THE year is 1978, the time 9.30 in the morning on the first day of term at Ragley-on-the-Forest C of E Primary School in North Yorkshire.

Headteacher Jack Sheffield already knows it’s going to be a bad day. Mrs Brown, the school’s “least favourite parent (with)… the build and manner of a raging buffalo” has left him in no doubt of that. Nits is the problem. More specifically, as Mrs Brown puts it: “Ah don’t want this school giving my Damien no nits, Mr Sheffield! We never ‘ad no nits when Mr Pruett was ‘eadmaster.”

So begins the follow-up to Mr Sheffield’s bestselling Teacher Teacher. Jack Sheffield is the pen name of Jack Linley, who for six years from 1977 to 1983 was headteacher of Huby primary school.

Ragley-on-the-Forest is a kind of amalgam of Huby, Sutton-on-the-Forest and Easingwold, with a healthy dose of imagination thrown in. And Jack Sheffield is, to all intents and purposes, Jack Linley himself.

Teacher Teacher, with its gentle humour, nostalgia and unforgettable Yorkshire characters, drew comparisons with the work of James Herriot, Gervase Phinn and Nicholas Rhea.

Mister Teacher takes up where the first book left off – as Jack Sheffield begins his second year in charge at Ragley.

It’s as warm and nostalgic as ever – but once again it is the characters who bring the books alive. There’s Mrs Brown and her four-year-old walking disaster of a son Damian; Vera, the Margaret Thatcher-worshipping school secretary; Ruby, the 20-stone caretaker who sings like Julie Andrews; and Dorothy, the coffee shop assistant who dreams of being Wonder Woman. All these, plus Jack himself and the lovely Beth Henderson, a teacher from a nearby school who just won’t relinquish her hold on Jack’s heart.

A lovely, warm nostalgia-fest that will have you chuckling out loud.