Enid Bagnold's National Velvet

National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

'Hollywood made National Velvet a phenomenon, while betraying many of its charms'

Jane Smiley

guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 April 2012 22.55 BST


Elizabeth Taylor in the 1944 film of National Velvet. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

When 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. 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.


National Velvet
by Enid Bagnold

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. 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 three older daughters are "golden greyhounds", and Donald, aged four, is a beautiful boy who is determined to control his own narrative. 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 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. 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.

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. Velvet, though, is still in that last stage of childhood when sex and love simply do not exist except as the peculiar activity of older sisters. At the end of chapter one, she says her prayer, "Oh, God, give me horses, give me horses! Let me be the best rider in England!"

The Lord, of course, works in mysterious ways. We know from the beginning that when The Pie is sold in an informal lottery by his owner, Velvet will hold the winning ticket. But Velvet, whose only equestrian experience besides riding the old delivery mare is acting out imagined gallops on the photos of famous racehorses cut from magazines and library books, needs a well-trained horse, and so Bagnold makes sure she gets Sir Pericles, "a slender chestnut" with "a fine artistic head". Sir Pericles belongs to Mr Cellini, an eccentric old man who is walking about his garden when Velvet shows up with the meat his housekeeper has ordered.

"'I'm very much too old,' said the old gentleman. 'Too old. What did you say you'd brought?'

'Meat,' said Velvet. 'Rump.'

'Meat,' said the old gentleman. 'I shan't want it. Let's see it.'

Velvet pulled the dank parcel out of her bag.

'Throw it away,' said the old gentleman, and threw it into a bush."

After talking to Velvet about horses and showing her the ones he owns, he then signs a paper bequeathing them to her, walks around a corner, and shoots himself in the head. Bagnold is not interested in practicalities, or, indeed, in plausibility. She is interested in idiosyncrasy.

Much is made of Velvet's mother, Araminty, who had been coached by Mi Taylor's father to swim the Channel, but who has since become so "embedded in fat" that "her keen, hooded eyes hardly lift[ed] the rolls above them". Though everyone else is talkative, she usually communicates in monosyllabic commands: "Larder", "Lay the table". She is a mystery to her children. Only once does she explain herself, when Velvet goes to her room to help her treat a sore made by the tip of one of her metal stays: "Mrs Brown rose and drew breath. Working from the bottom up she unhooked the metal fencework within which she lived, and sat down again." Velvet treats the wound, and her mother becomes philosophical. "Childbirth … an' being in love. An' death. You can't know 'em until you come to 'em. No use guessing and dreading. You kin call it pain … but what's pain? Depends on who you are and how you take it." Later, it will be Araminty who funds the deception Velvet must, as a girl, embark on to race, with the emblems of her former pain – gold sovereigns she has saved from her Channel-crossing prize.

Like Araminty, Mi has also been moulded by his father – he hates water and avoids it. He has never ridden a horse. He has spent his life running away from his family, hanging out at racecourses, doing odd jobs, developing his theory of things but not in fact doing those things. He goes along with Velvet's horse obsession, and works out the details, but she is the motivating force.

Bagnold's appreciation of idiosyncrasy provides her narrative structure. She skips from character to character and incident to incident in a way that does not seem to add up to a picture of how a young, very amateur rider might take a barely broke little horse over the stiffest jumping course in the world and survive. As much time is given to Donald's tantrums and her sisters' choice of sweets or attachment to canaries as is given to Velvet's training methods.


When the girls set off for the summer gymkhana, in the soaking rain, they are more concerned with the fact that they only have two mackintoshes between them than they are with the coming events. Throughout the gymkhana chapter, narrative focus moves like a hand-held camera – noting remarks, images, crowd response, weather. In the midst of it all, Velvet remains focused: she manages to win one race on Sir Pericles and to settle for The Pie's single excellent effort over the wall in the jumping class. It is only then, 140 pages into a 250 page book, that she begins conditioning The Pie for the Grand National – she rides him in the evenings, on the hills around the town, and occasionally they secretly jump some old jumps at a local estate.

After the gymkhana, the narrative moves away from Velvet, until by the time of the race, Mi's is the principal point of view – he delivers the entry fee, puts together the ruse whereby Velvet will race under the name of a half-Russian jockey who is out of the country, recognises the dangers Velvet is confronting, and panics. The nature of Velvet's task is detailed only a few sleepless hours before the start, when Mi shows Velvet a map of the jumps and explains them to her as a substitute for walking the course. She listens for a while, then quails, then refuses to think about it – the course is obvious enough; her faith is in The Pie.

It's clear by the start of the race that Bagnold has given herself a narrative dilemma: is she to detail the race from Velvet's point of view, or from Mi's? She finesses this one very nicely. As Velvet arrives at the start, she is relieved: "The worst moments had come and gone, and there could be no doubt at all that she and The Piebald were in together for the Grand National." All she sees when the tape goes up is that "the green course poured in a river before her …" Mi knows, of course, that the worst moments are still to come, and his anxiety is enhanced by the fact that he is too short to see anything in the seething crowd. And then the fog settles in. Bagnold relates the race through half-seen glimpses, overheard remarks, unsubstantiated rumours, all anchored by Mi's fears and regrets. It is an exciting chapter, full of wit and dread, and perhaps attests to Bagnold's method of composition, as detailed in her autobiography: "I'm afflicted by images. They gang up at the mind's exit and block. My thoughts come so quickly that I 'jump' the story. I think I've told it, but I've not … As I write forwards, I have flashes backwards, afterthoughts and enricheners, on what's two pages behind."

The real horror of Velvet's quest comes after the race, when the press takes up the story of a girl winning the Grand National. Velvet is carried off in an ambulance; Mi can't find her and must renounce her in order to save himself. The Brown's establishment is besieged. Velvet, though, is preserved from the chaos by the focus her faith in The Pie affords her – the novel's last image is of Velvet "able to get on quietly with her next adventures".

Bagnold was not as fortunate. In 1944, Hollywood made National Velvet a phenomenon, while betraying many of the charms of the novel. Elizabeth Taylor was never a plain one with cottony hair and buck teeth; the Shore Course at Pebble Beach, California, looked nothing like Aintree; and The Pie, maybe 15 hands, was transformed into a giant chestnut with sparkling white stockings.

In her autobiography, Bagnold reflects on her Hollywood experience with bemusement – once she'd received her cheque for £8,000, she bought the most expensive cigarette case to be found in Bond Street for her husband (a hundred pounds), a silver-plated model pony for her daughter (£120), and some typewriters. Though she was smart enough to invest the remainder, she was not worldly-wise about taxes - every year, she threw away the tax notice she received in the mail. Eventually, Bagnold owed thousands in back taxes and interest, and because of clauses in the contract that she hadn't noticed, she earned nothing from later productions. But the novel remains a strange and original production, inventive, lively and alluring, a fairytale rooted deeply in rain, muck and, as Araminty might say, what you kin call pain.

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When the fun-for-all the-family movie of National Velvet was first screened, wife and kids were following the story while dad was watching Elizabeth Taylor.