Pony-mad

Did your mother, like mine, throw them out in the end? They stayed on the bookshelves in my old bedroom long after I’d left home, waiting for the next generation of girls to join our family, but my sister and I produced boy after boy. When, after my mother died, I cleared out her house, I looked for my Jill books, but they were all gone.

Ruby Ferguson wrote nine ‘Jill’ books, of which Jill’s Gymkhana is the first. Originally published in 1949 by Hodder & Stoughton, it was beautifully illustrated by ‘Caney’, and priced at 7s 6d. A review by Frances Vivien in the Observer of 9 May that year declared it ‘a perfect pony story for girls’. Why did I need the books? Well, I was putting together a talk for a girls’ school on how I became a sportswriter. This meant retracing a route back through teenage crushes on footballers, to watching the horse-racing on Saturday afternoons with my father, to my prepubescent pony mania when Jill was my first role model. It began on the summer morning in 1955 when our family moved house. While the pantechnicon was being unloaded, a diminutive girl with freckles and a corolla of tawny curls strolled along from the house next door. I recognized her; we were at the same school and her name was Jo, but we had never spoken because she was in the form above me. Nor did we speak now. She bypassed me and went directly to my mother: ‘Would Julia like to play?’ My mother explained that I had chickenpox and in consequence was confined with my spots and germs in the back of the family saloon. ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said the world’s most self-assured 8-year-old. ‘I’ve had it. You can’t get it twice, you know.’ She tapped on the car window to get my attention: ‘Do you ride?’ ‘Oh gosh, yes,’ I said excitedly, while mentally crossing my fingers since my sole experience had been a humiliating episode in which a pony called Snowball had bolted with me when I was 4. I’d grabbed a strand of barbed wire as a handbrake: six and a half decades on, the scar is still visible, a faint, pale forward slash on my middle finger. But off I went with Jo to the Buckhurst Hill Riding School: two lessons a week, eight shillings a go. Jo must have seen through my fib because I fell off a lot, but she had obviously decided to mentor me. ‘There’s a book you might enjoy called Jill’s Gymkhana,’ she said. ‘It’s about learning to ride.’ It was about more than that. I grew up during the great post- Second World War era of pony books and eventually my shelves included almost every title in print, from Monica Edwards’s Romney Marsh books and the American series by Mary O’Hara that began with My Friend Flicka, to the entire output of the Pullein-Thompson sisters, Christine, Diana and Josephine (a horsey version of the Brontës though a good deal more cheerful). But the ‘Jills’ were the first, best-loved and most frequently reread. They were witty and irreverent, did not talk down, and introduced me to one of the greatest joys of novel-reading, that sudden moment of self-recognition – ‘Yes, that’s exactly how I feel.’ Ruby Ferguson was already an established author when she wrote them but, in the same way that Richmal Crompton wrote bags of novels for adults but had to settle for immortality via Just William, her earlier output of mysteries and romantic fiction is now pretty well forgotten. Born Ruby Ashby in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, in 1899, the daughter of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, she was educated at the Girls’ Grammar School, Bradford, and left St Hilda’s, Oxford, in 1922 with a degree in English Literature. What a lot of dreary jobs brainy women had to settle for back then. For a while she was a secretary; then she did some teaching and worked in a political organization. She loathed both, but at least they allowed her to do some writing. Her first break came when Manchester City News took a series of her short detective stories, after which she edited the Woman’s Page of British Weekly. At one point she was a staffer on the Manchester Guardian and moonlighted as a reader for Hodder & Stoughton. They were to be her chief publishers. Part of the generation that lost all its men, she did not marry until her mid-thirties. Her husband, Samuel Ferguson, was a comfortably-off widower with two grown-up sons, Bobbie and Alan, with whom she got on well. She was 50 when she embarked on the Jill books, which she wrote for Bobbie’s four daughters, the oldest three of whom appear as the rambunctious April, May and June Cholly-Sawcutt. Jill teaches them to ride in Jill Has Two Ponies, number three in the running order. It’s possible to go into such detail because of some fine detective work by Alison Haywards, whose article on the author appeared in the Newsletter of the Children’s Books History Society for April 2005. The text is accessible thanks to Jane Badger, author of Heroines on Horseback: The Pony Book in Children’s Fiction, who has a glorious website dedicated to the genre (just Google Jane Badger Books). By the time I found it, I had already shopped online for Jill’s Gymkhana. Having boggled at the cost of early-edition hardbacks, I settled for a 1985 Knight paperback. It had a not very interesting photo cover, but it would have to do. As soon as I looked inside I had a shock. I knew that when Knight, the paperback division of Hodder & Stoughton, had taken on the Jill books they had changed the name of her pony Black Boy to Danny Boy. Subsequently they relented, and I was delighted to find that in my version he was Black Boy once again. What I wasn’t prepared for was a second change that had not been amended. Black Boy was . . . a piebald? Surely not. I was outraged, gripped by a kind of near-Aspergic literalism. How could you call a piebald pony Black Boy? Had I remembered it wrong? I couldn’t have. Black Boy was, with Jill, the book’s main character – ‘sturdy but graceful, about fourteen hands, with a nice action and very intelligent face’. He had velvety lips and loved carrots, apples and jumping. And he was black. Thank goodness for Jane Badger’s website. Here I found thumbnails of the original covers, and here it was, the Caney illustration I remembered of Jill in her brown hacking jacket and fawn jodhpurs astride Black Boy, a red rosette fluttering on his bridle, his coat as black as an old LP. The original Black Boy was not a piebald. The publisher must have changed his colour when they renamed him Danny Boy. My memory hadn’t been at fault. What a relief. So, Jill’s Gymkhana. Here’s the plot. Eleven-year-old Jill Crewe has come to live in reduced circumstances with her mother in a village called Chatton. A briskly dealt with tragedy has whisked Mr Crewe out of the picture, and gallant, principled Mummy holds the tent up by writing dreadfully twee books for children. Jill cannot ride so, in horse-mad Chatton, she is ostracized, but she befriends a pony, the aforementioned Black Boy. His owner, Farmer Clay, offers to sell him for £25, which is well beyond Jill’s means, but life takes a turn for the better when Mummy sells the serial rights to The Little House of Smiles. Mummy shares some of the bounty with Jill (‘Thirty pounds! Oh crumbs!’) and she buys Black Boy. The story – told, like the other books, in the first person – follows Jill and her best friend Ann Derry through a series of adventures as she learns, with the help of Martin Lowe, a wheelchair-bound former RAF pilot, to ride Black Boy and care for him (‘everyone knows that the best quality soap-flakes are the nicest thing for washing a horse’s tail’). She has to earn the money for his keep, resulting at one point in an amusingly doomed Bring and Buy sale, and she turns an outhouse into a stable (‘all sensible people know that really messy manual labour is one of the jolliest things in the world, when you are dressed for it and it doesn’t matter how filthy you get’). Boys, of course, she treats as equals, rather than Gods Come Down: ‘Even if you are sixteen you’re not all that marvellous,’ she tells Martin’s supercilious nephew, Pierce. The male characters though, while benevolent, don’t come to life in the way the females do. Ann Derry’s mother is crisply described as ‘living in a perpetual state of thinking there’s going to be a disaster’, and the slightly fearsome Mrs Darcy, owner of one of Chatton’s riding schools, ‘was the sort of person who always seemed to have an exclamation mark after everything she said; that is why I have put one’. Jill’s enemy is the snooty Susan Pyke, who has rich parents and a string of effortlessly superior ponies, and who leads the laughter at Jill’s initial attempts to ride. I had a Susan Pyke in my life. She mocked the elastic-waisted trews and school lace-ups in which I turned up for early riding lessons, my mother having deferred kitting me out properly until I’d proved this was more than a phase. Susan, of course, wears ‘a perfect black jacket and cream cord breeches, and black boots, and a white shirt and yellow tie, and a new hat and cream string gloves’. To show off her trophies and her latest pony, Susan invites Jill and Ann to tea. Chez Pyke, they meet Susan’s mother, ‘who was majestic and had a deep voice’.

‘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 little habit with my long fair curls hanging down to my waist.’

Soon Susan is satisfyingly shown up at the Lentham Park Children’s Gymkhana, where she whips her pony about the head and is ordered from the ring by the judge. Jill triumphs ultimately with a clear round and first prize in the under-16s jumping at Chatton Show:

I was frightfully happy, of course, but I didn’t feel the least bit cocky or conceited, because I knew that I’d had a lot of luck . . . And I have written this book to show what a quite ordinary person can do with a quite ordinary pony, if he or she really cares about riding.

I can’t be the only Jill enthusiast who wishes she still had theoriginal, as well as its sequels. I made do with the thumbnails of the covers on Jane Badger’s website. They were my equivalent of Proust’s madeleine. I relived my hauntings of the bookshop in Loughton High Street in the hope of a Jill book I had not yet read; my dreams of competing, just like Jill, at the Horse of the Year Show at the Harringay Arena; the joys of reading in the bath with Jill Enjoys Her Ponies, the publication of which coincided with the arrival in our household of the bath tray, a metal rack that had enough room for a book to be propped alongside soap and flannel. I remembered that the name of one character, Mercy Dulbottle (a bit of a drip), had made me giggle so much I crawled on the floor. I absolutely did. In Jill Has Two Ponies (the title self-explanatory), the name of Jill’s new pony is Rapide. I can still hear my big sister cackling with laughter when I pronounced Rapide ‘Rap-eyed’ (because, as Jill observes, ‘the most shattering thing in the world is being laughed at’). But what would a 9-year-old of today make of them? Would they seem dated, even off-putting, with their tacit approval of hunting? The language is of their (and my) time, when people were ‘jolly decent’, when if something nice happened you were ‘frightfully bucked’, and when people exclaimed, ‘Gosh!’ and ‘Oh, rather!’ The tea bell with which Mummy summons Jill and Ann must be as obsolete as other artefacts of a mid-twentieth-century childhood, like combinations and cod-liver oil, and surely no one has eaten sardine sandwiches since 1979. But then again, Enid Blyton’s school stories, where everyone goshes and gollies like mad, are still in print, relished by new generations of little girls. And anyway, ponies don’t date. So then I did some more digging around on the Internet and discovered that reprints had been available recently from Fidra Books, although, disappointingly, only Jill’s Riding Club was on offer when I looked. But one way and another they have stayed in print longer than any other series of pony books. I think it’s because Jill is such an engaging character. Self-reliant, enterprising, honourable and full of joie de vivre, she is a wonderful example of how to be a girl. A few weeks after its arrival, I received an email from the online bookseller: ‘Julia, did Jill’s Gymkhana by Ruby Ferguson live up to your expectations?’ Oh gosh, yes.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 58 ©Julie Welch 2018