Velvet, 14, is the plain one – weak stomach, 'all teeth', 'cottony hair' – and her father is openly worried that she'll never find a husband. In this world, a neighbour's piebald horse that leaps over five-foot walls and gallops into town, slipping and sliding on the cobbles, only qualifies, at first, as mildly interesting much less important than the gold band of Velvet's brace, which is a constant topic of conversation, since Velvet keeps removing and hiding it. The fox terrier is named and has indoor privileges, while Mi Taylor, who helps in the slaughterhouse, lives in a box stall with a rotting floor beside the old mare that the girls ride when they get up at dawn to deliver meat. A 'black barking dog on a string' lives outside – 'the Browns slept and lived and ate beside its barking' – and a clump of spaniels huddles against the front door, unnamed, sometimes tumbling in. The three older daughters are 'golden greyhounds', and Donald, aged four, is a beautiful boy who is determined to control his own narrative. Father owns a shop and a slaughterhouse on the south coast, Mother does the books and cooks the liver, kidneys and sheep's heads that remain after the steak is sold. The horseless novel, The Squire, that Bagnold published three years after National Velvet, provides the clue – what fascinates Bagnold is family life, and indeed, the driving force behind National Velvet is the intricate psychological chaos that is the Brown household. But Enid Bagnold did not write a young-adult novel, and now that I am grown up and know something about horse racing, I appreciate National Velvet much more than I once did.

W hen I was a girl and wanted a horse, I thought National Velvet, published in 1935, was about a girl who wants a horse: a female version of, say, Walter Farley's The Black Stallion.

National velvet enid