Heroines on horseback, p.4
Heroines on Horseback, page 4
War did, though, make its way into pony books, with varying results. Shirley Faulkner-Horne’s characters were insulated from the worst effects; Primrose Cumming’s were more directly involved. For Mary Treadgold’s children, war ripped away all vestiges of a normal, comfortable life, and they were confronted with a world utterly changed.
Shirley Faulkner-Horne started writing early, publishing her first book in 1936, when she was fifteen. Her first fictional title, Bred in the Bone (1938), started a series of books placed firmly in the upper reaches of society, allying sound fact to characters whose existence is gilded. Cherry, heroine of Bred in the Bone, is the granddaughter of Lady Peebles and is taught to ride by the head gardener. Faulkner-Horne does not ignore the war, but it does not have a major effect on her characters: in Riding with the Kindles (1941) Corona Kindle and her brother Ken cannot go home for the holidays from their respective boarding schools as London is being bombed. They concentrate instead on learning to ride better. Her next book, Parachute Silk (1944), is a straightforward spy-chasing adventure, the first title of the series featuring Ian and Veronica Paisley. Their dog Rufus finds a piece of parachute silk; Ian and Veronica are convinced this means that a German spy has landed, but no-one will believe them. It is quite possible that the author would have written more on these themes, had she been allowed to, but publishers were not always keen on the war being mentioned in children’s books.
Faulkner-Horne’s books are in some ways an odd mixture. She is good on description of the equine events—the polo lesson, the point-to-point—and her adventure stories are generally fast-paced. Her characters, however, are given to periods of moralising that detract from the pace of the story. Veronica, as she and her brother are off to investigate the innards of the mysterious saddle (Mexican Saddle, 1946), starts to discourse on the lack of perfection in the world, this being ‘a warning that it is only a testing ground where we must prove ourselves worthy of a land of perfection. Here beauty is a slender promise and an encouragement.’ Her brother soon stops her short, though it seems more likely that Veronica is intended to be ‘deep’ rather than irritating.
What is notable about many of Faulkner-Horne’s characters is their utter self-confidence. They have never had to question their place in society: they are at the top. The critic John Birks’s characterisation of pony book heroines as ‘self-conscious little misses’ would pass Faulkner-Horne characters by: they are generally blithely unselfconscious, completely comfortable in their settings, ready to ‘take their place in forming the destiny of their country’ (Green Trail, 1947). Jennifer Charrington, for example, in White Poles (1957), immediately addresses those she knows are her social inferiors by their surnames.
As time goes on there is some loosening of the social straitjacket, but only a very little. Philip in Mexican Saddle describes (with some lack of sympathy) how his grandmother has failed to adapt to the changes in society:
‘She even expects the village school children to bow and curtsey to her. It’s really rather pathetic; if she’d only come out and learn how things have changed she’d be a lot happier.’
Jennifer in Look before You Leap (1955) persuades her parents to let her work with horses and train to three-day-event. Once off the parental leash, she meets and falls for an amateur jockey. Jennifer is convinced her parents will not approve of someone whose only method of support appears to be racing, and she is right. But all is not lost: once it becomes clear that her beloved is from the top drawer, Jennifer’s parents manage to overcome their opposition.
Primrose Cumming’s characters experience something of the reality of war. Silver Eagle Carries On (1940) sees the Chantry family struggling to keep their riding school going in war conditions. They fight to keep their horses (horses were still requisitioned at the beginning of the war) and tackle petrol restrictions by teaching ponies to pull carts. Owls Castle Farm (1942), though it has minimal pony content, reflected Cumming’s own war work. Brother and sister Brian and Sheelah are evacuated to their grandparents’ house, near which is the neglected Owls Castle Farm. The farm’s owner, Stephen Tabrett, is put under notice to improve the farm substantially within the next few months, or it will be taken over by the Government. Sheelah, and later Brian, set to, and after considerable hard work start to bring the farm round. The war is there as a constant presence; Sheelah lies in bed and listens to the aeroplanes droning overhead, returning from air raids. The foreign family lodging at the farm generate xenophobic reactions from the villagers. A German plane crashes and burns in the farm’s spinney, leading to an invasion by souvenir hunters. The farmhouse is blacked out:
It was one of the things by which she would most remember the war, Sheelah thought: this passing from a still fairly light world with blackbirds chattering up and down the hedges into night-time with curtains drawn and lamps lit as if it were quite dark beyond the windows.
The book is, at the end, hopeful. The farm is saved, and, as Brian and Sheelah survey the land, another formation of aeroplanes flies overhead, on its way home.
… they knew, too, that the future was worth fighting for … for the right to enjoy the good things of the earth.
Agriculture was important to Primrose Cumming: she saw it as the key to survival. Her characters meet the challenges of rationing and restrictions with gaiety and verve. Mary Treadgold’s were placed right in the line of invasion.
Mary Treadgold (1910–2005) did not write conventional pony stories, but what she did with the pony book was important. She took the same starting points as many authors before and since—the golden beginnings of summer holidays, filled with ponies; visits to pony-mad cousins; the grand country house—but she did not leave her characters there. Her children have major issues to face, shattering events which are beyond their control. In We Couldn’t Leave Dinah, leaving Dinah the pony fades into insignificance for Caroline beside coping with the reality of invasion in the Second World War. The children in No Ponies learn that war does not end tidily. Paul and Sandra, the heroes of the Heron books, have a cold and difficult world to deal with after the death of their parents.
After being educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and Bedford College, London, Treadgold became Heinemann’s first Children’s Editor in 1938. Her work there coincided with the flood of pony stories inspired by Joanna Cannan’s A Pony for Jean and its imitators. Among the books she received were ‘a staggering number of manuscripts about ponies and Pony Clubs—a few, a very few, outstanding, the majority quite frightful’. Treadgold resigned from Heinemann in 1940 and, before she went to work with the BBC as a literary editor and producer, wrote her first book, We Couldn’t Leave Dinah (1941), in an air-raid shelter: ‘This was September 1940, and not being a knitter or caring for the sound of falling bombs, I occupied myself relatively painlessly in the air-raid shelter with trying to implement my own verdict: “I could do better myself!”’
We Couldn’t Leave Dinah, which won the Carnegie Medal, has in its opening pages only the briefest hint of what is to come in the story. Caroline is busy living life as it has always been, daydreaming about the glories of competition:
Her eyes grew dreamy as she pictured herself in immaculate riding kit, leading a spirited, blue-rosetted Dinah round the ring with the judge stepping eagerly forward to shake hands. ‘Never, Miss Templeton,’ he would say, ‘never have I seen a horse take that gate better ……’
Caroline’s golden dream is soon shattered by her six-year-old brother with the news that their Channel Island, Clerinel, is threatened with invasion by the Nazi forces. Caroline’s first reaction to the news is to insist that they must take the ponies with them when they leave; then reality crashes in, but only briefly. Her father tells her straight away that the ponies must stay behind, but, wanting to give his daughter a little more of the golden world she has just emerged from, uses that classic tactic with children to soften the news: distraction. He reminds her about the next Pony Club event. It works:
You couldn’t really believe in awful things like Hitler when you were out in sun and wind and sea-spray and with people as absolutely marvellous as the Pony Club.
The Pony Club dream, however, fades utterly when Caroline and Mick are, in the confusion and panic of the evacuation, left behind. Treadgold shows conventional pony owning as the luxury it is. Both children quickly gain some perspective: despite the title, it is not the pony Dinah who is central to the story.
During the time the children spend hiding on the island, the ponies are used both to carry what they need when they hide in a cave before being able to escape and also as transport—to move around the island more quickly when they are attempting to find out the Nazis’ true invasion plans. The ponies’ position as part of life of the ruling class is emphasised by the German girl Nannerl, the young daughter of the German commander. Not only do her family take over the Templeton house, they also annex the ponies. But the ponies become the means through which the Templetons and Nannerl connect, the shared love of the horse being a common language, no matter who is the invader or the invaded. When Nannerl helps both Templetons escape, Caroline is able to take the extraordinary step of regarding Nannerl as more than just an enemy. She makes her an honorary member of the Pony Club:
Nannerl was fumbling with the Pony Club badge. She held it out to Caroline. ‘Zis is yours,’ she said sadly. ‘You most ’ave it to take to England.’
Caroline looked at the little badge as it lay on the palm of Nannerl’s broad, stumpy hand. Suddenly she had an inspiration. There was just one thing she could do for the small German girl who had rendered her so great a service.
‘You keep it,’ she said generously. ‘You keep that, Nannerl. And I’ll tell you what. There’s a boy on this Island called Peter Beaumarchais. He used to be President of the Pony Club when we were all here. You find him and tell him Caroline Templeton made you a Junior Member of the Pony Club and gave you her badge. He—he’ll remember me.’
Treadgold shows life in all its complicated muddle in her next book, No Ponies (1946). It does not take the story of the Templeton children on (that was done in the non-pony The Polly Harris, 1949) but looks at what happened to the ponies belonging to a British family whose home is in France but who had to leave to spend the war in Britain, leaving the ponies behind. The children who own the ponies do not actually appear: the book’s heroes are their non-horsy cousins, Jane, Colin and Andy. After the war the three, with their aunt, are travelling through France by train to the house, where their cousins will later join them. Jane in particular loathes the very idea of ponies:
‘It’s just that I’m sick of being bad at things like games and—and riding. And it’s all so lovely here, and next week it’ll all be spoilt because I’ll have to be trying not to mind being laughed at. And—and—it’s not that I don’t want to like riding either, because I’d like to like it, and I do really like Katherine and Anthony, oh—’
Like Jane, Treadgold does not deal in gymkhanas: these are kept at a distance. The rosette-winning, Pony-Club-going children of No Ponies are physically absent. They are simply there to act as a counterpoint to Jane’s horror of the horse-obsessed.
Mary Treadgold allows her characters to see a fuller vision of the horse and its position in society than Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig would grant her. They thoroughly approve of the lack of role for the Pony Club in We Couldn’t Leave Dinah: “… the book provides, among other things, a view of the “pony club” from a proper perspective.” This is true, but ignores the role of the Pony Club in providing part of the essential vision of a war-free future that Mick and Caroline need to get through the dreadful reality of war. They dream of being able to set up a branch of the Pony Club in London; and is that dream any less worthwhile than others, free of ponies? Similarly, Jane, though loathing the very idea of the Pony Club and all it represents, comes to appreciate the comforting presence of an animal and its role as a companion in adventure.
Treadgold’s novels ask questions: are people always what they seem? How does one cope with a horrible situation with no way out? Caroline and Mick Templeton see Monsieur Beaumarchais, father of their friend Peter, handing over their house to the German Army, and it is clear from what they overhear that he has been instrumental in the successful invasion. The true situation is infinitely more complicated than what they immediately imagine is true. In No Ponies, Jean, the cheerful French boy whom the children meet on the train, is really a Nazi youth leader being smuggled out of Germany to safety; and Pierre, denounced as a wartime collaborator, is anything but. However, Pierre does not end the book with his reputation restored: he knows he has to go on being loathed as a collaborator in order to carry on entrapping some of the remaining Nazis.
The occasional unlikeliness of Treadgold’s plots (though this is true of any children’s spy adventure) pales beside what Anne Carter, a contributor to Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, calls her ‘shrewd eye for character and relationships’. Treadgold is particularly good at the interplay between brothers and sisters. The Templetons and Atherleys are entirely believable, and it is also apparent in her post-war novels. The relationship between Sandra and Adam, the brother and sister heroes of The Heron Ride (1962) and Return to the Heron (1963), is also beautifully observed. The children’s diplomat parents have been killed, and the children have been shipped back to England, there to live with an uncle and his family, none of whom want them, or even particularly like them. Sandra has the worst of it, because she lives with the family full time; Adam is away at school, but recognises the shrivelling effect living in that loveless, noisy household has on her:
Now he came to think of it, she had seemed to be smaller, and paler, and thinner than when they had been together at Easter. She had looked somehow—quenched. Staring down at the Long Meadow turf, Adam made a colossal effort with his imagination—she had looked like a girl who had been out in the snow and the winter cold for a long, long time …
Even after their charmed summer staying with Miss Vaughan, who understands and likes them, Sandra will have to go back to her grim Bayswater existence with relations who do not really want her. Nothing can be done about that; there is no easy way out, and Sandra simply learns enough to make it a little more bearable. Onkel Anton, the Hungarian refugee, who once worked at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and teaches Sandra to ride, knows this.
‘Nobody expects that you should like it,’ answered Onkel Anton. ‘Why should you? You have not much in common with your Uncle Arthur, I think. Why should one like to be with people with whom one does not share? Why should one think that one will fit there? And already look what you have done—you have begun to make your own way out—’
Return to the Heron breaks both Sandra and Adam out of their prison, but the book is not just about that: it is about loneliness, possession, and the love of beauty and what that beauty represents. At the end of the book, it is Adam, difficult and closed off from Sandra at the beginning of the novel after a terrible accident, who genuinely rejoices for her when she is to be bought a horse:
To Sandra, Grant Maynard’s voice seemed to carry right over the shadowed garden, right over Betsy’s field. It seemed to carry right up to the sleeping Downs, where she would again ride Grey Horse. And, as she came down the terrace, speechless because of what she had heard, hardly yet believing, it was Adam’s voice that said: ‘Thank you. Oh, thank you.’
Treadgold, although inspired by the desire to write a better pony book than the examples which came across her desk, did not let herself be bound by the conventions the genre had already developed in its short life. She saw ponies in the round: as luxuries or childish dreams, but also as working animals, and as ‘castles in Spain’, a means of escape and comfort and a symbol of freedom. She saw too the love of ponies that brings people together across boundaries and politics. Her ponies are more than matched by their human owners. Treadgold is not a lazy writer: her characters are never stock stereotypes but are all intensely human. Perhaps her greatest success lies in the value she gives to her characters’ feelings. They are never patronised for loving the horse, but neither are they treated as if loving the horse is some superior virtue. Mary Treadgold trod a brilliantly measured path, one trodden by few since.
4
SKILL, COURAGE AND DETERMINATION
THE PULLEIN-THOMPSON SISTERS
The Pullein-Thompson clan bestrode the pony book world; there were three of them, plus their mother, Joanna Cannan, and by the 1970s it was a rare pony-mad child who had not read at least one of their books. After Cannan wrote some of the earliest books in the genre, the daughters picked up the theme and ran with it. Brought up in bohemian surroundings in Oxfordshire, they lived the lives they wrote about. In their joint autobiography, Fair Girls and Grey Horses (1996), Josephine describes their childhood:
But there was always a pony book flavour about The Grove: Cinderella, Ugly Duckling, Rags-to-Riches themes abounded. Beginning without skill, wearing the wrong clothes and riding untrained ponies, we failed for a time and then succeeded beyond all expectations. We bought ponies with bad names which became prizewinners, and in the role of the hard-up scruffy child, we managed to beat the richer, well-dressed children on their expensive ponies. We became convinced that skill, courage and determination could triumph over almost anything and we tried to pass this on in our books.
