“Thought so,” replied the woman behind the counter, “I still can’t get rid of my Heidi books.”

It was a damp afternoon smelling of the spring and I had just dropped into the Cromarty Gallery for a cup of tea. Shelves with secondhand books were all around me but my eye had fallen on one with its cover cunningly presented to the world — “Jennings Goes to School” by Anthony Buckeridge.

Buckeridge died in June 2004 and I remembered there had been extensive obituaries and news items at the time. Those had reminded me of Jennings and then I had forgotten him again until the chance encounter at the end of the Black Isle.

The book was priced at only £3, so what the heck. It was added to the bill for the tea and the scone and jam. Most of the dustjacket remained although it was well frayed at the edges and inside the front, in pencil, was written “A. Murray, 18 Mackenzie St” A slip of paper was also present with the name Dorothy Macleod — did girls too read Jennings?

Curiously this was the first time I ever owned a Jennings book. My boyhood acquaintance with him came through the serials in the “Children’s Newspaper”, a very worthy weekly founded by Arthur Mee.

This bit of information was displayed on the masthead, presumably to reassure worried parents that nothing unseemly and likely to influence their offspring for the bad lurked inside. Arthur Mee had also created the Children’s Encyclopaedia — he could be trusted.

It is strange how these trivia from childhood stick in the mind. Anyway, what about Jennings? He and his mate Darbishire attended a public school — it was called Linbury Court and it was in the Home Counties — and the books were accounts of his adventures.

I devoured the stories and so it seemed did thousands of other 10-year-olds up and down the land although I do not think the “Children’s Newspaper” ever achieved the universal popularity of “The Beano”, “The Dandy” and the other exports from Dundee.

In the 1950s all the books and comics about schoolboys seemed to be set in public schools — public, that is, in the English sense, ie private and certainly not public in the sense that the village school I attended was, although the word public was emblazoned in Gothic lettering on the slip pasted inside our prizes.

As well as Jennings, there was Billy Bunter the owl of the Remove — he went to Greyfriars School. See what I mean by trivia. In the “Wizard” there were the adventures of a group of four lads — all with the same first name, which I now forget. I’m a bit worried that I can remember the name of the four girls in “Bunty” who had female versions of the same events in a girls’ public school — the Four Marys — and which I read in copies scrounged from the girl down the road. Surely you did not think I would have gone into a shop to buy “Bunty”?

Billy Bunter came on the telly, played by Gerald Campion, who was in his 30s at the time, although that did not bother anyone. I learned from the book that Jennings had had his first airing on the BBC in Children’s Hour in 1948. He appeared in print two years later and Buckeridge went on to write a total of 25 books about his hero in short trousers.

These public school stories were always resolutely English and middle class in their outlook, tone and language. Children’s Hour in Scotland decided it had to have a home-grown version and came up with the Boys of Glenmoriston. But I do not remember much about them — the trivia command is breaking down — and a web search produced nil.

Although all these stories made me think it would be nice to attend a boarding school they remained foreign to my own experience of school, both primary and high. Was it all unthinking propaganda to undermine the confidence of the northern rural Scot? Or a kind of anthropology that would come in very useful when we ventured south to run things.

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