PBOTD 10th April: Patricia Leitch - The Black Loch

-
If you've read Patricia Leitch's Jinny series, you'll know that Patricia Leitch welded fantasy into the series. The Jinny books weren't the first of her works in which fantasy appeared: one of her earliest titles, The Black Loch (1963), had a strong element of the fantastic. The Black Loch is set in a wild and lonely Scotland, where Kay Innes and two of her cousins, Sara and Edgar, are going to stay with their Uncle Vincent and his family in the ancestral family home: Deersmalen. The Innes family are guardians of the huge, mysterious water horse, which lives in a loch, emerging occasionally to thunder over the glens. 

Patricia Leitch's brilliance with description is well to the fore: the water horse  “reared up, straight and high, striking out with its forelegs against the golden orb of the sun.”



The scenery in pony books does feature more than you'd think: all those rides at early dawn, with misty sunrises, and the sheer beauty of scenery you can only reach from the back of a horse, but Patricia Leitch took these descriptions way beyond those of most authors in the genre. Here's Kay and the horse, galloping towards the sea:
“We rose over the last of the encircling hills, and stretching away in a billion sparkling diamonds was an island-fretted sea. Without pausing the Horse sped down towards it.”


The horse and the wild Scotland it inhabits represent those things that are best left alone, and which are destroyed by commerce and the preoccupations of the modern world. It is the Innes' family's duty as well as destiny to preserve a symbol of something ancient and which could not be understood.


~  0  ~

The Black Loch was first published by Collins in 1963, and was illustrated by Janet Duchesne. It was republished by the Children's Book Club, with a suitably enormous black horse in the cover. The book appeared in paperback, with an unusual attempt in a photographic cover at accuracy. Knight published this edition in 1979, retitling it as The Horse from Black Loch, presumably to make sure the lucrative pony market didn't overlook the book.

For much more on Patricia Leitch, she has a page on my website.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes

-
Image
My friend Louise sent me this picture today. It's from a children's book with the rather wince-making title For The Wee Ones. I thought, when I read that (because I read the message before I looked at the picture) that the picture was going to be a typical winsome production from the school of artists who think (or who are paid to think) that the child is a thing sent from God and a blissful thing. They had obviously never met a child, and certainly not mine. I should have known Louise better. The artist responsible for Archibald, don't eat the bedclothes slipped this one past the editors. Just look at the poor, broken Mother Rabbit. She knows she has not the faintest chance of being listened to, and poor thing, she is stooped in the way of a mother to whom this is just the lastest in a long line of horror; with nothing good to come. And Archibald is obviously the spawn of the Devil. Just look at those eyes. He'll have the bed after he's finished the bedclothes
Read more

Dick Sparrow - 40 Horse Hitch, and Neil Dimmock's 46 Percherons

-
Image
Here's a clip of Dick Sparrow driving 40 horses. It's an amazing sight, particularly when the shot changes to show the team from the rear and you get the great incongruity of modern American corporate architecture as a background to the wagon and horses. I love the anticipation in the video: the sense of something amazing being just round the corner is palpable. Thanks to Christina Wilsdon for telling me about this world record 46 Percheron hitch (alas just stills) but you get the idea.
Read more

The Way Things Were: Pony Magazine in the 1960s

-
Image
As you have probably realised by now, as a child, I was pony-obsessed. My favourite monthly reading was Pony Magazine, which I read cover to cover: every advert; every word. I recently bought a set of Pony Magazines from the 1960s. I actually took Pony in the 1970s, but there wasn’t a lot of difference between the decades in the style and contents of the magazine. One advert which took me instantly back to that state of childhood wanting; longing for things I couldn’t have, and trying to work out what I could do to afford them, was for Jacatex riding clothes. How I loved that ad. The Pat hacking jacket; the Pat riding mac and the Pat jodhpurs. Who was Pat? Was there a Pat? Or were the clothes just something that was off pat? It was never explained. Jacatex adverts didn’t change much over the years. The 1969 ad below is the same one that I remember from the 1970s, a cheerful pony girl in immaculate clothes. I don’t know whether Jacatex ever did haul themselves into the modern age a
Read more