Buckeridge, of Course! Anthony Buckeridge has delighted generations

IT was as I had expected. A genuine Mr Chips encounter. Anthony Buckeridge assembles the real essence of the retired schoolmaster - Panama hat, silver-tipped cane, swan-necked pipe (minus tobacco since a heart attack last year). An erudite, doting wife, Eileen, who calls him darling in lovely, wartime tones, completes the cosy mirage. Except that the author - who, a year from 90, is being shrewdly remarketed by his publishers as the JK Rowling of his day - quit the classroom long ago.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Buckeridge's own charismatic public school hero, Jennings, was as much the talk of 10-year-olds as Rowling's little magician. Indeed, his creator's own brand of literary wizardry that relayed the adventures of an "ordinary child" to thousands of others shifted six million books worldwide, engineering a lifelong career beyond the school gates.

The author's modesty undermines his impact. But the league of schoolboy fans, including Stephen Fry, Alan Ayckbourn and Robert Leeson of Grange Hill fame, the annual conventions and his new publisher's insistence on reprinting a selection of his books tell a different story.

At his Sussex bolthole, with its garden dripping with summer fruits and flowers, I anticipate the obligatory ginger beer. We sit beneath a tree, heavy with apples, and discuss the popularity of a pupil who has forever been 11.

Buckeridge's health has clearly diminished - he almost didn't make it last year - but his intellect remains sharp.

So what inspired the Jennings undertaking? "I was teaching boys of 11 and they behaved in a very funny way. It was material for such comedy. It was like studying little animals - you learned an awful lot about them."

Private school is not every child's birthright. It came to Buckeridge quite by accident. His father, a gifted poet who worked in a bank, was killed in action in France in 1917. "The official War Office postcard merely said, 'Missing believed killed', but there was really no doubt. What the postcard meant was demolished without trace," he says, with palpable anger. After the war, the Bank Clerks' Orphanage for fatherless children packed him off to an independent boarding school, Seaford College in Sussex.

Later, after a short time in a bank and the fire service during the second world war, he became a prep school teacher and developed the art of storytelling. Of his own time at school, he once said: "The boys of my form were told to write a story. Mine was tragic. However, when the master read it aloud the form rocked with laughter. I was so taken aback that I decided my next literary effort would be comedy. Then if people wanted to laugh they might do so".

It was at Seaford that he met the fellow who was to become the star of his books, John Christopher Timothy Jennings. He described him as a bit of an oddball who did "one or two crazy things". There was an incident with a spider in the school dorm. "Knowing something about them, he knew it was perfectly harmless. But it was an ugly thing and he told everyone it was poisonous. He pretended he had lost it and no-one would go to bed."

Buckeridge's tales are rarely more complicated than this. Jennings helps a cow back onto a farmer's land during a cross-country PE lesson; he becomes obsessed with snorkelling, which helps him clean the fish tank and flood the school bathroom; mimicking Lady Macbeth, he tries sleep-walking to retrieve provisions for a midnight feast.

The writer knows that what makes children laugh can be utterly mundane for adults. But he finds humour in this fact. "You can read Jennings purely as funny stories for ordinary children or from an adult point of view."

It is the everyday nature of Buckeridge's stories that have allowed them to cross class and continent. They have been published in 12 different languages, most recently Mandarin Chinese. He says: "Ordinary events got Jennings in a muddle and we can identify with these. But I would always ask what would have happened if the story had been allowed to go one step further before the schoolmaster had intervened. Then I had a story".

The Jennings epic began as tales to quieten his boys before lights- out at his prep school. They were later sent to the BBC and first featured in Children's Hour in 1948. Later they were translated into books and for television.

Despite a library of 25 stories about the antics of this famous pupil, Buckeridge still has reservations about his talent. He has concerns that his innocent narrative may be simplistic for the young now, for children have changed, and sex education now is vastly different from what it was in his time, when a curate made the young Buckeridge think children were conceived from flower seed packets.

And what of comparisons with Harry Potter? Buckeridge says the two characters are similar. "He has magic; Jennings has humour." Rowling is talented but hers was probably a smoother ride on the publishing merry-go-round. "We never had the sort of help there is today," says Buckeridge. "What with trains and big book tours."