her own fears that her family have serious concerns for her (she is often referred to as Georgie throughout the series, but for consistency’s sake I have called her Georgia). Georgia Kane is shy and awkward, terrified of many things but particularly of horses. There is good stuff in her, though. When a horse and rider have an accident outside her house, she manages to overcome her fear for long enough to sit on the horse’s neck to stop it injuring itself further. Rather touchingly, when the horse is stabled in the family garage until it can be moved, Georgia feeds it apples with a toasting fork, being too terrified to feed it by hand.
In an effort by Georgia’s family to help her overcome her fears she is then sent away to the Grange School, at which pupils ride. Although still terrified of horses when she arrives there, and bullied for it, she does manage to get over her terrors and thus sets the scene for a further nine books about her and her pony, Spot.
Gervaise’s portrayal of Georgia and her family life is central to the series. The Kanes—Georgia’s mother, her generally absent engineer father, younger twin brothers (known as Rough and Tough), elder brother, Peter, and beloved ginger cat, King Toby—provide a strong family setting in which a procession of characters lacking something in their own family background can find succour. Georgia, awkward herself, is blessed with the ability to sympathise and put herself in others’ shoes:
‘A strange house is horrid, just at first,’ said Georgie, very sorry for her. ‘I know what you feel like—’
‘You don’t.’ Patience spoke in a desperate little whisper, quite unlike her usually sedate tones. ‘No one can possibly know. You see, I’ve never been inside a real home before, let alone stayed in one … It makes me feel—odd.’ (Ponies and Holidays, 1950)
Georgia and her friend Susan Walker are bright and lively creations. Susan’s impetuous nature adds spark and gentle humour to the narrative, contrasting neatly with her moments of thoughtfulness. After Georgia is injured in a fire, and a show of hands is needed in Assembly, Susan shows typical consideration:
Twenty-nine hands shot into the air. The thirtieth, still bandaged, did not move, as its blushing owner was wondering what to do. But it was seized—quite gently—by Susan, and waved amongst the rest. (A Pony of Your Own)
Gervaise likes an outsider, and generates much of the tension of her stories through one or more. Once Georgia has fully entered the charmed world of the Grange, and made good and lasting friendships, it is her cousin Gerry who becomes the outsider. Formerly the confident one, she is unable to cope with the new, popular Georgia, and snipes at her constantly. There are other outsiders: in Ponies and Holidays a new pupil, Patience, is brought up by an elderly and old-fashioned guardian, until she finds that she is the long-lost daughter of the Daneforth family. In Ponies and Mysteries (1953) Patience’s unhappy integration into her new family makes her still an outsider. By the end of the book she and her family are reconciled to their new situation, and Gervaise seems to lose all interest in her as a character. The next we hear of Patience, and her twin Pat, is that they have left school—and the series.
Although the Georgia series is nominally set in a school, Gervaise seems positively reluctant for her characters to experience any meaningful life within it. It is as though, having written so many school stories by that point, she is as desperate to get out as any girl condemned to learning Latin vocab on a particularly beautiful day. Out of a ten-book series, six are set during the holidays. Three are based at school, but the action and dialogue are set almost entirely in the girls’ free time. The Vanishing Pony (1958) opens at school but swiftly moves to a nearby house. The ponies, too, are sometimes remarkable for their absence. With the exception of A Pony of your Own and Pony from the Farm (1954), they are not central to the stories. In most of them the ponies could be replaced with bicycles and they would progress just the same. In Pony Island (1957) the ponies are used to get the children to the island, but are redundant after that: they graze while the main drama, Margaret’s rescue from the rising tide, takes place.
Nor does Gervaise enter fully into the world of the pony. In A Pony of your Own the whole school, plus ponies, is due to sail off to Lennet Fair and gymkhana, but Georgia doesn’t go, as she thoughtfully stays behind to keep another girl, Teepoo, company. She is then ideally placed to save the headmistress’s horse from a fire. There is a more fully described gymkhana in Ponies and Holidays, but its main purpose is to advance the plot and show the Kane family’s reactions to the mysterious behaviour of the girl they think is their friend Patience, but who later turns out to be her previously unknown twin.
But what Gervaise does have a particular talent for, and what kept pony enthusiasts reading the books, is her portrayal of the ponies themselves. They are distinct and recognisable characters—something not every pony book manages. Georgia’s chestnut Spot is a kindly soul, and Susan’s first horse, Black Aggie, instantly endearing.
… Georgie felt a lump in her throat when she saw how pleased the little mare was to see Susan again. Black Aggie had never been to Dockleford before, but she did not seem to notice that she was on strange ground. She simply followed Susan, pushing against her so strongly that she almost knocked her down. (Pony from the Farm)
Ermyn’s Widdershins, the pony who has been trained to do the opposite of what the rider expects, is unforgettable, and even the donkey Penelope emerges as a lovable character. The episode where Black Aggie dies is genuinely moving. Gervaise was best at creating characters and that is true of her ponies just as much as of her people.
It is Gervaise’s strengths of observation and characterisation that make her books successful; her plotting tends to the obvious. When an author writes in the first few pages ‘And after all,’ she asked herself, ‘what can possibly happen now?’ the reader knows perfectly well the answer will be ‘Quite a lot’. Arrangements for the Kane children to be looked after in the frequent emergencies which beset them have a regular habit of going wrong, and in the holiday stories they are often, conveniently, thrown on their own devices.
Gervaise’s sympathy with the lonely, the awkward and the troubled, coupled with a sense of fun and the attraction of a strong (if idealised) family network, proved attractive enough to keep readers hooked.
Judith M Berrisford, a fellow 1950s author, did not focus on the family. Her heroes and heroines are generally firmly removed from parental influence pretty much on the first page, as the author whirls them off into incident and adventure. She wrote over thirty pony books, and was responsible for one of the longest British-written pony book series, clocking in at sixteen titles, as well as other, shorter pony book series, and many standalone pony books. It is remarkably difficult to find biographical information on her, for which there is good reason. Contemporary Authors gives her birth year as 1912, as Judith Mary Lewis, born in Staffordshire; the dustjacket of one of her gardening books, however, gives a birth date of 1921. Both, it appears, are right. I have not been able to find any record of a birth in 1912 under the name Judith M Berrisford, but there was a Clifford Lewis (a name under which the author also wrote) born in Staffordshire in 1912. Clifford Lewis married a Mary Berrisford, born in 1921, in 1945. Adrian Room’s Dictionary of Pseudonyms has the solution to the mystery: it states that Judith M Berrisford is a joint name used by Clifford and Mary Lewis, the writers of animal books for children.
Berrisford’s first book was Taff the Sheepdog, published in 1949. There were several short stories before this, including ‘Pedro, the Terrible’ for Riding in 1946, and an early series in Pony magazine, ‘Silver Star’, which appeared in 1950, as did the first pony book, Timber, the Story of a Horse. Unusually for a pony book, this has a male hero, but otherwise it is a standard story of pony and rider improvement. Berrisford’s early books include, in 1951, the first of the Sue and Ballita series, Sue’s Circus Horse (in which Sue buys the ex-circus horse Ballita), as well as other standalone pony books: Red Rocket, Mystery Horse (1952), The Ponies Next Door (1954) and Pony Forest Adventure (1957). These books established the Berrisford formula as ‘fast-moving fun’ (as a contemporary review put it), with plenty of adventures with willing ponies. Berrisford’s stylistic quirks were well established by the time the Jackie series started: her writing fails to give her readers any room for their imaginations to work; she is prone to exaggeration to prove her point; her writing is generally pedestrian and unsubtle. Lest the reader have any doubt about what sort of series she was reading, the word ‘pony’ is used relentlessly—a forest isn’t just a forest, it’s a ‘pony forest’, and there are ‘pony holidays’, ‘pony dreams’, ‘pony boys’ and ‘pony girls’.
In 1958 Berrisford launched the first of what was to be a sixteen-book series, Jackie Won a Pony. The heroine, Jackie Hope, acquires her pony, Misty, in the first book, and together with her cousin Babs goes on to have a series of holiday-based adventures in which the duo try to help out someone in need, fail (frequently), prove their worth, and help matters to a happy conclusion.
If the quintessential pony book is that in which a previously ponyless child gets a pony, Jackie Won a Pony loses no time in hooking the reader in. In the 1950s there were indeed competitions in which the first prize was a pony. Pony magazine ran several, perhaps the inspiration for the Horseshoes magazine competition in which Jackie wins hers. The title of the first chapter is ‘Pony-Mad—And Ponyless’, but in the very first sentence the heroine Jackie Hope’s ponyless state comes to an end. There is no scene setting, no introduction of the character; straight away the plot gets going with the classic pony-mad person’s daydream coming true:
I’d won a pony! I simply couldn’t believe it. Breathlessly I kept telling myself the staggering news as I hurried along the garden path, reading again the letter which the midday postman had just handed me.
There is no long-drawn-out process of choosing the pony either: within twenty pages or so, Misty is Jackie’s. Berrisford was not interested in the conventional schooling-and-entering-a-gymkhana pony book model, or in the educational role of the pony book (when she tried this, in the Jane and Penny series, the results were depressingly turgid), or (as I shall argue) in showing strong and independent girls working out their own destinies. What she wanted was adventure, a relentless whirl of incident. As the reviewer of Skipper and the Headland Four in a 1958 Pony magazine says: ‘There is never a dull moment in a Berrisford book.’
Each Jackie book progresses along a very similar path. The story establishes Jackie and Babs’s absence from their parents and locates them at a pony-filled venue. It soon emerges that this place is in some sort of trouble. Jackie and Babs, enthusiastic and good-hearted girls, long to help. Their efforts soon go disastrously wrong, infuriating a (usually male) older character. Jackie and Babs will finally manage to do something genuinely helpful to ensure the survival of the establishment, earning themselves often grudging approval. The plots, prone to coincidence, are not there to challenge the reader. Berrisford is the Enid Blyton of the pony book world.
The books follow the same basic format, and Berrisford even re-uses (virtually word for word at times) the plot of one of her earlier novels in a Jackie book. Five Foals and Philippa (1963) sees two girls staying at a pony stud that is under threat after an accident hospitalises the owner. Jackie and the Pony Rivals (1981) has a few minor changes to character names but is otherwise identical, and lifts, with only slight alterations, entire pages from the original.
In Jackie Won a Pony, any upcoming disaster is well signposted. All seems well, but Jackie says:
I felt on top of the world, but if only I could have foreseen what would befall us a few days later, I don’t think I would have dared to be so lighthearted and carefree.
There is a constant rush of incident in the typical Berrisford book, often of a similar type. Berrisford is very fond of trial by water: wells, rushing rivers, bogs, the sea—particularly the sea. If Jackie and Babs are anywhere near water, something will go wrong. In Jackie’s Pony Camp Summer (1968), Jackie and Misty are swept off a causeway from an island to the shore and need to be saved. In Jackie on Pony Island (1977), Jackie and Babs are late leaving the island, and have to be rescued from deep water on the causeway.
These accidents and disasters nearly all happen because of Jackie and Babs’s rash enthusiasm: they rush in where angels fear to tread. This continuous stream of incidents fuelled by the girls’ ineptitude paralyses character development: if they genuinely learned from their mistakes (and they do, especially Jackie, frequently take themselves to task over their dimness) then there would be nothing to drive the plot. And so the girls are condemned to remain forever puppyish. The girls stay at around the age of fourteen for virtually the whole sixteen-book series, having summer holiday after summer holiday. These are not books to be read if you are keen on following timelines.
The two heroines have more crosses to bear than simply never growing older. The girls frequently refer to themselves as jinxes. To believe that your very presence really will cause disaster is a heavy burden for any teenager to bear, but Babs and Jackie do believe this. The lack of psychological depth in the stories, and this frequent, unexplored reference to jinxes, jars.
From the very first book, Jackie does exhibit some degree of self-awareness: she castigates herself for her over-enthusiasm, and knows perfectly well it gets her into trouble, but she never ever changes. In Jackie Won a Pony, Jackie discovers the grazing she had planned to use for Misty is being used by the people renting her house, so to find grazing, she rides her pony across country to her Aunt Monica’s house. She is joined by her cousin Babs, who has ‘rescued’ a horse, Captain, from being sold to the knacker by putting a down payment on him and whipping him out of his field. The two girls flee the journalists who get wind of their plot. It takes a while before the mess is sorted out, and once it is, Jackie says:
We’d been wayward, impulsive—and taken the law into our own hands. We’d done something which certainly wasn’t a pattern of good behaviour for other pony-mad boys and girls. We realized that only too well.
But nothing changes. In Jackie and the Misfit Pony (1976), she’s at it again. The pony Freckles is prone to bolt, and has been left out of a trek because of it. When another ride is proposed, Jackie takes Freckles, deciding that the pony will be better for exercise. The ride goes disastrously wrong. Freckles is spooked, bolts, and is only stopped when she fails to clear a stone wall, badly wounding her knees.
This was my fault. John had warned us that Freckles was unreliable to ride—yet, somehow, I’d felt that I’d known best ... a pony bearing scars of broken knees would be known to have fallen badly on a hard surface. People would realise she’d been involved in an accident and who then would be willing to buy her for a child to ride? By my recklessness I’d probably robbed Freckles of all her chances.
It is not surprising, bearing in mind the trail of disaster that attends them, that Jackie and Babs succeed in infuriating at least one older character per book. In virtually all the books up until the end of the 1970s, there is an older male character who holds a very low opinion of the girls. John Collins, the older brother of Jackie’s penfriend Molly, runs the trekking centre the girls go to help at in Jackie and the Pony Trekkers (1963). He is alarmingly sexist in his attitudes—‘Pony trekking’s too big a venture to be run by a bunch of girls,’ he says.
