We Met Our Cousins by Joanna Cannan

Author:Joanna Cannan [Cannan, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jane Badger Books

7

FOR a bit our cousins were awfully polite to us, but I am glad to say that it didn’t last long, and we were soon calling each other idiots again, but not cowards or babies or silly Sassenachs. John stopped sniffing at Scotland, and we gave up wearing shoes, and we learned to row the sea stroke and always ate our porridge standing up like Highland gentlemen. For about a week everything was lovely, and then one morning when we woke up it was raining.

It had been fine for such ages that, though I hate writing letters, I had written to Nanny to tell her that she had been quite wrong to say it was always raining in the Highlands. She had written back and said that, even if it was fine, it must be terribly cold so far north and she hoped I hadn’t left off my vest or anything. Of course I had, so I didn’t answer. Well, it was raining hard, and the mountain that you can see from the garden had its head in the clouds, and the waterfall, which usually looks like a thread of silver, looked like a ribbon. Everybody said that it would rain for a week at least, and after breakfast we all went into the gun-room and stood about, looking out of the window and wondering what to do.

It was Morag who suggested acting a play. John and I had never acted except at school and then it was only silly nursery rhymes. I said, “Who’ll be the audience?” and John said, “We haven’t got any plays to act.”

It turned out that the cousins had done plays before. They wrote them themselves and then they rode round the country scattering invitations at all the cottages. The children from the cottages would come miles to see a play, they said; at Christmas a lot had come from Kinlochfinlay, all across the hills, in the snow. The children and the boatmen and shepherds and people came free, but the nobility and gentry had to pay sixpence. At Christmas our cousins had made eighteenpence, which they seemed to think was a great deal.

Though John and I had seen lots of pantomimes and Peter Pan and Treasure Island and Toad of Toad Hall, we had no idea how to write a play, but Angus sent Morag to borrow some paper from the MacAlister, and then he sat down and started writing. By lunch-time he had written two acts and the play was finished just before tea.

Morag and us went round the house collecting things. We collected the laundry clothes-horse, which the cousins always hung plaids over and used as screens. Angus told us that the play was going to be about Jacobites, so we collected his kilt and an old tartan skirt of Morag’s and some clothes of the MacAlister’s—a Glengarry bonnet and things. John and I were rather horrified at going into his room and taking them—we shouldn’t have dared to collect anything of Aunt Pamela’s—but Morag explained that, being a philosopher, he didn’t mind.

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