Few symbols are as evocative or as powerful as those that remind us of our childhood. The label on a jar of chocolate spread, the saccharine, plasticky smell of Angel Delight powder, the jaunty theme tune to Bagpuss: all are capable of evoking with a jolt the days when the average daily temperature was a good five degrees warmer and the summer holidays seemed at least as long as the Dail recess.

So Mick Jackson's decision to borrow the name and evocative, red and white wrapper, last seen wrapped around the illicitly pleasurable form of Five Boys chocolate some time in the 1960s, was his first stroke of genius.

Happily, though, it wasn't his last. His second novel is an unexpected delight; a museum to eccentricity, and a treasure trove filled with the things that give us comfort in an age when all around is turning to chaos.

The age in question is, of course, World War II. The book opens as soon-to-be evacuee Bobby and an "infant army" are being bussed across London to Paddington station, and back again, in an effort to get them used to the idea of leaving their mothers.

Just as Bobby is beginning to suspect that "the rest of his life might consist of nothing but endless rehearsals for evacuation -- year upon year of marching through the streets (which would be good practice for being, say, a postman) and sitting on coaches (which would be no use at all)", the train finally departs with a shock that is almost too much to bear.

Jackson excels at capturing such moments of silent desolation. The terrible, gnawing strangeness Bobby feels when he awakens after the long train journey to find himself deposited with a Miss Minter, whose duty, as she sees it, is to "stop him from starving or drowning or catching pneumonia, until someone with the proper qualifications came along", is enough to make your chest tighten.

Miss Minter eventually hits upon the idea of giving her brooding charge a bundle of old newspapers to cut up, which he does, at first bewildered, and then with a growing enthusiasm for the bizarre project. The picture of the pair engaged, night after night, in this silent complicity designed to simply get them through their days together, is as affecting as anything I've read.

We leave Bobby and Miss Minter behind in this state of slightly uneasy accommodation, and from here the book's focus shifts into a series of comic and startlingly powerful vignettes. All of Jackson's characters are beautifully drawn, wildly eccentric, but immensely sympathetic individuals: there's the Captain, whose seafaring past, you suspect, may begin and end with his obsession for ship bottling. His days are spent wrapped in a sleeping bag, fantasising about the postmistress, and his nights engaged in a virtual participation -- via his attic window and a telescope -- in the village women's aerobic class.

There's Aldred, who seems determined to act out his appearance as -- thanks to an overactive thyroid -- someone caught up in a permanent state of shocked excitement. Then there's the arthritic vicar, who is responsible for nearly sending one of his flock to the asylum when she encounters him fleeing through the town, delirious, and wrapped from head-to-toe in bandages, following a self-administered cure of bee stings. And the solemn procession of fake mourners who, in what is perhaps one of the book's most finely-executed comic moments, infiltrate the American army base in an attempt to rescue a drunken pig.

So named because they were born within weeks of each other, the five boys of the book's title betray an ability "to exhibit any emotion at the drop of a hat".

Their capacity for coming up with imaginative ways to destroy the bucolic life of the village is matched only by their ability to get out of actually having to do any of it themselves. So it is with a mixture of enthusiasm and suspicion that they hear of Bobby's arrival, and they quickly set about making him a dupe for their derring-do.

By the time the bee-keeper arrives, you almost wish Jackson had saved him for a separate novel. His careful, fascinating explanations of life in the hive strike a slightly jarring note with the brink-of-chaos air that envelopes the rest of the book, but this may be deliberate. Nonetheless, the boys are enthralled and find themselves spirited away, Pied Piper-style. But the war is over and the book is drawing to a close, and just when you feel as though you're embarking on an entirely new adventure it ends, leaving you with the vague sensation that the author's determined meandering may be something of a missed opportunity.

If there is a criticism, and it feels churlish to level one against so original and engaging an enterprise, it is that Jackson is handicapped by too many ideas and too much enthusiasm for their execution. Here's hoping it's catching.