Pony Club
Secrets
Issie and the
Christmas Pony
Stacy Greeg
HarperCollins Children’s Books An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2008
Text copyright © Stacy Gregg 2008
Illustrations © Fiona Land 2007
www.staygregg.co.uk
The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007288748
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007341443
Version: 2017-03-29
For Hayley and all the kids in Room 10, Merry Christmas
Contents
7 The Chevalier Point Pony Club
Issie Brown was just a little girl when she realised that Christmas was all wrong. Not wrong exactly, but sort of mixed up, muddled. Not the way it should be.
Christmas on TV was always cold and wintry. There were sleigh bells and snow and you crowded round a roaring fire with hot chocolate while your mum cooked roast dinner with turkey and plum pudding. You’d wrap up warm in coats and mittens to sing carols and then tuck yourself up indoors and watch the snowflakes patter against the window while you waited for Santa to arrive.
Issie couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Because Christmas wasn’t like that at all in Chevalier Point. It wasn’t snowing for starters-in fact, it was positively baking hot, the middle of summer, without a cloud in the bright blue sky. And there wasn’t any turkey or plum pudding. Issie couldn’t remember ever eating that sort of food for Christmas. For as long as she could remember her family had cooked their Christmas lunch on the barbecue down at the beach. They would wake up on Christmas morning and open their presents, which nearly always included a beach toy like swingball or a boogie board. Then they’d race down to the beach, where Issie would meet up with Stella and Kate.
While their dads put crayfish and scallops on the hotplate to sizzle and their mums set out the picnic blankets, the girls would swim in the sea, riding the waves in on their boogie boards. When lunch was ready, they’d sit down on the blankets, still wearing their swimming costumes, letting the hot sun dry their backs as they ate. Their plates would be piled with bright red crayfish claws, which they would smash open with nutcrackers, prising out the juicy white flesh, dipping it in hot melted butter and mopping up the juice with crusty bread.
For dessert there would be pavlova and strawberries and ice cream, and afterwards Issie, Stella and Kate would lie back on the grass in the hot summer sun until their mums were convinced their food had been digested and it was safe to swim again.
No roaring fire, no snowflakes. It was a very different Christmas. A New Zealand Christmas.
It was hard to believe that when it was summer here in Chevalier Point, on the other side of the world it was winter. Right now, it was midnight in Europe and all the kids were fast asleep. Here, it was midday on Christmas Eve. The weather, as usual, was gloriously sunny, and Issie was in the kitchen at her house with Stella and Kate. The girls had come up with the genius idea