This arrived in my letterbox today courtesy of my mom in England. I'd heard that there were facsimile copies of some old comics being given away with The Guardian last week, and asked my mom to get me whatever she could find. Although it's been fun receiving my copy of Bunty, I do feel a bit guilty about this, as The Guardian cost my mom a pound and she most definitely is not a Guardian reader. Then there was the postage to Australia on top. And for a summer special that, given I was 10 in 1972, she must have bought me before many years ago!

But if I did read it back then, I had no memory of the stories at all. Of course, The Four Marys were there, in an amusing story in which a cottage in the St Elmo's grounds has been taken over for training the girls in 'housecraft' (a splendid storyline and one which I wish I could use for Cotterford, as I'm sure Juliet and Amber could do some very illicit things in a cottage). The girls have to compete in teams of six, and it's no surprise that the Four Marys are teamed with those school snobs Mabel and Veronica, who are "utterly, utterly" appalled that they are expected to do "a charwoman's work". "It's all right for Mary Simpson, I suppose," says Mabel. "I mean, she is of the lower classes - " Mary Radleigh sticks up for Simpy by being quick to raise her fists - now I don't actually remember Raddy being like that, but she tries to punch Mabel's lights out twice in three pages in this summer special, so she must have been the fiery one - but only ends up losing ten points for her team. Mabel and Veronica do everything they can to avoid the domestic chores and also have fun sabotaging the Marys' valiant efforts - until Simpy has a brainwave that results in the two snobs having to do their bit. At the end, the girls win the prize - a trip to the Ideal Home Exhibition in London - but Mabel and Veronica go down with mumps and can't go. Hurrah!

The other stories are all complete, and include another amusing one called 'Tommy the Tomboy', in which a feminist mother sends her daughter to a 'we'll-teach-anything' school and asks the owner to teach Thomasina (Tommy) to be a man. "It's a man's world, but we are working for equality for women," declares Tommy's mother. "And the only way is for women to be the same as men, able to take over all their jobs!"  So Carol, owner of the school, decides to teach Tommy such manly things as chopping wood, boxing, and stoking the boiler. Unfortunately, though, Tommy is no George Kirrin or Tom Gay - for a start, she wants to be called Thomasina. Anyway, just as Carol's getting somewhere, the mother reappears wanting her daughter to become girly - a rich uncle has died and Tommy will inherit everything as long as she's feminine and hasn't been contaminated by her mother's involvement with the Feminine Freedom Fighters (known as the Three Fs , ahem ... ). It's all looking bad for the inheritance when the solicitor comes to check out Thomasina's feminine behaviour, but Carol's quick thinking and a little mouse save the day.

I won't go into details about the rest of the stories, but there are a couple with 16-year-old girls who run their own businesses as main characters. Another sign of how times have changed since 1972, when the majority of 16-year-olds did have jobs. 

But the biggest surprise (apart from Raddy's fisticuffs)? The summer special is only 32 pages! Now it seemed to me back when I was 10 that summer specials had many, many more pages than that ...