Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  My next great love among the Sworder ponies was a red roan mare of 13.2, named Lassie. She was very gentle and rather nervous, but I found I could supply the self-confidence she lacked and inspire her to race and jump. Mamma, observing my love, told me sadly we couldn’t afford the twenty-five guineas that Mr Sworder was asking. Later Christine, who disliked nervousness, bonded with Pennywise, an uncomplicated brown pony, and they made a wonderful gymkhana pair, while Diana developed a special relationship with Northwind, a blue roan, who needed great patience and persuasion.

  I disagree with Diana about our profits from the sale of the ponies. My memory is that Mr Sworder brought his customers to The Grove, we put the ponies through their paces, and if he got a good price he rewarded us with five pounds, which we paid into our joint bank account. It was only as teenagers that we did the actual buying and selling ourselves.

  Some of the ponies Mr Sworder brought us were not suitable for children and, as we grew more experienced, he would readily accept our verdict. There was Brecon, a little grey who reared, and Black Tulip, a mare of uncertain temper. He would then enter them in sales, without a warranty that they were safe for children; in those days, with no market for horse meat for human consumption, such ponies were worth very little.

  A publisher once asked me how we had produced so many pony books when most of the other writers in the genre only wrote two or three, and I’ve always believed that this was due to the huge cast of equine characters we met and rode as children.

  We had begun to win rosettes. I was never very good at dressing-up races or anything demanding haste, as Christine had written in her poetic description of the family:

  Josephine is low

  and very slow.

  I preferred to stay on the pony. The exception was the ‘Handy Hunter’ competition in which you had to dismount to lead your pony over a slip rail, but the rest of the course, including a trappy ‘in and out’, made it worthwhile. Rum enjoyed ‘Handy Hunters’ too, and always used her twitch lip to assist in the opening and shutting of the gate.

  Showjumping was becoming more and more important to me, and I remember my indignation at the Kidmore End Show when the judges – all male and very red-faced after an alcoholic lunch – muddled the results and called in one of the twins on Milky to receive Rum’s and my rosette. I wanted the parents to object but they wouldn’t. They said that life wasn’t fair. Everyone else seemed to think that as it was ‘all in the family’ it didn’t matter. I sulked.

  In those days middle-class parents had not become competitive, and unless you were a professional you simply hacked to the nearer shows and gymkhanas. We entered for only two or three each summer and the Woodcote Show on bank holiday Monday was the highlight of the year.

  The Three Jumpers. From top to bottom: Christine, Josephine and Diana

  It was the largest horticultural show in the district. Diana has described how one year a man died from drinking a wasp in his beer, and another year a member of the Royal Berkshire Regiment’s gymnastic team fell in a vaulting display and died because his comrades, not realizing that his neck was broken, carried him off without a stretcher. Both disasters were added to Mamma’s list of awful warnings.

  Then there was Captain Angier whose name always appeared on the programme as an entry for the adult jumping. But when, year after year, he scratched at the last minute, we didn’t believe his explanation that his horse was sick or lame; meanly, we suspected him of cowardice.

  The first year that I rode Rum in the children’s jumping we did well, but the parents wouldn’t let me take her in the adult class; instead they invited Christina Edward-Jones from the riding school to be her jockey. Rum had taught me exactly how she liked to be ridden round the boringly uniform courses of those days. Brush, stile and gate were all straightforward, but the wall unnerved her. Denis had made a wooden wall and painted grey stone on one side and red brick on the other, but she was still apprehensive and it was my duty to put the reins in one hand and give her a tap with the whip on take-off, which supplied the courage she needed. Then, turning up the centre of the ring for the solitary triple – her favourite fence – you rode fast and saying ‘Come on Rummy,’ gradually gave her her head. The audience always exclaimed ‘too fast,’ but that was how Rum liked it and she would soar over with a whisk of her tail.

  Christina’s round was clear until she took control and approached the triple at a measured pace. Deprived of her speed, and appalled at this interference, Rum made a spectacular last-minute refusal, shooting her rider head first among the poles. Christina got up shaken and with a rapidly blackening eye, and Cappy, who admired tall slim women, hurried her away for an unwise brandy. The next year I was allowed to jump Rum in the adult class. We won a prize, beating the local horse dealer, who was heard to say, ‘Damn that child!’ as he rode out of the ring.

  Sulhamstead Gymkhana. From left to right: Josephine on Rum 1st., Christine on Pilgrim 2nd., and Diana on Tarragona 3rd.

  Chapter Five

  Josephine

  Perhaps because of my Dustbin campaign, I was kitted out quite stylishly for Wychwood school. Mamma balked at the clothes list, providing, as she had with Denis, about half of the school’s demands. But when it came to linen I took new yellow sheets and towels and my eiderdown was re-covered to match. She refused to provide two pairs of slippers and walking shoes or Clark’s expensive sandals, but bought me an elegant pair of dancing shoes. Then at the last moment she presented me with a charming little writing case, the writing paper deckle-edged and yellow, with envelopes to match.

  Observing gloomily that ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close,’ Mamma seemed far more affected by our parting than I was. I minded leaving her and Pip and the ponies, but it was only until Friday and then I would be home for the weekend; she saw a gulf opening between us.

  I think the family finances must have improved at that moment, for Bouncing Bertha, incapable of twice-weekly drives to Oxford, vanished to the scrap-yard and a small, brand new Ford took her place.

  On the way to Oxford (the twins having stayed at home), Mamma told me about menstruation. Apparently a recent new girl at the school had suffered untold misery, for, believing she had a terrible illness, she had tried to conceal her bleeding. The brisk Scottish matron had now decreed that all mothers were to give their daughters full explanations, and instructions to go straight to her if a period began. As Mamma linked her explanation to Dinah being in season, which I knew to be a very messy business, I fervently hoped that my ‘curse’ would not start for years.

  The next revelation was the medical inspection. The doctor was unprepossessing; to me he seemed old and fat, and suitably named Higgins. He listened to my heart and chest and then announced with a series of irritable tuts that I had an inverted sternum. I knew I had a hollow, Mamma had it too, and Nana dismissed it as ‘the Cannan chest’. Then I was weighed and with even more tuts I was pronounced ‘severely underweight’ – at twelve and a half I still couldn’t make five stone. Then he found fault with my feet; they tended towards flatness.

  I don’t think I was cast down for long. I had to meet my ‘Housemother’, a remote and very senior girl called Diana. She was distantly kind, but won my respect by painting a stylish watercolour of two riders in my autograph book.

  We slept in mixed-aged groups, three or four to a room, with cubicle curtains around our beds, which were only to be drawn for dressing and undressing. I warned my room mates about my sleep-walking and explained that my sisters had found that, if ordered back to bed in a commanding voice, I obeyed.

  I think I found an enemy before I made a friend. Rosemary, who had darting eyes behind pale spectacles, was one of those unpopular people who batten on to new girls. The reason she was shunned was an obsession with Harrison Ainsworth, a long dead but still popular writer of historical romances. She could talk of nothing else and she spent all her spare time poring over telephone directories in search of people whose names were either Harrison or Ai
nsworth. Then she pestered them, writing or telephoning to ask if they were related to the writer.

  An early letter home states ‘I have just had a fight.’ I can’t remember this quarrel, but the saga of the dancing shoes which vanished, still in their packaging, the moment they were put in my locker, remains clear in my mind. The dancing mistress, displeased at my clumping through her class in leather slippers, demanded a new pair. Mamma, consulted at the weekend, resolutely refused. Various mistresses and I searched in vain. The lockers were in the basement passage, opposite the kitchens. It was a very public pathway, along which supplies were delivered; they had obviously been stolen. The following week I wrote to tell Mamma that it has been resolved: ‘No need to write an angry letter, they are getting me some more dancing shoes and paying for them … I hope my new henhouse has arrived.’

  I had been assigned to a form called the Lower Remove, but after a day or two I was told quite tactfully that as I hadn’t done Algebra or Geometry and didn’t speak French I was to be moved down. I didn’t mind. The Lower Remove people seemed too tall and sophisticated for me. I felt much more at home in M.1, where, though one of the oldest, I was still one of the smallest in the form. Lack of height meant I was hopeless at netball – I never shot a goal, even in practice – but it had one advantage, for in the endless games of horses I was in great demand as a jockey and never had to play the part of a horse.

  Wychwood had a policy of taking one or two mildly mentally handicapped or ‘backward’ girls, as they were called at that time. The intention was, apparently, that their company would teach the rest of us understanding, compassion and benevolence, but I’m not sure that it succeeded. We were told we must be kind to them and the staff set a good example, but it was hard to overcome physical repulsion, especially of Joy who breathed heavily and had clammy hands. Always picked last for teams, at dancing they were forced to partner each other and, if one was missing, our desperate rush to avoid partnering the lone one must have been both obvious and hurtful.

  The surplus women left without hope of marriage by the First World War had provided a multiplicity of schoolmistresses. They had grown middle-aged in a badly paid and not always chosen profession, but that first year at Wychwood they didn’t seem too bad. There was Miss Ruddock, the senior housemistress, severe, rather masculine, but admirably decisive, who taught us maths; Mademoiselle, mild and kindly, but over-tall with a long neck and prominent eyes, who had trouble in keeping order. Mamma, who regarded xenophobia as a sin, had forbidden me to torment the French mistress, so I sat passively while the bloods of the class used their rulers to catapult their rubber erasers in her direction. Miss Lyons, who had taught scripture in Mamma’s day, was also under her protection on the grounds of age. But she made the mistake of trusting us to do our homework and usually let us recite en masse what we were supposed to have learnt. This meant that only a few of the virtuous actually recited; the rest of us mouthed in unison. Once I was highly embarrassed by being singled out for a solo performance, but Scripture prep remained something that one skipped.

  Miss Vaughan, who taught English, was fair game. Though younger, she had been at the Battyhole with Mamma, who confessed to tormenting her endlessly, mostly by tying her long plaits to the back of her chair. I had a strong feeling that I reminded her of Mamma and that she disliked me. This was sad, as English was my favourite subject. I still learnt poetry for pleasure and had discovered that if I said a half-learnt poem to myself just before falling asleep, I was word perfect next morning – a great time-saver. I even liked grammar when it was a question of parsing sentences and underlining the component parts with crayons in different colours.

  Miss Chandler, with her wide frog mouth, was neutral towards me. She taught Latin from a cheerful modern picture book, the antithesis of the grim tomes we had used at Miss Fryer’s. I can’t remember who taught history and geography, but history, which I wanted to like, was incredibly dreary. We were ‘doing’ Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, which seemed a remote period for twelve-year-olds, few of whom had ever been abroad. As for geography, I was incapable of tracing neat maps – mine were always dishevelled and dirty – and I had no visual memory for the shapes of countries and continents.

  Carpentry I liked but not Miss Pinhorn who, fair and fringed with her hair in a bang, also taught nature. The workshop, with its smell of sawdust and gleaming tools, was in a loft above the wooden building known as the Hut, where we had prayers every morning. I enjoyed prayers; providing an undemanding interlude between breakfast and lessons, they gave one time to wake up. Gym was also taught in the Hut. My first lesson passed in a daze after someone had let the bar down on my head and, later, I found not knowing my right hand from my left a distinct disadvantage. Having no rhythm made it impossible to do exercises in time with the rest of the class, and being so small meant that the vaulting horse and the bar were always too high for me. My only gymnastic prowess was on the ropes; I shinned up them with ease and was accomplished at something called flying angels.

  As winter came on, the three houses – two facing the Banbury Road and the one in the Bardwell Road – all built in the red brick of Victorian North Oxford, became freezing cold. Most of us had chilblains; I had them on my hands and feet. We licked the ones on our hands and held them to the anthracite stove in our classroom. They oozed disgustingly, but Matron didn’t treat them, they were considered a normal hazard of childhood.

  The only civilized room open to me was the library. I had been directed there early on my arrival. Someone, eager to inform, had suggested that I hurry to a book which described the facts of life. I was given the title, shelf and even the page number.

  The book was a disappointment; sticking to birds and bees and flowers, it offered no real enlightenment on sex and was much less explicit about birth than my veterinary book. But I liked the library. There were several comfortable chairs, an open fire in winter, and window seats for the summer. As a sitting room it was under-used, the seniors had their own common room and the chatty were discouraged by the rule of silence. With one foot of my chair in the grate, I began to read my way through the books.

  My new friends were indignant. Angry faces would appear round the door and mouth demands that I played horses, Truth, or just came. I never understood why I belonged to the élite of my year, for all the others were good at either games or work and my only accomplishment was learning poetry. They wanted to call me Jo – unisex names were popular, we had a Tony and a Charlie – but my old hatred of Jo hadn’t abated. When I threatened them with disgusting names in retaliation, they tried Cheshire Cat, on the grounds that I was always smiling, but finally settled for J P-T.

  The younger half of the school was regularly swept by fashions. Crazes, we called them. The first one was for yo-yos. When I returned home and announced my desperate need for a yo-yo, Mamma was unmoved, but Cappy, whose wardrobe was full of discarded fashions, from spats to plus-fours, was more sympathetic. He posted me a yo-yo at school and bought them for the twins as well. The next craze, a term later, was for pot plants; it was essential to have some flowering object on the chest of drawers beside your bed. The third one was for wretched little white mice in tiny cages and Mamma refused to allow mine in the house. After the mouse’s lonely and miserable end, I think I became less susceptible to fashion and acquired a grim trophy from biology, a partially dissected toad preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. It too was banned from the house, so I kept my disembowelled corpse in the laurel bushes by the coalhole and when in a mean mood would brandish it at the twins, who fled shrieking.

  I rather enjoyed horrors at that time, but I liked them inanimate. On a nature lesson with Miss Pinhorn, fishing in a stagnant backwater near the Trout Inn at Wolvercote, I had the misfortune with Anne, my pair for the afternoon, to net a rare and utterly repulsive water beetle. It was the catch of the day and Miss Pinhorn was delighted. She pronounced it carnivorous and ordered a diet of raw meat. Anne, known as Bully, was a day girl, so she swiftly o
pted out and I had to make daily visits to the kitchen to beg raw meat and feed the unlovely creature, now in an aquarium in a junior classroom. Either I overfed it or the meat was not to its taste, for the glass tank and the classroom soon began to smell of rotting flesh. We were told to clean the aquarium, but I don’t think we did and eventually, after a weekend at home, I returned to find the tank empty; someone had thrown our monster out with the stinking water.

  The summer games field, where we played tennis and rounders, was some distance from the school on the way to the Rear, the dark tree-shaded stretch of the Cherwell where we swam. The timetable was tight and you had to run most of the way back if you were to be in time for Art. I began to lobby for a bicycle, my friends all had them. Mamma withdrew from the discussion, but Cappy said that if I had the money he would help me; we went to Reading and bought a second-hand one for 27/6d.

  Winnie was being courted by Georgie Parker who worked at the brewery in Henley and now spent his evenings at The Grove. As they were both poor conversationalists, teaching me to bicycle provided an occupation. They arranged testing courses in the paddock and, steering round jumps and bending poles, I gradually became efficient. Miss Lee made a habit of using her pupils with bicycles to deliver notes to her friends in North Oxford. When Mamma heard I had been used in this way she was furious and wrote one of her scathingly erudite letters of complaint. I suppose I suffered from a comeback, because in a letter home I told her, ‘I am very annoyed with you for writing to the Lee.’

  Schools didn’t like our reading matter. Denis’s housemaster, shocked at finding Philip Lindsay’s Here Comes The King in his room, and then learning that it had been provided by his mother, had only instructed, ‘Keep it to yourself, old man.’ But Wychwood wrote asking that my beloved veterinary book, ‘be kept for holiday consumption as it upset the other children’.