Jemma's Jill Books
Jill's Ponies
Black Boy and Rapide
Book Eight
Jill Crewe lived in a small village, Chatton, during the 1950s and enjoyed an idyllic life riding ponies, having adventures and attending gymkhanas. She grows up and has to sell her two beloved ponies, Black Boy and Rapide. They went to the same family so that they could be together but then had to be sold on separately. This story picks up on the ponies' lives with their new owners. Lavender Ellison-Heath is a young girl, a single child with a mother who wants her to win in gymkhanas so that she can gain entry to the local county set. She has learned to ride on Black Boy and has had some riding lessons from Jill Crewe. Rapide now belongs to Morgan Pevensy, the youngest child of the horse-mad Pevensy family. She has inherited Rapide from her sister Porsche who is going to compete in adult riding classes. This book follows on from Ruby Ferguson and Jemma Spark's Jill books which have followed the life of Jill Crewe. Now the focus is on the ponies and what happens to them.
The Adventures of Jill's Ponies
Book Nine
This is not only the story of the adventures of Black Boy and Rapide, Jill Crewe’s ponies, but many of the horse people who live in Chatton, a village in Oxfordshire in the early 1960s. It is the sequel to Jill’s Ponies: Black Boy and Rapide. There is a pony club rally, a point-to-point at Grassmere, a huge Christmas party at Pevensy Park and Tiddington Hunter Trials.
Susan King (née Pyke) is unhappily married to a small town solicitor, a dull stick, and has become infatuated with Austin Pevensy, the dashing but careless second son of the Duke and Duchess of Tolkington. Mark Lansdowne, who is related to Jill through her mother’s second marriage, has become enamoured of Mercedes Pevensy. The loveable, eccentric, old women, Felicia and Jessica Farthington run an animal refuge and have a promising eventer living in their dining room. Mrs Darcy is back and expanding the business of her riding school. Jill is en route to Australia and spends a week in Chatton before she leaves. She arrives to find that Black Boy has gone missing. In the last chapter, Jill confides in Ann a truly astonishing situation which changes everything.
Jill and the Prize Winners
Book Ten
The magazine, Riding, has run a competition and six winners have been selected to go to Blainstock Castle for two weeks to compete for the grand prize, a weekend for two at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. The winners include Charles Ravenscroft, Susan Barington-Brown, Lettie Lonsdale, Janet Fawley, Patrick Huntingdon and Rennie Jordan. They take part in a number of competitions and a grand prize winner is selected. While they're still at the castle, a couple from America and their horse trainer arrive, having rented the Dower House for a year. Jill has just returned from Australia, where she was on a showjumping tour. She helps with the organisation of the prize winners' activities, but finds herself caught up in the drama of the new arrivals and has to make some drastic decisions.
Jill and the Wild Horses
Book Eleven
Jill goes to Australia to go showjumping with the Heyward family. She had been told that her father died when she was a young child, but shortly before she leaves her mother tells her that her father is still alive and living in Australia. Struggling to cope with the idea of having a real father and having been deceived throughout her childhood, she is thrown into the family life of the Heywards. Norah Heyward, a young woman of her own age, has a new boyfriend who is deemed entirely unsuitable by her family and JIll is drawn into the drama as she struggles in an environment that is totally different to anything that she has experienced before.
She attends a showjumping event at Bowral and then goes to visit her father in the Snowy Mountains. They go deep into the bush to hunt for an escaped mare who has joined the wild bush horses. Riding through the mountains she experiences life far beyond civilisation.
