Jennings and Darbishire

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The Jennings books, at their best, are a species of pastoral, evoking a very English, idealised world of boyhood innocence. The earlier novels including Jennings Goes to School present an idealised version of small town, middle-class English life in the 1950s and mid-1960s which is the period I went to school in Tunbridge Wells, so a lot of the environment was what I considered ‘normal’. Atkinson, like Darbishire, is definitely a follower (and for some reason I always see him as terribly skinny), while Venables is a pleasant but undeniably generic boy. Aunt Angela's cake-baking prowess comes in handy when Jennings breaks a vase belonging to Old Wilkie. As editor he was responsible for the exposure of the Tweed Ring and subsequently received a letter from Chester A.

So far as he had been able to judge the translation was: ‘the gentleman who wears one green hat approaches himself all of a sudden.These hilarious books were my personal favourite when I was growing up, although they seemed dated even then. Much of the humour rests on misunderstandings attributable to Jennings's literal-mindedness and impetuosity. This is the one in which Aunt Angela sends Jennings “The Ideal Junior Printing Outfit” for his birthday, and Jennings starts his own newspaper, the “Form Three Times. I found a cache of them in hardback during a visit to Camden Market about 20 years ago and have read them a few times.

He befriends Darbishire, foxes into town in disguise, accidentally kicks the Archbeako on the kneecap while practising his football-skills, displays too much (or not enough) initiative during fire practice, and has a hair-raising incident with a poisonous spider. Although some modern reviews wrongly accuse them of being too gentle, by contrast they really are quite dark, biting satire of the boarding school experience. E. Johns; there’s no need for the silent surgery I have seen in one 1912 children’s classic in which a black horse that once had a six-letter name starting with “N” has now been renamed “Ebony. Jennings and Darbishire go for a cross-country run on a bus, spend an afternoon trying the patience of the patrons of the local cinema and manage to flash unintentional SOS signals in the dorms after getting locked in the boiler-room following an abortive attempt to roast chestnuts on the fire down there.The later books tend to contain more of a continuing narrative, though Jennings Goes to School still feels well structured, and any loose ends are nicely tied up. 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. There were 25 books, and I don;’t know how many radio broadcasts; they have been reissued and rebroadcast since I heard them as a child, and I hope they enliven and amuse children who read or listen to them now. I especially adored the language, peppered with posh schoolboy slang that I’d never come across in real life – a “wizard wheeze” for a good idea, and so on.

In her early days, Carina, my second heroine, and still Karen went to the local state school in rural America. His nickname is obviously a pun on the nightwatchman's nickname of Old Nightie (a shortening of nightgown). By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. The Blyton school stories only last for half a dozen or so books: but if you are writing the Jennings series, with about 20 novels, you simply can’t get away with setting one book in each term, and moving the kids up a form every three books.Jennings and his friends originally appeared on radio, the first play appearing on Children's Hour on the BBC Home Service in 1948. So, again, you can’t really compare the two authors, because they are not writing about the same thing: the stories of Jennings are realistic, but those of the Famous Five are exaggerated (often wildly so), even though Blyton sets them in a world of donuts and cream buns and lemonade so as to make them seem more realistic than they actually are.

Either author Anthony Buckeridge was a very clever man or I still have an infantile sense of humour. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. At this point children’s books were still wholesome and pure, staying right away from difficult issues like divorce or sexuality. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. What I liked most about it was the humour, and it came as no surprise to me to learn recently that one of Buckeridge’s writing heroes was P G Wodehouse.The rest of the boys at Linbury Court have few distinguishing features, especially this early in the series. He also wrote five novels featuring a north London Grammar School boy, Rex Milligan, one other novel, 'A Funny Thing Happened: The First [and only] Adventure of the Blighs' (1953), wrote a collection of short stories, 'Stories for Boys' (1957), his autobiography, 'While I Remember' (1999) and edited an anthology, 'In and Out of School' (1958). There is also, to a greater extent than in the Blyton school stories, some sense of what is going on in the wider world (such as space travel) and also a sense of the place, the Sussex Downs, where Linbury Court School is located. They are ideal for readers aged 9 + but don't let their classification as "children's literature" turn your nose up at them; like the William books they are ageless and classless.