PBOTD: 2nd April, Mary Gervaise - Ponies and Holidays

-
Mary Gervaise had a particular talent as an author: although she produced children's stories which fitted neatly into popular genre fiction categories, she still managed to concentrate on what interested her most: families, and the outsider. 

Mary Gervaise was one of the pseudonyms used by Joan Mary Wayne Brown (1906-1998). Her own school career was brief, being brought to an end by ill health. She began to write, and produced 66 books as Mary Gervaise. Many of them are school stories, but there is among them a percentage which can just about be categorised as pony books. Her Belinda and Farthingale series contain ponies, but the most pony-orientated of her books is the G for Georgia series.

I featured the first, A Pony of Your Own, in an earlier PBOTD. In it, Georgia overcomes her fears, goes to a splendid school which has riding on the curriculum, and gets given a pony in the final pages of the book. Although nominally set at school, remarkably little of the book's action takes place there. Mary Gervaise seemed to take every opportunity to get her characters out of school. Out of a ten book school series, only four of them are set during term time.

Lutterworth 1st edition,1950, illus E Herbert Whydale
The second, Ponies and Holidays (1950) is set, as the title suggests, in the holidays. Mary Gervaise did like an outsider, and in Patience she has one. Patience has lived with her elderly guardian for as long as she can remember, and starts school at The Grange. She is like a survival from another age: her clothes, her manners and her speech are all from another century.

Georgia Kane, the series' heroine, is an essentially kind girl, and she takes Patience under her wing. When the holidays arrive, Patience comes home with Georgia, and her friend Susan, whose parents are off doing other things. She is absorbed into the family, but strange things start to happen.

Armada paperback, 1970
Georgia's beloved ginger cat, King Toby, disappears. And then the Kane family meet Patience on a horse, but she cuts them completely dead. They do not understand it. This was always my favourite book of the series: I loved the blank incomprehension of the Kanes as "Patience" ignores them, and I loved the way the long lost twin is found (sadly having been captured as a baby by gypsies, who tend in pony books to lead a prescribed and stereotyped life).

Patience is returned to her birth family, with a large house, plenty of money, and all the ponies she could want. I wonder how many of us wondered, having read this, if we were actually changelings, and our true parents (complete of course with rows of immaculate stables, filled with splendid horses) would soon come and claim us? It certainly added a new dimension to the pony-owning fantasy.

Ponies and Holidays was first published by Lutterworth in 1950, and was illustrated by E Herbert Whydale. This edition had at least one reprint. The next, and last reprint, was an Armada edition that appeared in 1970, with a photographic cover.

~  0  ~

For more on the author, see her page on my website.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more

The Way Things Were: Pony Magazine in the 1960s

-
Image
As you have probably realised by now, as a child, I was pony-obsessed. My favourite monthly reading was Pony Magazine, which I read cover to cover: every advert; every word. I recently bought a set of Pony Magazines from the 1960s. I actually took Pony in the 1970s, but there wasn’t a lot of difference between the decades in the style and contents of the magazine. One advert which took me instantly back to that state of childhood wanting; longing for things I couldn’t have, and trying to work out what I could do to afford them, was for Jacatex riding clothes. How I loved that ad. The Pat hacking jacket; the Pat riding mac and the Pat jodhpurs. Who was Pat? Was there a Pat? Or were the clothes just something that was off pat? It was never explained. Jacatex adverts didn’t change much over the years. The 1969 ad below is the same one that I remember from the 1970s, a cheerful pony girl in immaculate clothes. I don’t know whether Jacatex ever did haul themselves into the modern age a
Read more