Gardam, Jane

About the author

Jane Gardam has won the Whitbread Prize for best novel twice (Queen of the Tambourine, 1991, and The Hollow Land, 1981) and has been nominated for the Booker. Although she wrote as a child, secreting her writings up the chimney, which led to disaster when she had chickenpox and a fire was lit in her room, she did not start writing seriously until her thirties. She is the author of the excellent Bilgewater, still one of my favourite teenage books, as well as adult and children’s fiction. She has written two books with a horsy connection: her Horse is only tangentially horsy – it’s about a chalk horse. Bridget and William (or Black Woolly Pony, to give it its later title) is about an actual pony. Both books are aimed at the younger reader.

Finding the books
Easily available in all their printings.

Links and sources
Jane Gardam interviewed by Lucasta Miller in The Guardian, Saturday 30 July, 2005


Bibliography (pony books only)


Horse

Julia McRae, London, 1982, laminated boards, 46 pp.  Illus Janet Rawlins.
Republished by Macmillan Education, 1987 as Bridget & William & Horse
Republished by Walker Books, London, 1993, 96 pp,  as Black Woolly Pony, White Chalk Horse

A young reader, this is about a white horse, cut into the turf on the hillside above the village. He is so large that 20 people can fit in his eye. When there is a threat to obscure the horse by overplanting him with Christmas
trees, Susan and the village take dramatic action.

Bridget and William

Julia McRae, London, 1981, Illus Janet Rawlins.
Puffin, 1984, pb
Republished by Macmillan Education, 1987 as Black Woolly Pony, White Chalk Horse
Walker Books, London, 1993, 96 pp.

Bridget loves her pony William, but her father thinks the pony is a waste of money, until a storm comes and William proves his worth.