After being criticised by the Times Literary Supplement for not knowing enough about her subject, ballet, in her first school story, A Sprite at School, she made sure she did her research when she decided to write a pony book. This change of tack came about after she was begged to write a pony story by a neighbour’s pony mad daughter. She stayed on a farm, watched the horses and talked to the groom. She said that as her speciality was school stories, she combined the ponies with school. She was the first to do this, being followed by authors like Mary Gervaise and Peggie Cannam.
Constance White integrated ponies into the school format: the ponies are vital, and not simply tacked on. Sue Sims said “they are important in so far as they affect the girls and their relationships; Susan’s growing maturity can be equated to the w ay she copes with the animals.” Susan in fact, after her initial disobedience when she lames the pony Cobber, is always firmly on the side of the ponies. However badly she gets on with the girls, she is always anxious to do her best by the ponies.
Both pony books and school stories often have a strong redemptive theme: The School or The Pony is often the means whereby a bolshy girl is humanised and made acceptable. Poor Susan in Ponies at Westways had little chance but to succumb under the twin redemptive powers of School and Pony.
Ponies at Westways is an engaging read. Many girl’s school stories have the heroine defeating some criminal or other, and sure enough Susan does this, though it doesn’t sit terribly well with the rest of the book. This apart, I enjoyed the way Susan thawed out, and I particularly liked her tentative championship of the stand in headgirl, Fenella.
Sims and Clare describe Constance M White as, though not in the first rank, “well worth reading”, and I think she is.
Finding the books: Ponies at Westways is very easy to find, having been reprinted several times. Nutmeg Comes to Westways and Dream Pony are quite hard to find, and tend, for pony books, to be pricey.
Sources:
The Encyclopaedia of Girl’s School Stories: Sue Sims & Hilary Clare, Ashgate 2000
An article on the author by Sue Sims
Ponies at Westways
Hutchinson, London, 1949
Reprinted 1959, cover by Sheila Rose
Many thanks to Amanda Dolby for the pictures.
Susan is sent from Rhodesia, which she misses desperately, to school on Dartmoor.
At
first she is difficult: prickly and bolshy, and she lames a pony who has just
recovered,
as well as alienating herself from most of the girls. As she moves through
the school,
she reaslises people are not what they seem at first, and develops her
relationships
with everyone at the school: equine and human.
Nutmeg Comes to Westways
Hutchinson, London, 1956
Dream Pony
Country Life, London, 1951, illus John Goodall, 79 pp.
Many thanks to Lisa Catz for the picture.
“This is the story of a little gipsy girl who passionately longed for a pony of her
own -
as the result of an encounter with a more fortunate small
boy, were wondrously made real.”
Bibliography: pony books only
