A favourite from my childhood, still brought out occasionally ( )

A charming story about eight-year-old Barney who spends holidays with his grandmother, explores a local chalk pit and makes friends with the cave-boy Stig who lives in a shelter at the bottom and makes tools and weapons from the accumulated detritus. Many adventures ensue, and there's also some midsummer magic. ( )

Initially the low stakes, slow paced ambience of this book was a shock in comparison to contemporary world-saving, thrill-ride, kids' books but having accepted it for what it is, I found this book to be charming and by the end, delightful. It's heavily episodic, with no discernable through-plot, but Barney and Lou's adventures with Stig when they visit their grandmother are successively more extravagant and the last two chapters are particularly surprising and fun. ( )

A delightfully little story about a eight year old boy, Barney. He is a curious boy, with a desire to explore, and is told not to go too close to the edge of the quarry. He does get too close though, and falls down to the bottom. He lands in a cave cut into the chalk, and there looking at him is a short hairy man, with sparkling black eyes, and wearing animal furs. The start to communicate using gestures and grunt, and barney decides to call him Stig. And so begins a series of adventures with his new friend. They raid the rubbish dump at the bottom, disturb a fox hunt, and capture an escaped animal from a circus amongst other scrapes.

Part of a challenge where you had to read a book from your childhood, this was one that I had fond memories of, and amazingly I could still remember details of the story several decades on. Timeless storytelling at its best. ( )

A silly little story about a boy who finds a caveman living in the local dump and has adventures alongside him, but of course the grownups don't believe that Stig (said caveman) is real.
Simple, silly, and fun. ( )