Mr Arthur Jennings – Jennings's kindly and jovial uncle, who appears in 'Our Friend Jennings' and treats both Jennings and Darbishire to a memorable meal involving lots of baked beans in between courses, but is unfortunately too busy to stay long beyond that. The two final volumes were published in the 1990s: Jennings Again [3] in 1991, and That's Jennings in 1994.

My son went to a local prep school for a while in the 1990s before transferring to grammar school, and there were definitely some resemblances to Jennings’ Linbury Court! Set in Linbury Court preparatory school in England, Jennings (John Mitchell) shared his dormitory with his “right-hand man”, Darbishire (Derek Needs) and fellow boarders Venables (Colin Spaull), Atkinson (Jeremy Ward), Temple (Peter Wood) and Bromwich (Major) (Janek Smigielska). They are unusual in that few school stories were written to be deliberately humorous, and indeed the boys’ school story genre had long been in decline by the 50s. First, they nearly miss the train, then, after Jennings loses his ticket, the pair move further down the train to escape Old Wilkie's wrath, only to find that their carriage has split off from the others. The themes of interacting with others in your group, acting equitably, trying to make your way through the bewildering business of school and growing-up are universal even though expressed differently today.

In Jennings’ Little Hut, the headmaster decides that the huts near the pond in the school grounds which the boys have constructed with diligence and care, are unsafe; as a result Jennings and Darbishire are in rather bad odour with their schoolmates. Their first mission, to recover a "stolen" sports cup, is the first of several bungled attempts to imitate super sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps it gave me a wish to read books only with snappy dialogue and a succinct style and plenty of action.

Although I am an adult reading these stories for the first time, I cannot help but laugh and laugh and laugh at the stories, to the point of needing tissues to wipe my face. Playing cricket together, a superb shot by Jennings causes the glass in the the headmaster’s cucumber cold frame to break, and much effort is then expended by the boys to repair it, involving photographs of Old Boys and much running back and forth. Note: I haven’t made comparison with the Naughtiest Girl series partly because I haven’t read them and partly because, as I understand it, Whyteleafe School is very different to the others.Another series of six episodes – simply named Jennings with David Schulten in the title role – aired on the BBC in 1966. Actually, although all the series are told in the third person, there’s an intangible feeling that Jennings is being narrated by an adult – Buckeridge originally told them as stories to his pupils – which isn’t present in the Blyton stories.

Mind you, it did make me look up an English flapjack recipe and make some, but how could even a ten-year-old boy eat a plate of super-heavy solid-rolled-oat-and-sugar squares? She doesn’t seem to have a sense of humour, but Jennings author Anthony Buckeridge intentionally wrote his school tales as comedy. The Jennings stories essentially ran from 1950 to 1973, so, again, the characters couldn’t be allowed to age. Examples include ‘fossilised fishhooks’ (expression of surprised alarm), ‘addle-pated clodpoll’ (fool, idiot) and ‘ozard’ (meaning something bad, deriving from ‘Wizard of Oz’ because ‘wizard’ means good, so ‘ozard’ is its supposed opposite). Binns Minor, Blotwell – shrill-voiced first-formers who are treated with the condescension appropriate to their junior years by Jennings and his contemporaries.To understand the Jennings books, it’s necessary to understand the context in which they were being written.

Jennings finds and loses FJ Saunders, Atkinson's guinea pig; uncovers a case of suspected furtive feasting amongst the masters; and saves the day when a Ministry of Schools inspector visits Old Wilkie's history class.It was also used to describe the anger of Mr Wilkins, Jennings’ form master, which could be ‘ozard’. In the earliest novels in the series there are some Latin puns; these were often omitted from later reprints which is a pity, but times changed from the 1950s and few children now learn Latin. In both cases, the boys never age: Greyfriars began in 1908 and ran until 1940, so it was necessary that the characters did not age. At that time, in the 1950s, the BBC’s biggest success was the Billy Bunter television show, written by Frank Richards, about a boys’ boarding school.