Ben Bloggs is an agent of MI5.
Except he is not! Well, there is a Ben Bloggs who is a highly respected and experienced operative with that British intelligence organization but he is NOT this Ben Bloggs. Obviously, this requires some explanation.
The year is 1940. The War with Germany has just recently begun and one of the many men showing up to volunteer for military service was our Ben Bloggs. He was rejected because he had flat feet. Still, he was told there were other ways of serving his country and two options were presented: work on a farm to help produce food for the troops or work in a factory to help produce war supplies. He chose the former so a little farm near Shrewsbury received his assistance.
So it is that Bloggs, described as a "big, amiable-look" fellow who did not look in the least like a secret agent, possessing "broad shoulders, mighty hands, and a round, pleasant face, went to the countryside to do his part for the war effort.
To say the farmer there was pleased with the help would be less than accurate. "Bloggs needs constant supervision. Given a job to do, he goes at it with a will but he lacks the ability to make his own decisions." After a few months, the farmer suggested that a transfer was not a bad idea so came the orders to move to a different farm, a bigger place near Warwick. It would be this switch that brought our Bloggs into the cloak and dagger world.
In the compartment on the train that Bloggs took to his new location was another man though because our Bloggs was a shy individual, the two did not speak. A bomb from a German plane would cause trouble for the train and in the resulting crash the car carrying the two men derailed and chaos was felt. The other man was knocked out. Our Bloggs was bounced a bit but otherwise alright. He grabbed his coat and his suitcase and climbed out, alerting the arriving authorities. And that's when the confusion happened, if you have not seen it coming already.
The other fellow was Benjamin Bloggs, highly valued and respected and experienced operative with MI5 heading to his new staging point for his next mission. It was that Bloggs whose coat our Bloggs grabbed and in its pocket his warrant card. Back then there were no pictures to prove the bearer was the owner. And when our Bloggs honestly and correctly identified himself, the authorities looking at the warrant card he had handed over without looking himself saw he was an important man and immediately contacted the higher-ups who whisked the wrong man to the wrong place.
Suddenly our Bloggs was on a plane heading for a night landing in France to join the Resistance to fight the Germans. And the slowly reviving other Bloggs was given 'his' instructions to continue on to work for a while on a farm. Many requests for clarification would bring the same response - just keep doing what your doing, all is fine.
Now one very important fact to mention here about our Bloggs is while he is admittedly not the brightest bulb in the chandelier and definitely not someone who would take initiative, he is an expert in one field and that is languages. He has a terrific knack for them and speaks French almost like a native and German as if he had lived there his whole life. This will prove extremely useful in the adventures that he has.
And those adventures are funny! The things that Bloggs is asked to do, each of which he has no idea at all how to accomplish, are varied and interesting and the way that he remarkably and usually unintentionally pulls off are delightful to read.