8 1GT Thursday December 3 2020 | the times

arts

recognition as they careered around

the paddocks, kicking up their heels

like children practising playground

handstands. It felt like pure joy.

Buckthorn and Blackbird will now

live with us for ever. Neither has a clue

as to how brutal humans can be. And,

thanks to the lessons that Black Beauty

has taught me — most of all about

what can happen when you sell a

horse on — with luck they never

will. However, we have a third horse,

Whistler, a fretful thoroughbred mare

who came to us straight from the

racetrack. She had been abused. It

took her years to learn to trust us.

“Whistler: never to be harmed again”

read the sign that my daughter wrote

on the stable door. Then I broke my

neck in a fall from her. I can’t pretend

I hadn’t been warned. Whistler is no

longer ridden. Thanks to Black Beauty,

that stable-door promise will be kept.

She will always be safe.

Sewell’s story, helped along by the

film adaptations, is the tale of a black

horse who gets traded down the line,

learning to adapt to a progression of

kind and cruel owners until, finally,

recognised by his erstwhile stable lad

Joe Green, he arrives at the happy

ending without which his tale would

be emotionally untenable (but rather

truer, no doubt). The book has

imprinted itself on the imaginations

of generations of horse lovers.

Sewell didn’t write Black Beauty for

those devoted to horses, though. She

wrote it for people who didn’t give a

damn. Born in rural Norfolk, she was

14 when an accident left her disabled.

From then on, dependent on horse-

drawn transport, she developed an

ever-deeper sense of empathy with her

equine companions. By the time, in

her fifties, that she started writing the

book for which (after her death) she

would achieve worldwide renown, she

was a woman on a mission.

Black Beauty, with its candid

observations on human nature and

A

nna Sewell’s

Black Beauty is

one of those books

that stand like

a waymarker in

my life. Horses

have always been

important to me.

I can see the two horses that I live

with out of my window as I write this,

winding their way up from the valley,

wading knee-deep in mist.

Buckthorn is the leader: a gold-

coloured gelding of indeterminate

origins, although there must be a

teddy bear somewhere down the line.

He is my companion. To fly at full

speed in a trustful partnership with

half a tonne of athletic power seems to

me one of life’s greatest wonders — for

a moment I am allowed to touch the

face of the wild.

Blackbird, the follower (because at

four years old he is barely more than

a baby) belongs to my 12-year-old

daughter, Katya. He came to live with

us last March, and she has spent most

of lockdown in his company, forging a

bond with a Black Beauty of her very

own. At the news that a new Black

Beauty film was about to be released

by Disney+, she jumped straight into

bed (it’s rather cold in the country)

to watch a preview with me. On a

rainy Saturday morning, it was the

second-best option to going out riding.

We have watched at least three of

the filmic predecessors.

Those familiar with Sewell’s classic,

told in an autobiographical first person

by its eponymous equine protagonist,

will know that it begins by establishing

how deep the sense of “family” is

to a herd animal such as a horse.

Buckthorn and Blackbird came from

the same place in Ireland. They had

run together in the fields as colts.

I am rather sceptical of Sewell’s

anthropomorphism. Yet to see these

two reunited gave me pause for

thought. There was no doubting the

‘My Black Beauty is now

a lunge line of clichés’

A new Disney adaptation of Anna Sewell’s novel reassigns the genders of the stable

lad and the horse and neuters the plot, says horse-lover Rachel Campbell-Johnston