the story of my life

Here's part two as promised. Another multi-part book series that I was well into in my formative years was Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine adventures, which comprised twenty books, of which I appear to own fourteen.

Wait a minute, you'll be saying, there are sixteen books in that picture. Well, yes, but if you look closely you'll see that Mystery Mine is in there twice. Interestingly (or not) the Armada edition in the middle of the picture is about 25 pages shorter than the older Merlin edition at the bottom. A flick through the first couple of pages of each reveals that some dialogue has been trimmed, presumably to speed up the narrative for late-1970s kids with their Raleigh Choppers and their Sony Walkmans and their short attention spans.

Wait a freakin' minute, though, you'll be saying, we're still one book over. That's because the barely-legible fourth book down is The Master Of Maryknoll, written by Saville but not part of the Lone Pine series. I can't remember much about it except that its missing-parent-accused-of-some-vague-misdemeanour-resolved-in-tearful-reunion-at-the-end story is somewhat reminiscent of The Railway Children.

The Lone Pine books I don't have a copy of are Mystery At Witchend, Saucers Over The Moor, Sea Witch Comes Home, Man With Three Fingers, Strangers At Witchend and Where's My Girl?. Of those I definitely have read Where's My Girl? and I definitely haven't read Mystery At Witchend; I couldn't say for sure either way about the others.

What I'd say about these books 30-odd years later is that they're a bit prissy (though not quite the full Enid Blyton), some of the characters are a bit Mary Sue-esque (David Morton in particular), the younger Morton twins were irritating characters even when I was in my early teens, and that by the end of the series there were just too many Lone Piners to keep track of, and that as a side-effect of that my favourite character, resourceful but taciturn farm boy Tom Ingles, wasn't in them nearly enough.

What they share with the more spooky books in the previous post, though, is a powerful sense of place, most of them being set around the Long Mynd in Shropshire (here's me and Hazel standing on top of it in 2008). The Garners had Alderley Edge and the Coopers had the Thames valley in The Dark Is Rising and north Wales in the later books.

Onward. Here is my collection of Jennings books. You'll notice that I again have one duplicate (or one pair of duplicates, depending how you look at it), since I have two copies of Jennings Follows A Clue, one from 1959 (the hardback) and one from 1974.

Earlier generations would have obsessively hoarded Billy Bunter books in much the same way, and indeed my father has quite an extensive collection, most of which I have read. Despite there being some overlap in the period in which they were written - Charles Hamilton aka Frank Richards died in 1961, and the Jennings books were mostly published between the early 1950s and the early 1970s - the Jennings books feel much more modern. That's partly because that overlap is a bit of a red herring - while Bunter novels were being published into the 1960s, they reflected the attitudes of when the original material was written back between the wars - but also probably reflects the differing outlooks of the respective authors. The Jennings books have much more of a sense of boys being boys, muddy scabby little herberts constantly yammering away between themselves on a variety of topics totally incomprehensible to adults, rather than swanning around in starched collars quoting Latin aphorisms.

All of these school series have their own argot, and while the Bunter books have their share of I say, you fellows, yarooooo and getting a ghastly impot from old Quelchy, the Jennings books feature old Wilkie getting into a frightful bate, teachers having supersonic earsight, much confusion over rhino and occasional trips to see the Archbeako. It's probably only nigel molesworth who has made a similar contribution to the English language.

Books that I didn't find but which I did own and would very much like to find include:

• My Roald Dahl books, which I'm pretty sure included Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Danny The Champion Of The World and at least one or two others;
• I Am David by Anne Holm - a tale of escape and adventure which I think I'd always assumed was set during World War II but is actually situated somewhat more vaguely in history than that; it also has a Railway Children-style parental reunion at the end;
• The Cave by Richard Church - oddly enough there was a copy of this book on the shelves at the cottage we stayed at in Pembrokeshire a couple of months back. While I was tempted to nick it my hand was stayed by the terrifying amount of religious literature surrounding it on the shelves; word would be bound to get back to the Big Man somehow. This book (as the name suggests) features some thrilling underground adventures very similar to the antics in The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen, though without the whole being pursued by goblins thing;
• After The First Death by Robert Cormier - a disturbing story of hijack, kidnap, violence and betrayal, exciting and baffling in equal measure.