If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession
If Wishes Were Horses: A Memoir of Equine Obsession
Alternating between Berlin, London and Norfolk, urban, suburban and rural, Susanna Forrest visits gymkhanas and pony shows, horse refuges and inner-city riding schools, acquainting herself with fabulous figures such as Alice Hayes, a medical missionary turned horsebreaker who was the first woman to ride a wild zebra, and a fragile and fierce old lady called Hope, who today carries a knitting bag full of painkillers for her old riding injuries. In doing so, she takes to the saddle once more and rediscovers her own riding legs in this frank, eclectic and captivating memoir of an ever-changing equine world.
Reviews
How lovely! IF WISHES WERE HORSES brought back all my childhood obsessions about ponies; all one’s old friends are here: Enid Bagnold, the Pullein-Thompsons, Golden Gorse, Joanna Cannan and the visit to Redwings. Susanna Forrest has done a fantastic job. She really loves and knows her horses.
I adored this book. All aspects of the horse and pony – historical, current, personal, obsessive – are beautifully written. The wonderful chapter on riding Tav through the Norfolk countryside … I was on Tav, quite tired when I dismounted. It took me back. Gorgeous.
Susanna Forrest’s delightful and exhaustively researched book examines the history of the obsession of little girls with ponies, while tracing her own career as a rider...IF WISHES WERE HORSES rejoices in the physical and imaginative joy of riding.
A richly evocative book...This is not just a tale of one woman’s love, but of swathes of people who are involved in the equine world.
Tackling what exactly the appeal of ponies really is, while powerfully conveying her passion for them, Susanna Forrest has written a beautiful book about her own equine obsession...this is not a lament for a lost age, but a reminder of the unique roles ponies can play in the lives of girls to make them feel strong and independent.
Swiftly refuting the 'pony-mad-girl of cliché', Forrest points out that 'not all love is a simple sublimation of sexual desire'... Threaded through her personal journey are various examples of human interaction with horses... As Forrest shows, you don’t have to be 'posh' to be passionate about horses.
Forrest’s book interweaves accounts of her Norfolk childhood and her Berlin riding lessons with a historical account of women’s horsemanship and excursions into the stranger byways of the horse world...highly readable.
This passionate account of all things horsey, from Bronze Age warriors to inner-city riding schools for deprived children, is captivating even if you didn’t grow up reading Black Beauty or watching Follyfoot. A lovely exploration of the relationship between man and beast, this is a personal quest that expands into a much wider hymn to nature.
‘For any women who once shared Forrest’s obsession, the result will be thought-provoking nostalgia; for everybody else, it’s a fascinating, beautifully-written social history – and one of those books that makes you suddenly interested in a subject you may never have thought much about before.
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