Further Doings of Milly-Molly-Mandy

Further Doings of Milly-Molly-Mandy by Joyce Lankester Brisley is a collection of village stories for 5 year olds where the biggest crisis is two tea-parties on the same afternoon.

What happens

Milly-Molly-Mandy's home is the nice white cottage with the thatched roof, shared with Father and Mother and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle and Aunty. All six of them turn up whenever anything happens, which is half the charm of it.

Nothing enormous ever occurs. Uncle brings a doll's tea-set home from market and pretends it's rubbish so she'll open the box herself. Then she and little-friend-Susan discover they've both been given tea-sets on the same day, and neither will give in, until Billy Blunt wanders past scraping a stick with his knife and suggests a double tea. He gets two cups to himself for being guest at both parties.

The best one is the hedgehog. She finds a baby in the wood, rolled into a prickly ball no bigger than a penny rubber ball and far too small to lap milk from a saucer. So they squirt warm milk into its mouth with Father's fountain pen filler, drop by drop, and Uncle names it Horace. She creeps downstairs in the dark with a candle when she hears it squeaking in the night.

There's a picnic on the Downs, a roof that blows off in a gale and has to be thatched again, a fishing expedition that starts far too early in the morning, and a letter written on Aunty's fancy notepaper with two primroses tucked inside the envelope.

The sentences are long and looping and pile one small thing onto the next, and they read aloud beautifully. One at a time, at bedtime, with somebody who isn't in a hurry.

It's also very old, and you'll notice. The children travel by pony-trap, the thatcher is called Mr Critch, a treat is bread-and-dripping, and Uncle takes his parcels in through the kitchen door. A few words will need explaining. Honestly that's part of the pleasure, but if your child gets impatient with anything unfamiliar, this is a slow read rather than a funny one.

The title tells you it isn't the first collection. Each story stands entirely on its own though, so it doesn't matter a bit where you come in.

What to read next

For a child who likes being put in charge of an animal, The Curse of the School Rabbit is a much more modern sort of chaos. Tommy's little sister brings the class rabbit home for the holidays, and it wees on a famous actor within about a minute of arriving.