Children's Suite, woven from popular nursery tunes, was composed under Lilburn's supervision at the Cambridge Summer Music School, 19-30 January 1948. It was performed at the School's closing concert on 29 January under Alex Lindsay, who subsequently adopted it (minus the movement included in the appendix to this volume) for his own orchestra. The Alex Lindsay String Orchestra premiere was a studio broadcast from station 2YA (transmitted in Wellington) on 15 May 1949 and this was followed by a public performance in the Wellington Town Hall Concert Chamber three days later, where it was enthusiastically encored. 

‍Children's Suite remained in the orchestra's concert repertoire until 1954 by which time Pruden, returning from study with Benjamin Frankel at the Guildhall in London, deemed it to be overused. He says in a letter to his parents: "I think it is about time old Alex relegated that Children's Suite to the limbo of forgotten things, where it belongs." This opinion may have sprung from the occasion when Frankel pronounced that the score was "more childish than child-like"; a comment that Robert Burch, Pruden's classmate, thought "totally undeserved" but which the composer, according to his widow, Penny Pruden, probably interpreted as a cue to "advance beyond it".