Diary: Kathryn Davis on National Velvet

Beauty and power—if you don’t possess these qualities yourself, you look for them elsewhere. In the case of Enid Bagnold, you become a writer.

Illustration by Laurian Jones, Enid Bagnold’s daughter, from the William Morrow first edition of National Velvet. She did all the illustrations when she was fourteen years old.

When I was a girl I ran like the wind, which is to say like King of the Wind, the Godolphin Arabian, born with a white spot on his hind hoof, signifying great speed, and a wheat ear on his chest, signifying misfortune. For a while I was a horse, after I was a fairy and before I was a teenager. I nickered, I cantered. I couldn’t get enough of the words describing the self I was as a horse, especially the body parts: pastern, withers, fetlock. The farrier trimmed my hooves, taking care not to injure the frog, the beating organ of the hoof that connects directly to the heart.

When I ran like a human girl everyone could see me; I was in thrall to the condition of being human, which is also why Velvet Brown waited until dusk to canter her cut-out paper horses across the chalk hills of the Downs. “The horses were unsharable. They needed uninterrupted belief and invention,” according to Velvet’s creator, Enid Bagnold. “It was quite hard to get the collection because they had to be the same size and they had to be right-facing ones.”