Peter Maughan

Peter Maughan is an ex-actor, fringe theatre director and script writer, married and living in the Welsh Marches, the borderland between England and Wales, and the backdrop to the Batch Magna series.

'The Cuckoos of Batch Magna' is the first novel - on Kindle and in print - in the Batch Magna Chronicles. It is followed by 'Sir Humphrey of Batch Hall', 'The Batch Magna Caper', 'Clouds in a Summer Sky', and 'The Ghost of Artemus Strange.' All published by Farrago Books.

"'The Cuckoos of Batch Magna', and its sequels, was born," Peter Maughan has said, "out of nostalgia, the memory of an idyllic time in the mid 1970s spent gloriously free living in a small colony of houseboats, a bohemian outpost in a village on the River Medway in deepest rural Kent. The summers of that time when life was moved outside - particularly in the long, torrid one of '76, when it seemed that there was only summer,summer and youth and the river. Boating or swimming in it, or coming together for another jolly, for the weekend lunches that ended up somehow in the evenings, and the parties that saw in another summer dawn. And the winters when the lamps were lit and the smell of log fires scented the air, snug around the stove below when there was rain on the deck, or the owls in the wood across the river called in the frosty dark.

"I carried those memories of place and people around with me for years, until we moved to the Welsh Marches and I found a home for them in a river valley there, in a place I called Batch Magna.

"The houseboats from those days on the Medway were converted Thames sailing barges; for my houseboats, on Batch Magna's river the Cluny, I used converted paddle steamers (once part of an equally fictional Victorian trading company, the Cluny Steamboat Company) because they too speak of fun and another time. And it seemed entirely right somehow that they should have ended up in quite dotty, amiable decline in Batch Magna.

"For the fourth novel (a work in progress) in the series, 'Man Overboard'(which opens with one of the houseboats turned back into a working paddler), I am indebted to a real-life paddle steamer skipper, Captain John Megoran, master of the PS Kingswear, the last coal-fired paddle steamer in Britain, for unstinting help with technical details. John's vessel, after her years plying the Medway, is now back in the home waters of the River Dart in Devon.

"'In Man Overboard', my paddle steamer, the PS Batch Castle, chugging up to Shrewsbury and back, plies the home waters of the River Cluny carrying passengers and goods, and deck cargoes of livestock from the fields on market days, and crates of chickens, geese and Christmas turkeys, and fun - and most of all, fun.

"The Batch Magna novels are feel-good books (The Wind in the Willows for grown-ups, as a couple of Amazon reviewers have described Cuckoos), pure escapism - for me now, looking back, and I hope for my readers."