on id="udf00268c-7e18-57e0-8f32-1e9259d943d7">
Pony Club
Secrets
Issie and the
Christmas Pony
Stacy Gregg
HarperCollins Children’s Books An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. HarperCollins Publishers 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
Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020 Cover photography © Shutterstock.com CBBC logo © British Broadcasting Corporation 2016
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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007288748
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007341443
Version: 2020-08-18
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
