Tales from the countryside

Nostalgia to one generation, new to another - there's plenty of enchanting and instructive children's hunting fiction to be found, says Rory Knight Bruce

- Rory Knight Bruce

IT is hard to imagine now that there was any rewarding children's fiction before Harry Potter or, for an older generation, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. But children's hunting fiction has been quietly popular and around for more than a century. It is a genre at which some teenage boys might smirk for its giddy innocence, being largely aimed at pony-mad girls.

But within these books are useful instructions as to how young foxhunters should care for ponies, terriers and puppy walks, and learn to live a life in a vestige of rural normality.

Talk to any adult brought up in the countryside and they will tell you they were weaned on Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter and the film of The Belstone Fox. But there are many lesser-known stories and anthologies that mine this happy landscape with humour and, often, practical advice.

The doyennes of children's hunting fiction are surely the remarkable Pullein-Thompson sisters (Josephine, Diana and Christine) who, between them, wrote more than 100 books. They were, in part, inspired by their mother, Joanna Cannan, herself the author of They Bought Her A Pony.

The Pullein-Thompson titles speak of their innocence: Pony Club Camp, Riding with the Lyntons, I Carried the Horn and Goodbye to Hounds are just examples.

In many ways, they were worthy successors to Anna Sewell's only novel, Black Beauty, published in 1877 and acknowledged as the sixth-best seller in the English language. By telling the story of a horse's life in the form of an autobiography and describing the world through a horse's eyes, Sewell broke new literary ground and allowed the genre for pony stories to flourish.

In the trilogy We Hunted Hounds, I Carried the Horn and Goodbye to Hounds, published in 1949 and the early 1950s, Christine PulleinThompson drew on her family upbringing in rural Oxfordshire where she learnt to ride at seven and in her teenage years ran a riding school.