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  Contents

  Foreword

  1 Milly-Molly-Mandy Writes Letters

  2 Milly-Molly-Mandy Camps Out

  3 Milly-Molly-Mandy Finds a Train

  4 Milly-Molly-Mandy and Dum-dum

  5 Milly-Molly-Mandy and the Gang

  6 Milly-Molly-Mandy Finds a Nest

  7 Milly-Molly-Mandy Goes for a Picnic

  8 Milly-Molly-Mandy Has a Clean Frock

  9 Milly-Molly-Mandy Dresses Up

  10 Milly-Molly-Mandy and the Golden Wedding

  11 Milly-Molly-Mandy Rides a Horse

  12 Milly-Molly-Mandy Finds a Parcel

  13 Milly-Molly-Mandy Goes Excavating

  14 Milly-Molly-Mandy Has an Adventure

  15 Milly-Molly-Mandy on Bank Holiday

  16 Milly-Molly-Mandy Does an Errand

  17 Milly-Molly-Mandy and a Wet Day

  18 Milly-Molly-Mandy Makes Some Toffee

  19 Milly-Molly-Mandy Has American Visitors

  20 Milly-Molly-Mandy Goes Sledging

  About the Author

  Foreword

  Joyce Lankester Brisley’s books were among the very first ones I read independently, and from the beginning the beguiling stories about Milly-Molly-Mandy, little-friend-Susan and Billy Blunt (unhyphenated but no less loved) were the source of my greatest joy and my greatest torment.

  They were my greatest joy for the reasons I dare say are shared by everyone who loves the tiny domestic adventures of little girl in the pink-and-white-striped cotton dress (red serge in winter). Each story is a miniature masterpiece – an episode in the charmed and charming life of the small child who lives in the nice white cottage with the thatched roof with her lovely extended family in a beautiful village full of friends. In this collection, she camps out, befriends a duck, has a bubble-bath (of all the impossibly decadent things), goes to the cinema, makes toffee and even has American visitors. It seemed to me then – as it still seems to me now really – that you could ask for literally nothing more out of life. Except, possibly, another dress.

  And – and! – all the books had maps and illustrations by the author herself. So I knew exactly where Milly-Molly-Mandy lived and what she looked like. I was a stolid, unimaginative child. I liked to get these things locked down.

  But Milly-Molly-Mandy and her maps were also my greatest torment, because I lived in the suburbs, and the 1980s, and I knew even then that her world had already vanished. It was my first introduction to the art of yearning – to long for something you can never have. It was an exquisite agony that warped my prepubescent mind in ways I suspect I am barely beginning to recover from now. But it was worth it.

  The strange thing, I know now, is that such an existence had almost vanished from Joyce Lankester Brisley’s world too. She first doodled a picture of Milly-Molly-Mandy and her family on the back of an envelope and began writing stories to go with them in the early 1920s. They were part of her efforts to earn money to support her family, as she and her sisters had been doing since their parents divorced in 1912 – a very unusual and shocking occurrence back then. The first stories were published in a magazine called the Christian Science Monitor in 1925, a time when England was still reeling from the practical and emotional effects of the First World War. One of the effects seems to have been to inspire writers for younger readers – most famously A. A. Milne, with his invention of Winnie-the-Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood – to create safe, old-fashioned rural idyll free of any sign of machinery or modernity, a retreat to pre-war innocence. Young readers could feel safe and perhaps so too could adult writers.

  This feeling of safety, and the sense of continuity that infuses Milly-Molly-Mandy, is perhaps why she endures. We all need comfort reading now and again, and new young readers can need it more than most. These simple, satisfying stories provide a dash of excitement and plenty of succour, compelling and comforting the reader at the same time.

  And if they spark the same sort of yearning for a lost world in you or the child with whom you’re reading them that they did in me – well, you can always point out that they have only to turn back to the first page for it to live again. That is what books are for.

  Lucy Mangan

  1

  Milly-Molly-Mandy Writes Letters

  Once upon a time Milly-Molly-Mandy heard the postman’s knock, bang-BANG! on the front door; so she ran hop-skip down the passage to look in the letter-box, because she always sort of hoped there might be a letter for her!

  But there wasn’t.

  “I do wish the postman would bring me a letter sometimes,” said Milly-Molly-Mandy, coming slowly back into the kitchen. “He never does. There’s only a business-looking letter for Father and an advertisement for Uncle.”

  And then Milly-Molly-Mandy noticed that the business-looking letter was from Holland (where Father got his flower bulbs) and had a Dutch stamp on it, so that was more interesting. Milly-Molly-Mandy was collecting foreign stamps. She had collected one Irish one already, and it was stuck in Billy Blunt’s new stamp album. (Billy Blunt had just started collecting stamps, so Milly-Molly-Mandy was collecting for him.)

  “If you want the postman to bring you letters you’ll have to write them to other people first,” said Mother, putting the letters upon the mantelshelf till Father and Uncle should come in.

  “But I haven’t got any stamps,” said Milly-Molly-Mandy.

  “I’ll give you one when you want it,” said Grandma, pulling the kettle forward on the stove.

  “But I don’t know who to write to,” said Milly-Molly-Mandy.

  “You’ll have to think round a little,” said Aunty, clearing her sewing off the table.

  “There’s only Billy Blunt and little-friend-Susan, and it would be silly to write to them when I see them every day,” said Milly-Molly-Mandy.

  “We must just think,” said Mother, spreading the cloth on the table for tea. “There are sure to be lots of people who would like to have letters by post, as well as you.”

  Milly-Molly-Mandy hadn’t thought of that. “Do you suppose they’d run like anything to the letter-box because they thought there might be a letter from me?” she said. “What fun! I’ve got the fancy notepaper that Aunty gave me at Christmas – they’ll like that, won’t they? Who can I write to?”

  And then she helped to lay the table, and made a piece of toast at the fire for Grandma; and presently Father and Uncle and Grandpa came in to tea, and Milly-Molly-Mandy was given the Dutch stamp off Father’s letter. She put it in her pencil-box, ready for Billy Blunt in the morning.

  And then she had an idea. “If I could write to someone not in England they’d stick foreign stamps on their letters when they wrote back, wouldn’t they?”

  And then Aunty had an idea. “Why, there are my little nieces in America!” she said. (For Aunty had a brother who went to America when he was quite young, and now he had three little children, whom none of them had seen or knew hardly anything about, for “Tom”, as Aunty called him, wasn’t a very good letter writer, and only wrote to her sometimes at Christmas.)

  “Ooh, yes!” said Milly-Molly-Mandy, “and I don’t believe Billy has an American stamp yet. What are their names, Aunty? I forget.”

  “Sallie and Lallie,” said Aunty, “and the boy is Tom, after my brother, but they call him Buddy. They would like to have a letter from their cousin in England, I’m sure.”

  So Milly-Molly-Mandy looked out the box of fancy notepaper that Aunty had given her, and kept it by her side while she did her home-lessons after tea. And then, when she had done them all, she wrote quite a long letter to her cousin Sallie (at least it looked quite a long letter, because the pink notepaper was rather small), telling about her school, and her frien
ds, and Billy Blunt’s collection, and about Toby the dog, and Topsy the cat, and what Father and Mother and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle and Aunty were all doing at that moment in the kitchen, and outside in the barn; so that Sallie should get to know them all. And then there was just room to send her love to Lallie and Buddy, and to sign her name.

  It was quite a nice letter.

  Milly-Molly-Mandy showed it to Mother and Aunty, and then (just to make it more interesting) she put in a piece of coloured silver paper and two primroses (the first she had found that year), and stuck down the flap of the pink envelope.

  The next morning she posted her letter in the red pillar-box on the way to school (little-friend-Susan was quite interested when she showed her the address); and then she tried to forget all about it, because she knew it would take a long while to get there and a longer while still for an answering letter to come back.

  After morning school she gave the Dutch stamp to Billy Blunt for his collection. He said he had got one, as they were quite common, but that it might come in useful for exchanging with some other fellow. And after school that very afternoon he told her he had exchanged it for a German stamp; so it was very useful.

  “Have you got an American stamp?” asked Milly-Molly-Mandy.

  “No,” said Billy Blunt. “What I want to get hold of is a Czechoslovakian one, Ted Smale’s just got one. His uncle gave it to him.”

  Milly-Molly-Mandy didn’t think she could ever collect such a stamp as that for Billy Blunt, but she was glad he hadn’t got an American one yet.

  All that week and the next Milly-Molly-Mandy rushed to the letter-box every time she heard the postman, although she knew there wouldn’t be an answer for about three weeks, anyhow. But the postman’s knock, bang-BANG! sounded so exciting she always forgot to remember in time.

  A whole month went by, and Milly-Molly-Mandy began almost to stop expecting a letter at all, or at least one from abroad.

  And then one day she came home after school a bit later than usual, because she and little-friend-Susan had been picking windflowers and primroses under a hedge, very excited to think spring had really come. But when she did get in what DO you think she found waiting for her, on her plate at the table?

  Why, three letters, just come by post! One from Sallie, one from Lallie, and one from Buddy!

  They were so pleased at having a letter from England that they had all written back, hoping she would write again. And they sent some snapshots of themselves, and Buddy enclosed a Japanese stamp for Billy Blunt’s collection.

  THEY SAT AND WROTE LETTERS TOGETHER

  The next Saturday Billy Blunt came to tea with Milly-Molly-Mandy and she gave him the four stamps, three American and one Japanese. And, though he said they were not really valuable ones, he was pleased as anything to have them!

  And when the table was cleared they sat and wrote letters together – Milly-Molly-Mandy to Sallie and Lallie, and Billy Blunt to Buddy (to thank him for the stamp), with a little P.S. from Milly-Molly-Mandy (to thank him for his letter).

  Milly-Molly-Mandy does like letter-writing, because now she has got three more friends!

  2

  Milly-Molly-Mandy Camps Out

  Once upon a time Milly-Molly-Mandy and Toby the dog went down to the village, to Miss Muggins’s shop, on an errand for Mother; and as they passed Mr Blunt’s corn-shop Milly-Molly-Mandy saw something new in the little garden at the side. It looked like a small, shabby sort of tent, with a slit in the top and a big checked patch sewn on the side.

  Milly-Molly-Mandy wondered what it was doing there. But she didn’t see Billy Blunt anywhere about, so she couldn’t ask him.

  When she came out of Miss Muggins’s shop she had another good look over the palings into the Blunts’s garden. And while she was looking Billy Blunt came out of their house door with some old rugs and a pillow in his arms.

  “Hullo, Billy!” said Milly-Molly-Mandy. “What’s that tent-thing?”

  “It’s a tent,” said Billy Blunt, not liking its being called “thing”.

  “But what’s it for?” asked Milly-Molly-Mandy.

  “It’s mine,” said Billy Blunt.

  “Yours? Your very own? Is it?” said Milly-Molly-Mandy. “Ooh, do let me come and look at it!”

  “You can if you want to,” said Billy Blunt. “I’m going to sleep in it tonight – camp out.”

  Milly-Molly-Mandy was very interested indeed. She looked at it well, outside and in. She could only just stand up in it. Billy Blunt had spread an old mackintosh for a ground sheet, and there was a box in one corner to hold a bottle of water and a mug, and his electric torch, and such necessary things; and when the front flap of the tent was closed you couldn’t see anything outside, except a tiny bit of sky and some green leaves through the tear in the top.

  Milly-Molly-Mandy didn’t want to come out a bit, but Billy Blunt wanted to put his bedding in.

  “Isn’t it beautiful! Where did you get it, Billy?” she asked.

  “My cousin gave it to me,” said Billy Blunt. “Used it when he went cycling holidays. He’s got a new one now. I put that patch on, myself.”

  Milly-Molly-Mandy thought she could have done it better; but still it was quite good for a boy, so she duly admired it, and offered to mend the other place. But Billy Blunt didn’t think it was worth it, as it would only tear away again – and he liked a bit of air, anyhow.

  “Shan’t you feel funny out here all by yourself when everybody else is asleep?” said Milly-Molly-Mandy. “Oh, I wish I had a tent too!” Then she said goodbye, and ran with Toby the dog back home to the nice white cottage with the thatched roof, thinking of the tent all the way.

  She didn’t see little-friend-Susan as she passed the Moggs’s cottage along the road; but when she got as far as the meadow she saw her swinging her baby sister on the big gate.

  “Hullo, Milly-Molly-Mandy! I was just looking for you,” said little-friend-Susan, lifting Baby Moggs down. And Milly-Molly-Mandy told her all about Billy Blunt’s new tent, and how he was going to sleep out, and how she wished she had a tent too.

  Little-friend-Susan was almost as interested as Milly-Molly-Mandy. “Can’t we make a tent and play in it in your meadow?” she said. “It would be awful fun!”

  So they got some bean poles and bits of sacking from the barn and dragged them down into the meadow. And they had great fun that day trying to make a tent; only they couldn’t get it to stay up properly.

  Next morning little-friend-Susan came to play “tents” in the meadow again. And this time they tried with an old counterpane, which Mother had given them, and two kitchen chairs; and they managed to rig up quite a good tent by laying the poles across the chair-backs and draping the counterpane over. They fastened down the spread-out sides with stones; and the ends, where the chairs were, they hung with sacks. And there they had a perfectly good tent, really quite big enough for two – so long as the two were small, and didn’t mind being a bit crowded!

  They were just sitting in it, eating apples and pretending they had no other home to live in, when they heard a “Hi!”-ing from the gate; and when they peeped out there was Billy Blunt, with a great bundle in his arms, trying to get the gate open. So they ran across the grass and opened it for him.

  “What have you got? Is it your tent? Did you sleep out last night?” asked Milly-Molly-Mandy.

  “Look here,” said Billy Blunt, “do you think your father would mind, supposing I pitched my tent in your field? My folk don’t like it in our garden – say it looks too untidy.”

  Milly-Molly-Mandy was quite sure Father wouldn’t mind. So Billy Blunt put the bundle down inside the gate and went off to ask (for of course you never camp anywhere without saying “please” to the owner first). And Father didn’t mind a bit, so long as no papers or other rubbish were left about.

  So Billy Blunt set up his tent near the others’, which was not too far from the nice white cottage with the thatched roof (because it’s funny what a long way off from
everybody you feel when you’ve got only a tent round you at night!). And then he went home to fetch his other goods; and Milly-Molly-Mandy and little-friend-Susan sat in his tent, and wished and wished that their mothers would let them sleep out in the meadow that night.

  When Billy Blunt came back with his rugs and things (loaded up on his box on wheels) they asked him if it were a very creepy-feeling to sleep out of doors.

  And Billy Blunt (having slept out once) said, “Oh, you soon get used to it,” and asked why they didn’t try it in their tent.

  So then Milly-Molly-Mandy and little-friend-Susan looked at each other, and said firmly, “Let’s ask!” So little-friend-Susan went with Milly-Molly-Mandy up to the nice white cottage with the thatched roof, where Mother was just putting a treacle-tart into the oven.

  She looked very doubtful when Milly-Molly-Mandy told her what they wanted to do. Then she shut the oven door, and wiped her hands, and said, well, she would just come and look at the tent they had made first. And when she had looked and considered, she said, well, if it were still very fine and dry by the evening perhaps Milly-Molly-Mandy might sleep out there, just for once. And Mother found a rubber ground-sheet and some old blankets and cushions, and gave them to her.

  Then Milly-Molly-Mandy went with little-friend-Susan to the Moggs’s cottage, where Mrs Moggs was just putting their potatoes on to boil.

  She looked very doubtful at first; and then she said, well, if Milly-Molly-Mandy’s mother had been out to see, and thought it was all right, and if it were a very nice, fine evening, perhaps little-friend-Susan might sleep out, just for once.

  So all the rest of that day the three were very busy, making preparations and watching the sky. And when they all went home for supper the evening was beautifully still and warm, and without a single cloud.