Help from my literary and British friends?

[gridlore]

In the wake of HBP and general memories of good young adult fiction, I'm struggling to remember the name of a series of British YA fiction books i treasured as a kid. I think I got them (or Craig got them, and I stole them) from the British grandparents. The books (and there were several) concerns a group of four friends. In their early teens, they have Kipling-esque adventures all over the world. One of them owned a parrot, and one was obsessed with the Great Auk, an extinct seabird. From the writing, I suspect that the books were written in the 1920s or 30s.

Not much to go on, I know, but it's been bugging me for days.

A lot of great stuff from those days. Craig and I devored the Tom Swift series, along with The Hardy Boys and even the wonderfully English Biggles books.

Comments

[rboleyn.livejournal.com]

Aside from Enid Blyton's books, some may have been from the Swallows and Amazons series, by Arthur Ransome. They were set in the same period, and the later adventures included at least one in China (Missee Lee, IIRC).