He then moved to a secondary modern school in Holloway Road, north London, where he wrote his first and best-known book, Roaring Boys (1955), suitably subtitled "A Schoolmaster's Agony". Blishen portrays himself as a martyr rather than the boastful messiah of other autobiographical classroom accounts published around that time. But behind the initial panic he never lost sight of the essential good- humour of the young tearaways he was in charge of. Gradually teacher and taught came to an accommodation satisfying to both. His account of those years is still the best book ever about life in the classroom. Lessons that did not work are described with a rueful honesty that makes descriptions of the more successful times to come all the more convincing.
It is appalling that young teachers can no longer buy and learn from Roaring Boys or its sequel This Right Soft Lot (1969) - both out of print; books whose fans stretched from Kingsley Amis to Neil Kinnock. These works are too precious to lose to the bleak operation of market forces; a case for some judicious spending of Arts Council literature funds if there ever was one.