A Horse In My Suitcase - Paperback

by John Charles Walter Holman (Author)

A Horse In My Suitcase is a humorous and engaging memoir of childhood and adolescence spent on a small farm in Southern England during the 1950s and 60s. The story takes the reader into the homes of the farm's inhabitants, four-legged and otherwise with tales of a culture long gone featuring rugged horse dealers, tenant farmers, eccentric aunts, and animals such as a psychotic Jack Russell terrier, a kamikaze goose, and an evil Shetland pony. Into this mix gallops a pony named Stroller, allegedly rescued from a life hauling a milk cart. Stroller's unlikely path to Olympic stardom parallels that of a former royal jockey who, against all odds, rides to the winner's circle of the biggest steeplechase in England.

The lives of notables such as Tommy Grantham, Jimmy Edwards, Douglas Bunn, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Hilaire Belloc, Sir Harry Oakes, Duncan Goodhew, and Jayne Harries are interwoven into a world that effectively ends with the Swinging Sixties. When a North Sea gas pipeline divides the farm in two, destroying any hopes that things might return to the way they were, the author makes a life changing decision to emigrate to Australia. But, in his heart, there would always be room for... a horse in his suitcase.