Show Jumping Secret

by Josephine Pullein-Thompson

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Genres: Horses

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

The Pullein-Thompson sisters — Josephine Pullein-Thompson MBE (3 April 1924-[1]), Diana Pullein-Thompson (born 1 October 1925) [2] and Christine Pullein-Thompson (1 October 1925–2 December 2005[2] — are British writers of several horse and pony books (mostly fictional) aimed at children and mostly popular with girls. They started at a very young age (initially writing collectively) and they were at their peak in the 1950s and 1960s, but their popularity has endured. They have written a collective autobiography Fair Girls and Grey Horses.

All 3 sisters have written at least 1 book under a different name; Josephine wrote 1 under the pseudonym of Josephine Mann, Diana 3 books under her married name of Diana Farr and Christine wrote 2 books under the name of Christine Keir.

Their mother, Joanna Cannan (1898–1961), sister of the poet May Cannan, wrote similar equestrian stories, but is better known for detective mysteries.

Reviews

[Dark-Draco · Rating 4 out of 5]

On 5th December 2010, me and a friend went to the Society for the Welfare of Horses and Ponies open day - http://www.swhp.co.uk/
There was a bookstall, and we were pathetically excited to find a lot of old childhood favourites - this included. We bought a whole box load and I am really looking forward to reading them all.

I really liked this story - Chris is recovering from polio and can't do his normal sports, so decides to give riding a go. With dreams of winning a Foxhunter competition, he has lessons and eventually gets his own pony.

Yes, completely unrealistic and, even as a child, I would have wondered just how someone could have months of school, yet be able to ride every day and manage all the care the pony would have needed, but on some level, I didn't care. Like all the Pullein-Thompson pony books, there are a few lessons to be learnt for the main characters, some other characters you just love to hate, and everything comes out alright in the end.

The main focus of this book is the change from the traditional hunting seat to a more classical dressage and forward jumping seat - something that us more modern riders take for granted. Strangely enough, you still do see signs of the old styles in the showing ring, so I loved how the story rags on the show riders as not so modern as dressage and jumping riders!

Entertaining - it kept me quiet for a couple of days and made me want to get out jumping on my horse again. Loved it.

[Christa Schönmann Abbühl · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful read. This made me smile and laugh. I also got quite annoyed with the cousins. The book is told from a teen boy‘s point of view, and you really get the insecurities and the emotional roller coaster, but also the love for the horse and for show jumping. His parents are amazing. The riding lessons he gets from Claire sound brilliant and hold up well. But some things seem strange to me, like how much sugar he feeds his horse, and how he keeps her without any other horses for company.

[Jaimie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick read, with some interesting insights into the British horse scene in 1955. There is little plot, and the secondary characters are unlikeable.

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first Pullein-Thompson book I ever encountered, this one was part of the oddball collection at my home town's old public library. I was a horse-crazy kid with no access to real horses, so I liked my fiction as realistic as possible. The main character, rather unusually for this type of book, is a boy named Charles, who is riding partly as therapy for a leg affected by his recent bout with polio. His highly irritating but mostly very kind cousins offer to teach him, but fortunately he ends up at a riding school run by a young woman with modern (for the 1950s) ideas. When I picked up the book I was expecting a mystery of some kind, but Secret is a horse, and still one of my favourite fictional horses. I read the library copy several times in the 1980s and then spent years looking for a copy of my own. Thanks to the Internet I now have one, and every couple of years I spend a happy afternoon with Charles and Secret, as well as those annoying-yet-likable cousins. Fun!