Heroines on Horseback by Jane Badger

Author:Jane Badger [Badger, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jane Badger Books

Hill wrote two series, Patience and Marjorie, which are classed as pony books. They were written for her daughter, Vicki, before she went to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. The books are holiday adventures centred on the characters of the children who ride the ponies rather than on the equines themselves—in the Marjorie series, Guy and Marjorie herself are infinitely more memorable than any pony they might have ridden. However he was regarded when the books came out, Guy, with his penchant for physical punishment and stern and unbending ways, seems rather strong meat today:

‘You mustn’t beat Peter. Why, he was nearly drowned—’

‘That was my fault,’ Peter broke in. ‘I deserved a licking. And it’s no use kicking up a fuss, Pan, because it’s over and done with, and we’re all square again, aren’t we, Guy?’

Guy nodded gravely. (Border Peel, 1950)

Josephine Pullein-Thompson’s male characters meet their female equivalents on level ground; Guy is more likely to sling the recalcitrant female over his shoulder. At least these two series avoid what Angela Bull calls the ‘syrupy romance’ of the ballet books, although Guy is a character chafing at the pony book bit to escape into his rightful home, the romance novel.

The Patience books form a shorter series but a much more endearing one, at least for the first two books. Patience is a character with considerable charm, less brutal than Guy and less downright difficult than Marjorie. Patience’s elder brother, David, the hero of the first two books, is patient and kind; he teaches the difficult Judy the right way to ride and behave without bullying. It was Guy, however, whom Lorna Hill’s daughter and her friends wanted, and, after a testing-the-water appearance in It Was all through Patience (1952), it was Guy they got. David is marginalised in So Guy Came Too (1954), and in The Five Shilling Holiday (1955) he is removed from the action altogether after an accident.

There was not a great deal of competition on the ballet book front; there was considerably more, and better, in the pony book field, and Lorna Hill’s books do not measure up. Their strong sense of place and the occasional shaft of decent characterisation are not enough to make them stayers in the race for pony book glory.

Kathleen Mackenzie (1907–1993) also went in for family adventure rather than conventional tales of gymkhanas and wanting a pony. Families, friends and their relationships were what really interested her. Her first book, The Four Pentires and Jimmy, was the start of a series featuring the Pentire family, Sarah, Frances, Vivien and Jane, who live on a farm. Characters are added as the series progresses, until in Vicky and the Pentires the author is handling a large cast. The author had plenty of inspiration in her own background for such multitudes of characters. She was born in the Argentine, but returned to England when she was three. Her father was one of ten, her mother one of twenty, and she herself was one of eight.

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