When you were a child, did you have a list of things you thought you’d do once you were a grown up?
For me, one of those things was visiting the Julie Loughnan children’s shop in Beauchamp Place in London. Not that I was interested in their children’s clothes, it was what was in their basement that I wanted. The Julie Loughnan shop stocked Julip model horses.
Although we didn’t live a million miles away from London when I was a child, we very rarely went. There was a solid reason for this. The only time I remember visiting, when I was about 10, my stepdad had decided to drive us all down to London and tour around in the car. I was spectacularly sick outside Buckingham Palace, and the day deteriorated rather from that point on. There are only so many places you can take a child who is wearing her semi-digested lunch.
I was always travel sick, and the shortest journey could be misery. Even now, the smell of leather upholstery in a car takes my stomach straight back to my stepdad’s Rover, and that dull feeling of wondering exactly how long I’d last this time. It’s perhaps not surprising that my parents tried to restrict journeys to essentials, particularly as my sister was also travel sick, though without my whole hearted enthusiasm for the process.
It was a pity my parents weren’t fans of the train, because I discovered at the age of sixteen that I wasn’t travel sick on trains, and a whole new world opened up.
By that time though, I thought I was a bit too old for Julips, and so my trip to Julie Loughnan had to wait until I’d been living in London for some years and had a son of my own.
My son loved trains, buses, cars, and anything mechanical. His idea of heaven was a guided tour of a coach (my parents lived next door to a coach garage). I will, I thought, buy him a Julip horse. If he ever shows the slightest flicker of interest in anything that is not mechanical, there it will be. Ready and waiting. He will have what I did not have.
All I needed to do was to go to the Julip shop and make sure I had a horse, just in case. I rang my sister, and we arranged to meet up there “to buy horses for our sons.” We both knew perfectly well the only people we were going there for was ourselves. If the boys ended up liking horses, that would be a bonus, but it wasn’t one I think either of us thought for a minute it would actually happen.
The visit
The shop was weeks away from closure when we went, but trotting down the stairs to the basement was to enter another world. Julips everywhere: Julip horses, Julip ponies, riders, saddles, bridles, rugs, stables … and overlaying it all that distinctive smell of cured rubber you only got with a Julip horse. A grandmother came in to buy her granddaughters a few ponies, riders, and a stable, making sure that the ponies had pretty much the same markings as the granddaughters’ ponies. Lucky things – I do hope they loved them.
Eventually I chose a cob stallion for my lucky son. An ambition achieved at last.
I still have the cob stallion. My son remained utterly uninterested. The little dun Julip never became an actor in Star Wars dramas, haunted Lego models or was even a very large visitor to the Britains farm. My daughter took him on when she was old enough, but she has long outgrown him, and now he spends his days tucked away in the dark so he doesn’t rot.
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More Julip …
There’s a Julip book by Ursula Hourihane. It features the very earliest Julips, which are very, very different creatures from the one you can see above
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