Pony Books

I love horses.

I love the look of them; I don't think a more beautiful or noble animal exists. I love the feel of them. I love the smell of them. I love to be in their company.

There must have been a time when I didn't love horses, but if there was I no longer remember it. Like most female horse-lovers, the passion began in my childhood. It was fuelled by my other passion: reading.

I inhaled books and read anything with words on it. But I think my formative pony books were the ones about a teenage girl called Jill. If I recall correctly Jill was the only child of a single mother, although this seems unlikely given that Jill was growing up in some form of idyllic 1950s rural setting, where it was possible to accommodate not one, but two, ponies in the orchard at the back of the house. If Jill had really been the offspring of an unwed mother then I'm sure the wrath of Jill's village would have descended on her in full force and Jill would have been banned from keeping even a pet goldfish, let alone a pair of ponies. She would almost certainly have been prevented from participating in the delightful Pony Club activities I took so much pleasure in reading about, for fear that she would spread her illegitimate germs to the clean-living offspring of the local pony gentry.

I suspect then that Jill's father was 'away' somewhere, or dead, and that Ruby Ferguson, author of these delightful tracts, planned things this way to demonstrate that Jill wasn't an over-privileged spoiled brat, for whom the pony was merely a necessary country-pursuit accessory, but instead a young girl (like me!) with a passion for ponies and the drive and independence to pursue this passion despite exceptionally difficult circumstances, ie. having only one parent, living in a tiny cottage, and having only enough grazing for just the two ponies. Such trying times, Jill!

About two years ago I started to try and locate the Jill books through the marvellous ABE website. ABE for me sums up what the world wide web should really be about. It's a big on-line shop made up of a million little local stores. Myriad local second-hand booksellers from places I've never heard of and am never likely to visit, such as Goring-by-Sea and Tynewydd list their stock and sell it to you on-line. While searching the site you can almost see the shop in your mind's eye: it's straight out of a Dickens novel, painted a washed out shade of navy, with dusty bay-windows and a door that squeaks. Inside it smells of damp paper, moth-balls and lavender. There is a messy desk, overflowing with old-fashioned paperwork: inventories, envelopes, brown paper and string. The shelves are ramshackle and only the aged proprietor understands his complicated cataloguing system. But somehow he has managed to drag his be-tweeded frame into the 21st century and has lovingly (and frequently descriptively) transferred the contents of his beloved bookshop onto the world-wide-web, so that we can all become browsers in the world's biggest 'local' bookshop. It's pure genius.

Ironically for a booklover, I don't actually like bookshops. I find the act of choosing a book excruciatingly difficult. Whenever I find myself in a bookshop I usually find myself picking up books I've already read and quite seriously considering buying them again. I just can't choose.

I had no such trouble when I was a young teenager reading pony books. There were the nine 'Jill' books for starters which I read and re-read until the pages fell out. But I never kept them, which is why I found myself on the aforementioned ABE site trying to track them down. I managed to do just that, but fell (as I so often do) at the final hurdle, when it came to coughing up the readies to have Mr Pumblychick of Little Fotheringhampton wrap my book in brown paper and string and post it to me.

By the time I'd added on the postage, the whole thing started to look like an expensive exercise in nostalgia. Should I go back? Do I want to re-read the books and discover that I no longer love and admire Jill as I once did? Will my romantic visions of passing the books to my 13-year old pony-obsessed daughter be met with derisive laughter?

Or was Jill the real McCoy?

There's only one way to find out ...