Fireside reads

Long evenings and roaring festive fires give us the chance to bask in childhood nostalgia and dwell on our favourite equestrian fiction, finds Madeleine Silver

“THERE is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham,” says coachman John Manly in Anna Sewell’s 1877 Black Beauty, the tale of a sweet-natured colt who goes from a life of comfort to one of hard labour and cruelty.

“It’s the great classic of horsey books,” says author Jilly Cooper, who was “absolutely obsessed with ponies” as a child and begged her parents to buy her first pony Rufus — “a complete villain” — while on a holiday to Cornwall after the war.

“Black Beauty is so sad. But on the other hand, if you can bear it, it’s really a crusading book, telling you all the cruel things that people mustn’t do to horses, and I don’t think those sorts of books will ever date.” There were other, lighter-hearted tales that Jilly would devour under torchlight at boarding school, too, including sisters Josephine, Diana and Christine Pullein Thompson’s gung-ho tales of horse-mad girls.

“What fascinates me about those Pullein Thompson books is that they were actually early romantic novels,” insists Jilly. “There would be a girl from the Pony Club who was absolutely useless, but then gets better and better. And then there would be a man running the Pony Club who was a Colonel or something, with burning eyes. He always recognises the girl and says, ‘Well done, well done,’ at the end, and she is always terribly delighted.”

FOR grand prix dressage rider Anna Ross, growing up in an unhorsey family in North London, it was the common theme of a pony-less girl triumphing in her quest to ride that fired her up.

“I wanted to be Jill — she was my idol,” Anna says of Ruby Ferguson’s series about the straight-talking Jill Crewe.