Persia on Exmoor

I have never been on horseback. The best I can offer is a snap of myself, captioned ‘September 1937, Littlehampton’. Aged 31 2, hair in bunches, apprehension in eyes, I am installed on the back of a donkey with the sea as a backdrop.

The photograph in question fell out of a recently rediscovered book, The Far-Distant Oxus, in which horses – or rather ponies – play the leading role. The date of publication is 1937, the very year of the snap, though I am fairly sure that the book itself did not reach my hands until ten years later. Did I buy it myself with a Christmas or birthday book-token after foraging through the shelves of Bredon’s bookshop in Brighton? Or did a clever aunt send it to me? I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter. What I can still recall is how I fell in love with it – with the dust jacket, the line drawings and the subject: ponies, Exmoor and children. I was totally ignorant of the first two but reckoned I did know something about the third. The Far-Distant Oxus is a story of adventures: six children with six ponies, tales of camping, rafting, building their own hut, enjoying a freedom from parental watchfulness that amazed me even then. And, perhaps best of all, it was written by two girls, clever boarding-school girls, Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock. Together they wrote the twenty-three chapters, adding bold pen-and-ink illustrations and maps, all drawn by Pamela. The final draft was bravely sent off to Arthur Ransome, whose own books were clearly an inspiration (boats in his case, not ponies), and he in turn sent it to his publisher Jonathan Cape, who read it, loved it and immediately published it. I dreamed of writing like that, and then forgot about it. Until 1974. By this time I was part-owner of an Arab dhow in Abu Dhabi, still had not attempted horse-riding, but was at least writing a weekly column for the local English-language newspaper. This explains why I found myself lurking on the fringes of an expatriate reception one evening, looking for material. The material found me – Helen, a sixth-generation Australian, brought up in Melbourne, with no exposure to horses, but a greedy reader of books of all kinds. How did we establish that, at the age of 12 and separated by more than 10,000 miles, we had both read and loved The Far-Distant Oxus and could still remember its plot? By the time we did so we must have covered a great deal of conversational ground, not all of it to do with books. One thing we certainly didn’t discuss was the book’s title, nor the quotations prefacing each chapter. Their source is in fact revealed in the text, but Matthew Arnold’s poem Sohrab and Rustum meant nothing to me at the age of 12 and still didn’t thirty years later, when I actually went to live in Iran. I had forgotten that those clever girls had culled from Arnold’s poem versions of his Persian place-names to disguise those of their beloved Exmoor landscape: Aderbijan, Siestan, Mount Elbruz, Organje, the Aral Sea – names and places that were to become familiar to me. But the book itself was not lost, just straying, packed carelessly at the bottom of a travelling trunk. It is only now on rereading it that I find myself playing the detective. How was it possible for six children to live in such freedom, far from adult control? Where were the parents? There is a reference to ‘coming home from Sumatra’ and of the sea being ‘as far away as Africa . . . as far away as Mummy and Daddy’. Three of the children lodge with the local farmer and his wife, who hire them ponies and do puzzled duty as their guardians; two others have an indulgent father (‘Daddy doesn’t mind what we do’) living in a fine house on Exmoor where he tends his roses and from which he usefully absents himself to London for as long as a week at a time – no sign of a mother. And in the case of the sixth and most charismatic member of the group, young Maurice, no home or adult appears in his life at any point. He does, however, have a black labrador, Ellita (‘the Persian for dragon’, he claims), a dashing pony, a sleeping-bag and mysterious supplies of money. In short, he’s a dark-haired romantic figure, though he’s only 14. I assume that the two authors were already in love with Heathcliff and Darcy, of whom I then knew nothing. It is Maurice who becomes the mastermind of their adventures. From concealed resources he provides building materials for their hut, food for campfires, money for sausages from the local shop. All their small adventures – sleeping on haystacks, riding moorland trails, saving a mare and foal from an Exmoor roundup, winning a pig at a fête – are training for the big idea: a three-day expedition down the River Oxus to the Aral Sea. So they build a raft. Then they stock it, cunningly get adult permission, and set off with six ponies, taking turns to ride or to pole their craft along. There are setbacks, of course – shallow waters, mist, detours, errors. Until ‘“The sea! The sea!” Bridget cried ecstatically.’ Pouring rain, wet matches, a lack of food on the way back, nothing detracts from that great moment. Spirits only sag when the holiday ends. But Maurice plays a final card. With dry matches he lights four farewell beacons across the moors before wordlessly riding off into the night. ‘“He’s gone”, said Frances.’ It was Maurice who first made my heart beat. Another enduring influence on my tastes was Pamela Whitlock’s illustrations. I loved her two maps, especially the one which traces the journey of their self-built raft. And then there are lists. The children write a list of expeditionary essentials which opens with six hammocks and runs through thirty items, ending with dog biscuits and saddle dusters. I realize now that it is to The Far-Distant Oxus that I owe my own irritating obsession with lists, for shopping, cooking, reading, travelling. I suspect that if I were 13 today, preparing for a trip down the Oxus on a raft, my list would begin and end with a mobile phone. Times have changed. Still, if you are lucky enough to have young teenagers in your life who love ponies and long for adventure, give them a copy of The Far-Distant Oxus and ask in return for their own list of essentials required on such a trip. But first of all, before handing it over, read it yourself and travel back in time to the freedom of those prelapsarian, pre-Second World War years. Oh, and read Sohrab and Rustum as well – preferably out loud. It’s stirring stuff.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 38 © Cynthia Clinch 2013