Book Description

Jill Crewe was a young woman living in rural England during the early 1960s. In the original books by Ruby Ferguson she enjoyed a charmed childhood in the village of Chatton with her two ponies Black Boy and Rapide. In her spare time, she wrote autobiographical pony books. In the Jemma Spark Jill books, one, two and three, our heroine is teetering on the edge of adulthood. She has escaped a doomed life as a secretary when her mother married Richard Micheldever and they moved to the Scottish Highland to live in a castle. She has graduated from ponies to horses and is the proud owner of Balius, a magnificent thoroughbred cross Highland gelding, and a sweet chestnut mare, Copperplate, who is a trained showjumper.This book contains a two-in-one bundle of the fourth and fifth book in the series. In "Jill and the Steeplechaser" she returns to stay at Pool Cottage with her best friend Ann Derry, who is emotionally wrecked from a love affair gone wrong. Their life of horsey adventures, and sometimes misadventures continue and Jill acquires a steeplechaser and enters a point-to-point to try race riding. In order to qualify to enter the race Jill has to foxhunt and after her first enthusiasm she is forced to grapple with a moral dilemma when faced with anti-blood sport protests. A host of original characters parade through the pages including the Cholly-Sawcutt sisters, Jill's old enemy Susan Pyke, Dinah Dean, Wendy Mead the instructor at Mrs Darcy's riding school, James and Diana Bush, Jill's cousin Cecilia and many more.In the fifth book, "Jill Dreams of a Dressage Horse" our heroine turns from steeple chasing to dressage. She has been away for a month dressage training in Germany and is beset with a burning ambition to buy her own dressage horse and compete at the highest levels. During her childhood she dreamed of competing in the open jumping at Chatton Show, now she wants to represent England in the dressage competitions at the Olympics. She is scheduled to work as an assistant to the Master of the Horse while the film Macbeth is being shot at her home Blainstock Castle, in the Scottish Highlands. By chance, she finds a dressage horse right under her nose and can think of nothing but how to raise the huge amount of money that she needs to buy it