Heroines on horseback, p.7
Heroines on Horseback, page 7
Although Josephine was uncomfortable with situations of which she had little direct knowledge, such as Patrick’s background, she was on surer ground with emotions. Alison Haymonds says of the pony story: ‘It ignores the world outside the stable yard, and most of the traditional conventions of storytelling—love and villainy, conflict and mystery.’ While this is mostly true of Josephine’s early works (after a gap of ten years during which she wrote mostly for adults, she returned to the pony fold with the mystery-based 1971 story Race Horse Holiday), the lack of romance at any rate was the fault of her publishers. Josephine included a lightly drawn romance between Noel and Henry in Pony Club Camp (1957), and it is clear from what the other characters say that they, as well as Noel and Henry, have the entirely normal preoccupations of teenagers.
‘Susan … swears she prefers John Manners, and Judith’s mad about the head boy at Frensham Park, but Carola and Polly think Henry’s absolutely it.’
‘What about Marion?’ asked David.
‘Oh, she has fits when she’s all for Henry, but at the moment, she’s fallen for Christopher, haven’t you noticed?’
‘Whew, has she really? I say, Christopher,’ he yelled down the table.
Nicolas stifled his words by putting a hand over his mouth and Gay said, ‘Shush, do show some tact. Christopher’s quite keen on her.’
Whatever Josephine, and indeed her readers, wanted, Collins, her publishers, were not keen on romance. Although Pony Club Camp generated the most fan mail of all Josephine’s titles, ‘with people begging “Please, please, can they get married”,’ Collins told Josephine that it must be the last of the series. They preferred what Josephine called ‘Peter Pan characters’. She, however, saw her characters as real children and took pleasure in knowing them as they grew up.
This was certainly true of one of her most accomplished books, All Change (1961). It was her last pony novel of the 1960s, and her personal favourite. In it the Conway family are another numerous and well-delineated set. They live on a large estate of which their father is the agent; the owner has died, and the estate has been sold on to a London financier, Mr Smithson. The book is a full-blown clash between the traditional way of doing things and more efficient, but possibly more heartless, modernisation. The children are desperate to stay in their home while determined not to antagonise its new owner.
This book was a departure for Josephine Pullein-Thompson: the tension comes not from the improvement in equestrian standards (there is actually relatively little pony content in the book, and rather more cow) but from the uncertainty about whether the family will keep their house and livelihood, and whether the old ways will triumph. The end result is somewhere in between the two. Misunderstandings and refusal to listen on both sides complicate matters. The Conways’ new friend Nick is a well observed victim of a divorce where neither parent wants him; a more believable portrait than Patrick’s in Patrick’s Pony.
All Change skilfully blends adventure, a believable family background and a tension between old and new which is satisfactorily resolved in a realistic compromise. It marked a break in Josephine’s output of pony books while she concentrated on writing detective stories for adults. She returned to pony books in the 1970s, but moved away from the instructional novel that had been her forte with a series of pony adventure stories known as The Moors books, and a collaboration with her sisters with the historical Black Beauty’s Family series. In the 1980s, as The Moors series was coming to an end, she started the much stronger Woodbury Pony Club series, which saw a return to the instructional format and the Pony Club.
In all, Josephine wrote 32 pony books in a writing career which stretched for over fifty years. Her books, and those of her sisters, were eagerly awaited by the pony fraternity: ‘Books by the Pullein-Thompsons … are right in the top class,’ wrote Colonel C E G Hope, editor of Pony magazine. No-one reading the sisters’ books could doubt that hard work and perseverance could bring success. As Alison Haymonds says:
[girls’] life with ponies was a trial run for the sort of life post-war women had to learn to cope with, juggling relationships, responsibilities and family.
Josephine’s best books are those in which the vigour of her characterisation sugars the pill of her instruction: the reader is never preached at, but absorbs the information while being thoroughly caught up with the characters and their adventures. She is equally at ease with adults as with child characters, and her stories, while not stuffed full of plot, are thoroughly believable portraits of children and their ponies.
Christine Pullein-Thompson (1925–2005)
Christine was the most prolific of the sisters by far, and for decades the British author with the most pony books to her name, until overtaken this century by Jenny Oldfield. Her bibliography numbers over a hundred titles, ranging from non-fiction to early readers, children’s adventure stories and, of course, classic pony stories.
Her first solo novel was We Rode to the Sea (1948), very different from the first solo books her sisters produced. Josephine’s Six Ponies and Diana’s I Wanted a Pony were domestic riding adventures; Christine wrote about Scotland, adventure and escaped prisoners. We Rode to the Sea opens in a whirl of chaotic activity on a train from Glasgow to the Highlands as the Macgregor family journey to Fort Frederick to start their riding holiday. After mangling an unfortunate fellow passenger’s knitting to a heartbreaking extent, the children set themselves problems from the start by leaving their map on the train. Nevertheless, they launch forth, mapless, into the Highlands, get lost, battle with their recalcitrant camping gear and then find that two German prisoners have escaped. The Macgregors decide they must catch them. Eventually, of course, they do.
This first foray by Christine into what she described as her ‘Scottish obsession’ is written with enthusiasm and verve, but this is not enough to overcome her characters’ irritating foibles, of which they have plenty. Their own ‘Scottish obsession’ takes the form of endless digs at the English; ironically, bearing in mind that the family live in Glasgow, Lowland Scots are not favoured either. The family are prone to peculiarly Scottish exclamations and, having read the poetry of William Aytoun, spout it frequently and curse ‘by the blighted hopes of Scotland’:
‘Oh, losh, don’t say we’ve lost it,’ exclaimed Christina. ‘It would be too awful, after all we told Daddy about being practically grown up and quite capable of looking after ourselves.’
‘I believe you’re right …’ said Alister. ‘I did have it in the train. Now what, by the blighted hopes of Scotland, could I have done with it?’
The adventure itself is weak. Why the two escaped Germans are such a danger is never satisfactorily explained; they are simply faceless examples of convenient evil. Being dashing is confused with enthusiastic ineptitude: the Macgregor family are horribly prone to wishing, after their latest disaster, that they had thought ahead, and then promptly failing to do so in their next crisis.
Christine returned to the adventure formula in later novels, with more success. She used her experience as a professional rider in Virginia when she wrote Phantom Horse (1955). It is an interesting study of English children living in America and experiencing the differences between American and British horse life as they plot to catch a horse running wild in the mountains. Ride by Night (1960) is Christine’s most successful adventure story. It has a very similar plot to We Rode to the Sea—as if the author, recognising the earlier book’s weaknesses, wanted to try again once she had matured as a writer. Set in Scotland, it tells the story of children who decide to go on a trek. They are persuaded to take an adult with them, but he is soon out of action after the dressage horse he has borrowed is lamed. The children become lost, and come across two Rumanians (as it is spelled in the book) who have escaped from a nearby Russian ship and are seeking asylum. The children try to transport them to the nearest town. All the characters are better differentiated than those in the earlier novel, and the adventure is believable and flows more naturally from their actions. Sheila Delmore, who with her brother came up with the idea of the trek, initially despises a fellow trekker, Jennifer, who is ‘sure to cry’. In fact, Jennifer proves herself stalwart, brave and with unexpected talents, including one it was probably fair not to expect: the ability to speak Rumanian. Sheila generously admits her mistake:
I said: ‘I think it’s taught me not to judge people. We despised Jennifer and really her nose was broken which is probably enough to make anyone keep crying. And then she knew Rumanian and saved the day.’
As in We Rode to the Sea, the villains—the Russians—remain only a shadowy presence, as evildoers were to be in most of Christine’s adventure stories. Her villains are wicked because of what they represent: oppressive Communist Russia in Ride by Night, teenage bikers in The Open Gate (1962), one of her Riding School series. This last-mentioned series does, however, give us one of her more convincing villains: Jim Morgan, the criminal who tries to sell off his horses for meat in The Empty Field (1961), emerges as a more realistically malign presence, a man who sits outside his shack doing nothing in the day, and surviving by sometimes vague but usually illegal means.
After We Rode to the Sea, Christine wisely left the territory of the adventure novel for a while; with her first series, the Chill Valley Hunt, she wrote about what she knew, and with much greater success. As did her sisters, she made full use of the riding school they ran as well as her experience as whipper-in to the Woodland Hunt. The Chill Valley Hunt trilogy, We Hunted Hounds (1949), I Carried the Horn (1951) and Goodbye to Hounds (1952), is a considerable literary step forward from her first book. The plot, which involves two families of teenagers starting their own hunt and battling to gain supporters, provided Christine with a firm narrative framework within which she worked to produce a series with vivid characters and credible action. The third book, Goodbye to Hounds, shows her style maturing: there are well-delineated tensions between the Dashwoods and the Days when the Days’ farm, which is on a short lease, must be sold. This means the Days must move, their horses be sold and the kennels, and therefore the Hunt, close. Sandy and Lawrence Dashwood believe in perseverance until all hope is gone; the Days are convinced there is nothing they can do. The Dashwoods prevail in the end, and although it needs adult help in the shape of a wealthy landowner buying the farm, the two families have at least shown they can work together.
There is considerably more hunting in Christine’s pre-1970 output than in her sisters’ books, and indeed than in pony books generally. This makes some of her books unattractive now to a population either more squeamish or more principled, depending on your point of view, than its forebears. Her books reflect a time in which hunting was generally accepted. It is integral to many of her titles: in The Impossible Horse (1957), Jan, who has started a business schooling horses, has to convince the local equine community that the horse Benedictine is safe by hunting him successfully; David, the hero of The First Rosette (1956) and its sequels, helps out at the hunt kennels and has a hunt pony, Sinbad, on loan; and A Day to Go Hunting (1956) is about precisely that.
The Chill Valley Hunt series has not met with unqualified approval. It is not too harsh to say that the distinguished children’s book critics Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig loathe this trilogy (but fortunately appear not to have read We Rode to the Sea, an infinitely worse book). Cadogan and Craig are entirely right to find some aspects of the hunting novels unpleasant. Goodbye to Hounds sees the hunt riding over gardens and being selfishly unmoved by their trespass:
We rode into the garden belonging to the largest of the two houses. We rode up some steps, across a rockery and through a tennis court. We heard shouts behind us, but we didn’t care because we had seen a little wicket gate giving access to the wood, and because this was probably our last hunt with the Chill Valley Foxhounds and we wanted to enjoy ourselves more than anything else in the world.
Whatever one’s views on hunting, this is not impressive. Christine was, however, an author who learned as she went, and later books go a little way towards acknowledging that there is another point of view. A Day to Go Hunting sees the frantic efforts of the hunt to keep hounds out of the deer park owned by a woman who disapproves of bloodsports. They fail; the Master goes to apologise, and after an hour’s hard talking over tea manages, in one of the book’s less credible moments, to talk the owner into supporting the hunt. It is highly unlikely that the hunting novels would be published today, but they provide an insight into the sport, and of how it began to change.
Christine’s books reflected more than just changes within hunting. The Pullein-Thompsons were not unaware of changes in society. Josephine’s Patrick’s Pony (1956) dealt with a boy living at an orphanage; Christine’s more credible The First Rosette of the same year had one of the earliest working-class heroes to appear in a pony book, David Smith. He is the youngest son of a family where money really is an issue: they genuinely struggle, and there is no money for riding lessons, let alone ponies. David manages to learn to ride through a combination of luck and graft: after he catches the pony of the Master’s daughter when she falls off, he is invited to tea and offered the chance to borrow a pony. He works for the pony’s keep at the kennels, and, for extras, does a paper round.
David’s poverty and need to work to achieve his ambition of showjumping success is contrasted with the altogether easier life of the Master’s daughter, Pat. She is expected to be a debutante, and sure enough the riding school she and David run together in The Second Mount (1957) is broken up once Pat moves to London. David is thrown back on his own devices in Three to Ride (1958), though by a massive stroke of luck it is Pat who rescues him after his disastrous experience working in a London riding school.
Although it was laudable to try to step outside the typically exclusive realms beloved of the pony book, Christine was a better writer when remaining within the world she knew best. Her working-class characters—who, after David, included Janice and Mick in The Lost Pony (1959) and the comprehensive school pupils from Riders on the March (1970)—are all prone to the same mercurial swoops from happiness to gloom. It is as though Christine’s desire to sympathise with the difficulties of being poor leads her to over-write their emotions. Without any direct experience herself, she seems to assume there must be a heightened emotional response to life generated by being brought up in difficult circumstances. This is particularly noticeable in the Janice and Mick books (The Lost Pony and For Want of a Saddle), where Janice exists in a constant state of resentful envy, her rare moments of cheer being transformed by the slightest setback into a cry against the unfairness of life. Her brother Mick, while more positive in outlook, is prone to the same see-sawing of emotions. Janice and Mick lived with their parents in a one-room flat, but have been put into foster care now that the arrival of twins has meant hopeless overcrowding. Their foster home is in the country, and brother and sister are both desperate to ride. They find a stray pony who has returned to his now-deserted old home, and they decide to look after him and treat him as their own. Predictably, disaster ensues when the pony goes down with colic, but they manage to find a vet. The pony is stabled with the now grown-up David Smith, of The First Rosette, who puts the family in touch with the possibility of a job and cottage. The family get the cottage, and the next book, For Want of a Saddle (1960), tells the story of what happens when the family move to the country. They have to work out how to survive through market gardening, and how to improve their riding on the landlord’s pony when they have no saddle. This seemingly Elysian improvement in their circumstances still does not seem enough to cheer Janice up:
Nothing was as she had expected it to be. She had expected a large rambling market garden, divided from a paddock by a wire fence, and in that paddock she had imagined a pony—the pony David Smith had said Mr Stone was anxious for them to ride. But the garden had been a garden for years, and had straight, neat, paths and fruit trees trained to climb walls, and there was no pony to be seen anywhere. It seemed to Janice that she was to be disappointed as she had been so often before. ‘Nothing ever comes right for us,’ she thought, staring at a cluster of snowdrops without seeing them. ‘One might as well give up hoping …’
Perhaps it is personal taste that makes the constant swinging between despair and delight wearing: Margery Fisher finds the children ‘engaging and probable’; the publisher Clarissa Cridland, however, finds them ‘rather annoying’.
Christine’s literary style does not help. Her constant use of the word ‘suddenly’ always seems to herald an emotional plunge of some sort:
He had meant to tell Pat about Tornado, to say, ‘You should have seen her up and down the hills and over the bunkers,’ but suddenly there didn’t seem any point any more. (The Second Mount, 1957)
We had been fighting to save a man’s life, or so it had seemed; and we had been fighting for our own survival. But now suddenly we were facing life as we had lived it for so long. Suddenly Tom Thumb’s cracked heels mattered … (Ride by Night, 1960)
Her characterisation is better when she is dealing with settings and events that are familiar to her; being freed from the need to construct an adventure allows her to concentrate on her characters rather than a whirl of events. Her most successful characters are her teenage girls. Jan in The Impossible Horse, determined to prove that the horse Benedictine is not dangerous, Olga in The Horse Sale (1960), shocked out of her passivity by the imminent sale of the borrowed horse she has schooled, and Debbie in I Rode a Winner (1973) are all realistic and sympathetic portraits.
