Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  Surprisingly, German planes only once attacked Reading, a large railway junction, and dropped just two or three bombs, on the British Restaurant and the Heelas department store where, because it was early closing day, casualties were few. I only felt threatened much later when I heard the doodlebugs overhead and knew that if their engines cut off a rocket might drop on us.

  By 1940 Christine was the healthiest and the tallest of us. She was up first in the mornings, mucked out stables most speedily, and, although she ran the highest temperatures (or perhaps because she ran them), made the quickest recoveries from ’flu.

  The spring and summer weather of that year had been superb, which made the news of the fall of the Low Countries all the more distressing for me, because of my crazy idea that when the sun shone we should all rejoice.

  Today I feel so happy, so happy,

  I don’t know why I’m happy I only know I am,

  we had sung for years. And:

  The sun has got his hat on, hip, hip, hip, hurray,

  The sun has got his hat on and is coming out today.

  And now horrible, ranting Hitler was wrecking everything.

  Our friendship with the Dutch inventor Henry Wynmalen, whom Josephine will describe, made us feel affectionately towards the Dutch and brought the awful tragedy closer to us. Yet, despite the dire news, there was the pleasure of ready money in our pockets for the first time. We could catch a bus into Reading whenever we wanted. When Mamma handed us the dentist’s bill and suggested we pay it, we felt we were grown-up in responsibility if not in years.

  We started our first book, It Began with Picotee, writing most of it on the ponies’ days off, which were Sundays during the holidays and Mondays during termtime. The first few lines, written in pencil in a sixpenny exercise book from Woolworths, were prosaic:

  We all were sitting at breakfast one morning at the beginning of the Christmas holidays, when Mummy showed us a letter from a woman we knew slightly called Mrs Chantry asking whether we would like to borrow a pony called Tony which she had bought for her daughter, Jennifer, who couldn’t manage him and had decided to give up riding.

  Several of the three girls’ adventures in this book mirror ours; and Cocktail features as Bronx. We argued good-naturedly while writing It Began with Picotee, and giggled a lot, and, although the book was not to be published until after the war, the story was finished, apart from a little tidying up, by the spring of 1942 – without our parents’ knowledge. By this time I had started writing my own book, I Wanted A Pony, which was influenced by Mamma’s A Pony for Jean. This story, like many of my children’s books, is as much about human relationships as ponies, perhaps because I was still trying to come to terms with my own failures.

  Meanwhile, Mr Sworder brought us a temperamental, dark brown mare to school and sell, whom we called Tarragona. Tarragona was self-willed, hard-mouthed and traffic-shy. Her instinct was to flee when frightened, ignoring her rider’s aids and jumping any obstacles in her way. The first time I rode her in a show she leapt out of the ring over three rows of chairs, which were fortunately empty. When I rode her down the Old Bath Road by Hare Hatch, she jumped into a restaurant’s garden because she saw a lorry approaching. But her most dramatic escape happened as I rode her home from a field in a headcollar, bareback and leading a pony either side of me. The Home Guard had been busy the previous night making barbed-wire barriers to impede the enemy should they invade. One of these, which was decorated with white rags so local people could see it in the blackout, caught Tarragona’s eye as we approached it on a patch of grass opposite Peppard post office.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I patted her neck and urged her on, and we were almost safely past when a gust of wind set the white rags fluttering. And then Tarragona was away, hoofs clattering on the tarmac, and no amount of tugging at the headcollar would stop her. I let the other ponies go as The Grove came into sight; they turned up the drive and a few pupils dashed to the gate to see who was galloping by. Seconds later Tarragona and I passed the Kews’ farm and turned right at the Butcher’s Arms and down past the Bottomless Pond. Then my tugs at the headcollar grew more frantic because now we were heading for the main Reading-Peppard Road, which even in war took a good deal of traffic including buses. Supposing in her madness Tarragona crashed into some vehicle and we were both killed? But we were in luck, the road was empty and I managed to steer her straight across and up the hill beyond. (Hills are sometimes a rider’s best friend.) Out of breath, we came to the fish shop, where Mamma sometimes sent us to buy whale meat when our meat ration was spent, and Tarragona broke into a walk; I jumped off and led her home. I was greeted by cries of ‘John Gilpin!’ and my gallop became a joke, but thereafter we always took a bridle when we fetched Tarragona up from the fields.

  Tarragona became a great character and a good showjumper, although her dressage never reached Pony Club Inter-Branch Competition standard. So when Mr Sworder started to bring prospective buyers to see her, our hearts sank. He wanted twenty-five guineas for her, while we could only afford seventeen pounds. But fortunately for us she possessed one trait which made her unsuitable for many children – Tarragona could not bear to be laughed at. So when she was back in the stable after a trial ride we only had to stand in front of her door as she looked over, and laugh, and then, with ears back, she would bare her teeth and lunge at us viciously, unmistakable fury in her eyes. The prospective buyers would recoil and change their minds and Mr Sworder would agree that she wasn’t quite suitable for kiddies after all.

  The day came when Mr Sworder asked if by any chance we would like to buy Tarragona. ‘She’d be handy in your school,’ he said. We offered him fifteen pounds and he said, ‘Twenty,’ and there followed one of those pauses which come about when two people are trying to strike a bargain, before we said ‘Seventeen?’ And he agreed. We shook hands. Mr Sworder watched me writing the cheque.

  ‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘Never leave a gap there. Someone could put a one in front of the seventeen, and make it one hundred and seventeen. And don’t leave a gap there either or a sharp customer could add nineteen shillings.’ Tarragona was useful in the school. She won lots of prizes, but lacking patience, would tread on the feet of any children who spent too long grooming her. Yet she loved being with us, and when at last our school shut down, she escaped from her new home at Stoke Row and returned to The Grove’s now empty yard.

  Much earlier, Denis, looking pale and thin, had been home during the first stage of his recovery from his acute peritonitis, but he left quite soon to stay in an army convalescent home, after Cappy, whose leg was probably hurting, quarrelled with him. Apart from Josephine, Cappy didn’t like his children around him. He would fight our causes, be proud if we enjoyed success – although we only heard this second-hand from Mamma – but would have been happier if he had been an upper-class father with his children behind a green baize door. Mamma said all men were like bulls, difficult when they reached middle age. And, of course, at this time he was also suffering from the Blitz.

  Cappy, who had come out top of his course at the Staff College at the end of the First World War and believed himself to be a good tactician, was soon at odds with his Home Guard commanding officer, Colonel Ogilvie, who had seen less active service. Cappy’s hip had locked, fixing his leg at the wrong angle, but, although near mental collapse, he never complained. Then an orthopaedic surgeon, who was a member of Cappy’s club, offered to break the leg and straighten it out. So Cappy went into the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore, where we all visited him; afterwards he said his operation and convalescence had saved him from a nervous breakdown.

  Waiting for Denis to die and the other unspoken anxieties of war had taken their toll on Mamma, too. Although Idle Apprentice and Death at the Dog (set at the New Inn) came out in 1940 and Blind Messenger the following year, there was an uncharacteristic gap before More Ponies for Jean (which was inspired by our school) appeared in 1943. When food was scarce, Mamma always insisted she didn�
�t want a second helping. She began to cough at night and when we suggested she went to the doctor, she said, it was nothing, just smoker’s cough. There is a moment I shall not forget when she stood, hands in hot washing-up water, and said flatly and wearily, ‘Granny’s gone.’ And none of us comforted her, for at that stage in our lives we only knew how to comfort animals and children. Anyway, if we had, Mamma might well have been embarrassed.

  Granny had refused to come home when war broke out, although all her three daughters had offered to accompany her, saying firmly that she would rather face Hitler than the English climate. As the war went on her financial returns from stocks and shares had come increasingly slowly through Portugal and Switzerland. And Mme Darde, hating the British for leaving the French in the lurch – as she saw it – did not like waiting for money. Granny sold her car and boat to pay Mme Darde and then gave her some of her belongings including a fur coat in lieu of payment. But when Granny died, it was Silvio, now working against his will as a chauffeur for the Germans, who found money for a burial and temporary grave and an English chaplain, still resident in the south of France, who wrote to Mamma.

  In 1941 or thereabouts, I lost a top front tooth, when an abscess developed and my face swelled. The French dentist who had replaced Mr Bruce stopped root canal work when he began to fear cellulitis. I was riding Tarragona, my temperature rising, when Mamma told me I had to go back and have it out under gas. The gap never closed, which is why – as photographs show – I smiled with my mouth shut for almost twenty years, until a dentist filled the gap. Yet that summer I decided naively that the jumping prize Tarragona and I won soon afterwards was meant to cancel out my loss, proving that bad luck could sometimes be an advance payment for success.

  Parties were few and far between. Most of our clothes coupons went on riding gear. Riding, writing and books became our life. With no radio of our own – the parents’ was strictly for their own use – we were at a loss when contemporaries talked of ITMA, Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh or other popular wartime programmes. In bad weather we resorted to the gramophone and, when Cappy was in London, Mamma would come to the nursery and urge us, if we were listening to songs, to slow the turntable down so that she could hear the words, which always meant more to her than the music. We played ‘South of the Border’, The Chocolate Soldier, The Merry Widow, the ‘Barcarolle’ from The Tales of Hoffmann, Madam Butterfly, Strauss waltzes and much more in the same vein. Christine and I liked Richard Tauber and later discovered Gigli and Edith Piaf. Mamma sang ‘Abide With Me’ and ‘You are my Heart’s Delight,’ and ‘Just a Song at Twilight’, and none of us was musical enough to know she was out of tune.

  We became a team which survived another decade and, after the war, ran a second riding school at Wolvercote, Oxford. We gave each other riding lessons, competed in practice sessions against one another and in shows, and so long as a Pullein-Thompson won a competition, no one minded being beaten by a sister. Later it was the same with our books – surprisingly we were not then jealous of each other. Fortunately the pupils appeared to show no preference for any one of us.

  Ironically, we who had disliked teachers loved teaching. Josephine was the most systematic, Christine the most easy-going and I was, as usual, somewhere in the middle, although I liked to think, perhaps wrongly, that I specialised more than the others in explaining why we rode in a certain way. We were all asked, while still in our teens, to judge at shows and gymkhanas; and eventually we each possessed our own grey horse. When Christine and I left the field, Josephine went on to become a well-known riding instructress and one-day-eventer on Rosebay, who was sired by Henry Wynmalen’s Hungarian Arab, Basa.

  So we grew up belonging to no outside group, no teenage craze, no movement, learning what we wanted to learn from books. We grew accustomed to being with all sorts of people, and over the years countless children and ponies provided, without knowing it, material for our stories. But I always felt and still feel that however conventionally we might dress or behave we were never quite like other people, neither superior nor inferior, just different.

  Josephine

  When war was declared I think everyone expected instant horror; we braced ourselves for gas attacks, for bombs to rain down on us, and, as Cappy had put it, to die together. Some people, who remembered the 1914–18 war and were convinced that this one would be even worse, fled to the United States or committed suicide. When Cappy’s friend killed his wife and then put his head in a gas oven – my version is different from Christine’s, and I don’t think they had children – the executors sent Cappy his wristwatch (a half-hunter) and he gave it to me. I displayed it proudly and heartlessly, telling everyone that it had belonged to a murderer.

  The Gollans, who lived on the west side of Peppard Common, had never forgotten the terrible sufferings of the horses in the last war and, sending for the vet, they had their beloved hunters shot. Later it transpired that gun-horses and officers’ chargers were no longer needed; the army was fully mechanized, and only the occasional pack pony or mule was used for carrying supplies in mountainous terrain.

  As the months of the ‘phoney’ war passed, our fear faded and life became boring. The parents remained apprehensive, and Mamma hated it when Joan and Moey sang the triumphant songs of the period: ‘We’re Going to Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ and ‘Run Rabbit Run’. CLOSED FOR THE DURATION notices appeared on the doors of clubs and non-essential businesses; it became unpatriotic to give parties, and the Pony Clubs, which had lost their organizers to the war effort, ceased to function.

  Before our education had been totally abandoned Cappy had written round the veterinary colleges trying to find me a place, but it seemed that women were not wanted and the small number of places allotted to us were filled for many years ahead. When the parents had worked out that I would not qualify until my late twenties, Mamma explained apologetically that, as they couldn’t support me until then, I must choose another profession. I think I was only mildly disappointed and I promptly decided to become an equitation expert.

  Horsemanship in Britain was at a very low ebb. Throughout the ’twenties and ’thirties our riders had been hopelessly outclassed in international jumping competitions, and dressage was unknown or mockingly referred to as ‘that dressage and massage stuff’. Becoming aware of this, the twins and I turned away from the hearty but unscientific works by English cavalry officers to read foreign writers. Fillis was interesting, but too abstruse; there was no point in teaching horses to canter backwards on three legs. But we discovered a very lucid work on the forward seat, by Piero Santini of the Italian cavalry; and Equitation by the Dutchman, Henry Wynmalen, instantly became our bible. The photographs in both books convinced us that horses were far happier ridden over fences and downhill with the forward seat, so we adopted it immediately, despite our unsuitable saddles: all were straight cut and some had knee rolls, which made riding with short stirrups impossible. Gazing at photographs of the permanent course at Geneva, I began to dream of the day when British shows would have solid fences instead of flimsy poles topped with lathes, that earned you half a fault if your horse swished one off with his tail.

  Henry Wynmalen’s book introduced us to dressage, and schooling a pony assumed new dimensions. Kicking with the heels became barbaric; the rider’s legs and seat had to create impulsion invisibly. Every corner became interesting when, instead of swinging round in polo-pony style, you had to bend your pony in the direction of the movement, and make sure his hindlegs followed the same track as his forelegs. We became proficient at turns on the forehand, could announce airily that the rein-back was a forward movement in two-time, and were soon attempting shoulder-in.

  It seemed an extraordinary piece of good fortune when we learnt that Henry Wynmalen had come to live at Hare Hatch – only twelve miles away – and was to share the mastership of the Woodland with Colonel Hill. Our first meeting with our new hero was inauspicious. We were out hunting – two of us on rough borrowed ponies – and wh
en a longed-for fence appeared we all raced for it at once. H.W., as we were soon to call him, gave a furious roar, followed by a lecture on the dangers of jumping on another rider’s ‘tail’. Used to Cappy’s roars we were not too cast down. We had observed that H.W. rode beautifully, that his splendid horse was better schooled than any we had seen before, and, while we tried to placate him by hurrying to open recalcitrant gates, we were already plotting.

  H.W. had retained the charisma of his youth. He had been an early and intrepid aviator, winning the Paris-to-Brussels race and the Grand Prix for altitude flying; and with his first wife, a well-known singer until she was struck down by illness he had been fêted all over Europe. Now it was rumoured he was in the construction business and erecting aircraft hangars for the Government. Obviously we couldn’t ask him to give us riding lessons, but perhaps if we formed a riding club …

  I appointed myself secretary of the Woodland Riding Club, which was to be restricted to experienced riders, and telephoned round our horsey contemporaries. Deprived of holiday amusements, they were delighted to join, and we agreed to meet to jump each other’s jumps, and for occasional instruction. When the membership reached ten, each paying a subscription of 2/6d, it was plainly my duty to telephone H.W. and persuade him that, in the interests of horsemanship, it was his duty to instruct us. I had great difficulty in screwing up the courage, and when I had explained about the riding club, he didn’t help me at all, demanding in his then very guttural accent, ‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’ I stuttered nervously how keen we all were to improve our horsemanship, how we had read his book and how much we would appreciate it if he could spare the time to instruct us. At last, reluctantly, he agreed to a date and place.