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). If I choose Jennings and Darbishire (Darbishire beings Jennings’ bespectacled sidekick) as my particular favourite, there’s a reason. Set in a traditional English boys’ boarding school, and written by a former prep school teacher, the series revolves around the spirited, well-intentioned Jennings and his cautious best friend Darbishire.

Jennings is full of ideas, and Darbishire follows, but neither of them are inclined too much to think through the consequences of their actions. And although they are set in a very particular kind of educational institution, the English boarding school, they still manage to capture some of the universal experiences of childhood.In Blyton’s tales of the Famous Five, lots of impossible things happen: they find a secret passage, they find hidden treasure, they get kidnapped, they catch a gang of smugglers, they fall in with criminals, etc, etc — things that are not the stuff of ordinary everyday life.

Madame Olivera from the Inscrutable East (AKA Miss Tubbs of the Linbury Post Office bacon counter) tells Jennings's fortune and predicts a journey over land and sea, an unexpected legacy and that he will succeed in an ambition close to his heart. Enlisting faithful Darbishire as his assistant hack, Jennings sets off to the cove, where a French fishing vessel is moored, for their first story. The two friends are able, at length, to persuade the headmaster to rescind the ban on hut-building, and inadvertently show the daughter-in-law of a distinguished Old Boy, General Merridew, that the school is just the right place to send her young son. Perhaps it gave me a wish to read books only with snappy dialogue and a succinct style and plenty of action.The earlier novels present an idealised version of rural or small-town, middle-class English life in the years between the Second World War and the social revolution of the 1960s; the later ones are still rooted in this era (as Buckeridge admitted) but reflect the changing times surprisingly well. The Silent Shadow was hiding in a corner with the portfolio belonging to the Minister without Portfolio on a table in front of him.