Jennings and Darbishire
Anthony Buckeridge
House of Stratus. First published 1952.
I re-read a much beloved favourite of my early teens. I am not sure when I read my first Jennings book, sometime probably in the 1969/1970. I have though good memories associated with them. Coming, as they did, after I had more or less finished reading the entire series of Richmal Compton's 'William' books, and after I had grown away from Enid Blyton, Buckeridge, as I remember, was an unpretentious and uncomplicated follow-up. His stories held their own even against books by authors like Alistair Maclean and James Hadley Chase, which I was just beginning to devour.
J.C.T. Jennings is an inky-fingered, tousled-headed 'third-former' at Linbury Court school with a bright imagination and a genius for getting into troube with his school masters. His closest friend is C.E.J. Darbishire, a gentle Watson to Jennings's eager Sherlock. Like William, their troubles are often caused by their grandiose schemes, derived from the stories they read, the movies they watch, or from their classroom lessons. Some of their scrapes are uproariously funny, and all of there are amusing. Each book is string of overlapping anecdotes, sometimes with a continuing point of tension that is resolved only at the end.
The background is a preparatory (i.e. primary/middle) boarding school in the 1950s and 1960s Britain. It is a gentle time, with little changing in the countryside, and very little of the larger world intruding. This was the time Britain was ceding world leadership to the Americans. It was the beginning of multicultural Britain, when people from former colonies around the world sought to share in the prosperity which the previous generations of their countrymen had created. These tensions, however, play little part in these books. The only signs of 'progress' as compared to previous school literature (e.g. the school books of P.G. Wodehouse) are the many references to technological advances - motor cars, supersonic flight, space travel, etc.
In this book, Jennings receives a play printing press as a present from his aunt. He and and his friend decide to publish a 'newspaper' called 'Form Three Times'. To collect reportage they conduct a hilarious interview with the solely French-speaking crew of a fishing boat that seeks shelter from the storm at a nearby harbour. They are given a bunch of fish as a present. Their efforts to smuggle the wet news-paper parcel into school forms a genuinely LOL sequence. Later in the book they are trapped at a tea-shop in Linbury village without money, unable to get back to class of Mr. Wilkins, their particularly irritable master. They are rescued by a personable young lady to whom they pour out their troubles, being especially complaining about Mr. Wilkins, without realizing that she is his sister. Matters end well, however, when Miss Wilkins intercedes on their behalf with her brother.
After four decades, the stories are as fresh and as enjoyable as they ever were.
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