I was born at Dartford in Kent just before the war and my earliest memories are of the army convoys of trucks and tanks driving past my house on the main road to Dover and the docks. A little later the memories include flying bombs coming over on their way to London. They did not always get that far and after a near miss by one my mother took me to stay with my grandmother in the safer area of Burton-on-Trent.
When I was twelve, we moved to London. My mother and father had both been teachers, though my mother had stopped work when I was small. My father was an economist and mathematician, and he joined the board of Marks and Spencer in London as an adviser on store management.
Until then I had gone to a convent school where I was fairly happy, but I hated the high powered Camden School for Girls. I went as little as possible and ended by being registered as home taught. I always felt a drive to write: I used to write about my pets, guinea pigs and mice, and when I started riding and became obsessed with horses writing about them was another way to enjoy them.
It was in London that I began to ride at the De Vere riding school in Kensington. It was owned by Anthony Pratt, one of the nicest people I was ever to meet. The horses were stabled on the first floor of De Vere mews with old coach houses on the ground floor and flats above the horses. The stables were reached by a cobbled ramp and the balcony outside them had a high wooden fence. I was soon spending all my spare time there helping with the horses in return for rides and I met my lifetime best friend there. Now both in our eighties Kay and I are still best friends, each of us now widows with daughters who also ride and compete.
It was Kay who inspired Jump to the Stars (1957), my second published book—the first was Horses and Heather (1956), for which I received a one-off payment from Warnes. Kay was sent to a rather exclusive boarding school and managed to turn permission for riding lessons into riding horses belonging to a dealer and jumping them in shows. It seemed a great plot for a book and so Bobby, Guy and Shelta came into being.
The 1950s was a good time to be writing pony books. Riding schools were opening, pony ownership was becoming more accessible and show jumping was on TV, its stars such as Pat Smythe, Marion Mould and David Broome collecting many fans. Even princesses were interested in show jumping and it was great to see Princess Anne photographed getting off a train with Jump to the Stars under her arm.
My third published book was Tan and Tarmac (1958), about horses and riding in London, and I used many of my experiences at the De Vere stables in that. It was after Tan and Tarmac that I set out seriously to write my next book as a sequel to Jump to the Stars and The Difficult Summer (1959) was the result.
I was by then working as an invoice typist at Country Life magazine but I never gave up writing: it has always been an essential part of my life. As well as over twenty books, I wrote weekly scripts for D.C. Thompson’s series of girls papers, Bunty, Judy and the like, which I continued to do for twenty five years.
I was even lucky enough to get my own pony, the first of many through the years. He was Tommy, a brown cob bought from a farm in Marlow where one of the girls who worked for Tony Pratt had connections. I was to own him for over twenty years. He was a very kind pony, quite plain with a hogged mane, lazy but excellent for learning on. As I got more experienced I rode many more horses but Tommy was always there, kind and good for most things from hacking down Rotten Row to galloping across country behind hounds, which he liked best. Many years later he was the first horse my daughter sat on when he was grey and elderly but still going. He was finally put down when he was thirty after increasingly bad bouts of colic.
In 1963 I got married to Peter Hirst, who was a teacher, and we had two daughters, Christina and Victoria, who are now keen riders themselves. Peter died quite suddenly from a heart attack and life in Surrey seemed to be a dead end. Chris was now with her future husband and Vicky was engaged when an advertisement in Horse and Hound gave Chris and me the idea for a new life with horses. This led us and Chris’s Paul to my present home in West Wales where we ran pony trekking and a riding school. Chris got a new event horse, and we were later joined in Wales by Vicky too. Much of this was the basis for my new Patsy series of books which started with With Vacant Possession? (2018).
As I started to think about new plots and characters I began to wonder what might have happened to Bobby, Guy, and their horses. I decided to find out. I had written many other books but always had a soft spot for Guy, bringing him back from his crippling injuries in The Difficult Summer and in The Perfect Horse. Now giving my characters a real romantic interest was very appealing, and that led to Love and Horses at Bracken (2019). This picks up where The Perfect Horse ends, with Guy proposing to Bobby. There are now six further Bracken stories, as well as three more books in the Patsy series.
I can no longer ride due to severe arthritis in my spine but as long as I can tap away on my iPad I hope to keep writing.