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Flambards
Flambards, 1967
The Edge of the Cloud, 1969
Flambards in Summer, 1969
Flambards Divided, 1981

Who Sir? Me Sir?
Who Sir? Me Sir?, 1983
Downhill All the Way, 1988
The Boy Who Wasn’t There, 1992

The Swallow (High Horse) Series
Swallow, 1995
The Swallow Summer, 1996
Swallow the Star, 1997

Maybridge
Fly-by-Night, 1968
The Team, 1975
Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer, 1970
The Beethoven Medal, 1971
Prove Yourself a Hero, 1977
A Midsummer Night’s Death, 1978
The Last Ditch (Free Rein), 1984
Marion’s Angel, 1979
K M Peyton: Series

K M Peyton has written several series, and has other books which have sequels.  The
Maybridge series is her longest: not all of them are pony books (Ruth, by the time she meets Patrick Pennington, the pianist hero of Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer, has put ponies firmly behind her) but Peter and Jonathan continue their equine careers, more or less willingly.  

Flambards became a television series starring Christine McKenna, and is probably K M Peyton’s best known set.  It is an historical series, set at before and during the First World War.

The Swallow (High Horse) series of three books concerns another pony mad girl.  Like Ruth in Fly-by-Night, she loves a pony who is unsuitable, and again like Ruth she has help from a horsey family, but Rowan does not quite have the drive of Ruth.

The Who Sir? Me Sir? Series (of which I have only read the first, alas) starts with a well above the average team event story.  
Pony books are often dismissed as genre fiction, but K M Peyton is proof that writing within a genre doesn’t stop you from being good.wp2a7dc538_0f.jpg  When I re-read her Fly-by-Night and The Team, I am constantly have those magical moments when you read something and think “Yes - that is exactly how  that is.”    K M Peyton knew  Antonia Forest, and their brilliance with characterisation is in some ways similar.  Her books are consistently good.  When I first read Blind Beauty, the dog went unwalked, and children had to forage for themselves.
She has been writing since she was 9, with her first book being published when she was 15 [Sabre, the Horse from the Sea].  Her training though was in painting, at Kingston School of Art and then Manchester Art School, where she met her husband, Mike, an ex prisoner-of-war.  They married when she was 21, and as they both loved sailing, that is what her first books as K M Peyton were about.  (I, who am anti-boat and dreadfully sea-sick, find them absolutely enthralling.)  Their first pony was Cracker, an unbroken New Forest bought for their daughter Hilary.  The traumas of breaking Cracker in and being a Pony Club parent found their way into Fly-by-Night and many of  the subsequent books.
After the success of Flambards,  Kathleen acquired an agent, Michael Motley.  “... I didn’t need an agent, but he... asked me out to lunch, not to talk about writing, but about racing.  Of course I fell for this, which resulted in my acquiring both an agent and a race-horse.”  Wise Words, the race-horse,  never won, but from her involvement with racing sprang some of her best books.  
She is still writing, and has published a book a year for the last sixty years, with the most recent being Minna’s Quest.  No Turning Back is due out later in 2008.
Finding the books
Most of K M Peyton’s books are easy to find, though her books written under her maiden name, Kathleen Herald, are harder, Crab the Roan being very difficult indeed, possibly the hardest.  First editions of the Flambards series tend to be pricey (though they have come down in recent years).  The Last Ditch (Free Rein) and Marion’s Angels can be tricky, but are not impossible.  
Links
K M Peyton has her own website.
Fidra Books are republishing some of K M Peyton’s works.  So far they have done Fly-by-Night, and The Team.
The Dictionary of Literary Biography has an entry on K M Peyton

K M Peyton (1929 - )

 

 

Bibliography

Photos:

Thank you to Dawn Harrison, Sue Howes and Susan Bourgeau for all their help with photos and bibliographical information.