Every little girl wants a pony and my parents took this as a childhood whim.

But it was only when I started trying to mount our ageing Labrador to jump over double oxers (jumps) in the garden that my parents started to consider the idea.

On what was probably the best day of my young life so far, at aged ten I started looking for a pony.

Lucky Penny, or ‘Bracket Leo’ as she was called then, had just arrived from Texas and I instantly adored her.

But at just three years old, my mother naturally wondered whether it would be risky to match up her daughter with such a green (young, inexperienced) horse.

My instructor, Dawn Fox, thought it would work.

“I like the idea: a blonde and a buckskin,” she said, referring to her distinctive coat colour which varied between ashen and golden.

Penny had many other original features — a dorsal stripe on her belly instead of her back — and a white star that melted into a stripe, then dripped into her left nostril.

We did many competitions together from dressage to show jumping on the circuit of events at Malabar and Vesey Street. After winning many other smaller competitions, in 1998, she won best pony at the Agricultural Exhibition.

But it wasn’t her achievements which made her such a great pony.

Her sweet nonchalant temperament helped many young Bermudian children learn horsemanship including her next owner, Claire Howard, who would later go on to compete for Bermuda in international show jumping competitions. Penny never once threw me off and she probably should have many times.

She would barely blink when, as an exuberant girl on the verge of adolescence, I would sprint up to her from behind and leapfrog onto her haunches with a thump.

“She was a bomb as a gymkhana pony,” remembers Claire, referring to fun races on horseback. On hot summer days, she would thrill onlookers at Spiceland’s (Riding Centre) by pushing the button for her owner’s favourite drink, a Sunkist Orange, with her nose.

Penny was put to sleep on September 7 at the age of 24.

In a huge blow to me, it was the same day that my mother and I had finally fixed a day to visit her for the first time in more than ten years. I spent a storybook childhood bouncing around bareback with Penny on Bermuda beaches and railway trails. I hope that the next generation of local equestrians will be as lucky as I was, with my Penny.

Emma Farge is a Bermudian journalist working for Reuter’s as a West and Central Africa correspondent.