We Met Our Cousins is a delight.  It is sharp and funny and you never doubt for a moment that these are real children.  The ponies are not central to the plot, but they add to the humour - you will not start off a good relationship with anyone by describing their beloved Highland ponies as cart horses.  The ponies are, of course, quite beautifully drawn by Anne Bullen.

We Met Our Cousins was originally published by Collins in 1937.  It was Joanna Cannan’s second children’s book.  Unlike its predecessor, A Pony for Jean, it is not devoted mainly to a girl’s quest for a pony and her adventures with it.  We Met Our Cousins features two sets of cousins.  Antonia and John are living with their Aunt, Uncle and young (and spoilt) cousin in London.  They are over-nannied and fussed over to the point that their Mother tells them they need to “learn that the world doesn’t end if you get your socks wet.”  

So, Tony and John are sent to stay with their Highland cousins, Angus and Morag MacAlister, who are as unlike their London cousins as it is possible to be.  They disdain shoes and tidiness, and have a ferocious sense of honour.  They have no nanny:  only a distantly friendly uncle, and no irritating, favoured younger cousin:  their younger brother is a charming soul.  The two sets of cousins instantly take agin each other.  Tony tells Morag that her shoelessness is “... very dangerous. If you cut your foot and hadn’t any iodine handy, you might get blood poisoning.”  To Angus, John is a “feckless Sassenach”.

The Highland treatment is immensely successful.  After some thoroughly enjoyable adventures, Tony and John return to London.  “Hugheena was there, fussing over my packing. She said that I didn’t seem to have nearly as many things as when I came; she had put out all she could find on the bed, and I must say they did look rather few. My chip straw hat had gone and all I could remember about it was that I had used it to collect bait in...”

This clash of cultures mirrored Joanna Cannan’s own experience.  She and her sisters were brought up in a city, and had a governess to insist on “lady-like decorum”.  But the Cannan parents spent the long vacation abroad, and Joanna and her sisters were sent to Roshven, on the Moidart Peninsula in the West Highlands to stay with a great aunt and uncle and their lively daughter, “Lady”.  Josephine Pullein-Thompson, in her introduction to We Met Our Cousins describes the experience.  Lady “whisked the Cannans away from Nana and introduced them to another world.  There was no road to Roshven in those days and their arrival in a boat rowed by tam o’ shantered oarsmen was just as described in We Met Our Cousins... Away from pavements they were soon running barefoot, scrambling over rocks and swimming in the sea.”

We Met Our Cousins was not re-published by Collins, and it has been out of print until Fidra published it in 2006. The original was illustrated by Anne Bullen.  Fidra have kept all the original illustrations and text, and have added a biographical introduction by Josephine Pullein-Thompson, Joanna Cannan’s eldest daughter.