The protagonist is enjoyable, and like all good pony books, she faces interesting horse-y challenges along the way. Mild wear and bumping to spine, board edges and corners, with scuffing, staining and marking to boards. In the first of the Jill books, young Jill is an only child living with her sole parent, her mother. Anyway my mum had many of these books when she was a kid, and I read them over and over in my teens. With hard work and the expert assistance of Martin Lowe, a wheelchair-using former Royal Air Force pilot, Jill becomes a star of Chatton equitation.

Missing two paragraphs (20 lines) describing Ann having lunch at Jill’s, what the girls wear, make up and nail varnish, and Mrs Derry arriving with Ann’s sisters to collect Mrs Crewe. And they keep it in their back garden which it later turns out includes not only an orchard, but a hay field (! You can certainly forgive the impressionable child reading this book for thinking that ponies must actually be quite cheap and if her parents don't get her one it's probably just because they're evil.P114-5/92 Final four paragraphs (19 lines) describing the jodhpurs/jacket being repaired and Jill trying them on have been deleted. It's a dream come true, but Jill very soon finds out there's a lot more to owning a pony than she realised. And yet I know I knew that a bit at the time, and that I saw myself as pretty awful too, so we were good company for each other.

My whole world as a pony mad child revolved around ponies, stables, riding and getting mucky, and of course I read everything there was to read on the subject, this brought back fond memories of the Jill series of pony books so I decided as an equally pony/horse mad adult to see if they still had the same charm I remembered as a child. So far as I know, there is no comprehensive explanation of why this particular hobby so dominates the hearts and minds of the fairer sex, but then again when I was a kid I was completely obsessed with dinosaur trivia, and at least you can actually ride a pony. I was thrilled to find that this book is published with the original text (some of the newer versions updated the language to reflect modern times) as this was the text of my original books.The series takes the protagonist from the age of twelve to fifteen, from a pony novice to a prize-winning rider. Then we went to have a look at the ponies and make a fuss of them for doing so well, and we found them resting quietly in the shade of the trees and making soft little nickering noises of pleasure when they heard us speaking to them, and saw the handfuls of oats we held out to them.