I’m not really sure who will get most fun out of Hunter Davies’ Flossie TEA CAKE’S FUR COAT, which is produced with large type and with wildly humorous line drawings by Laurence Hutchins but will have parents (as well as nine-year-old readers) in stitches.

The heroine of Hunter Davies’s Flossie Teacake’s Fur Coat may have an unusual surname but her milieu is reassuringly familiar: middle class and comfortingly reminiscent of the home life of Davies himself, as chronicled regularly in Punch. Even here, however, all is not quite normal; plump, four-eyed, sub-teen Flossie tries on her sister’s fur coat, buttons it up, and at once becomes tall, thin, sophisticated Floz who looks 18 but still talks and thinks as a nine-year-old—cue for string of good jokes.

I much enjoyed Flossie Teacake’s Fur Coat with her deliciously funny leanings into (and fortunately out of) being temporarily an almost grown-up 18-year-old, with Sixth Form, Driving Lesson and of course a Disco. The author has in fact done a very delicate and accurately imagined piece of gentle satire. I only wish we could have been given another half dozen episodes.

Mr Davies may lack the magical touch which graces the natural children’s writer, but the way my nine-year-old special adviser has repeated the book’s jokes confirms his success in converting the humour, ambition and narrow outlook of that age.