Annotated: Sabre The Horse From The Sea by Kathleen Herald

My research has been recently turning towards juvenilia – stories written by girls, for girls, and what that tells us about being a girl – and it bought me to an extract of Sabre The Horse From The Sea by Kathleen Herald (in: Where Texts And Children Meet, eds. Bearne and Watson). It is an extract that stopped me in my tracks and one that I do not think I’m quite over yet. Or maybe ever.

Kathleen Herald is perhaps better known under her married name of KM Peyton. Still writing today, Peyton is a remarkable figure. She is perhaps even more remarkable when we consider that she wrote Sabre… when she was fifteen. Fifteen! Forgive me but I’m going to have to shriek over that a little bit more before we continue. When I was fifteen, I could barely write a coherent sentence let alone deliver something as sophisticated and as fiercely wonderful as this.

Sometimes when I am obsessed over something like this, I have to investigate it. It pays for me to dig beneath the surface of what a story is and how it’s been presented. It’s my first stage of understanding – I need to figure out those intertextual points of reference, those beats that connect to another story in the world, and figure out why this story works the way it does for me. Whether that’s punctuation, or sentence structure, I can only figure it out when I burrow into the text itself and make it my own.

I also thought it might be something fun to share …