Patricia Leitch (1933–2015) was born in Paisley, Scotland. She had a varied career, but her jobs as a riding instructor, librarian and primary school teacher all honed her ability to communicate. Despite two teaching careers, Leitch did not write didactic books. She understood the longings of the ponyless: she had to wait until adulthood before she bought her own first pony, Kirsty, a Fell-Highland cross who ‘almost broke her’, and who provided the inspiration for many of the Highland ponies who feature in her books.
She understood, too, the haunting equines who stalked the imaginations of her readers, and she created one of the most vivid of them all: Shantih, a creature so real that some readers have gone on, years later, to buy their own chestnut Arab mares. Shantih was, Leitch wrote in correspondence with me, ‘all dream. In fact, I used to dream about the chestnut Arab mare long before I wrote about her … I still feel, if I could walk out onto the moor and call her she would hear and come galloping over the skyline to me. But then what is imagination for if not to call up the past?’
Patricia Leitch was unique. Her best books combine mysticism, fantasy and an insight into the teenage psyche in a way quite unlike any other pony book author.
