When Jennings arrives at Linbury Court Preparatory School as a new boy, he soon discovers how much he has to learn, especially when the other boys seem to be talking in a different language!

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. Fossilized fishoo However, the Jennings books, like any really good series, succeed in rising above petty considerations of genre.He is intelligent, impulsive and imaginative, and takes himself and his occupations incredibly seriously. e. preparatory to Public school or independent school) whereas St Clare’s and Malory Towers are girls’ Public or independent schools, so the ages of the children are different. I remember an Avengers episode where Steed and Mrs Peel are attending a conference held during the holidays in a girls boarding school.

Jennings] seized the hem of the blazer and heaved it over his friend’s head, but again they were baffled by the tight cuffs. Meanwhile, Jennings' plan to listen to the test match in class lead to trouble for Bromwich, who resorts to giving an Old Master to a not quite so old master to get his portable transistor back. 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.I was, possibly, wrong – as school also by implication, covertly taught us that we were, indeed ‘equal’ and never implied that we must ‘submit’ to husbands or not talk as equals at dinner parties…or was it reading Jennings that somehow taught me that? We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

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. 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’.They were written at much the same time, by another schoolmaster, and I came to them at the same time as I was reading Jennings.