Whilst re-living my childhood by reading the Magic Faraway Tree, I fell into an E-Bay shaped hole. You can literally buy anything on E-Bay. A good friend of mine, each of time she would visit for tea would return home to discover her husband had bought a vehicle from E-Bay. These ranged from a classic car to a JCB. My favourite was when a decommissioned tank turned up at their property, complete with cheery driver delivering Pip's latest purchase. She would give a small sigh and then get ready to re-arrange the garage for the 60th time that year.

But I digress. Thankfully my purchases are a lot smaller and in this constitute a long forgotten children's book. When I think back to my childhood, a lot of the Enid Blyton novels acted as a moral compass. There was always a lesson in them about doing good turns and not being rude. Naughty children got their comeuppance or learned a valuable lesson. Good children had nice things happen to them.

Mr Pink Whistle is half brownie and quite magical, He has pointed ears and make himself invisible with a few magic words. He lives in a dear little house with his talking cat Sooty who knows all the animals in the area. Mr Pink Whistle is known as someone who can help a child in distress, who is sad or being bullied. Sometimes the children write to him, other times he comes across incidents of unfairness.

What then happens is that Mr Pink Whistle usually takes matters into his own hands and dispenses justice. The naughty child writing nasty untruths on a wall is given a taste of his own medicine when a mysterious piece of chalk writes all the bad things he has been doing on his wall, or corrects him when he lies. The little girl who always helps people across the road and who is unable to go to the circus when she becomes ill, is invited to a magical birthday party complete with woodland and fairy creatures and lots of cake.

There are 3 (I think) Mr Pink Whistle Books and they are a truly charming collection of children's stories. They are perfect to read to a child or for a developing reader to read to themselves. The stories are simplistic and from a more old fashioned time, but sometimes simple is good. I sometimes do wonder if these books have a place now in our society, I can imagine a lot of the text has been updated but I remember as a bookseller that children still enjoyed stories that fired their imagination. Stories about fairies and magical creatures always remained popular.

I would love to think that I have passed a piece of my childhood onto others. But for me, I have just enjoyed being a child again myself.