That shepherd’s pie we’ve just had was supersonic muck so it’s wizard, but this school jam’s ghastly so it’s ozard. and my favourite gigs My novels Names, naming and words National Novel Writing Month People Places Poems Pubs and and pints.

In her early days, Carina, my second heroine, and still Karen went to the local state school in rural America.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).

Jennings falls into the pond while he, Darbishire, Temple and Venables are sailing their home-made yacht 'The Revenge' on an illicit Sunday visit to said pond - and this, together with the small matter of Jennings and Darbishire's hut collapsing on the visiting Archbeako, leads to a temporary ban on hut-building. Oxenham Society Elsie Oxenham Enid Blyton Ethel Talbot Fidra Books fill-ins folk dancing Girls' Own Girls Gone By Publishers goddess Gwendoline Courtney Hamlet Club hero heroine interview Isle of Man J. The British Library does indeed have a single copy which they may be willing to loan (for 3 weeks which includes postage time here and back, so at most the book would be in my hands for 2 weeks). These hilarious books were my personal favourite when I was growing up, although they seemed dated even then.Although the milieu of his setting – an English public school in the 1950s – may seem impossibly distant even to adults, the charm of the stories is in the boys’ behaviour: their vivid imaginations, their invention, and their capacity to be absorbed in what adults might consider trivial matters.

Unsurprisingly, Jennings (John Christopher Timothy) is the central character throughout the series, more so than any one character in the Blyton series, even Darrell Rivers in Malory Towers. 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. Anthony Buckeridge was still writing the stories in 1994, although he changed some of the content with the times while keeping the basic concept intact.That includes things like the midnight feasts found in Blyton’s school stories, but is more often to do with Jennings’ confused understandings of the world around him, for example mis-concluding that a burglary is in progress or that a teacher is leaving, or Darbishire’s incompetence and impracticality, for example his boasts of swimming technique when, in fact, he is unable to swim. The novels proved popular in other countries; in Germany Jennings is Fredy, and in France he became Bennett. Jennings and Darbishire were two school-boys, probably about nine or ten years old, whose adventures I followed on the Children’s Hour on the radio, and also in the books written by their creator Anthony Buckeridge.