One of life’s great pleasures is reading to your children at bedtime, and your blogger, accordingly, has read many a children’s story to his own girls (and provided, incidentally, many an amusing voice to bring characters to life and make the story more interesting – I didn’t live through years of Jackanory for nothing, you know!). Some of the books we read were contemporary, and some were hardy perennials from bygone eras enjoyed by preceding generations. One of the latter, from nearly a hundred years ago now, and which stands out as a paragon of charm is Joyce Lankester Brisley’s 1920s collections of stories about Milly-Molly-Mandy, the little girl in the nice white cottage with the thatched roof.
To this day, from time to time in our house, we return to Milly-Molly-Mandy and read one of her stories, each one a miniature masterpiece and the literary equivalent of comfort food. Now, it is pretty obvious that these stories are not “relevant” to today, and they are vulnerable to claims of sentimentality and a rose-tinted depiction of a simple and long-gone world. But such objections don’t matter a jot to a child to whom the story is being read; nor to me, the narrator, frankly. Children don’t need “relevance”; they need to be transported…and Joyce Lankester Brisley’s world certainly does that.
We are invited into a world of rural charm, in an unnamed village with a school, a blacksmith’s, a grocer’s, and a baker’s, along with copious fields used as shortcuts by Milly-Molly-Mandy, Little Friend Susan, Billy Blunt, and Toby the dog, as they walk to and from school or run errands for Mother. Each story begins with “Once upon a time”, and is followed by reassuringly unspectacular goings-on in Milly-Molly-Mandy’s life, be it running to the shops with a sixpence for a skein of wool for Grandma, feeding milk to a baby hedgehog, or having a picnic in a hollowed-out tree trunk with her friends.
The magic lies in the way Joyce Lankester Brisley weaves her simple stories, the words and phrases she uses, and the charming illustrations, drawn by the author herself, that accompany the narrative. Such simple childhood pastimes as “mending” a puddle by adding pebbles and stones into it, or getting wet and flapping and quacking like ducks: who doesn’t relate to that?
So to those to whom Milly-Molly-Mandy’s world is still culturally comprehensible, be warned: these stories can give you a lump in your throat, as you mourn a disappeared world trodden underfoot by the pitiless forces of modernism and globalism! Nevertheless, the stories are an absolute delight and solidly deserve their place in the pantheon of childhood literature.
