Milly-Molly-Mandy’s Summer

Milly-Molly-Mandy's Summer by Joyce Lankester Brisley is a sunny collection of six village stories for 5 year olds, about long light days spent outdoors with your best friends.

What happens

Milly-Molly-Mandy (her full name is Millicent Margaret Amanda, which is quite a mouthful) lives with her big family in a thatched cottage by a meadow and a brook. The stories don't follow on from each other, so you can read them in any order.

She gets up before anyone else and finds Susan and Billy Blunt already out picking mushrooms. She and Billy grow tiny gardens in bowls for the village Flower Show. Uncle builds her a "nest" with a proper floor inside a hollow oak, and the whole family send up a rug, cushions and plums on a rope.

Who wouldn't want a nest in an oak tree?

Then there's a picnic by a wishing-well, a Bank Holiday spent sliding down a hill on an old tea-tray, and an old railway carriage that turns up in a field by the brook.

The best bit is how kind the children are, without anyone making a fuss about it. They tip all their mushrooms into the basket of a boy who's picking them to sell for his grandad. When Billy's little tree wilts the day before the Show, Milly-Molly-Mandy offers up her own garden to help.

The picnic story has a gentle message about litter too. Father fishes old tins out of the wishing-well with his stick, and the children tidy the whole glen before they go.

Things happen at a slow, happy pace. Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle, Aunty and the rest are always close by, and there's a village map to pore over before you start. It's an old-fashioned world of cot-beds, red buses at the cross-roads and a tinker who mends pots and kettles, and that's a big part of its charm.

What to read next

When the holidays are over, Milly-Molly-Mandy's School Days takes the three friends back to the village school, with a duck in the classroom and a snowy ride on Billy's new sledge.