Amazon The Batch Magna Novels. Category:  Mainstream Publisher: BeWrite Books ISBN-10:  1904492460 Type: Fiction Pages: 300 Copyright: 2004 Batch Magna is threatened by a cold wind blowing in from beyond the hills of its valley.  When Sir Humphrey Miles Pinkerton Strange, 8th baronet and huntin’ shooting’ and fishin’ squire of the village of Batch Magna in the Welsh Marches, departs this world for the Upper House (as he had long vaguely thought of it, where God no doubt presides in ermine over a Heaven as reassuringly familiar as White’s or Boodle’s), what’s left of his decaying estate  passes, through the ancient law of entailment, to distant relative Humph, an amiable, overweight short-order cook from the Bronx. Sir Humphrey Franklin T Strange, 9th baronet and squire of Batch Magna, as Humph now most remarkably finds himself to be, is persuaded by his Uncle Frank, a small time Wall Street broker with an eye on the big time, to make a killing by turning the sleepy backwater into a theme-park image of rural England – a vacation paradise for free-spending US millionaires. But while the village pub and shop, with the lure of the dollar in their eyes, put out the Stars and Stripes in welcome, the tenants of the estate’s dilapidated houseboats are above any consideration of filthy lucre and stand their ground for tradition’s sake … and because they consider eviction notices not to be cricket. Each disgruntled faction sees the other as the unwelcome cuckoo in the family nest. So, led by randy pulp-crime writer Phineas Cook, and Lt-Commander James Cunningham DSO, DSC and Bar, RN (ret) – a man with a glass eye for each day of the week, painted with scenes from famous British naval victories and landscapes that speak of England – the motley crew run up the Union Jack and battle ensign and prepare to engage.  But this is Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And does … Excerpt In which the tenants of the houseboats, after receiving their eviction notices, meet in the pub to discuss them. Chapter Five The village pub, the Steamer Inn, a paddler puffing away on its sign, was built in 1662, and called the Black Boy, in honour of their restored monarch, Charles II, until Sir Cosmo brought the boats home. When in London, and if not at his club or discussing vintages over a glass of Oloroso in Berry Bros & Rudd, Sir Cosmo had spent his days riding up and down the Thames on the new fleet of paddle steamers, owned by London County Council and run like a bus service between Hammersmith and Greenwich. He had found heaven there, in a drizzle of steam, soot and spray, lost to the music of the wheels and the sound of a twin cylinder compound diagonal engine hammering away. And then, after a couple of years of steadily falling receipts, the LCC decided to cut their losses and sell. And on the day of that sale Sir Cosmo, nagged to London by his wife for a much-needed meeting with his accountants, came across it in the ironed pages of The Times when breakfasting at his club on the morning – the very morning – he was to deliver himself and his finances into the hands of bean-counting abacists and scriveners, intent on getting a tighter grip on the estate’s purse strings. He was not, he told himself, a fanciful man, but if this was not fate, then he’d very much like to know what was. And if, in the arithmetic of that notion, it didn’t add up to a paddle steamer service on the River Cluny, then he’d very much like to know what would. He was among the first at the sale on Westminster Pier, coming on the entire fleet of thirty paddlers tied up along the river on that mid-December morning with the growing wonder in his eyes of a small boy in his first toy shop. Christmas, for Sir Cosmo, had come early. He bought five of them, the smallest vessels of the fleet, at a combined cost of nearly six thousand pounds, selling off another slice of his estate on the back of an envelope to pay for them. He telegraphed for a team of estate workers to entrain for London, to be instructed with him in the mysteries, the wondrous mysteries, of a paddle steamer, and with one of his keepers acting as fireman, took the wheel of the largest of them, earmarked as his flagship and already renamed the PS Felicity H after his wife, in an attempt to placate the tiresome questions she had no doubt waiting for him. Trailing smoke and white water, they paddled their way upstream to Gravesend, to the River Medway and dry dock in Chatham, where they were partially dismantled and hauled over to the railhead on steel rollers for the journey to Shrewsbury, borne there on a train pulled by an engine called Progress. In Shrewsbury, they were put together again and their fires relit for the thirty-odd-mile journey down the Severn, to the home waters of the River Cluny. There, they closed stations and shovelled on more speed for a finishing flourish, panicking cattle and horses along the water meadows, and flooding the banks with their wash. Half the county, and a good bit of Wales, had turned out to greet them. The village school declared a day’s holiday and the children lined the banks in their Sunday best, each, in an excess of excitement, given a little flag of empire to wave. Bunting was hung throughout the village and the flags of two countries flown, and the Silver Band from Church Myddle, waiting with the Mayor and the local press, tuned up on a hay wharf that was soon to be the landing stage of the CSC. The bouncy, sea-brisk notes of ‘Hearts of Oak’ struck up on the approach, when the steam whistles of the tiny flotilla opened full throttle, screaming above the cheering and the music. Photographs and other memorabilia of that time looked down silently now from a wall of the bar where the present-day occupants of those boats had gathered. Copies of sailing bills and freight charges, advertisements and tickets, and photographs of the paddlers and their crews, and Sir Cosmo in a top hat among the Sunday bowlers and best bonnets, and the first herd of sheep being loaded, dogs low at their heels. They were sitting in the bay window, which looked out over the small terrace with its summer chairs and tables, the upended mahogany sculling boats for hire on the slipway below, and the river. And now, after discussing the eviction notices and the news Annie Owen had brought back from the Hall, a small silence had fallen over the table. “Are they all right, Jasmine?” Phineas asked then, nodding at two of Jasmine Roberts’s young sons, grimly trying to strangle each other on the floor. “Stop it, you two! Get off him, Thorin!” she hissed. “They’re at that difficult age,” she explained. “Halfway between their aether body and their astral.” “Ah,” Phineas said. Jasmine had been doing readings in Shrewsbury, the result of a recent ad in the Shrewsbury Gazette, introducing her ‘world famous psychic powers’, with a special rate for pets. She had read for six adults there, and a canine client called Coco, a great dane stretched in elegant decline the length of a chaise longue, her brown eyes regarding Jasmine with ineffable yearning - ineffable, that is, to anyone else. There were times when Jasmine didn’t have to bother making up things, and she knew almost immediately what ailed the animal, even if she did spin the ‘consultation’ out for an hour. Coco was broody, and if the owner wasn’t going to let nature take its course, a course Jasmine herself had always been enthusiastically inclined to take, then she suggested surrogates, a few large soft toys for her to mother. All in all it had been a successful day, even allowing for Coco’s special rate, with enough now in her handbag to pay off some of the final demand she’d stuffed in the back of a kitchen drawer, something to throw the electricity company to stop them cutting her off again. And shoes, there’s be enough now as well for new shoes for Arian and Morwen, she thought with satisfaction, singing softly to herself as she walked up the gangway of the Cluny Queen, and found the solicitor’s letter and Priny’s note waiting for her. She rounded everybody up and mustered them on deck, as if checking for casualties, or survivors, as if disaster had already struck, as in a way it had. She did so out of nothing more than an instinct for drama that had to go somewhere, had to do something. With no babysitter available for the evening, and without stopping even for a cup of something, she had then headed back down the gangway for the pub, carrying the baby and with her brood in tow as if leading them to a place of safety. Careful not to wake her daughter asleep on one arm, Jasmine reached with a plump hand dressed with fish and abraxas rings for her pint of Black Boy bitter, her breasts, under her working dress of voluminous purple silk printed with stars and moons, rainbows and comets, filling the blouse like pillows. “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but my letter came as no surprise, I can tell you. I’ve known for days, I have, that it was coming. I just didn’t see yours as well, I’m afraid,” she apologised. “Otherwise I would have warned you all, of course. Terrible news, it is. Terrible,” she said, with a relish for even her own disaster. “Homeless now, we are.” She smiled with sudden brightness at another two of her brood eating crisps at her feet. “Still, never mind, we can always drown ourselves, can’t we, little ones.” “I was hoping for a royalty cheque,” Phineas said to no one in particular. Her daughter stirred and woke with a cry, and Jasmine tossed her Egyptian charm necklace over a shoulder. “There, there, little heart, pert bach, there, there,” she cooed, popping the top buttons of her dress like peas, and fumbling for one of her generous bosoms. Her daughter fastened lustily on it, and Jasmine gazed down at her feeding head, her long hair, the colour of coal, falling like a curtain over the scene. “I saw it all one night in a dream, I did,” she crooned, rocking gently over the infant. “I dreamt that the letter blew in like the seven ears of corn, like locusts sent from Moses, on a bitter East wind, the wind of destruction, and pressed itself against my forehead. And I read it then, through my skin,” she said, and gave a little shudder. Rumour had it that the baby was the work of a slaughterer and butcher from the valleys who passed this way regularly, killing and jointing cattle for the home freezers of local farms, and whose van had been spotted twice parked up for the Cluny Queen. “He was just dropping in a bit of meat he’d promised me,” she’d said afterwards. “Quite, darling,” Priny had replied. The Commander shook his head. “The poor General. To have his name associated with such an act of vulgar greed. Little wonder that he’s restless,” he added, and winked conspiratorially at Phineas. Annie had learned at the Hall that the American heir was submitting plans for a riverside holiday village with a paddle steamer theme to be built on the combined plots and moorings, news that by now, of course, was all round the village, the valley. “Nice weather for ducks,” George Bishop had smirked when he came in. George was busy with his own plans, to put up a bed and breakfast sign, ready for when the future turned up in Batch Magna by the coach load. “The Yank’s got to get planning permission for it first,” Owain Owen growled. “Can’t just walk in here and build what he bloody well likes, doesn’t matter who he bloody is.” Owain’s chest had caught the sun again, rearing out of his shirt and a pair of the General’s braces like an inflamed bull’s. “Of course he can’t,” Phineas said. “The reason, no doubt, he’s given us three months’ notice instead of one. He can afford to. It will take at least that for it to go through planning. And meanwhile it makes him look good.” “Crumbs from a rich man’s table,” Owain growled. “A sop to Cerberus,” the Commander said. “We could get up a petition,” Annie suggested. “For the planning people, like. It probably won’t help us, I know, but it will at least show how people feel. There’s bound to be more people against it than for it, surely? I mean, be like bedlam it would here in the summer. Like Piccadilly Circus.” To Annie, who had only seen Piccadilly Circus, only seen London, on television, it came to the same thing. “Good idea, darling,” Priny said. “And we could lobby our MP, that tall girl, the one who wears all those ghastly-coloured suits. Be rather like attacking them with a bunch of delphiniums but it might help get the local press interested.” Priny herself was wearing a dress that looked more suited to a Kensington cocktail party, and a rope of pearls that had been across the odd pawnshop counter a few times in the past, in exchange for what she and the Commander called marching money. Phineas had remarked how grand she was looking. I am grand, darling, she’d told him. “That’s the stuff,” the Commander said. “Lob as much as we can at the fellow. Any more suggestions?” They looked at each other. Phineas, feeding the last of a packet of pork scratchings to the two dogs under the table, had nothing to add either. As far as he was concerned it was already all over. The real world was already on the doorstep, with words like area regeneration and maximising potential in its briefcase. “Myself, I’d like to drown the bloody man,” Owain said. “Oh, Owain!” his wife protested. “What do you mean – oh, O-wain?” “Well!” “I would! I’d like to drown him, and that’s the bloody truth of the matter.” “He means well.” “Something I find far too many people mean today,” the Commander muttered. “Duw,” Owain growled at her. “You soft woman!” Annie was also an obstinate one once she’d decided she liked someone. “He does,” she insisted. “He has the good of the estate and village at heart, really. He talked about that, about bringing money into the area, and that. I just didn’t know that evicting us and all the rest was going to be part of it, that’s all.” “Damn busybodies are everywhere these days,” the Commander puffed crankily on. “Earnestly knowing what’s best for the rest of us. One can’t even get a weather report without some impertinent comment or other as to how one should or should not dress if one is out and about, as they put it. Out and about, indeed!” The Commander snorted, his good eye glaring. Tonight, his glass one, like rallying colours in battle, was flying the flag. “And if they’re not busy knowing best, then they’re banning something. And if they’re not banning it, they’re modernising it, whether it wants it or not. We are once again in the hands of busybodying puritans. Puritans, bounders and blighters, and now this damn vulgarian from the colonies! I second Owain’s idea. Let the fellow face the consequences of his own actions.” He shifted abruptly in his chair, his leg troubling him. They were in the bigger of the inn’s two bars, a room of worn Welsh slate flagstones and high-backed settles, under beams of estate oak, a summer urn of foxgloves and bracken standing in the hearth of a fireplace big enough to stable a pony. It had been the thought of pubs like this that had helped keep the Commander going through the worst of his war. While waiting with stretched nerves in the Ready Room, or utterly alone in the cockpit of a Swordfish or Dulmar, with all that sky and an enemy waiting. He had kept an image of such places, an image of home, close to him, like a photograph kept in a wallet. As far as he’d been concerned it was what they were fighting for. “We could do it on one of the paddlers,” Phineas said, his eyes narrowed with plot. “Invite him aboard on some pretext or other, and finish him then. Knock him out, and tip him over the side. He wasn’t pushed of course. He fell. And must have hit his head on the paddlebox on the way down, poor chap. We could easily make it fit forensically.” Owain came closer, a Welsh conspirator. “He was inspecting the boats, wasn’t he. And must have leaned over too far, like. Saw him then, we did. When it was too late, like. Drifting down to Prill Weir, he was. Like a dead sheep.” With a practised movement Jasmine hiked her baby on to the other breast. “An accident. A tragic accident,” she intoned. “Regrettable, but there you are. These things happen,” the Commander said briskly. Jasmine brightened. “Then perhaps Sarah will inherit.” “Be the end of our problem,” Owain murmured seductively at them. Priny changed the subject, like an adult with childish talk getting out of hand. What, she wondered brightly, as if inviting them to wonder with her, did the American intend doing with the boats. “That’s the bit no one seems to know anything about.” “They’ll be given to the tourists to play with, that’s what will happen to them,” Owain scowled. “Holidaymakers, wearing plastic caps with Captain written on them. That’s what it’ll come to, you’ll see. I’m only glad the General won’t be here to see it. Break his old heart, it would. Break his heart.” “The General didn’t mind holidaymakers back then, did he. You remember,” Annie said. “That was different,” Owain said. “Not that he got any, mind. Well, not many. I remember that,” Annie went on. “Years ago, that was. It was a big thing then, when we were young, to have holidaymakers – strangers, turning up. We used to come down and have a good gawk at them. There was nothing else to do. And, well, I mean, if it didn’t work then why’s it going to work now? You remember that, Owain. Course you do. I used to watch him about the place,” she told the others. “Had my eye on him even then. He used to smell of skinned stoat, stink of it, he did sometimes,” she recalled fondly. “He was keepering then, see.” “Well, you could earn your beer money, couldn’t you, with stoat skins in those days,” Owain said, mellowing with memory. “We used to send them to Birmingham, to a fur and feather merchant there, batches of them. We had rabbits all over the estate then, see, used to drive ‘em with dogs, we had so many. And stoats like rabbit.” “He used to come courting with half-a-dozen of them, for mam,” Annie said. “And a brace of pheasant on Sundays. But that was when I was older, like, and he was completely free again. I made sure of that. Oh, no, I wouldn’t trespass.” Annie, who was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, was Owain’s second wife. “But was he worth waiting for, Annie?” Priny asked. “That’s the thing. Or would you like to tell me later, darling?” “Yes, what we want to know, Annie,” Phineas said, “is if you knew then what you know now, would you have thrown the old chap back?” Annie studied her husband, head on one side, while Owain bridled under the scrutiny. “No-oo,” she said then, on a long breath, eyes narrowed sexily at him, and reaching across, tickled him under his chin. “Not my old pike.” Jasmine’s laugh started somewhere in her stomach, the sound like a heavy engine turning over, and then catching, until her whole body rocked with it, almost shaking the baby loose. “Don’t say anything interesting till I get back,” Phineas said a while later, when the conversation had moved on to what sort of day they’d all had, and the rest of the village gossip. They were like a family, it seemed to him, leading separate lives in separate rooms, but always with the warmth of a kitchen there, and a glass or cup of something to share when needed. Up at the bar he was served by Lucy, an ash blonde who’d arrived a couple of weeks earlier from the Welsh side of the border, and who lately had been looking in his direction. She looked again now, when she gave him his change, her eyes signalling promise like a lure from the rocks. She counted it out slowly, in a low, light voice, like fingers walking, tantalisingly, on his skin. Phineas concentrated on his change. For one thing, there was the homicidal Carl, her boyfriend, and the pub’s chef, a man who had once chased a critical diner from the pub with a boning knife. And then there was Sally. When Jasmine had last read the tarot cards for him, just before he’d met his new girlfriend, she’d talked of calmer weather on the way in affairs of the heart. And he’d thought, wouldn’t it be nice, just for once, to have a relationship that didn’t end in tears and the sound of breaking crockery? And now there was Sally. Sally and the new Phineas, who thanked Lucy politely for his change, paying her as much attention as he would have Patrick or John the barman. It was all the same to him now, he thought, sitting back among his friends, wondering if it showed. Later, with yet another pint of the local Sheepsnout cider in front of him, its name stencilled on the wooden barrel like a warning, he looked with a sudden fierce rush of love at the others. What fun it had all been, what fun. Lord! The times we’ve had together. What a jolly life it must be, Mole said, living by the river. By it and with it and on it and in it, Ratty had replied. It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts and company, and food and drink. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. Lord! The times we’ve had together. “No!” he cried suddenly, as if in his sleep, and then glared at them. “No! Damn it, we will fight! We will fight and we will win! We’ll drive them from the river. From our river!” They watched with surprise as Phineas stood, and draining his glass like a salute, lurched off in the direction of the lavatories. Lucy, picking up glasses from the tables, was leaning across one of them to wipe it, her breasts buoyant in a silk vest, a miniskirt riding up over gleaming tanned thighs. Phineas looked tormentedly towards the rocks for a moment. Then with a sound like a groan, plunged through the door into the corridor. Zipping himself up before leaving, he almost walked into the condom vending machine. They were the last out of the pub, which largely kept its own hours, out into a sleeping world, the village and valley deep in darkness. Patrick, the landlord, saw them out through a side door into the car park. “See you tomorrow,” he whispered, and closed the door after them. “Cut adrift,” the Commander said as the bolts went home in the silence, and lifted his voice in one of the songs Patrick had been banging out earlier on the piano. “Shhh!” Priny said. “Shhh!” Lucy the barmaid said, and giggled. Phineas smiled fondly down at her, and drew her closer. He really could not think why he hadn’t got round to this before. “Where to now?” the Commander enquired brightly. “Home,” Priny said. “Nonsense, Number One,” her husband said, looking about him as if to see what else the night might have to offer. “Home, Cunningham,” she said firmly, taking him by an arm. “I don’t want you getting your feet wet on me quite yet.” The lights went out downstairs and the others straggled after them round to the front of the pub, their feet scrunching on the gravel. “Lead kindly light,” the Commander sang out, “the mariner home across the …” Priny gave him a dig with her elbow. “Shhh!” “Across the storm-tossed sea!” the Commander finished. “When you’re an admiral,” he told her, “then you may tell me what to do.” He sailed on for a few more yards, listing slightly, and then stopped. “I know. The very thing! Let’s wake Mr Pugh. Invite him back for a nightcap.” “Home, James,” Priny said. “Let’s show him Lucy’s legs,” Phineas suggested, and Lucy giggled again. “Eh?” he said, laughing with her. “Eh? You naughty girl!” “Shhh! You’ll wake Carl,” Priny warned them. Phineas halted abruptly. “Right. Thank you, Priny. I will. Which is his room? Show me the blighter’s room!” “It’s that one.” Lucy, who lodged in the village, pointed out one of the bedroom windows. “He always sleeps with his window open. Winter and all. He’s a fitness fanatic, he is.” “And mad as your bloody hat with it,” Owain said. “Yes,” Annie said, “perhaps we ought to go home now, Phineas, bach. Come on now, there’s a love.” “Yes, come along, Phineas. There’s a good chap,” Priny said briskly. “What! And show my back to that pot burner. That scullion! That – that Frenchman!” Phineas said to a cheer from the Commander. “Shhh,” Priny said, digging him again. “He’s English,” Lucy said. “That swill bucket! Beetle head!” Phineas went on, getting into his stride, and swaying as he tried to focus on the darkened window, his voice rising. “Cockroach! Piddle-faced dish of cat’s meat! What! Have him come down here! I’ll cudgel him like a dog. I’ll break my sword on the rogue!” He looked at Lucy, holding her to him like a prize. “And my sweat will be the tears of his once love, weeping in her tenderness for his death.” “Ahhh,” she said. “Come on, Phineas,” Owain said, pulling him by the arm. “Before he gets his trousers on.” It was Owain’s turn to stop a few moments later. He held up a hand. “Listen!” “Shhh,” Lucy said, and giggled again. The night was sultry and utterly still, the air holding the heat of the day like a cooling stone. A tawny owl called between silences, the cries drifting raggedly across to them from Mawr Wood. The light of a battered-looking full moon shone like blue frost on the slate of the village, and on the bright fields, the drifts of shadows under trees and the fat summer hedgerows piled as soft and as black as soot. “Lovely, isn’t it,” Owain said, more to himself, and breathed deep of the river-scented night. “Lovely, it is. Lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely,” he chanted mournfully, waving a hand at it as he made his way down towards Lower Ham and the Felicity H, adrift and a little unsteady, Bryn his collie at his heels. “Don’t forget lunch tomorrow,” Annie called back to them, going after him. After saying goodnight to Priny and the Commander, the other two walked on slowly past the Cluny Queen. Jasmine had left the pub much earlier, a sated, sleeping baby slumped on one arm, the rest of her family following like a brood of chicks, and the paddler looked becalmed now in the night, deep in stillness and shadow, the upperworks bleached by moonlight. Phineas waved a hand in the manner of Owain. “He was saying goodbye, Lucy. Owain was saying goodbye to it. The way it is.” He stopped and regarded her solemnly. “Because no matter what happens, Lucy, no matter what happens now, it will never be the same again. No. Not the same, Lucy. Not what we meant at all,” he said, shaking his head and swaying off course. “Not what we meant at all.” “I know, darling,” Lucy said, steering him back, and then losing him again as he dived for a bush and pushed his head into it. Something he often did when drunk, and for reasons which always escaped him the next day. It was a sallow bush, threaded with honeysuckle, and he came out with a sprig of it caught in his collar. He lowered his head like a cow and looked at her, his eyes foolish. “Pribbles and prabbles,” he said, and Lucy giggled. “Cobwebs and doorknobs. Moths and mustard seed,” he said. “Benabbled, dibbled and faddled. Undone I am. Drunk on moonshine and Lucy, and sweet summer buds, de-da, de-da,” he said, and waggled his head at her. And then he lifted his arms and spread them, sharing it with the village, the valley. “I know a bank,” he roared, “whereon the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. Quite over canopied with lush woodbine, with sweet musk roses and with eglantine. There –” “Shhh!” Lucy hissed, looking at the small, darkened terrace of Masters’ Cottages opposite. “Come here,” she said, and pulled him to her. “Kiss me,” she said, and pushed him back into the hedge, melting into it with him until they were still, one shadow in a pool of shadows, the air oiled again with the sudden scent of honeysuckle. The lights of the two other paddlers were out as well by the time they reached the Cluny Belle, lingering in more shadow on the way. Sikes had gone ahead, wandering off after they’d left the pub, and was now sprawled on deck, looking as if he’d collapsed there out of boredom. Phineas put him in the kitchen, and gave him what was left of his favourite dried pigs’ ears as a sop. When it came to a show of human affection, Sikes was a dog who liked to join in. Lucy was standing at the rail of the Belle, holding her face up to the moon as if to the sun, its light falling like dust in the air. The river was sluggish with light, stirred with it midstream to a thick inky silver, and black with shadows under the trees. Lucy turned and eased the scooped neck of her vest away from her skin. “Phew!” she said. “Hot, isn’t it?” She peeped over at the canopied hammock from Patio Living. “I sleep on the deck in this weather,” Phineas said, and smiled at her without knowing it. He rather liked the way the moon warmed the hollows of her neck and made inviting shadows of her breasts and waist. She pouted up at him. “Not very big, is it,” she said and, lifting her throat, touched delicately at it, at the sweat on it, with her fingertips, as if with scent. “And what’s in there, then?” she wanted to know, looking over at the sitting room. Phineas showed her. “I’ve often wondered what they look like inside,” she said, after he’d turned on the light, and not looking at the room, looking at him. He showed her the bedroom next. She slipped away from him once they were inside, teasingly, giggling, and was undressed by the time she reached the bed. Phineas followed, getting his jeans tangled up in a frustrated struggle with his deck shoes, and stumbling into the bedside chair, and then the bed. Before finding Lucy in the dark, the sudden, satiny warmth of her skin against his. “Hmmm,” she breathed a few moments later. “There’s nice!”

The Cuckoos of Batch Magna
“… written in a wonderfully descriptive style that enfolds your imagination as the rural conflict unravels in the Welsh Marches on the English-Welsh border. Personally, I eager await his next novel” The County Times.

“This fine, Marches-based novel, written in a punchy and descriptive style, is the sort of book which could be swallowed up in a day or two under the shade of an English oak.” David Pilkington, Country & Border Life.


The Cuckoos of Batch Magna
“This amusing book is an intriguing mixture of character examination, social commentary and dark humour laced with an insight into the parochial infighting to which many Shropshire villages will be able to relate … Read this book, and you are bound to recognise someone you know.” Carl Jones, The Shropshire Star.
“An hilarious novel peopled with a cast of Welsh and English eccentrics, sited, rather like the Lion Hotel at Llanymynech, with its public bar in England and its lounge in Wales, on the border between the two countries.” The Monmouthshire Merlin.


The Cuckoos of Batch Magna
“A marvellously descriptive writer …”Laurie Lee, author of Cider with Rosie.
“This is one of the most enjoyable books I have read lately. I loved it and hated to put it down. Peter Maughan creates characters who are not only believable, but who are delightful and adorable. The Cuckoos of Batch Magna is a book I would recommend if you enjoy a good, solid read that makes you feel heartened at the end.” Celia A. Leaman, author of Mary’s Child and Unravelled.