For the #1954Club: Jill Enjoys Her Ponies by Ruby Ferguson

I was sitting on a pile of gravel outside a field gate feeling absolutely browned off. I don't mean a bit fed up. I mean crying like a small kid.

So opens Ruby Ferguson's fourth Jill book, in which Jill Crewe and her friends Ann and Diana spend a summer riding around the country lanes and competing in various gymkhanas. For this is 1950s' upper middle class England where, it seems, everyone has at least one pony, - even Jill, who claims to be as poor as anyone living in an idyllic cottage with an orchard, a stable, a tack room, an 'apple room' (no I don't know either..) and a daily cleaner must of course be...

So far, so very Famous Five, but Ruby Ferguson, who was also the author of the acclaimed Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary (now republished by Persephone) is a far better writer than Enid Blyton. The Jill books do of course feature the values of the time, and sometimes Jill is extremely rude and unkind to those who are poor, 'wet', or - much worse! - don't like riding, but unlike Dick and co, Jill always gets her comeuppance. She is a headstrong, self-centered teenager (in this book she is now 14) but Ferguson makes sure that she eventually sees when she has been wrong, and that she does her best to put it right.  And there is one other major difference between Jill and Blyton's sanctimonius lot; she is witty and funny, and this makes her story so much more enjoyable to read, even almost 60 years after its first publication. .

The reason Jill is so 'browned off' is that a minor injury has prevented her from competing at a local show. Whereas Dick or George would have nobly gone anyway to cheer on their friends, Jill has stayed at home sulking and now wishes she hadn't. 

I thought 'If they tell me to Look On The Bright Side and Some-girls-haven't-got-any-arms-at-all I'll burst into flames'

This allows Ferguson to introduce us to Ann and Diana, who return to tell Jill about what she has missed, and then Mummy's (for of course there are no 'Mums' here) affluent friends Mr & Mrs Lowe, and their son Martin, who, although confined to a wheelchair after a wartime plane crash, generously gave Jill her first riding lessons. Mrs Lowe has something to ask Jill;

'Would you like to do something interesting these holidays...?'

I nearly said yes, but not quite. I said Um, because you know how it is with grown ups, their ideas of what is interesting are often quite different from yours....I certainly didn't want to learn hand-weaving or go to French classes or take somebody's baby out.

But of course the interesting thing turns out to be joining a committee of young people to help Mrs Lowe's friend to organise a fete and gymkhana at her enormous estate to raise money for mistreated horses. 

This and the usual round of shows and events take up much of the book, but they take second place to the appearance of Dinah, a young girl ('a kid' as Jill delights in calling her) who turns up at Mrs Darcy's riding school desperate to learn, gets a lesson from Jill and then admits she can't pay for it. Jill is incandescent with self-righteous fury,

'I never had anything I couldn't pay for.'

until Mummy puts her right (Martin Lowe having given her quite a lot) and gives her the money to pay Mrs Darcy for the lesson. From then onwards Jill has mixed feelings about Dinah, who keeps turning up all over the place. She purports to loathe her, and says so,

'Now look' I said, 'You buzz off and don't come here again. I don't want you...Now go away and stay away if you can understand plain English.'

But at the same time she admits to a sneaking feeling that Dinah - who of course turns out to be a natural-born rider - isn't a bad person. Jill gives her her outgrown riding clothes, but tells her not to wear them in public (she does), she gives her a riding lesson on one of her own ponies, but will only do so in a secret place so that nobody sees them. According to Mummy, Dinah is poor, lives in

'one of the hard looking little houses on the new estate'

and is made to stay home from school to cook and clean for her widowed father. 

This, we are given to understand, is a quite different sort of  'poor' from Mummy and Jill's.*

The plot thickens when three horses are stolen from a local farm, and Dinah, who has been seen hanging around their barn, disappears too. 

Needless to say Jill, scathing as she is about the unspeakable crime of stealing someone's horses, eventually solves the mystery and finds Dinah. And equally needless to say, Dinah turns out to be no criminal, but instead the hero of the hour, the fete is a roaring success, and Jill rides happily into the sunset. 

Ruby Ferguson

The interesting thing to me about these books is that all of these girls are feisty and determined. Boys are only mentioned once; when Diana's brother James shows off to Jill's cousin Cecilia, Jill remarks

I don't know if you have noticed how a boy always shows off when he is with girls. James showed off disgustingly.  Diana said, 'He is a fool, Daddy has told him not to do that,' but Cecilia was impressed...she clapped and said, 'I say, you are most frightfully good!'

'Oh, I'm not so hot really,' said James, looking conceited.

I suppose puberty came later in the 1950s, but still. 

Similarly, when contemplating their future, both Jill and Ann bemoan the fact that their mothers intend them to have 'women's' jobs - Ann will be a physiotherapist and Jill will be sent to a secretarial school and then to Switzerland to learn French and German (see what I mean about 'poor'? Were you, dear reader, packed off to Switzerland for this or indeed any other purpose?) 

When Cecilia comes to visit, Jill despises her enthusiasm for sewing and flower arranging, and especially, of course, her lack of interest in riding (though Cecilia does - surprise! - come round to it, and they are soon good friends.) Mummy seems somehow to keep the household going by writing whimsical stories for children, about which Jill has not a good word to say,

I sometimes think it's a good thing that the children in Mummy's books don't go to my school or they'd be murdered. She had just had her latest one published, called Angeline, the Fairy Child, about a person who was only six and brought joy and gladness into the heart of her bitter old grandfather.. 

And as already noted, Jill has no intention of spending her summer holidays hand-weaving or taking somebody's baby out.  

An encounter with an old friend brings unexpected good news for Jill about her future career, although at the end of the book she has still to break the news to Mummy. We know she will though. 

As a schoolgirl I loved these books and remember saving up my pocket money to buy them from the children's department in our WH Smiths. (I didn't get on quite so well with those by the Pullein-Thomson sisters, though I can't now remember why.) I knew nothing about ponies, and very little about class and money:  Jill said she was poor; we were poor. Jill's mother was a widow. so was mine. Why then could I not have a pony in our non-existent orchard? Or even riding lessons? I lived in hope, and in the meantime I read and re-read Jill's adventures. 

Ferguson was, I think, skilled at including enough technical information to satisy those readers who actually did ride, but not enough to confuse and bore those of us who had no idea. Re-reading Jill Enjoys Her Ponies now, I found myself still as eager to find out what would happen next, and at the end of the book I had come once again to like Jill, who with all her faults remains a gutsy, entertaining character.

*Though in the end Ferguson ties the plot up by revealing that Dinah isn't actually as poor as everyone - including Dinah herself - thought. Handy.