Jane Badger Books
Jean Cree
Jean Cree wrote just the one book (under that name, at least). A Pocketful of Ponies is a collection of pony anecdotes tied together by the conceit of an aunt telling her niece and a friend bedtime stories. Occasionally the children have to tell stories too, but the common theme is ponies. Some of the stories are rather hair-raising for today’s safety conscious market: Abbie is swept off her pony and hangs by her plaits from a tree; Anne’s brother breaks his leg (and gets back on the pony and continues to ride home) and Abbie and another pony go for a swim in the Thames (and rather heartlessly, when the pony swims off out of reach, go back home and leave him to find his own way home).
The book is illustrated by Joan Begbie, who wrote a pony book of her own, Freelance.
Finding the book: not the easiest of titles to track down, and pricing can therefore be erratic.
Pocketful of Ponies
H F & G Witherby Ltd, London, 1956. Illus Joan Begbie. 89 pp.
A collection of pony stories: Anne’s Aunt Abbie, with whom she and her friend Marcia
are staying, carries
round a little album of photographs of ponies she has known.
Every night, the two girls try and persuade
Aunt Abbie to tell them a story about
a pony in her collection.
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